hazy

September 23, 2001

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Hideo Nomo

Today's Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove
domestic goose (3)
mute swan (21)
Canada goose (5)
mallard (47)
ringbilled gull (38)
herring gull (50)
laughing gull (15)
great blue heron (1)
great egret (9)
snowy egret (1)
double crested cormorant (36)
common tern (5)
American wigeon (7)
European starling (1)
tree swallow (3)
northern flicker (1)
Butterflies:
monarch (2)
Boats:
Vlaka Mlodych

Life Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove Life List

Today's Reading:
A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet by Jane E. Duncan, The Unveiling of Lhasa by Edmund Candler

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Photo:
Watchemoket Cove

Providence Harbor is engulfed in pale white haze. A tanker named Vlaka Mlodych docked near the gas tanks looks bigger than the whole Providence skyline. The haze must be causing an optical illusion. No tanker that big could possibly get to those gas tanks unless they've already dredged the shipping channel, which they haven't.

Everything at the cove is quacking or squawking or hissing or honking. I've never heard the birds so noisy. Tons of breaders stop by to feed the swans, the tame geese, and the mallards. The gulls get most of the bread though. Three kinds of gulls are swooping and soaring all over the place: ringbills, herring gulls, and laughing gulls. The laughing gulls are all over the place and I can't count them even close to accurately.

Oddly there are still some terns around. I thought they had left for the winter already.

A small flock of wigeons has already arrived to take up their winter residence. They seem early to me but I check the notebook and sure enough they always arrive around the 20th of September. Apparently I am also always surprised that they do.

The bird of the day is a northern flicker perched on a dead tree next to the East Providence Water Pollution Control building. I almost missed it.

Two monarch butterflies float by. It seems like I can't go anywhere without seeing a monarch or two or ten at this time of year.

In the slow reading department, I finally finished A Summer Ride Through Western Tibet. Great read! I checked everywhere and apparently Jane E. Duncan the Scottish traveler never wrote anything else. Too bad. I'd love to be privy to her travels in Kashmir and wherever else she went. And she was 57 when she spent the summer trekking through Western Tibet, Ladakh and Baltistan in 1904! A random thing I learned from her: Apparently K2 is also called Mt. Godwin Austen. Who knew?