Is it good luck if a
woodchuck crosses your path?
The day started with a couple of
beautiful mammal sightings. First, two white tailed deer
posed on the edge of a clearing perfectly lighted by the
morning sun so that they looked like they'd stepped out
of a landscape painting instead of a thicket of shrubs.
Then a woodchuck crossed the path to the beach from the
parking lot at the south end. The sun gave depth to the
color of its fur, making it a handsome wondrous creature
instead of a mere woodchuck.
On the beach, the light was even
more extraordinary. A silver-white haze obliterated the
horizon. The sea and the sky were exactly the same
silver-white color with no indication of any
discontinuity. A fishing boat appeared to be floating in
the sky or to be a boat-shaped speck on a vast vertical
mirror. And it was all so BRIGHT. Clouds, fog, haze are
all words that make you think dark. Not today. This must
have been the most reflective haze ever because even with
sunglasses on I had to squint to pick out the gulls, who
were also bright silvery white.
The birds and the visitors spread
themselves out pretty well -- no bunching up a million
visitors in 10 minutes -- OK that was an exaggeration but
I have had some shifts where I have seen no humans for 3
1/2 hours and then had to deal with 10 or 15 people in
the space of half an hour. Anyway, today they were spread
out. When I arrived, a mother and child had just walked
into the closed area, so my first task was to ask them to
leave, which they did with no problem at all. It was a
pretty easy day visitor-wise.
An eastern kingbird came over the
dunes and took up flycatching in the wrack. It's a wonder
more flycatcher type birds don't come looking for flies
on the beach. This kingbird was having a field day. It
was doing its whole aerobatic catch-em-in-the-air routine
about 6 inches off the ground. Low flying flies. A few
swallows came and went but the kingbird stayed at it for
well over an hour. There don't seem to be as many eastern
kingbirds or as many swallows as I remember from past
shifts on the south beach. I should look that up in my
inifinite series of notebooks sometime.
A pair of piping plovers flew in
from the south. The two of them, both adults, arrived
together and then went their separate ways. One fed
avidly in the wet sand above the water line. The other
ran around in the wrack and was only visible when it
happened to pass in front of a particularly large and
dark pile of seaweed, otherwise its cryptic coloring
blended in perfectly with the dry sand. It was the
incredible disappearing/reappearing bird. The one on the
wet sand was so pale it stood out against the dark sand
like a beacon in that weird bright hazy light I mentioned
earlier. This was a text book comparison of protective
coloration. They stayed around for about an hour. I
started to wonder if they were a childless couple. Who's
minding the chicks? No biological staff were around my
end today, so I didn't get a chance to ask about that.
Anyway, they were two beautiful adult piping plovers and
it was a treat to watch them for so long.
On the way back to the gatehouse to
return the radio and hand in my report, I spotted a
stunning black crowned night heron just south of the salt
pannes. I stopped to watch it for awhile but all it did
was stand there looking cool with its plumes trailing in
the breeze. It was so close I could've gotten a good
picture if I had bothered to bring the camera (for some
reason I never bring the camera any more). There had been
reports of a yellow crowned night heron around there the
past couple of days, but I missed that one. The black
crowned will do though. It's a fine looking
bird.
