Lots 6 and 7 are indeed open
today. The beach is gorgeous at the 5.6 mile marker.
There's enough breeze to mostly keep the greenheads away
and in general the visitors are much nicer and more
interesed in piping plovers than they were yesterday.
A woman comes over to ask me what
those big black birds, the cormorants, are. About 30 of
them are just sitting on the sand, not drying their
wings, just sitting. Then she asks me what piping plovers
look like and all kinds of other piping plover questions.
I show her the picture in Peterson and give her my whole
speech of their life cycle (though I don't make a nest
scrape in the sand with my foot this time). Give me
somebody the tiniest bit interested and I will make them
love piping plovers. I ask if she lives around
here, figuring maybe I could recruit her as a plover
warden. "Oh, no, we live in Tokyo" says she. Her family
used to rent a place on Plum Island in the summers and
she has many fond memories. We get talking about
childhood memories of PI and then get into to talking
about Tokyo -- a far cry from Plum Island. I tell her my
first trip to Tokyo was because Cosmodemonic Telecomm
(not its real name) sold equipment to DoCoMo. "Oh, we
have a DoCoMo phone" she answers. Naturally. Everybody
has DoCoMo phones. So she asks the inevitable questions
about why did I leave high-tech and why am I doing this.
How did we get from piping plovers to my brilliant
career?
Indeed, why leave high-tech just on
the verge of the biggest boom in history? Why leave at
the peak of my career, well actually just past the peak
-- I think I had plateaued by the time I left . I was
certainly burned out. So what do I tell the lady from
Tokyo? I tell her about the summer of the dying relatives
(Kathleen and Steven) and about driving the nieces to
piano lessons and wherever all else they needed to be
driven and putting in far more quality aunting time than
I ever thought I would and about how vastly more
important it is to save the piping plover than to make
sure the Yakuza or drug dealers in Miami get their phone
messages. (I do realize voice mail is useful to people
besides criminals, that was a rhetorical device.) After
all, when I come to the end of my life, am I going to
wish I spent more time at work? I want to go out birding
like the legendary Phoebe
Snetsinger. Anyway, the
lady from Tokyo agrees wholeheartedly that she would
rather spend time making happy memories for the
grandchildren than working.
A guy interrupts us -- good thing
before we told each other our entire life stories - and
he's carrying a huge fish vertebra. He wants to know what
it's from. I don't know. It looks like your basic fish
vertebra you'd pick out of your dinner except very big,
larger in diameter than my fist. It's too small to be a
whale bone, too big to be from a striper or most of the
fish around here, not cartilagenous so not a shark part,
definitely not mammalian, so I guess maybe tuna.The guy
says he already guessed tuna. So that's two of us
guessing tuna. The lady from Tokyo agrees it's probably
from a tuna. None of us know anything about fish bones,
but we're having a great time agreeing on our guess. The
guy wanders off to show it to a fisherman, who probably
has a better understanding of fish bones than any of
us.
I got my first greenhead bite of
the season today but other than that the jaws with wings
weren't that bad. There was enough of a breeze to keep
them down. People ask lots of questions about greenheads.
I assure them that the monsters can bite through denim
and through the bottoms and backs of canvas or vinyl mesh
beach chairs. Seriously, they can.
A party of teenage girls wants to
know if they can leave their picnic basket near me while
they walk the length of the open beach. I warn them to
secure the picnic basket really well because gulls can
open picnic baskets and steal Doritos. They laugh but
secure it and though a couple of herring gulls checked it
out while they were gone their lunch is intact when they
come back. They too want to know all about piping
plovers.
This all definitely makes up for
yesterday -- people are actually interested in the birds
not just in finding more room to spread their towels. And
the weather is great too.
