a top ten dayJuly 2, 2005
Awesome weather today! Comfortable temperature. White puffy clouds. Low humidity. Enough breeze to keep the greenheads away. MmmHmm. The kind of day people move here for -- under the mistaken impression that we have more than about 3 days a year this good.The visitors are all nice and respectful of the beach closure. "Have the greenheads started yet?" is neck in neck with "When is the beach going to be open?" as the most frequently asked question. The answers are "Yes" and "When the chicks fledge." Even people who want a date, a hard, concrete date, are cheerfully accepting "When the chicks fledge" because it will be soon now that they're hatching. The ones from the pair that immediately renested after Nor'easter 2.0 are like a week old now. For the rest of 'em (here and at Sandy Point) this is the big hatching weekend. Tuesday should be the big day.
Neither the gulls nor the visitors are doing anything particularly interesting and I'm having an easy day for a change.
Today's reading, as you can see from the sidebar, is The House on Ipswich Marsh by William Sargent. Ipswich Marsh and Crane's Beach of which he writes are just across the inlet from the south end of Plum Island. When I'm south warden (today I'm north , I should have mentioned) I can see Crane's Beach. Sometimes adult piping plovers and the odd fledgling fly over to Sandy Point or the south end of the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge to feed, so the fates of their plovers and ours are intertwinded. When I started reading The House on Ipswich Marsh I thought he was going to have a lot more to say about the Crane's Beach population than he does. Herewith the comments I jotted in my booklist on this subject:
Vivid and well written but stumbles on the facts in a couple of cases that only an Essex County local would probably catch. Unfortunately the glitches distracted me. If the guy is going to go to the trouble to contrast the piping plover chick fledging statistics of Crane's Beach and Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, he ought to at least get the name of the refuge right. It s Parker River Wildlife Refuge, not Plum Island Wildlife Refuge. And for the record, despite Sargent's implication that we don't use predator exclosures at PRNWR, we do -- and the biological staff has modified them to foil predators who started to view the exclosures as plover vending machines. Also, salt marsh hay has been stacked on "hay staddles" for hundreds of years, not in "hay straddles". I blame that one on Microsoft's spellchecker, which disallows staddle, gundalow, salt panne, and a bunch of other perfectly good words. I also blame it on the fact that University Press of New England is located at Dartmouth -- a long, long, way inland from any place their editors might ever have seen a hay staddle. On balance I liked the book, but the errors were really irritating.
Todays'
Bird Sightings
Plum Island
ring billed gull 16
herring gull 10
common tern 9
purple martin 1
tree swallow 8
eastern kingbird 2
great black back gull 4
American crow 2
double crested cormorant 3
Mammals
refuge staff & visitors
Coast
Guard Assets
none
Today's
Reading
The House on Ipswich Marsh by William Sargent
This
Year's Reading
2005 Booklist
Today's
Starting Pitcher
David Wells
Ignore this nav-thing unless you are reading Journal of a Sabbatical
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Copyright © 2005, Janet I. Egan