productivity July 16, 2005
As I'm driving over the bridge from Salisbury to Newburyport this morning I notice a turkey vulture circling over Rt. 1. Not that unusual. Then I notice 4 more. Cool! I stop off at Plum Island Coffee Roasters (which is not on Plum Island, but is in the boat yard, which is great fun) to get a large dark roast of the day and happen to look back toward the bridge when I come out of the coffee shop. There are now 11 turkey vultures circling over Rt. 1! It is not every day I see 11 turkey vultures. I whip out the binoculars for closer inspection and watch them for a few minutes -- dripping coffee on my shirt and making myself late for the plover warden shift, but heck, it's not every day I get to see 11 turkey vultures... not to repeat myself or anything. :-) As I'm getting out of my car at Lot 1 (the north boundary is still at Lot 1), I notice one of the refuge staff carrying a whale vertebra and a shovel. "I bet you're giving the talk on whales this morning!" says I. "What was your first clue?" says she. Y'know, for a techie geek whose day job involves sitting in a gray cubicle all week, I have an unusual number of encounters with whale bones and people carrying whale bones. She's worried no kids will show up for the talk and asks if she can practice on me if nobody shows. Fortunately, people show up, including, briefly, a high muck-a-muck from the regional office. While Erin's giving the whale talk, the guy from the regional office asks what I do. "I keep the people and the piping plovers apart." That sums it up. He says he's heard we've had good productivity this year -- like it's us who produce the chicks at our little piping plover factory (Hmm, I have wondered about cloning them but only in the wee hours of the morning when weird thoughts float around for the taking.). Anyway, the next three weeks or so are the crucial time. It's the time between hatching and fledging that's the most dangerous for the chicks. They can become gull food, or crow food, or fall in a hole, or keel over from stress, or get stepped on by a trespasser, or... or... you get the idea: Don't count your chicks before they've fledged. Not that I would tell the regional office guy that. I'll leave that to Jean or somebody. Anyway, Jean says that at one point there were 42 chicks running around but a couple have already been eaten by gulls or just dropped dead from whatever they drop dead of. It's rare that all 4 chicks from a single brood survive. It's cool that our 7 pairs, plus 3 on Sandy Point, and 3 on the town beach have had such a good year after all the storms and re-nesting. People are mostly asking about greenheads today. They're not really that bad. I get a few painful bites despite light colored clothing and copious Deep Woods Off , but I've experienced much worse. The number of ring-billed gulls sitting on the closed area of beach seems to be increasing exponentially every time I look over there. Maybe they're after the greenheads. Sometime during my shift the radio becomes only able to receive transmissions from the gatehouse. Everybody else is nothing but static. I hear a lot of one-sided conversations beginning with "Gatehouse." The beach really isn't too busy or crowded. The visitors are spread out. A few people are reading hardcover books. Nobody ever reads hardcover books on the beach. It's always paperback romances or thrillers or mysteries. So I have to check out the titles. A woman on my right is reading Ann Tyler's Ladder of the Years. A woman a few paces closer to the water is reading The Harder They Fall. She tells me it's a collection of celebrity addiction and recovery stories and she finds it very inspiring. There are still guys fishing for stripers but they're not catching anything. I think the striper migration is starting to wind down. Jean and I are talking with one of the fishermen, a regular on t he beach, about the stripers. We tell him how cool piping plovers are. Jean announces she has to go to meet people from the Chamber of Commerce to give them a tour of the native plant garden. "We have a native plant garden?" I ask. "It's weeds." "Well that's what native plants are." "All plants are weeds if they're growing where you don't want them." Turns out we do have a native plant garden.		Todays' Bird Sightings Newburyport Rt. 1 turkey vulture 11 Plum Island purple martin 10 tree swallow 6 eastern kingbird 6 northern mockingbird 1 common loon 1 double crested cormorant 3 least tern 4 common tern 6 Forsters tern 1 rock dove 1 American crow 2 redwinged blackbird 2 ringbilled gull (a way wicked lot) herrng gull (a lot) great black back gull (many) Mammals visitors refuge staff(Unit 3, Unit 61, Erin) regional office muck-a-muck Butterflies American copper 1 Coast Guard Assets none Today's Reading Rare Bird by Maria Mudd Ruth This Year's Reading 2005 Booklist Today's Starting Pitcher Matt Clement
		Back to The Plover Warden Diaries   Ignore this nav-thing unless you are reading Journal of a Sabbatical     Before Journal Index After   Home Copyright © 2005, Janet I. Egan