year in reviewAugust 29, 2005
According to today's Boston Globe it's been a rough year for piping plovers in Massachusetts. The overall number of breeding pairs declined by 3% statewide. The guy from Mass. Department of Fisheries and Wildlife categorizes it nicely as cause for concern but not panic. Some fluctuation in the population is normal, right? The good news from our little patch of beach : 13 chicks fledged on the refuge beach and 24 total fledged when you add in Sandy Point and the town beach. That is awesome in itself and particularly could compared with some of the other beaches that had more failed nests due to the storms. Those were some nor'easters I'll tell you! We lucked out that the piping plovers ended up with enough beach left to re-nest on.I was looking at the beach at my brother's house last Sunday after a huge high tide overnight on Saturday and there's hardly any beach until the tide goes out and there's absolutely no dune. The steps from his house down to the beach go over thin air and rocks placed there in the 1930s by the Corps of Engineers to catch the sand and rebuild the beach after they built the jetties. Uh, oh, stop me before I go into my beach erosion rant for the zillionth time. All you need to know is jetties and groins are bad bad bad -- they do not save beaches -- they make beaches go away. See, I ranted anyway.
Back to the subject at hand: the Globe article. It's actually a good piece of reporting on the subject of piping plovers. So now I want to be called a "coastal waterbird monitor". Jean, please have the badges made up for next season with the new title :-) Speaking of Unit 3, the article also had a nice quote from her.
Another thing I gleaned from the article was a perspective on the state of Massachusetts that I never had before. I never visualized it as running from Salisbury to Provincetown! I have that James Taylor song with the Mass. Pike running from Stockbridge to Boston running through my nead now. Speaking of James Taylor, he allegedly has ties to Salisbury or at least I read that in the Newburyport Daily News once anyway. Now I am seized with a desire to walk the coast of our commonwealth from Salisbury to Provincetown.
I second the closing quote from Scott Melvin: "A lot of us feel it's worthwhile and justifiable to hang on to them." I don't want to think about the beaches from Salisbury to Provincetown without them.
this i gotta see
August 24, 2005
I forsee a trip to Saskatchewan in my future 'cause now that I know there's a giant piping plover as a roadside attraction up there I can't imagine not photographing it. The monster that ate Regina. Imagine.
Today's
Reading
Neal Cassady Collected Letters: 1944-1967 by Neal
Cassady, The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher
This
Year's Reading
2005 Booklist
Today's
Starting Pitcher
Matt
Clement
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Copyright © 2005, Janet I. Egan