Friday June 10, 2016
Bird of the Day: piping plover
Coffee of the Day: Clipper City Roast
Weird Wrack Item of the Week: a dead skate
Invisi-bird Status: Official: 41 pairs, 18 active nests, 7 families, 20 chicks. Number actually seen by me: 4 adults.
 |
| Exceptionally Bright Day |
Bright blue skies and cool temperatures made for an unusually comfortable shift. I answered a bunch of questions for a bunch of different people and gave a short talk to a school field trip group. The only question that stumped me was "What happened at Sandy Point? Was there flooding?" Not having been down there, I had to answer that I didn't know but that there had a coastal flooding alert at the beginning of the week (Sunday night/Monday morning). I wasn't even sure exactly what she was asking about as I hadn't heard about any kind of disaster on the island.
 |
| You Can't See Me, I'm an Invisi-Bird |
Both piping plovers and least terns were very active all morning. I was starting to feel a bit like a plover, constantly running down to the water line (OK, so I didn't exactly run, more of a brisk walk) and back endlessly. The water line might as well be at the bottom of a cliff. I got in a pretty good workout. There has to be some way to communicate where the boundary line is at low tide when people walking/jogging can't see the signs above the berm. I couldn't find enough sticks to make a Big Steve style stick fence, so I just scratched the word STOP in big letters in the wet sand, which made me feel more effective but didn't really reduce the number of trips down to the water.
 |
| Oh, Hi! |
The most interesting thing that washed up on the beach was a dead little skate. For some reason the gulls were ignoring it. I've seen them peck at dead skates before, but today only one ring-billed gull approached it, gave it a peck, and then took off. A couple of beach goers tried to push the skate back into the water without actually touching it with their hands. They must have thought it was still alive. I checked it out, and it was really most sincerely dead. Anyway, I'm sure it washed back out when the tide came in.
 |
| Skate |
Walking back to my spot on the boundary from the skate's location, I found a northern moon snail in its shell with its operculum tightly closed. That's their major protection mechanism. What they do in response to a threat is to pump all the water out of the shell, pull their entire body in, and seal the entrance with the operculum.
 |
| Moon Snail |
 |
| Working the Waterline |
On the way back to my car, I saw a seaside sparrow in the beach grass
near the boardwalk. It was the first one I've seen this summer.
No new tall ships appeared in Newburyport harbor this week.
No comments:
Post a Comment