the heat goes on (but without flies)

Friday August 19, 2016
Bird of the Day: tree swallow
Coffee of the Day: French Roast
Weird Wrack Item of the Week: power cord
Invisi-bird Status: Official: 1 active pair, 2 chicks, 72 fledglings! Number actually seen by me: zero

72 fledglings! 72 fledglings! 72 fledglings! I think this might be a record for our beach. The remaining two piping plover chicks should fledge by Monday.  The least terns are taking their sweet time this year, especially the ones near the north boundary. I had a couple of grouchy people asking "what's taking them so long?" and other grouchy people insisting that "the web site" said the beaches were all open. I'm not clear on what web site they were talking about.  Grouchy people were in the minority this week. The greenheads are long gone and the small mean flies that aren't greenheads are also gone now, so nobody was complaining about flies. I talked to a lot of people and most of them were nice -- even the trespassers.

Beach - Looking South

Yes, there were trespassers. As soon as I arrived on the beach I spotted a couple in the closed area, walking along the lower wrack line (there are multiple lines of wrack right now) collecting shells. I called out to them, waved my arms and gestured for them to get out of there, yelled as loud as I could ... etc. Other beach goers (obviously fans of piping plovers and least terns) tried to get their attention as well. Finally, they began to stroll north, so I settled in and sipped on my coffee until they reached the boundary of the closed area.  Once they were out of there, I told them they were in a nesting area (mind you they had to walk past the signs and also past crowds of people obeying the signs -- gotta wonder how they didn't consider that there might be a reason none of the other beach goers were in there) and explained the whole thing to them. They were very apologetic. They are staying at Blue, the luxury inn, and are clearly from out of town. Guessing from their accent and from the fact that they thought the least terns looked like fairy terns, I'd say they're probably New Zealanders. They asked lots of good questions about least terns and were really very contrite.

Beach -- Looking North

So many people asked what was taking the least terns so long to fledge, I started making jokes about them. I mean, if your Mom and Dad brought you fish all the time, would you bother learning to fly? :-) Visitors picked right up on it and we started bantering about how the terns are like the Millennials living in their parents' basements. I'm picturing them playing video games on the couch while they wait for the next fish. They're not actually refusing to fledge, at least one family of chicks is only 2 weeks old. I don't know if the parents lost a first brood and renested or if they just laid a second brood for the heck of it. Anyway, I don't know any way of speeding up the fledging process -- unlike with Millennials where we could start a Go Fund Me campaign to pay off their student loans :-)

Heat Haze -- Not Sure Why the Center is in Focus

The sand was shimmering with heat haze making for a few optical illusions like cormorants the size of turkeys and great black backs the size of humans. Somebody actually asked if those dark birds were turkeys. Another person asked if people were working on the beach or doing something involving moving sand around. I didn't go into the whole scientific explanation of looming, just explained that the heat shimmer makes things look larger. I tried to capture some of the distortion in a photo (above) but it doesn't fully convey it. The dunes do look very distorted, but most of the birds don't. Another weird optical phenomenon in the heat haze is that Crane Beach and Ipswich look continuous with the island -- and also look weirdly flat. A visitor looking south along the beach asked me how far the road runs. I answered "to Sandy Point, about 7 miles", but that didn't satisfy her. She kept asking if the road ran "all the way to the end." Finally she gestured toward the Gloucester wind turbines and then to the east of that and I realized that "the end" meant the tip of Cape Ann. I explained that there's a lot of water between the tip of Plum Island and the southernmost land she could see. Heat haze and looming are very confusing.

Weird Wrack Item of the Week

Continually moving my chair back up the beach as the tide came in gave me different perspectives on the contents of the wrack line. I spotted a skeleton of something that clearly had a lot of vertebrae, but I'm no good whatsoever at identifying fish species by their bones. The strangest thing I spotted was a power cord of some kind wrapped around one of the fence posts. It looked old fashioned, not the sort of thing that Millennials would have in their parents' basement, but it didn't seem to be corroded at all. Go figure.

Normal Wrack Item of the Week

The cargo cult airplane is entirely gone without a trace, but a genuine flying machine of roughly 1940s vintage flew really low over the beach. Oddly, the least terns did not attack it. They seem to get most bent out of shape by state police helicopters.

Vintage Aeroplane

The biggest avian skirmish of the day came when a herring gull got hold of a juicy chunk of bait from one of the two fishermen on the beach (the fish aren't biting -- it's too hot -- so I'm surprised there were any fishermen) and flew up toward the dunes. A flock of at least 8 other gulls took off in pursuit and tried various techniques to steal that gull's prize. Remarkably, it hung onto the juicy morsel.

My Name is Herring Gull and I'll be Stealing your Bait Today

As I walked toward Lot 1 at the end of my shift, a huge swirling flock of swallows flew in over the dunes and surrounded Lot 1 -- and me. It's that time of year when you can't tell the swallows from the air. I walked through swallows to my car. Fortunately, they have not gotten to the point where they land on the road and tie up traffic yet. My camera was in my backpack, so no photo of the swallows. They'll be doing this for another couple of weeks and it's quite the show. Summer is definitely winding down.

This just in: As I was writing this, I saw the official post from Ranger Matt that the beach is open from Lot 3 to Sandy Point as of today.  Visitors will be happy. Now if we can just get those lazy Millennial least terns between Lots 1 and 2 to fledge ... :-)