crowded beach in the heat

June 29, 2018
Coffee of the Day: Ethiopian Yrgacheffe
Sighting of the Day: monarch butterfly (first of the season)
Weird Wrack Item of the Week: none
Invisi-bird Status: Official: Refuge Beach: 29 pairs, 9 nests, 37 chicks/17 broods; Sandy Point: 9 pairs, 5 nests, 12 chicks/3 broods; Town Beach: 5 pairs, 3 nests, 5 chicks/2broods. Number actually seen by me: 1.

Looking South

OK, it's really most sincerely hot today. The beach was already packed with people at 8AM and they just kept coming. Questions ranged from is the tide going out or coming in to why the plovers are not nesting as close to the north boundary as they did last year.  I didn't have a whole lot of time to take photos.

Herring Gull

The plover pair I can usually see from the boundary -- and their two chicks -- were doing a good job of becoming invisible for at least the first two hours of the shift.  I finally heard the peep-lo call coming from quite a way farther south and up closer to the dunes and located one of the adults walking around. I heard another one calling but didn't see it.  There really wasn't much bird activity on the beach except for a few herring gulls keeping an eye out for visitors' food scraps or bait.

My best sighting of the day was not a bird at all. A monarch butterfly flew down off the dunes and made a low pass over the beach. My first of the season. I'd actually been thinking about monarchs because I hadn't even seen the milkweed in bloom yet, never mind monarchs or their caterpillars. It seemed a little late to me. I guess I should read my old blog posts/notebooks to see when the milkweed usually flowers and when the monarchs come around. As I was leaving for the day I did find some milkweed in bloom in one of the usual spots. The only thing that would have been more exciting would be seeing the monarch on the milkweed.

Milkweed in Bloom