I've always said that the major thing piping plovers have going for them is cuteness. Now that Birdchick has posted the definitive cuteness of the piping plover entry there is no reason for me to go on with this blog let alone write my darn book. I've been wasting my days explaining their lifecycle and habitat choice to endless beach visitors. I should've just convinced one to yawn for the camera. :-)
The location on which Birdchick and the legendary Julie Zickefoose encountered these little bundles of cuteness, South Beach in Chatham, usually has the largest or one of the largest piping plover population in Massachusetts. It also doesn't usually have as much of a problem with washovers from storm tides as some of the other Cape Cod beaches . It's interesting to me that the South Beach population had such late nesters. We had two late nests (as you may have gleaned from my last entry). I've heard tales of other late nests along east/north facing beaches this year too even though this year has not had the terrible storms we had a couple of years ago. I'm guessing the re-nesters on South Beach lost their first nest to predation rather than washover, but I wasn't there. Just guessing.
Also, another cool thing in Birdchick's video is that you can hear least terns in the background. Piping plovers that nest close to least tern colonies generally succeed at fledging young at a far better rate than those that don't nest near least terns. Now of course Birdchick and company will tell me I need my hearing checked and that those are common terns I'm hearing. Maybe it's a sound compression artefact.
Anyway, the piping plover is the cutest bird on the planet and if anything can get people to care it will be the cuteness factor.
Life on the beach at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge and occasional other birding adventures and, of course, piping plovers.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Saturday, August 2, 2008
what color is your parachute?
I'm not at the beach today -- tired, burned out, and expecting severe thunderstorms -- but at least that gives me time to catch up with last week's tales from the land of gulls and radios.
The first thing I noticed when I got to the beach was the steep drop-off where the storms (plural for sure) had taken a huge bite out of the sand. It looked like a late autumn beach instead of a July beach. I debated whether to setup on the wet part of the beach for better interception of joggers and walkers but realized it would be easy to slide down the sand toward the waterline but harder to climb up to deal with people between there and the dunes. So I setup above the drop-off, berm, slope, whatever you want to call it. I wore quite a path in the sand running down to the water line to intercept clueless out of town visitors who walked blithely past the buoys marked "area closed".
There were more out of town visitors than usual. I attribute it partly to the New York Times article ranking Newburyport and in particular the Parker River Refuge as number 2 on their top 25 Northeast getaways. Also, Yankee Homecoming attracted people to downtown and some of them probably spilled over onto the beach. And then there was the parachute jumping thing going on (more about which later in this same post). Anyway, by like 10:30 I had worn quite a path and reduced my speech to "beach closed, new chicks, very tiny". Some of the out-of-towners did want to know about piping plovers and least terns so I was able to oblige them with more information than "very tiny". Also, a few people wanted to know about the jellyfish all over the beach -- like do they sting? No. The storms at sea cause the jellyfish to end up closer to shore and on the beach, and these aren't the dreaded stinging Portuguese man-of-war ones. I kept quite busy all morning.
At some point I noticed an airplane dropping two huge yellow streamers into the water close to shore. A small boat went out to pick up the streamers. They were to test the wind direction for the parachute jumpers. A target area for the jumpers was set up on the Newbury town beach roped off and marked with flags to show the wind direction. Well, it wasn't entirely on the town beach. The target area was partly on the refuge. This is a no-no. Unit 61 was already on the case and got them to move the target area completely to the town beach before the jumpers started. There were tons of them. I stopped counting them. Their parachutes were all different colors: rainbow stripes, hot pink, patriotic red white and blue, pale blue ... The pale blue one blended in with the sky and looked remarkably like a jellyfish. Come to think of it the moon looked like a jellyfish too. At first I thought the moon was a white parachute until I realized it wasn't moving.
Unit 61 was taking photos of the parachutists but I didn't get any because every time I got my camera out, I had to slide down the sand to intercept another clueless walker. As we were watching a parachuter landed in the dunes on the refuge. Oops. He won't be allowed to jump again today. Then the radio crackled. "A parachuter just landed in Lot 1!" Apparently Gatehouse and 62 were unaware of this parachute event until then. Unit 62 came to help out 61 with managing whatever. I went back to intercepting walkers and explaining "new chicks very tiny".
As I left, people om the boardwalk were asking 61 and 62 where the parachutes were coming from -- they couldn't see the plane because of the angle -- and the guys had them convinced they were materializing out of thin air. I assured them that they were beaming here ...
The first thing I noticed when I got to the beach was the steep drop-off where the storms (plural for sure) had taken a huge bite out of the sand. It looked like a late autumn beach instead of a July beach. I debated whether to setup on the wet part of the beach for better interception of joggers and walkers but realized it would be easy to slide down the sand toward the waterline but harder to climb up to deal with people between there and the dunes. So I setup above the drop-off, berm, slope, whatever you want to call it. I wore quite a path in the sand running down to the water line to intercept clueless out of town visitors who walked blithely past the buoys marked "area closed".
There were more out of town visitors than usual. I attribute it partly to the New York Times article ranking Newburyport and in particular the Parker River Refuge as number 2 on their top 25 Northeast getaways. Also, Yankee Homecoming attracted people to downtown and some of them probably spilled over onto the beach. And then there was the parachute jumping thing going on (more about which later in this same post). Anyway, by like 10:30 I had worn quite a path and reduced my speech to "beach closed, new chicks, very tiny". Some of the out-of-towners did want to know about piping plovers and least terns so I was able to oblige them with more information than "very tiny". Also, a few people wanted to know about the jellyfish all over the beach -- like do they sting? No. The storms at sea cause the jellyfish to end up closer to shore and on the beach, and these aren't the dreaded stinging Portuguese man-of-war ones. I kept quite busy all morning.
At some point I noticed an airplane dropping two huge yellow streamers into the water close to shore. A small boat went out to pick up the streamers. They were to test the wind direction for the parachute jumpers. A target area for the jumpers was set up on the Newbury town beach roped off and marked with flags to show the wind direction. Well, it wasn't entirely on the town beach. The target area was partly on the refuge. This is a no-no. Unit 61 was already on the case and got them to move the target area completely to the town beach before the jumpers started. There were tons of them. I stopped counting them. Their parachutes were all different colors: rainbow stripes, hot pink, patriotic red white and blue, pale blue ... The pale blue one blended in with the sky and looked remarkably like a jellyfish. Come to think of it the moon looked like a jellyfish too. At first I thought the moon was a white parachute until I realized it wasn't moving.
Unit 61 was taking photos of the parachutists but I didn't get any because every time I got my camera out, I had to slide down the sand to intercept another clueless walker. As we were watching a parachuter landed in the dunes on the refuge. Oops. He won't be allowed to jump again today. Then the radio crackled. "A parachuter just landed in Lot 1!" Apparently Gatehouse and 62 were unaware of this parachute event until then. Unit 62 came to help out 61 with managing whatever. I went back to intercepting walkers and explaining "new chicks very tiny".
As I left, people om the boardwalk were asking 61 and 62 where the parachutes were coming from -- they couldn't see the plane because of the angle -- and the guys had them convinced they were materializing out of thin air. I assured them that they were beaming here ...
Thursday, July 31, 2008
don't touch them
Tried to post this using Twitter but it didn't shorten the URL to one of those tinyurl thingies.
A well-meaning beachgoer in Wells, Maine contributed to the death of a piping plover chick.
Many people think piping plovers live and feed in the dunes. They don't. The feed on the beach. They eat bugs in the wrack or feed on marine invertebrates along the water line. People are all the time telling me that the plovers nest in the dunes. I am all the time telling them, no they nest on the beach between the wrack line and the dunes. Big difference.
Please, please, please don't touch the chicks. Do not pick them up and move them. This is not like picking up a baby bird fallen from the nest and putting it back in, which won't hurt anything. Piping plover chicks are precocial. Their parents do not bring them food. They have to get their own food. In the wrack. Not the dunes. A newly hatched chick needs to eat fairly soon after hatching too. Hours in the dunes far away from its food source is doom.
Stories like this are among the reasons I believe symbolic fencing is not enough. There needs to be live human education and possibly beach closure.
Hands off the chicks!!!
P.S. I know I owe brilliant narrative from Saturday. It's coming.
A well-meaning beachgoer in Wells, Maine contributed to the death of a piping plover chick.
Many people think piping plovers live and feed in the dunes. They don't. The feed on the beach. They eat bugs in the wrack or feed on marine invertebrates along the water line. People are all the time telling me that the plovers nest in the dunes. I am all the time telling them, no they nest on the beach between the wrack line and the dunes. Big difference.
Please, please, please don't touch the chicks. Do not pick them up and move them. This is not like picking up a baby bird fallen from the nest and putting it back in, which won't hurt anything. Piping plover chicks are precocial. Their parents do not bring them food. They have to get their own food. In the wrack. Not the dunes. A newly hatched chick needs to eat fairly soon after hatching too. Hours in the dunes far away from its food source is doom.
Stories like this are among the reasons I believe symbolic fencing is not enough. There needs to be live human education and possibly beach closure.
Hands off the chicks!!!
P.S. I know I owe brilliant narrative from Saturday. It's coming.
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