Just add sunshine.
Category Archives: Pastimes
Today
Birds are still singing;
the trees are long past their first delicate greening.
Peepers at the roadside are suddenly quiet.
The northward surge of Spring is past us now.
Summer flowers are blooming;
Canada Mayflowers put on quite a show this year
and I found my first blooming Starflower
(but the photo was awful!)
Birds are looking for homes
in boxes and under bridges,
gathering twigs and feathers.
Or building nests
from vines and rootlets
and whatever magic things they can weave together.
They’re making babies.
😉
Lots and lots of babies!
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I’m planting flowers of my own
and reading books
(and remembering how much I love the poetry of the Spanish language.)
I’m checking-off lists
and working on this year’s.
It’s a big one!
I’m planning a very private party to celebrate
and wanting to wander some, to contemplate
and squander time, letting it pass ungathered and unregretted.
There’s no pictures yet to share.
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What’re you up to?
World Series 2010
They were almost delirious enough around 7 pm to smile at my camera without much prodding beyond, “Time for the obligatory group photo everyone!”
😉
We’d been out for better than 12 hours at that point and had just about tallied our total for the day, save for the odd swallow and a bittern that never materialized. It was a fabulous day for birds… the kind of day where you just want to plant yourself in one spot and watch wave after wave of migrants come to you; it was that good! Sandy Hook can be spectacular under the right conditions and this year’s World Series of Birding was just such a day. We ended with a record-setting (for us) 143 species!
And to think some birders go midnight to midnight and traipse across the whole state for less.
😉
Bad bird pics to follow, shortly. Previous posts about WSB are gathered here.
Sea dog, jetty birds and the distance
A return trip today to Barnegat Light with the Monmouth County Audubon Society was graced by many of the same species as last week’s visit, plus a new one!
This harbor seal had hauled itself up onto the rocks of a small jetty behind the lighthouse to rest and soak up some sun, much to our delight. They’re fairly common here in winter, but this is the closest I’ve ever seen one. They have small rounded heads and whiskered snouts, but it’s their huge and soulful eyes that establish the resemblance with a more blubbery version of man’s best friend.
Click for whisker views!
It was really sweet to watch it nearly tipping off the rocks as it napped! The seal seemed well aware of, yet unconcerned with the group of admirers that had gathered at the base of the lighthouse to watch it.
Many thanks to Steve for letting me use his big lens for these closer-up views.
High tide and a heavy surf had rearranged the sea ducks and shorebirds in new patterns. The jetty was impossibly dangerous today… so hardly any harlequins were within view, but the crashing waves beyond the jetty were black with ducks!
😉
There were big numbers of long-tails and lots of scoters (black and surf) close within the inlet, disappearing and reappearing behind the swells… a real treat! I also saw quite a few common eiders looking just like the field guides say they should… sweet!
(Of course there’s no pictures… I wasn’t about to climb up on the jetty and get soaking wet or worse.)
The purple sandpipers, dunlin, ruddy turnstones and a lone sanderling were mostly feeding on the lee side of the jetty… out of the wind and the crashing waves. They’re all so inconspicuous somehow, looking like nothing more than jetty rock, until you realize that the rocks are moving and alive with birds.
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I often wonder why in the world I do this… why I stand out in the cold until my hands and lips are numb… just to see birds that I’ve seen any number of times before in much less awful conditions?
It’s mostly ritual, I think, like waiting for woodcock in an early spring dusk or estimating the number of swallows that might rise from the phragmites at North Pond on a late summer dawn.
What’s not often mentioned among birders is the time spent scanning the horizon, that distant magic place where sky and sea or sky and land converge to ignite the imagination. The time spent looking at nothing. You have to be patient when you look there. You might not see anything new… or see anything at all, but you have to look and wait, just in case.
Some people don’t ever want to look into that distance. Some people won’t tolerate the discomfort of it.
(Wimps!)
Sometimes the best thing I find while scanning that distance is inside me, anyway.
Still Alice
My plans for the weekend involve a blanket and a book or two.
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I’m a committed non-fiction reader; resistant, for whatever reason, to the suspension of reality necessary to enjoy most novels. Sure there’s the occasional story that grabs and holds me, but more often than not I leave them half-read and only half-enjoyed.
Sometime before the holidays I read the debut novel by Lisa Genova which was recommended to me by the owner of a little bookstore I found here in town.
(As a side note: How wonderful is it to have someone, anyone, employed in a bookstore actually be familiar enough with the inventory to be able to recommend something based on one’s favorite authors?)
Still Alice tells the story of a Harvard professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. A sad story, sure, but unique in that it’s told from Alice’s point of view and thereby offers insight into the painful descent into dementia.
One of my most favorite parts of the novel occurs toward the end; Alice has been invited to deliver the keynote at a national conference for Alzheimer’s care professionals. She makes a plea to not be forgotten and written off or limited by her disease saying, “… My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”
A worthy credo for any of us, I think.
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So… any good books this weekend to stay warm with?
Birds at Rocky Point
Susan and Seamus came to their first-ever birdwalk without a pair of binoculars between them. As Field Trip Chairperson, I’m supposed to be prepared for this inevitable oversight on the part of the beginning birder with spare bins to loan out, should anyone need a pair.
Of course I always forget the box of loaner bins that’s buried in a closet somewhere. Luckily someone else in our little group had an extra pair to share. Beginners are such fun and really make these walks for me. They’re enthusiastic about every bird and are curious about everything. I think I’m so used to birding with people that know more than me that it’s nice to feel like an expert once in a while.
We birded in the rain, but did pretty well considering the lousy weather. Rocky Point has an interesting history as a coastal defense site and the views on a sunny day can be dramatic. This morning, the ocean and the river and the sky were all gunmetal gray.
The shrubby fields around Battery Lewis held the expected redstarts and cat birds, a baltimore oriole and lots of vocal carolina wrens, plus some massing tree swallows and a lone chimney swift overhead. We had a nice look at a Peregrine and a couple Osprey, too.
Down at the fishing pier at Black Fish Cove, we found a yellowlegs and a couple oystercatchers, plus a very wet and cranky-looking red tail perched along the river.
Our species count for the couple hour walk was only 35, but for these beginners willing to be out in the rain, each was a small, wet joy.
Boardwalk reflections
Some scenes from an early evening walk along the boardwalk at Asbury Park today…
My favorite shop for reflection pics is the Bodega Shoppe at the southernmost end of the boardwalk. There’s always something interesting on display in the window there… lately there’s this crazy looking bust with a curly wig that ends in a sailboat… fun! Reflected in the window are the happy people dining at Stella Marina (which has really nice homemade pasta, btw.)
The sky reflected in the windows of the north side of Convention Hall… the south side of the building’s been restored, but this side is still crumbling into the Atlantic bit by bit.
A new children’s water park—a water-filled playground where kids wade through shallow pools and run under a giant squirting watering can—sits just off the boardwalk, in view of the ocean. I need to find a stray kid so I can go…
😉
I stumbled upon a jazz band playing a free concert in Convention Hall… Asbury, you just never know.
😉
Yoga with an audience
I arrive at yoga class at the Y really early so I can stake out my comfortable spot way in the back left corner. The lights are low. I can hide there.
So… yoga on the boardwalk, in broad daylight, was a bit of a stretch for me.
😉
I very nearly bailed when my sister-in-law called at the last minute to say she wouldn’t be able to make it to join me. Then I thought, “What the hell?”
I’m glad I did… it was a lot of fun. There’s something really humbling about practising yoga outdoors, with the sky and the ocean at finger’s reach and crowds of people gawking and pointing and laughing.
😉
The class meets outside a little health food shop on the boardwalk and proceeds benefit Mary’s Place by the Sea in Ocean Grove.
Teacher bird
A funny thing about birds in the hand; they’re so much smaller than we realize. Sometimes it’s even difficult to recognize them for a moment or two, I guess because we’re not used to seeing them in so much detail.
Or at least I’m not.
😉
Says Laura who refuses to wear her glasses when birding.
Ovenbirds are handsome warblers; an olive-green back and a white waistcoat spotted and streaked like a thrush. And they have very big eyes! They like to make their dutch-oven shaped nests on slopes in deciduous woods, on the forest floor.
Theirs was one of the first warbler songs I learned, because it’s so easy to recognize and so loud! When I first put bird an
d song together, I was surprised to imagine all that noise coming from such a tiny, inconspicuous-looking bird. Their only bit of color comes from that black-rimmed orange stripe across the top of the head.
The farmhouse we stayed at in W. Virginia was blessed with many ovenbirds in the surrounding woods. That was quite a treat for me as I’m used to having to *go* somewhere to hear their song. Something neat I learned about them there is that they sing at night… a funny sort of flight song, but I can’t find it referenced in any of my bird books. Anyone know any more about that?
Please click on the pics to make them bigger, especially that first one. It’s sure to make you smile.
17
Juliet’s snared you, little one, perhaps startled you into our nets…
interrupted your song or nest-building to carry you away for a moment…
our temporary prisoner, an object of study.
Tom wants only to fit you with a tiny numbered bracelet…
and to blow gentle kisses among the feathers of your breast…
to measure the distance of your wings and the length of longing in your journey…
to hold you up for a portrait; your bright eye looking to the sky for escape…
to release you, your bit of fire no longer contained; his open palm and our thanks for this moment in your life.
Sandy Hook Bird Observatory and CUNY-CSI are partnering in a banding study of spring/fall migrants, as well as breeding birds, at Sandy Hook. They put out a call for volunteers to help with recording data and running birds from the nets to the banders. Between schedules and poor weather, today was the first chance I had to help out and so I spent the dawn hours today with them, mostly trying to stay out of the way and taking pics.
#17 in my 38 by 39. Time is running short…