Category Archives: Wanderings

Remembering, Travels with the flock, Wanderings, Whatever

Time for a tease

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Susan’s counter thingy says that the Cape May Weekend is just 15 days away and I hear that Lynne has already started packing and KatDoc is saving quarters for all the tolls on the Parkway… and I’m resisting the urge to visit ahead of the rest of the flock.

I’d really like to go now while it’s still warmish and the Monarchs and Buckeyes are moving through. I’m sure Bunker Pond is still full of egrets and that there’s plenty of Peregrines soaring past the lucky people crowded in the shadow of the lighthouse and Merlins cruising low over the dunes in the late afternoon. Have a peak at some of the most recent numbers here.

Rather than that, I’ll think I’ll probably spend the next couple weekends wandering around the Pine Barrens. October is a great month to visit and there’s lots to see and do with the beginning of the cranberry harvest there.

I just got distracted with the duck numbers in that Cape May link, sorry.

Girls… you’ve got to find time to visit the Seawatch at Avalon while you’re here… it’s such a spectacle! I remember standing out in the pouring rain on Friday of last year’s weekend, wondering why you all weren’t there with me to witness the tens of thousands of scoters flying past in the fog and rain. It was just unbelievable and very wet.

😉

Something else we should all look forward to is more goofy pics of Susan playing in the surf. Though I suspect I may instead have my camera trained on Lynne as she dips her toes in the Atlantic for the first time.

So girls… what’s on your to-do-in-Cape May-lists?

Heather, you still in? John? Patrick? Patrick’s away on his honeymoon… what am I thinking?

😉

Birds, Small truths, Wanderings

Just ducky

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I’ll let you all in on a little secret, so long as you promise not to take too great an advantage from it:

Ducks are the way to my heart.

Stand with me beside the bay on a freezing winter day, face streaked with tears from the biting wind, ducks bobbing in the distance and you’ll have found a friend for life.

If it’s June and there are no ducks to be had in NJ, find an excuse to be in ND and coast with me along deserted roads, bordered by great puddles filled with all manner of breeding ducks and I’ll think you the best birding-buddy a person could find.

And if it’s late September, when only the earliest of Northern Pintails can be found on some secret shallow marsh, go with me to the decoy show and let me anticipate the arrival of my most favorite class of birds.

Humor me as I agonize over which decoy I’ll bring home.

Try not to be too impatient with me as my questions elicit yet another story about how an ex-insurance broker came to carve shorebirds and paint lighthouses in his retirement. Or how another came to copy the great carvers who made their living from decoys in the days of market-gunning.

Don’t be embarrassed when I (too loudly) compare the antique animal traps at the taxidermist’s “display” to barbarian torture devices. Be proud, in fact, that I don’t back down from his smart-ass response to overhearing my comment.

This is a decoy and gunning show, remember.

And I’m a duck-watching, tree-hugging, dirt-loving fool.

For all that pains me about it, there is almost nothing that I don’t love about the heritage this show represents. Historically an impoverished area of the state, the baymen who made their living there did so in cycles, commercial fishermen in season and boat builders or electricians or decoy carvers in winter. Cranberry and blueberry harvesters or chicken farmers on the side.

Collectible decoys are an artifact of tools that have outlived their usefulness. The draw for me is the workmanship; the finest of floating sculpture that was designed to be tossed in salt water and into the line of fire. Gone, mostly, are the days when decoys were used to lure ducks and shorebirds to the hunter’s gun and then on to restaurants or the millinery trade.

The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act put an end to the commercial hunting of wild birds and so we’re left with a piece of history. A piece of that heritage remains in the decoy, more sophisticated now than the early carvings meant just to evoke the likeness of a bird and thereby bring the real thing into the sights of a hunter’s gun.

Of course it’s those primitive-style decoys that I prefer. I think it must be partly because they remind me of the way I experience ducks as a birder; old style decoys are all about field marks: cheek patches and tail shape and bill color. There’s no time to see the fine-feather detail on the flanks of a Bufflehead as they bob like little rubber ducks in the frozen bay, anyway. Too much detail distracts my eye, makes me keenly aware that what I’m seeing is, after all, a decoy.

The Ocean County Decoy and Gunning Show continues tomorrow in Tuckerton.

Remembering, Wanderings

The blink of an eye

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While I was up in North Jersey on Friday to visit the hawkwatch site, I took a stroll around the campus of the college where I did my undergraduate degree.

When I was a student there it was still just a college and not a university like it is today. That change is mostly superficial, I guess, yet I went there fully expecting that I wouldn’t recognize the place for all the new buildings that have been constructed since I graduated. I was happy to find that the core of the campus was unchanged and that the feel of the place was the same to me. It does feel much more grown-up somehow, though, with a cafe attached to the library, a diner right on campus and its very own train station.

I spent an hour or so sitting on the familiar benches outside Partridge Hall, which used to house the Department of Spanish and Italian, where I spent the majority of my days for those four years. It was only twenty years ago this month that I started there as a freshman, after all.

Cripes! Where did twenty years go?

In the blink of an eye…

I’d started college as a Political Science major, of all things, but mostly C’s and a D or two (plus the riot act from my dad) convinced me that Poly Sci most probably wasn’t where my talents were.

How exactly I ended up as a Spanish Translation major is less clear in my memory, but I suppose I might have been influenced by the mission-style architecture of the campus, or my Spanish-born uncle, or more probably that I mostly always got A’s in Spanish without very much difficulty.

😉

Anyway… Spanish was a good fit for me. Not as easy one, as Montclair State is blessed with a diverse population and an excellent faculty that hardly ever cut me any slack as the only non-native speaker in most of my classes. One of my professors often ‘complimented’ me on my ‘creative’ use of the language, in fact.

😉

I never was able to make a living doing the type of translation work I love – literary translation – nor was the year spent doing legal and medical translations very lucrative, but I think I’ve been lucky since then to be able to make use of my undergraduate degree in most all of the jobs I’ve held over the years. That’s probably more than can be said for my friends who stuck with Political Science.

Of course I’m denying the fact that I had to get a graduate degree to be able to make any real money (as if!) but that’s another story, anyway.

It was nice to spend a couple hours there and see myself 18 again with the whole world for my imagining.

Birds, Wanderings

Skywatching for hawks

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I know it’s a Raven, but it’s the best bird pic I got today during a couple hours spent at the Montclair Hawkwatch. The hawkwatch site is NJ Audubon’s smallest sanctuary and the second oldest continuous- running hawkwatch in the country, second only to Hawk Mountain in Pa.

Finding hawks at a ridge site, as opposed to a coastal watch like Sandy Hook or Cape May, is really difficult and requires a lot of patience and much better eyesight than I have. We were looking at speck birds for most of the day! I did get to see a few kettles of Broadwings way up in the clouds (yesterday they counted 4437 Broadwings), some Osprey and Sharpies, a couple Kestrals and had a nice look at a Peregrine.

We had to be glad for all those clouds in the sky cause they gave us landmarks to help locate the birds soaring high above. A fun day, but I prefer coastal hawkwatching that doesn’t require quite as much imagination!

I met this guy there who has some fantastic hawk pics on his Flickr site.

Visit here for more Friday Skywatch posts.

Birds, I like to make lists, Wanderings

16

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That bit of early evening sunlight reflecting off this yellow-headed blackbird is what makes me like this otherwise terrible pic; the quality of light in North Dakota was magical and generous. Even the moonlight seemed to fill the prairie pot holes until they popped out like mirrors of the star-filled sky.

Anyway, I digress…

These were my prairie life birds:

Eared Grebe
Western Grebe
American White Pelican
Sharp-Tailed Grouse
Yellow Rail
American Avocet
Black Tern
Western Kingbird
Bank Swallow
Sedge Wren
Clay-colored Sparrow
Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow
Yellow-headed blackbird

I’m still holding onto most of my North Dakota stories like precious little pebbles in the pocket of my favorite pair of jeans. Every now and again I pull one out and turn it over in my hand and decide if it’s polished enough for telling yet. Most aren’t, but I’m beginning to remember and still enjoy just sitting with those memories.

Each of the birds on this very modest list has a story of its own; its own sweet memory. I’d forgotten, I think, how nice new life birds can be. A couple of them aren’t technically life birds for me, but I’m a little quirky about claiming life birds and would just as soon wait to check a bird off that list as not be able to really remember seeing it for the first time. These are all firmly set in my memory of a wonderful couple days spent wandering in the middle of nowhere.

#16 in my 38 by 39.

Birds, Seasons, Wanderings

Bits of summer in Cape May

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I drove south to Cape May on Saturday, in the middle of *Hurricane* Hanna, and so missed a lot of the signs of the season I know to look for along the coast. I missed the beach plums ripening close to shore and the wash of russet-gold that comes to the sea meadows that border the parkway in South Jersey. Mostly I concentrated on the raindrops and the taillights of the cars in front of me so as to not run off the road and into a tree. God I hate driving in the pouring rain!September is always beautiful in Cape May, regardless of the weather. By Saturday evening, Hanna was little more than a gray curtain over the ocean, but there was some hope of good birds brought in by the storm. Unusual birds never materialized beyond a Magnificent Frigatebird that we missed (of course!) I did hear some interesting call notes overhead one night on the beach though. If you ever have reason to be on the beach at night in the late summer under a clear sky – take it!

All the usuals for late summer were there and things are happening just as they should; I guess to most, September belongs to Autumn, but for me it’s still Summer and the best part at that. It’s hardly ever too hot and the nights have a faint chill that hints of what’s to come. The skimmers were barking and dancing over the cove by the jetty while we played in the surf as the sun set down along the bay…

We crossed paths with a box turtle looking for shade from the hot sun at Hidden Valley among the balled up fists of Queen Anne’s Lace going to seed and the ripening greenish-purple berries of Porcelain-berry Vine. We didn’t spot any of the hunting hawks that I know to look for there, but instead found vultures pitching and banking among the few clouds overhead.

I can’t go to Cape May and not remember other times there; other September days with hordes of migrating monarchs and dragonflies, clouds of sanderlings flying in a lane close to the edge of the ocean like distant twinkling lights as they turn and flash their underparts in the sun, wheels of hawks rising together over the Point and then setting their wings and streaming south.

The sanderlings this weekend were doing their thing on scurrying feet, up and back with every shining wave, alone or in twos. The egrets congregated in big groups at Bunker Pond in front of the hawkwatch, entertainment for the lack of hawks, despite a merlin spotted feeding on a swarm of dragonflies. Of course there’s no picture of that; the best memories somehow manage to always escape my camera.

Books, Remembering, Snapshots, Wanderings

Skywatch Friday

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You have to know how to look at this country. You have to slow down. It isn’t pretty, but it’s beautiful.
–Kent Haruf in West of Last Chance
In the weeks before I went to North Dakota in June, I spoke to a couple people out there and the weather always came up in conversation, mainly the hope for rain to “green things up some.” Green it was, but every so often we’d come across a view like this of a pale ocean of prairie grass laid out to the horizon. More often than not there weren’t any trees to mark the edge of vision, the sky and clouds a kaleidoscope of moods, the play of sunlight on the land the only thing to distinguish one moment from the next.

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