In the plans for this week:
Get to that Chocolate Sparrow! It’s attracting a flock of people to its roosting spot in Orleans right near The Red Balloon and the Kid and Kaboodle Store. It’s very cooperative too. Just don’t eat too much beforehand because this species of sparrow is special: It’s the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, the Original Coffee and Chocolate Barn in Orleans, Massachusetts.
So, anticipating a treat later on, I do my liesurely breast stroke, and, from under the 5-inch brim of my floppy hat with my eyes shaded by over-sized sunglasses, I watch the kids and grandbabies play in the shallows.
I look for birds.
I’m hopeful.
Other beaches along the coast seem to have Birds Galore.
I read that off Marblehead there’d been a Cory’s Shearwater, Parasitic Jaeger, and Black Guillemot–marvelous seabirds.
To start, I don’t see any seabirds out there on the water, nothing that I can spot, squint at, and speculate about even.
Not daunted, I scan closer to the beach, eyeing the shore for, well, for shorebirds.
Massachusettes Audubon says that South Beach in Chatham has tons of them: Black-bellied Plovers, Semipalmated Plovers, Oystercatchers, Greater Yellowlegs, Willets, Whimbrels, Marbeled Godwit, Red Knots, Sandpipers, Dunlins, Curlew Sandpiper, short-billed Dowitchers (700 of them!), Wilson’s Phalaropes, a Black Skimmer. (Earlier, I’d made a list and tucked it in my hat, thinking that it would help me notice what’s on our beach.)
But we’re here in Brewster, the so-called “lower Cape” that’s really North of Chatham: bordered on the north by Cape Cod Bay with extensive tidal sand flats along the shore. Inland, Brewster has Nickerson State Forest Park, the largest state forest on the Cape with several large kettle ponds, another place to spot birds.
All of this is to say that what Chatham has won’t necessarily be what I see here on Cape Cod Bay.
(Chatham likes to think that it’s The Best and the Toniest. At the Brewster General Store yesterday I found out one thing they’re definitely not better at. Largemouth bass. Brewster holds the record for the largest freshwater largemouth bass ever caught. It seems that Eric Frechette back on April 15, 1999 caught a 17.7 lbs bass that took him 45 minutes of brutal fighting to wind it in. The guys on the benches outside the store were not in agreement as to the minutes part, but all agreed with the use of the word brutal. The record hasn’t been broken.)
Eat your heart out Chatham, not this has anthing to do with birds, but hey, I had to reel the bass into this piece somehow.
Back to birds: I see one bird. A nice limited selection to start with. It goes with my limited skills.
- Image by Sergey Yeliseev via Flickr
It looks like this: very graceful, all black-and-white, and He Plunges. I learn later that it’s a Common Tern, and it’s sometimes called a Sea Swallow. He hovers briefly and then he falls from flight into the water and comes up with small fish. This is the kind of bird that suffered during the 19th Century when all the ladies wanted their feathers for their hats and then pesticides got them in the 1970′s. It’s still in trouble in some places, I’m not sure about around here. I’d love to see a group of them, or a “committee” of terns.
I learned that they drink salt water and never try to even find fresh water. We humans should check this out: they have nasal glands that excrete the excess salt. Wouldn’t this be a nifty invention for all those times the kids are clamoring for a drink? And presto-chango! you pop in an artificial nasal gland to pull the salt out of the ocean water you tell them it’s okay to gulp. Or how about for the survivors of a ship-wreck? A cruise ship with no fresh water due to some explosion in the hold?
I get sidetracked musing about nasal glands and then what I’ll choose to eat or drink at the Chocolate Sparrow, and that leads me to wonder where Pochet Road is in relation to said sparrow. Apparently a Chuck-will’s-widow is continuously calling (say his name a few times fast and you’ll replicate the call) from the end of Pochet Road in Orleans and it’s being very cooperative, meaning he’s sticking around for the birders to have time to get themselves to the spotting spot. A Chuck-will’s-widow! I hadn’t even known such existed until NPR’s Bird Note extolled its virtues.
Back to My Bird:
I read on thewww.birdwatchersgeneralstore.com website that this particular bird was spied on a fishing trip near Sandwich in Cape Cod Bay.
For a fleeting, foolish second I think maybe this is what is at our beach, a Pomarine Jaeger, a bird that goes to breed in the Arctic tundra, but if it can’t find enough lemmings it comes back early, I guess. He’s the only bird that can dig with its beak. (If those lemmings try to burrow into the, the tundra I suppose it would be, the Jaeger digs it out with its beak. It’s strong, powerful, and all-around marvelous. And, I think it really looks like the bird diving for fish right in front of me. I look closer, trying to make it into a PM.
Close Scrutiny Brings Enlightenment and Disappointment: ”My” tern does not appear to be at first glance a dark and chunky gull which is how the PJ may present itself. The PM has a dark body and a white and yellowish neck-collar. (No such accoutrement on the tern.) Also, my actual bird’s tail feathers lie flat and the jaeger’s tail is vertical like a fish.
I’m in a state of perceptual vigilance on the topic of birds. So when I read about the Pomarine Jaeger I began to think I was seeing it. My perceptual response to the lone, plunging bird was to tune out details that didn’t fit.
Once I’m sensitized to something my mind changes the way it filters my impressions. The info I’m sensitized to gets through the filter and other info that doesn’t fit stays out.
This is a good thing for me in that it gets me noticing more because I’ve got a bird I’m staying vigilant for, but it’s a problem when it keeps me from noticing all the facts of the bird. It must be what happens with a polarized political system and political ads. All Divergent Info is filtered out.
So, I wanted the Common Tern to BE this marvelous Pomarine Jaeger and that kept me blind to some facts: he was smaller and didn’t have the necklace and his tail was flat and his beak is different. In fact, he doesn’t look a lot like the PJ at all.
That’s too harsh; they look alike the way the pint-sized, 90-pound weakling and his Sumo Wrestler brother look alike.
I need to learn more and, with Ray the Birder not here to spell it all out, I’ve got to explore this website. It’s a trove of bird info stocked by Mike O’Connor, owner of the Bird Watcher’s General Store.
He writes the Ask the Bird Folks column for the Cape Codder, and every week he answers Life’s Most Persistent Questions, well, persistent for us birders.
They’re archived on the Birdwatcher’s General Store site.
I bought myself a nifty, plastic-coated accordian flyer that purports to have all the shore and sea birds of this area. Maybe I can begin to narrow my choices.
Or maybe I’ll begin by joining the group that’s organizing to check out that sparrow I mentioned earlier.
One for each of us.
More later.
Patty
7/24/11
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