Egrets and Dolphins - OH MY!

When we visited Chincoteague last Christmas season, we drove out in the rain towards the ocean on Assateague Island.  Rain on the ocean is often beautiful.  As we drove back towards Chincoteague, the sun came out; blue skies showed through the thunderheads, and at a pond-side marsh we saw a tree illuminated by sunbeam, completely covered with white egrets.  Though we visit Assateague often enough I had never seen such a large group of egrets, and I had seldom seen egrets in trees.  We discovered that a flock of egrets is called a congregation or a colony of egrets.

We often stay at an inn on the tidal Eel Creek on Chincoteague Island.  A great marsh with brackish pools lies beyond the creek. Large glass doors look out from the living room onto the creek and marsh. Two rusty trailers sit to the west of the inn’s wooden landing, and two lonely trees stand in front of the trailers.  In the mornings, as the sun comes up, we often hear the dawn squawk at the inn – several species of birds give voice at once to the rising sun.  Then the dawn parade starts.  Varieties of geese and ducks swim grandly west on the creek in formation or not.  Solitary heron and egrets fly with great slow heavy wing strokes to the ponds on the marsh.  The fishing day has begun.

The morning after we arrived in Chincoteague a few weeks ago, I slept till nine.  Ox, a sensible tourist, woke just before dawn.  He looked out our living room doors and saw the two trees covered with egrets facing east.   Each tree had, what he described as a priest egret at the very top.  As the sun rose the priest egrets, and seconds later the rest of the congregations, gracefully flew east to fishing spots on the creek.  Ox reported that the moment felt like a well-practiced sacred ritual.

The next morning as Ox slept, I looked out the doors before dawn.  Again the trees were covered with egrets, this time facing west.  At the top of each tree was a priest egret.  The world was hushed.  As the sun rose, the priests flew west and out of sight, followed by the congregations.  The dawn squawk sounded.  The directions the egret congregations flew likely had to do with the tidal currents in Eel Creek and the fish.

Ox decided that we should once again take Captain Dan’s boat tour around Chincoteague Island.  When we had done this before we’d learned a great deal about the island history and wildlife.  On our first trip we saw three bald eagles and a variety of birds as well as the famous wild Chincoteague ponies.  [I am not overwhelmed by the wild ponies as they are vaccinated every spring, fed when forage is sparse, and rounded up a couple of times of year.]  Captain Dan is a 3^rd or 4^th generation Chincoteague fisher.  He knows the history and wildlife of the island and of Assateague well.

This trip, the highlight was a sighting of about five pods of dolphins.  I have seen many dolphins before, but only on PBS.  These dolphins came into view as we came to the channel that led to the sea.  The five pods of dolphins ranged from five members to two.  In each pod as one dolphin rose to the surface the next dolphin dove, weaving a wonderful tapestry of motion.  The graceful arcs and rhythms of the dolphins left me speechless and awestruck.

OH MY!

Pests on the Beach: Canada Geese, Wolves and Lifeguards

The swimming beach at Mint Springs Park is enclosed with a tall, black, vinyl-clad chain link fence.   Canada Geese, who live in the park day and night during the school year, only visit the park at nighttime in the summer.  The pond is open for swimming during summer days.  Cars and trucks litter the parking lot.  The noise of children and teens enjoying themselves fills the air.

A pleasure of dusk at the park is the sound of a gaggle of geese coming in for a landing on the pond.   With hysterical hoarse honks and much back feathering about 25 geese land on the pond; they swim directly to the beach.  Earlier, on spring evenings, they spent time on the dam, pecking in the grass, or over by the picnic tables near Shelter One before they swim to their nighttime beach.  Canada Geese are not tidy; the geese defecate everywhere they land. 

 

At night the tall chain link fence gives the geese protection. The park is rife with predators.  Sometimes at night a few coyotes howl.  Bears, raccoons, hawks, and foxes visit after hours.  Occasionally a skunk perfumes the air.

While many of the geese sleep sound in the beach enclosure, a few keep their necks erect scanning the surrounding park for threats.  These sentinel geese detect enemies digging under the fence. One night recently, Ox waited for me as I walked around the pond.  It was almost dark when I returned to his picnic table. He said “Come, I want to show you something”.  The light had almost gone.  I could barely make out the form he pointed out.  Beside one of the lifeguard stands I saw what looked like a moth-eaten wolf, lowered head pointed at the herd of geese.  The wolf didn’t move.  The geese didn’t move. The sentinel geese didn’t more, and, oddly, didn’t even utter.

The next evening the wolf mystery was partly solved.  In the earlier evening light, the wolf, now lying on its side under the lifeguard stand, was clearly a rubber or plastic wolf.  My first hypothesis was that a lifeguard, clowning, wore the wolf on his head to amuse the children.

The evening after that there were two wolves at the beach, each lying under a lifeguard stand.  I took pictures.

We drove to the park later than usual one night.  We stood on the footbridge over a side pond ringed with young willows and watched as turtles surfaced their heads; when they spotted us, they sank into the murk leaving concentric rings in the water.  A rangy woman came up to us.  She said that she often came up here in the evenings to swim.   She talked to the life guards one evening.  They were worried, she said, about the pond as a source of disease.  After a day at work in the sun a couple of them felt tired and had headaches.  They feared that the geese might be a source of infection.  Suddenly the wolves made sense.  Hypothesis two is that the wolves are intended as goose repellents.

Obviously, as the goose flock sleeps under the wolves' noses, the wolves did not immediately work as goose repellents.  However, for the last two nights we have arrived at dusk and stayed until past dark, and the goose flock has not shown up.

For the last two weeks, all but one of the gates onto the beach has been locked with chains and padlocks.  The first time we noticed it, one gate had an unsecured chain wrapped around it.  After that first night the chain wasn’t even there.  I have a lawless streak and had a desire to surprise the lifeguards.  Last night, as Ox stood watch, I opened the gate, took each wolf from under its lifeguard stand, and posed the wolves on the stands.  I felt a surge of scofflaw joy as I did this.  Ox wiped my prints off the gate as we left.  You see before you a 77 year-old woman turning to the dark side and a couple of wolves coming out from the shadows.

 

                                                                                    

Solace at the Park

We have consoled ourselves this July for missing the wedding of a much-loved niece in California, by visiting Mint Springs Park every evening.  We go just before sunset, late enough in the day that few people are still at the park.  There are almost always one or two families of fisher people, sometimes a pair of lovers stroll over the dam hand and hand, sometimes mothers with small children play on the slides.  Twice the owner of the scofflaw dog has let him out at the top of the park to run, joyful and unleashed, down to the lower pond.  Every evening there is some surprise waiting for us at Mint Springs.

One night we found joy in the birds.  As we drove up to the park, a heron flew round the pond to the far marshy bit where the stream comes in from the hill above. 

Red-wing blackbirds had flocked and nested here for many years.  Muskrats gnawed down the cattails last fall and winter.  This spring the flock of red-wings returned, checked out the sparse remnants of cattails, and flew on.  This night we discovered two nesting couples of red-wing blackbirds had returned to the diminished stand of cattails. (Sadly, the muskrats, we have heard, have been relocated by park people; their silvery v-shaped wakes always thrilled us.)

We walked around the pond, passing quietly behind the flock of geese that often hangs out on the dam.  Though Canada geese are the hysterics of the bird world, they are so used to us that when we walk behind them they barely murmur anymore. 

 

Tree swallows, swooped over the pond, graceful streaks of blue, and flashed their white bellies as they switched direction.  As we rounded the pond to the farthest and most remote corner, we spooked the heron, who took off from the water with great, slow wing strokes. 

 

A little further into the woods and we heard the cacophony of a few coyotes.  Their howls are high pitched and eerie.

The sundown was the feature of another night.  A line of orange sunlight shone over the western notch and backlit the hills.  Piles of clouds in the east colored first gold, then orange, then rose, and faded into dark gray.  Reflections in the water were brighter than the colors in the sky.  The crescent moon shone in the western sky.   Every night that I have not brought a camera, we have had a beautiful sunset.

Tonight we were tired and sat for half an hour at a picnic table on goose beach watching turtles’ heads surface, gasp air, and then disappear in concentric rings of water.  We listened to the frogs – crickets, green frogs and last, the deep voiced bullfrogs.  Dragonflies darted, touching down to the water from time to time.  Fireflies rained upwards.  A movement caught the corner of my eye just as Ox said “Look, Jenny.”  A young raccoon, oblivious of us, sniffed around the picnic table five yards south of us; he was poking around for supper.   As he got closer to us, I got a little nervous and we stood up.  He startled, then waddled with deliberate speed behind the nearest trees.  He peeked out from behind a near tree, then from between two trees, and as we left so that he could dine, he climbed up the farthest tree.

Two Places

Mint Springs

More than a week ago we walked around the pond at Mint Springs Park.  It was almost dark.  Spring had come to the park showing itself first in the beautiful blossoms of the park’s fruit trees, light against the looming darkness, and then as the eye sharpened, in the soft and feathery look of the hardwood trees on the hills; a few weeks before the hills had looked hard and brushy.

We listened to the mating trill of the small American Toad.  The trill, sounded continuously around the pond except wherever we were; it is a sharp and musical sound, at several closely related pitches.  The small toads roiled the water in the place between the cattails and the bridge to the children’s beach. 

  

A week or two before last week the goose flock had broken into couples.  Now the others left the pond to one couple at the upper pond and one at the lower pond.  In each couple the gander, with pale breast and upright neck, guarded the goose who fed without cease on the turf.   We always talk in low peaceful voices to the couple as we cross the dam.  The geese remain in place but hum anxiously to each other.  A car driven by a scofflaw, drove to the highest point of the park, by Shelter Two, and a dog jumped out the window.  Nothing looks as joyful as a dog freed of its bonds.  The dog ran down to the parking area, defecated, and then ran down and out of sight towards the entrance to the park, followed closely by his owner’s car.  When the dog drew near the geese they squawked  hysterical squawks and flew to the middle of the pond.  We can always count on geese to provide drama.

We thought we saw the wake of the resident muskrats.  They are shy creatures who show themselves towards dark.  The muskrats have taken possession of the beaver lodges left behind when the beavers were relocated a few years ago.

Assateague.   

Today we are staying at Chincoteague and visiting Assateague.  The contrast with our park is overwhelming.  This place is as beautiful as the park.  We drive to Assateague in daytime to look at the ocean and the  birds and in the evenings to gawp at the sunsets.   After many years of consulting Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds, and a few years of consulting Sibley’s, I am still confused by sandpipers, plovers, and ducks.  I’m beginning to sort out the gulls with the help of a list of visiting birds that the NPS posts at the ranger station.  The commonest gulls are the elegant black, gray, and white Laughing Gulls.  These gulls fish the waters in Assateague Channel between Chincoteague and Assateague.  They pose, placed equidistant on the bridge across the channel, tipped forward at just the same angle to spot the fish.  On the beach they face into the wind and the sun.    

The egrets seem more collegial these days than they were.    A pool in the brackish channel on the way to the ocean hosts a variety of egrets.  We’ve seen the beautiful Great Egrets, mingled with Snowy Egrets in the pool, and perched on nearby trees..  The latter have black bills and black legs with yellow toes (to lure careless fish I think).   An occasional squat Cattle Egret hangs out in the pool.  At this season,, the mating plumes of these birds blow gracefully in the wind. The species have no trouble getting along when the fish are abundant.  The Great Blue Heron is more solitary; herons fish by themselves, widely spaced.  They are much rarer than the egrets.

The Snow Geese are here too. We have seen migrating flocks of these birds in mesmerizing murmurations.  The birds are not here in such great numbers this spring, but they still transfix the viewer when they fly close together.  They swirl and dip in beautiful patterns, picked out by the light.  Their patterns remind of the swirls of schools of fish.

Pine bark beetle periodically attacks the pines here.  The pine bark infestations kill local pines, which die and rot, enriching the earth.  Young pines spring up, become infected and die.  The cycle is old.   An area along the road to the beach has been bulldozed – it’ll eventually be an area for penning the ponies.  The area looks devastated – as if a developer has had his way here.  The infested pines have been cut down and hauled away. 

 

The last strong storm that hit Assateague this winter swept away much of the parking area at the beach along with the beach sand.  The sea is eating away at this island.  Now the old parking area is closed for giant earth-moving equipment to do repair work.  Huge piles of red dirt and oyster shells line the old parking area.  A small parking area is open to the north of the old one.    Slightly north of that parking place, signs and ropes close off the threatened Piping Plover's nesting site.

    

Assateague is a barrier island run by the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Chincoteague Firemen.  The firemen run the famous Chincoteague ponies.  The Nature Conservancy owns a large part of the north of the island, which is off limits to tourists.  Assateague is a complicated jurisdiction.

Misty of Chincoteague  was published in 1947 when I was eight,  but  I never read the book. Though I enjoy seeing them often this trip, I’m underwhelmed by the Chincoteague wild ponies.  They are penned sometimes, they are fed when forage is scarce, they are rounded up twice a year for medical checks and vaccinations, and the herd is culled for auction once a year every summer.   They don’t seem very wild.  The ponies and the beach are vital to the economic survival of Chincoteague.  Chincoteague survives on its tourists and its watermen.  For the most part people live here because they love the place.

The wind has been strong this last week and the weather cold.  We had one day and one afternoon of rain.  The colors of the ocean vary with the light.  It has been dark blue, teal, lime green, and pale mint with breakers and reflections tinted peach from the setting sun.  The wind makes a white veil up from the breakers.

I love these two places.  Getting to know them soothes my itchy feet.  Perhaps I'll inhabit some other paradise in some other life.  These are enough for this one.