12 July 03
A Break From the Heat
We’ve come west to Bodega Bay to visit my mother and immerse ourselves in the summer permafog of the coast, where multiple layers are essential and where we are gleefully freezing. There are also hills, too, so Numenius got a nice bike ride in. I went for a walk instead along the cliffs of the headland with my mother, checking up on the Western Gull chicks, the Pigeon Guillemots, and the Ravens who seem to have done away with the Oystercatcher offspring… Ravens are beautiful and majestic in flight but they are doing too well in this state, boosted by their adaptability to humans and our garbage. Marbled Murrelets in particular are suffering from the increased raven population.
The Turkey Vultures are doing well here. We saw three-a parent and two young-perched precariously on a telephone wire. Turkey vultures are almost always silent except in the breeding season, when they are said to coo and nuzzle. I would give a great deal to witness this!
On the way back we saw an Eared Grebe in breeding plumage sitting on the water with a Pied-Billed Grebe for company. I guess there was no spring migration for these two birds.
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Chris: I didn’t run into Suzanne but thanks for the heads-up. If you’d care to elaborate, I’m all ears.
Perhaps one of the most stunning views I ever had was of a huge flock of Greater Flamingo in the Camargue of southern France, feeding in the salt shallows. They all rose in unison when two wild Camargue horses trotted through their midst. Just imagine it: a rosette cloud of batting wings sweeping over two grey-white horses, manes aflowing…
And the most bird-intense place I ever visited were the Shetland Islands. Low lying, emerald green with finger high grass, treeless, and windy as a politician’s promises, you’d think that nothing would live or grow here. But along the coast cliffs, birds lived as if they’d found their utopia. One particular precipice, which my wife and I viewed from a wave-tossed boat beneath (it was pretty funny glancing back at all the birders turning green at the gills while attempting to shoot photos and level their binoculars! ) harbored a metropolis of millions upon millions of birds… Gannets, Razorbills, Puffins, Shags, Fulmars, Great Skuas, Arctic Skuas, Kiitiwakes, Glaucous Gulls, Great Blackback Gulls, Guillemots, Black Guillemots, Little Auks, and Cormorants (god, whoever came up with birds’ names must have been graced by a muse… aren’t they just great!? ) and all wheeling and soaring and diving and swooping and gliding and flapping frantically, with a din of calls and screeches and cries that thrummed the very air. I will never forget the sensation of their voices reverberating in the hollows of my chest, like the vibrations of a giant audience’s applause.