(As an aside, I never cease to marvel at how cool it is that there is a real, actual, place on the map called "The Great Saltmarsh", and that I live next to it.)
In addition to the Whimbrel (or more accurateley, Hudsonian Curlews, as the brown-rumped Nearctic variety is properly known) a few Saltmarsh Sparrows were giving their weak, sizzling songs. Like an anemic Seaside Sparrows, and not as "hot-wire thrown in cold water" sizzly as a Nelson's Sparrow.
But best of all, with its wings as angled and swept back as a Klingon Bird-of-Prey Ship, was perhaps my most favored of a favorite group of birds, the Laughing Swallow of the Nile. Gelochelidon nilotica, or more mundanely, the Gull-billed Tern. My first of the year, he was here hunting fiddler crabs. At times they hunt Frogs in ponds, at others they parasitize Common Terns, on the edges of whose colonies a single pair usually likes to nest. I have watched them get mobbed by pairs of Piping Plovers whose downy fledgelings they try to pick off from the sand, or pick off Whiptail lizards from dunes. Found on every continent but Antarctica, yet common on none, Gull billed Terns are in the running with Swallow-tailed Kites, Snowy Egrets, and Long-tailed Jaegers for most elegant avian predator. At least in my book.
Meanwhile, this evening back at Perfidious Heights (ie, the Vogel Apartment) I was looking in the library for information on the fledging and egg-dates of American Woodcock, so taken was I with the sighting of the Woodcock brood at East Point Light earlier this week.
I started with Arthur Cleveland Bent, and never really got any farther, for this is how the venerable, learned, Rabbi Bent begins:
This mysterious hermit of the alders, this recluse of the boggy thickets, this wood nymph of crepuscular habits is a common bird in our Eastern States, widely known, but not intimately known. Its quiet retiring habits do not lead to human intimacy. It may live almost in our midst unnoticed. Its needs are modest, its habitat is circumscribed, and it clings with tenacity to its favorite haunts even when closely encroached upon by civilization."
When did the convention in nature/scientific writing begin to favor the bland, boring, and banal above the descriptive and emotive? And more importantly, why?
Thumbing through Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds entry regarding the Woodcock (then known as Rubicola, not Scolopax, minor) I then hit upon this most remarkable entry by a most remarkable man.
"Audubon (1840) describes the actions of the anxious mother in the following well chosen words: She scarcely limps, nor does she often flutter along the ground, on such occasions; but with half exetnded wings, inclining her head to one side, and uttering a soft mumur, she moves to and fro, urging her young to hasten towards some secure spot beyond the reach of their enemies. Regardless of her own danger, she would to all appearance gladly suffer herself to be seized, could she be assured that by such sacrifice she might ensure the safety of her brood. On an occasion of this kind, I saw a female woodcock lay herself down in the middle of a road, as if she were dead, while her little ones, five in number, were endeavoring on feeble legs to escape from a pack of naughty boys, who had already caught one of them, and were kicking it over the dust in barbarous sport. The mother might have shared the same fate, had I not happend to issue from the thicket, and interpose on her behalf.
Um, Wow. Not only well chosen words, but a well placed heart from one so often characterized as a blood-thirsty bird shooter.
Like a Gull-billed Tern, Audubon can do no wrong in this writer's eyes. His actions and life were most deft, and again like those of a Gull-billed Tern, rarely misplaced.
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