Green Geese and Pink Gulls

Today at Heislerville WMA, in Cumberland county, I saw my first teeny olive and yellow Canada Goose hatchlings of the year, clearly fresh from the nest. That seems to have happened very fast, but I'm not complaining. Much derided though they are as adults (and unfairly so to my mind), there are few beings as sweet, innocent, endearing, and characterstic of a season as day-old Canada Goslings.

And on the exposed sand-flats of the Delaware bayshore, Laughing Gulls were arching their necks, bowing, and quite literally dancing in an effort to establish pair-bonds. One of the most ardent, and successful dancers was downright pink on the underparts. Not just a light bloom, as seen in the right light, with the correct squint, but pink. Much more intense than a Roseate Tern, but far less than a Roseate Spoonbill. I can only imagine he had more than his fair share of cartenoid-rich shrimp-like creatures to eat on the wintering grounds, and was just as fit as he looked and acted.

The Hereford Inlet neighborhood held far more shorebirds than is usual for the time of year. The numbers there were much more akin to what should be there in about three weeks, at the peak of Atlantic "beach-piper" migration. There were easily seven to eight thousand Dunlin, nearly a thousand Shart-billed Dowitchers, maybe 600 Black-bellied Plovers, 70 Red Knot, and more Ruddy Turnstones than I would expect. The nesting Willets and Oystercatchers were vociferous as usual, and the bright blue facial skin, peachy aigrettes, and floppy white coronal plumes of Tricolored Herons added a bit of color to the scene.

But the sounds were the most impressive: the raucous, maniacal din of thousands of bowing Laughing Gulls, the pill-will-willets of Willets, and best of all, the murmuring, whirring rush of a couple thousand Dunlin wings as they zoomed overhead, searching for higher ground as the tide hid their mud and dinner. One lane of the free bridge to Nummy's Island is closed, providing an excellent, and unusually quiet vantage point from which to scan the inlet. An added advantage to standing there, among the fragments of shattered bivalve dropped by clever Herring Gulls, is that the shorebirds are very close to one's head, and ears, as they whisk overhead.

That whir of wader wings makes the hairs on the back of one's nape literally stand on end. Even one with very jaded ears.