Common Birds XI - Canada Geese
The sun is dazzling in the blue sky, empty but for all the molecules that scatter the sun’s white light to yellow, blue, and red. I hear nuthatches and cardinals call ack, ack and pew, pew in the trees that run to the stream, but the brightness makes looking for them painful. I’m out later today, 10:30 rather than 9:15, because I had to get a new badge to replace the one I lost Friday. That loss trapped me inside. But Saturday, Amelia and I finally had nothing to do, so we went to one of my favorite places: the nature preserve on Plum Island, just outside of Newburyport. The weather was cold, windy, and overcast. There were fewer people at the preserve than in January, the last time the two of us had been. I think the longtime birders know that this is a slow time, the lull between our winter birds migrating north and our summer birds arriving from the south. But I am still relatively new to birding, earnest, and eager so we went to see the world.
We took a small trail which overlooks ponds and tidal inlets. Low tide smelled like musky decay and salt, like the last days of autumn preserved in brine. A few mallards tipped in the pools to eat the underwater vegetation, butts in the air and feet still paddling. Nothing else was out. In the summer, I’d seen great and snowy egrets and a beautiful American avocet, wading with its thin, black bill which curves delicately upward. Migration, for now, meant absence and not yet presence.
It was cold and windy and the beach would only be colder and windier, so Amelia stayed in the car as I went to see if I could see any surf scooters, the most puffin-like of all ducks. The path was a plastic boardwalk which gently slopes up through low trees and shrubs. As I climbed the twisted pines gave way. I could see the sand of the dunes, interspersed with gray grass, and dense, pale green lichen which turns the sand into the soil. Ahead, I saw the peak of the dunes and the rumble of the surf began to dominate all sound. As I crested the dunes, wind crashed into me, numbing my ears and making my eyes water. White waves roared from the shore to the horizon. Sea-foam blew and tumbled over the wet sand and the smell and sound and the utter extent of the ocean saturated my senses.
I turned my eyes to the beach. Rivulets carved tiny canyons in the sand and they flowed from the dunes to the waves. In the midst of the overwhelming presence of the ocean, tiny sanderlings chased and were chased by the rolling surf. I hurried off the dune to get a better look. I’d never seen sanderlings before and I wanted to know their details. They’re small and run on blurring legs, mostly white but with black flecks on their backs, black bill, and black accents on their wings which I saw when they flew. There were about forty of them in the foam, dashing and flying down the shore. They’ll be migrating soon, back to the very tip of the arctic. But for those moments, we all stood together before the ocean, defended by the surf, buffeted by the wind, and I felt immensely alive in this intertwining of wind, life, breath, and soul.
But today, it is warm and sunny, and I am back at work. The ground is damp but not muddy from Saturday night’s light rain. At the pond, two Canada geese drift in off the river as I stand to take a picture of the day. They are the invisible migration made visible, but made invisible by their sheer ubiquity. Usually fearless, huge, and cantankerous, on the water they are elegant, their long, black, swan-necks dipping beneath the calm surface. Two more Canada geese fly and hook past as I stand on the wooden footbridge. The river is slightly choppy from the weekend’s wind, but it’s slowly relaxing. Like most days, the endlessness of Canada geese makes them disappear, passing without note, despite the fact that they shout uproariously that they are heralds of spring and new life.
