Friday, May 6, 2005

Beach


Walking on the beach here is something like walking through a dry grass
field full of grasshoppers in August. A wave of motion precedes your path.
Here, it's a wave of shorebirds. The ever-present and ever busy
sanderlings. Complaining willets, black bellied plovers, red knots,
turnstones, dunlins, the occasional piping plover, least sandpiper, and
semi-palmated sandpiper. Such a concentration of shorebirds. They flush
and swirl ahead of every step, just a little farther ahead than the
grasshoppers in the field do, and they don't land on your legs. The
pelicans glide silently by. The laughing gulls, in full summer dress, are
anything but silent.