Port a

You walk the same beach every day and see the same birds. Swarms of sanderlings, flowing up and down the slope of the beach with the rhythm of the waves, punctuated by the little plovers and the occasional dunlin. The flock magically opens as you walk through, like a school of tropical fish, closing like it never happened when you’ve passed. The larger ruddy turnstones and red knots, larger still black bellied plovers, and even larger willets. Biggest are the great blue herons. Finally, after all these years, we recognize them all at a glance, always watching for something different. Then, without seeing something different, we realize we’ve been wrong on the little plovers. We thought there were two little round birds with collars and bald heads, reminding us of friar tuck of the Robin Hood stories, but there are three. The snowy plover has gray legs, but piping plover legs don’t range between yellow and orange, the yellow legs are piping and the orange legs are semi-palmated plovers. We thought we were looking at two tiny peeps on the beach, and they were three.

We’ll keep working at it.