On the far side of the pond bubbles braille the surface, cerulean blue, soft as morning stars. The air is still. Half light. The lilies rustle. Their posted buds stirred by a breeze of water sway like channel markers. There. Just off shore. Someone breaking fast. leisurely. Jaws worked in a whisper reaching across the silence there.
Then rolls. And dips. And disappears…
A beaver lodge stands nearby, they built this pond but that was no beaver. The texture of its fur, the shape and the way it moved. The smoothness of the dive and how the surface rose and closed, a navel of water, and what it brings to mind. That surface, opaque as skin, blind to what lies beneath.
Patience… Patience… The crease of a wake. Grainy light. No sound. The waters rake: A head appears. Oiled. Sleek. Coat as silky as a Tonkinese all umber and burnt ochre. Whiskers. Dark eyes. Fearless. That broad Boycat face so close –
And my heart leaps. And every hair is alive. I too am fearless I am soaring I see what I was sure I would never see again, a quarter century almost to the day:
We were making our way from the road down the steep banks of Herring Creek where the flood bores through the narrow. Behind us, back of the sluices, the weathered gray seine poles and the staggered fishing weirs worked by a people whose right went back a thousand years. But the herring run was over, only a few of the boney fishes swimming in place in the tidal rush, Squibnocket’s turn to pour its cup into Menemsha. The Snowy Egrets, bronzed by the shallow light had gathered in at the end of their early rising day. Black-crown Night Herons roosting in the trees were restless, preparing for their night of hunting. A changing of the guard. We’d just met, Valerie and me and I didn’t know a thing about her except that I liked her and was not sure how much she liked me. It was our first time together longer than a cup of coffee.
“Gold finch,” I said and handed her the binoculars, nodding toward to the bright yellow forms, each in pursuit of his opposite. “Osprey.” Valerie turned to follow the lead of arm. A kingfisher hovering. Swans. All the usual fare of late estuarian afternoon and then -
Round the corner of the creek one-two-three-four otters in slipstream, nose to tail, swimming with the flow. Uncaring of us and our close presence there they stopped to play not 15 feet from where we stood. Circling like dolphins, chasing the herring for the pure pleasure of it, not killing, (though they surely could if they’d wanted). And the fish off in a terror, the otters swirling and whirling in the narrow and that wallering call, “Walla walla walla walla walla walla.,” the laughter a walrus might make, so guttural, so deep for a creature so small. And all I can say is, “You’ll never see this again, this is once in a lifetime, you will never see this again. I’ve been waiting more than twenty years…”
The otter, alone and having had his look turns away, now head, now back, now tail slipping beneath. He comes up some yards off and looks again, and again dives, and surfaces. This time he has a bullfrog (the prey that brought him here) dangling from his mouth as if forgot, gaze still fixed on me, more intense than curious as if he has as much to tell as to learn. For the last time he slides below, leaving a silence so profound neither speech nor written word can ever break it, the only river otter I have seen in all that precious time, a Millennium between the then and now.
Valerie claims she knew she would marry me the first time she saw me watching her from a doorway across the room. But I know it was among the river otters, as if we were the reason of their coming and lingering and their vanishing, an arrow from the bow flying out and the arc of our lives to come.
Quo Vadimus? Will I mark the visitations of the otter as Meton marked the perfect cycle of the moon? Or like the precession of Polaris will the Return outlive all our works and days?
Life is not for the weak. Be brave.
* * *
- For Valerie, Cent’anni!

Santa Cruz Island (at Scorpion)

From February 15 through the 23 I was on the California coast taking stills, video and making recordings of wildlife. I acquired a great deal of material, the product of which will be either heard on my segment of Living on Earth or posted here at Salt Marsh Diary over the next 5 or 6 months (it will take that long to write everything that needs to be written, and to edit sound and images). Of this work, the most concentrated and unusual material by far comes from Channel Islands National Park, this year celebrating its 30th anniversary. To say these islands are “gems” is to tarnish them: No diamond, no sapphire or emerald ever shone this bright. You will find a small sample of what I saw below. This is just a quick survey, but feel free to share your thoughts.

Mark Seth Lender March 1, 2010

Elephant Seal Combat [males]

Coming this week: Juvenile Elephant Seal; Elephant Seal Threat Vocalization [female]; Channel Islands Fox

And MORE:  Photographs of Southern Sea Otter taken well north of the Channel Islands in and around Elkhorn Slough, Monterey Bay.

Mountain Bluebird, wings beating time, follows the wire down the line. Her flight, a path that plies just above the barbs with which (in our pedestrian desire) we strive to set apart, cedar from silage; sweet corn from forest mosses; Nature from what we nurture: Untamed darkling wood, ungovernable rocks and rills from cows and fields in crop or fallow as they should. We divide. But when it comes to Mountain Bluebirds, Temperance on the vine, we consign what Bluebird seeks to find, nest boxes, arranged every twenty poles like pulses like hollows of the human heart.

Bluebird has come to depend upon our hand this to provide. Vindictive as we are against what is unkempt, our dread, our fell hand bringing the woods to their knees with two-man saw and chain saw. But insects still abound in the clearing and beyond at the green edge of what survives. And Bluebirds thrive.

Bluebird at the cross fence convenes with caution. First to the bleached twig with its empty pinecone. Then to the twisted pair of tines, shining, galvanized against weather sure to arrive. Though pressed by shortness of season, Bluebird hesitates. In her beak are beetles, cracked fluorescein green and crushed violet blue (though their legs and sometimes wings motor on in dumb refusal to the truth). She waits. Then comes to rest on a lichen-crusted tree, gray and yellow-green, unintended compliment to her cyan-washed Cerulean. She pauses. But now her Significant Other stands nearby, her guard and her decoy (Her muted hues a non-compete against his feathered lightning). Like a bolt from the blue he grabs that sprig of mullein just off to the side, it sways as he lands, his tail spread wide. He stretches his wings. Surveys the scene three-sixty degrees and while the world eyes the bright light of him… quick to the nest, she tips in.

Only two babies inside but they make quick work of the parcel she brings. No murmurings of motherhood (work is all she sees in them). Nor has she come for adult conversation: Through all her going, and coming, not one small word between her and him. She exits unceremoniously. He watches, his interest his only admonition. Fending off from the lip she launches into thin blue air, that collect call of the wild, answered in mime, quick-time, with care.  Bluebird toes the line!

Upon Reflection I

In the glass-calm morning the wading birds come walking, with their long feet talking, tickling at the bottom as they stop, then stride. In robes of whitest garment, like supplicants seeking salvation, for a eucharist of fishes they abide, and the crucifying beak as yellow as their eyes. Upon the glistening surface, in the rose-red rising, of the sun still yawning, their impervious reflection is transparent as a sigh.

They lean forward as if listening. Do they hear the creatures whispering? Through the ripples that are glistening like the sin of pride? The milli-peded seaworms, over weed and rock and sponges, toward the bright and deadly shallows, ticking as they glide? Now the White Bird hunches over plains of wave-ridged sandspars, where the underwater shadows are no cover for what hides. Pity them, the White Bird harrows towards the bottom like an arrow there will be no tomorrow where the long shaft drives.

In the dead of morning, when the dawn comes yawning, with her lids shut tightly still the pink light blinds. In the season of departure, in the dulled heat spawning, when ibis, and osprey toward the south’rd drive, does the White Bird think of leaving? When she does will there be grieving or joy among the heathen? In their low and caste-out corners where they lie, are they mob or are they mourners? Does their anger rise in chorus, do they love life or deplore it as they die? Oh the sea worms struggle madly, the crustaceans clicking sadly, do the flat fish give in gladly when their troubles subside? Do they kiss the claw that grabbed them? Is it vengeance that will have them? Is it justice or bloodlust they take in stride? Will the beauty of beholding be denied?

From tall grass egrets watching see the equinox approaching through the storm clouds’ broken awning, over ragged seas. What is Great Egret thinking? Is he tearing or just blinking as he sees the fishes shrinking from his rough and throaty cry? The irrelevance of martyrs, Great the Egret who is smarter, the ruffling of the fletching as his great wings rise, into the faded rainbow of the sky.

Did creation blunder? Is it god or only thunder? Will it pass or blast asunder? We contemplate and wonder at a rising tide. Will it carry us or drown us, who will witness, as we flounder? Is it dust or is it ardor the soul inscribes, in the end all magnificence is lies, in the end only Nothingness survives; cleave to the sight beyond your eyes.

*   *   *

Author’s NOTE:  The above piece, and the one following are based on the same observations but presented in very different styles. I would especially like to read your reactions to either or both, and why. Please leave your comments. Thank you! - Mark Seth Lender

*   *   *

Upon Reflection II

White as the whitest China porcelain Great Egret strides down the giddy shore, the waves chuckling and tickling at her long-toed feet. She steps, and stops, and seems to contemplate though the depths are not deep but callow. Every morning when the tide is just so, flat calm and low enough to wade (yet water enough to shade her presence from those who would avoid her) she appears. With a snap, the feathered parasols she dangles one on each arm lift and carry her there, and there. Each sentry point divines another edible. Each day just after dawn a different comestible (depending on season and heat and phases of the moon). Each time the inshore waters hold a different guest each varied quest (depending if you swim or if you stand) ending in fear, or satisfaction.

Plunk!

Another seaworm meets his Maker, though he twists and writhes, his millipeded appendages tractoring against the terrifying air.

Clip!

Sanddab scissored between the yellow blades of Egret’s bill will settle in the sand no more, his paired and flattened eyes at the limit of their floundering.

Clunk!

The hard casing of crustacean caught in his glassine shell, antennae streaming, the muffled screaming now only a bloating in that long white throat which no one else can hear…

Great Egret (the common wisdom goes) kills only because she can. Not self-aware. Soulless as the Homunculus of Prague, quo dam, she no more looks at her reflection than it regards her. That in the still and perfection of late afternoon only Gravity knows copy from original. Is it true? That Egret is merely simulacrum, an automaton of computation all Ones and O’s or at most the random alphanumeric of genetic code? Blind as a punch card, life not striding but only stumbling out the everlasting door? And of the fish? What streets of current, what corridors of seaweed does he navigate? What citadels built of thermocline and halocline does he understand? Or is “Fish: Swim-swim-swim.; Fish: Swim-swim-swim,” the constant compass that directs him, unknowing of Her who will kill him.

Stab! Grab!

A wayward Tautog, the mottling of his skin mauve and raw umber exactly as the chiaroscuro of bottom weed and patchy light where he lives and breathes - done in - by skill and speed and a voracious tenacity that will eat, him, whole.

Kneeling and grabbing or leaping and jabbing all comes to the inevitable plunge, the harpoon still hot from the gun, expunging on almost every strike whatever thing Great Egret sees that’s fit to swallow. What wallows, what swims free, what clicks and snaps among the eelgrass and sponges all sums to a bloody-minded solution.

Each day a different quest, a different ending (in satisfaction, or in fear), is Emptiness as Empty as it first appears? The Tao of Egret: Unchanging and Severe.

Near mud that is the detritus of ancient mountains; Behind hills that are the ribbed remains where continents collided; above deep folds where great forests turned to coal; Late in the day that will give rise to the last warm Full Moon Dragons appear on wings clear as antique glass. They do not whine or buzz or hum: Click-click! clacks the clockwork of those wings, a child’s toy built of metal and springs. Where do they come from?  What workshop, what secret cave where Q or Batman or Da Vinci in his wildest nightmare dreams contrived the perfect flying machine? Wright Brothers, you were wrong. John Glenn, you call that “flying?”  Yo, Chuck Yeager! Feature this: We make Mach II look slooooow, don’tcha know: This factory’s been tinkering Three Hundred Million Years.

Four wings times fifty beats a second by one thousand strong stack up seven stories high. No angle of attack too steep. No maneuver too extreme.  At a-hundred-and-ten on the straightaway they corner ninety degrees and stop - with a snap! - braking on air as if air where a hard and solid thing. Back flips? Ordinary. Sideways or upside-down? All the same.  While (to coin a phrase) “Eating on the fly”: Six hairy legs extend rotate and bend, knees turning into elbows, feet turn into hands, and Dragon rips with chitinous lips (like pickin’ chicken from the bone!).

Was it the tidal moon tugged these mythic creatures from egg to underwater nymph to emerge in awful magnificence? The split and empty skins from which they fly away left, waving, tattered royal pennants in wind. Or does the Dragon sally forth in his Omnipotence only when challengers appear? Poor Knight, poor dear. Or is it cogs wound to the gear by oblique forces yet to be revealed? Migrating Dragons cross a hundred leagues a day caring only that the works align, and that the flesh is fine.

The                                                                                                Sky

Tiny                                                                             toward

Life                                                                  flees

on                                               feed

which                          Dragons

Alas. Tree Swallows wait above the swarm.

Those who escape the Dragon’s teeth won’t live long

< . > Meanwhile, out in the bight  < . >

Where Least Tern and Osprey dive,

Stripped Bass drive up the bait.

Feathers, Fins and Scales

Armored Carapace

Hard as nails

United in One Fate.

vvvvvvvvv

^^^^^^^

]]> http://connecticutrivergazette.com/blog/2009/09/400/feed/ http://connecticutrivergazette.com/blog/2009/09/tern-tern-tern/ http://connecticutrivergazette.com/blog/2009/09/tern-tern-tern/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:09:57 +0000 Mark Lender http://connecticutrivergazette.com/blog/?p=390

Tern hovers, then tumbles from the sky.  “X” marks the spot where she enters, a cross made of the splash of her spray and the splice of her wings. Beneath lies Sunken Treasure.  She alone knows where to Seek and what to Find.

Tern rises from the dark surface, her body shaped now like a “V” and mirrored in the V-shaped wake of water that strays behind her.  “V” for Victory.  Though of all the boot’ and bounty of the sea, only a single silver minnow flashes in her bright orange beak.

Tern does not spend her meager winnings but holds, as if to savor.  West of here is an island where in spring a great metropolis arises: Least Tern and Common Tern, and their nests of stones, and the twinned eggs inside them.  Chatter and call echo from the ramparts of this temporary redoubt, out onto the endless moat of the sea like cries of Vikingar and Varinger returned with plunder.  But those days are over now.  The city abandoned as quickly as it came, gone till another year.  There is nothing for her there.

Quo Vada?

Passing her former quarters as if she were a stranger, tern tacks toward land.  Others of her kind hail and sometimes join her.  Routing up and down the beaches just offshore sometimes they rest on a buoy or piling , a transient place of mooring.  Elaborate conversations ensue, terns talking.  Some are words of greeting.  Some are angry warnings to gull or cormorant who’ve come too close. It is a warning heeded:  Though all of these are many times larger none dares approach these pirated roosts which terns have chosen.

Tern, if she is tempted by the society of her confreres, does not show it.  She talks to no one.  Her destination guarded.  Her council recorded only to herself until she hears among all others the one voice that is her polar guide.  On shore, upon a waste of pebbles and shells, one waits, lonely.  It is her daughter, fledged but dependent on her.  The features of the childbird are softer. Her plumage indistinct as if to hide her.  In plain sight only her mother finds her and feeds her with a kiss, bill to beak.  Then leaves, to seek what other valuables lie out on the shoals of the deeps.

And her daughter cries as if she will never see her mother again. As if she knows.  Alas, the day is coming. When fledgling learns to fend for herself or perish.  Then Child Tern’s worst fear comes true, that only in this time in this place does Double V become Double You.

She has the eyes of a cat the coat of a dog the “gruff!” of Black Bear, huffing. There is fur between her toes that her prints in dust and snow are a blur. Those paws planted firmly now she is angry with me. It shows. She does not lower her head or pull back her lips as she might if she wanted bite. She won’t. Instead she moves from the clearing to the woods, and stops and huffs again and furthers her retreat and huffs once more and only well into the underbrush, so that I cannot see her does she bark, twice, a mournful cri de couer, “Leave us alone!”

Red Fox confronts a dilemma: That “us” is more than a matter of diction. Four kits in her care peer from the mouth of the den on the other side of the clearing. Though I stand respectfully off to one side to her I am still in the middle, and she is the one who is stuck.

Foxes are acutely aware of their surroundings. They hunt for voles by sound alone, through matted grasses, through deep powder glazed with ice, ears twitching. Even if you approach in complete silence don’t expect to remain undetected. They will see you long before you see them – and Red Fox missed me entirely.

She had just returned with a squirrel, a squirrel without a mark on him. No blood. No part misshapen. Probably a broken neck, a kill that was quick and sure and without risk of injury (even rodents have teeth). Perhaps her concentration was still on that, its aftermath, that her brood would soon be hungry again. I doubt this was her first hunt of the day so there is also that and how tired she must have been. And so she was surprised. But not completely.

Red Fox, albeit on her own terms has acquired a degree of domesticity. She has made her den beneath someone’s garden shed. Not farm country, a suburban neighborhood, half-acre lots driveways front walks and every weekday morning a big yellow school bus, gears grinding. Why here in the middle of this dangerous bruit instead of the backwoods? Truth, it isn’t much of a woods, a thinned strip of silver birch, skunk cabbage and fern not paved in human habitation only because a stream runs through it. The garden shed is on high ground and perhaps no other clean dry place was available to her. More like, it was the relative absence of coyotes. As wolves are a coyote’s worst nightmare so coyotes are a terror to foxes. Though coyotes are opportunistic (and not above a hit-and-run on the family dog) they aren’t to be found hanging around the house. I suspect this was the risky bet Red Fox made. Better a fifty-fifty chance on us, than the certainty of them. This time she got lucky.

To Red Fox’s kits (who cannot know the difference) it seems the normal life. Proximity to people is all they know and after a while they forget all about me They romp and tumble and one of them drags the squirrel under the shed and leaves it there. Perhaps they do not know how to break the skin. Perhaps they prefer play to food just now. Perhaps both. That their game takes place on a cut lawn is by the grace of tolerant homeowners who might have had them shot, another thing they cannot know about.

A few days later I see Red Fox again, cutting through the woods on her regular route. This time she’s expecting me. She ducks around to the back of the shed and the kits, who usually greet her with their high little voices don’t make a sound. She must have told them not to, but there is only so much she can do. One of them rounds the corner in a blur, a dead chipmunk in its mouth.The kit stops and looks me right in the eye. Then it turns and trots back to where it came from, not too fast, not too slow, but at the necessary pace.

Turk-turk Turkey comes jerk-jerk lurking on, tip to toe.  Cautious, like ice just itching  to melt.  Through parkland, under low-lying limbs drip-drip-dripping with dew. Patient like mud settling where deer, galumphing, stirred up still water.  Driving slow and low and through and through from tall grass to scrub. Look at them go, Bad Boys, checking out the quiet part of the woods ahead of would-be girlfriends, might be lovers, always moving cover to cover.  Then right behind taking their sweet time wouldn’t you know here those Big Broads come, tut-stut strutting their stuff, proud and tall and don’t gonna be no one’s – I say not no one’s - stuffin’! Near twenty pounds each hey might look sweet.  Best first think on this:  Before you get to the meat have to beat back twenty pounds of lean, mean muscle, armored like a weaponeer. Got spurs on the backs of their legs sharp as a thorn. Jump up, shred somebody’s big fat belly like chop suey to a pair of cleavers; Got a beak like a pig sticker, fly in someone’s face put someone’s eye right out (good-night, dim the brights). So back away. Keep on lickin’ your lips that “Someone” gonna be YOU!

Morning catches the sheen, at shoulders, back, cusp of wing, iridescent as Mother of pearl but these ain’t no Girly-Girls, nor Choir Boys in Sunday Zuits. Feathers broad and flat as dragon scales. Neck like a reptile, long and ropey. Face a raging, violet and blue and crimson red, a horn of flesh in the center of the head. Bald as a vulture. Eye as dark as obsidian glass. Feet that leave a four inch track. Pickin their toes with a clickety clack!

Like those who have risen from the sea and crawled back in (seal and sea lion, whale and dolphin) some take to the sky only to return to land: Wild Turkey, this Jabberwock, weighty presence, work of art.

Less than the sum, more than the parts. 

We see the big bird land, close to the edge of the river where the sea lavender is high now and the color of pale lilac. As tall as the adult he will become though perhaps not as much heft, it is only the subtle particulars of the mottling on his throat and the absence of a crown that gives his youth away. “Great blue heron,” I say, handing my neighbor Mike the binoculars while I set up the scope for his wife Colette and before I have the lens cap off Mike yells, “He’s got an eel!”

This is what happens when you invite another fisherman to your patch of the pond. He steals your luck. This though we are not catching fish or eating any. It’s a vegetarian dinner and Mike is not exactly a fisherman, he and Colette own Star Fish Market. But still. I have thousands of hours watching this marsh, sat patiently at marshes fresh and salt across the continent. I have seen great blues all year every year of my adult life and I have never seen a heron eat an eel. And Mike? Mike’s been in my living room exactly five minutes.

“It’s a snake,” I say. I’ve never seen a heron eat a snake, either.

At this point what’s happening in the marsh is the pale shadow of the indoor drama. My wife Valerie (this between furtive glances through the lens) is yelling, “I can’t watch it I can’t watch it!” but she does and Colette, just as glued to the scene peals out, “It’s disgusting!”

“It’s an eel,” I say.

“It’s huge!” Valerie says.

Fish stories notwithstanding, the eel – snake - whatever - though only about 2 feet long is half the height of the bird which in turn is a bit more than the distance from the heron’s beak to his gut. Huge enough.

“It’s yellow-green on the bottom,” Colette says. “Are eels that color on the bottom?”

“I saw those little fins behind the head. It’s an eel,” I repeat with authority. Authority is the last redoubt of Birder’s Ego.

“It’s going down. There it goes,” Mike says.

It’s down all right, but not forgotten. The heron’s entire neck is undulating with its contents of live eel. Half a second later the eel wriggles partway out.

“Gross!” Valerie says.

Even I am having trouble looking. It is not exactly the best complement to dinner and Valerie’s been cooking all day. Dolmadakia, kouloukokefthedis, fried haloumi, humus ba tahini, babaganoush, boreki – the whole catastrophe of labor-intensive Mediterranean delicacies designed to keep Greek and Arab and Jewish and Kurdish and Armenian women permanently in the kitchen - despite which sacrifice we’ve hardly touched a thing. Given the pre-prandial entertainment, Pepto-Bismol may yet be the main course.

“He’s stabbing it,” Colette says.

“It’s down,” Mike says.

“It’s up,” Valerie says.

“Yech!” someone says, and finally it’s over.

“He’s drinking,” Mike says.

“Ooh. Just like cookies and milk,” I say.

“We’re EATING,” Valerie calls, inviting us to table as her sister Penny and husband David come unsuspecting through the door. We tell them what they’ve missed, switch to white wine from red and let the conversation drift to more convivial things while we eat like potentates, to repletion.

False horizon, Scaup form a thin dark line upon the winter sea. Like toys, bobbing high, they let the current carry them, and the wind. Sometimes one bathes. Sometimes another stands like a child in a high chair and stretches, arms flapping. Though they are diving ducks what you will not see them do is dive. Too early in the day, these are only preparations.

Females, except for that milk-lipped moustache at the base of the bill are dark all over. The males from this distance appear black on head and tail and have bodies of ivory. It’s easy to tell the one from the other. What is nearly impossible at more than a few yards is to tell Greater Scaup from Lesser. It matters. Habit and habitat are diverse between the two, and who knew the numbers would fall the way they’ve done? If you want to know the count ask a man who guns.

The Grouper is my source for all things Duck. In season, every chance he can, he’s out there. “Sleet? Never head of that. Storm warning? What kind of a sissy do you think I am?” It’s a Marine Corp thing except the ducks don’t shoot back. Only the weather does that.

Persistence and that thousand yard stare have a cumulative effect. The Grouper is your man if you want to know what is and what is not. Lately, the answer is “Not.”

“How’d you do?”

“I didn’t. Nothing on the weekend. Nothing all week. Shot one Scaup yesterday and saw a flock of forty.”

Greater Scaup was what The Grouper bagged, but he did not know about the flock. “Too far away,” he said. “I only know when I have one in my hands.”

The division into these two subspecies is more than academic. Greater Scaup winter principally on our saltwater coasts, all the way down into Mexico. Lesser Scaup prefer ponds and inland wetlands but this will not help you because they also cleave to the waters just offshore. It is possible to tell them apart by the males, Lesser’s head with a purplish sheen and Greater reflecting green but to see that, the light must be perfect. From shore, I have made that distinction only once. And if you cannot tell Lesser from Greater it is very hard to tell how each one is doing except we already know the larger bird is in rapid decline and in all probability the small is not far behind.

The coastal habitat of our waterfowl used to be the greatest wetlands in the world - the Fens, the Meadowlands, and all the major salt marshes in every cove between - just where we’ve built our great cities back to the days of the Pioneers and like them, water for us whether tidal or stream-fed is a toilet and a rubbish bin. These once-rich wintering and breeding grounds have largely been filled in or poisoned by a toxic brew, cadmium, mercury, nitrates, pesticides and oil spills to name a few. No wonder the numbers are dire, and the numbers do not lie. “We only see 7 or 8 flocks of Scaup a year now,” The Grouper laments. I know what he means. There were thousands…

The weather came up hard, sleet, snow, sheet ice. I-95’s a Demolition Derby, no time to be out and was I ever glad to get off the road. And wouldn’t you know, just as I pull into the driveway it’s The Grouper driving past, heading home with the duck boat in tow. He rolled the window down and told me the reason was not the storm. “Left the key on,” he said, “battery’s dead,” otherwise he’d be out there now, into the terrors all that open ocean has to offer because he knows, the day will come (and he may live to see it) when all there is to do is sit, the Remington idle across your lap remembering, how it used to be, and will not be, under a leaden sky bereft of wings.