All,
Checking the beaches south of the town harbor this morning to judge the
effects of yesterday's storm and very high tides, I came upon a small
club of terns resting on one of the sand spits. I was surprised to see
that all six of the sandwich terns in the group had small metal bands on
their right legs. They were too far away and the bands were too small to
get any info off of them but I'm curious as to where the birds may have
been banded. Otherwise the beach was fairly quiet (and largely
undamaged) with sanderlings, semi-palmated plovers, common and Forster's
and Caspian terns and herring and laughing gulls making up the bulk of
the avian community this morning. There was a single ring-billed gull
today, only the third I've seen north of the CBBT this fall. There was a
single lesser black-backed gull in the same area Wednesday but there was
no sign of it today. A merlin passing south along the beach harassed
some red-winged black birds until it was, in turn, run off its perch by
one of our semi-resident ospreys.
Tom Saunders
Cape Charles and Kilmarnock
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
(and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." HL Mencken
