Coot Ballet

You never know when nature will present you with something amazing. Sometimes it's hidden in the seemingly mundane.  On Saturday, January 19, a group of us carpooled to Back Bay NWR near Norfolk, Virginia, for a field trip for The Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival. 

Now, though I grew up in Richmond, I had never come back to Virginia on a real live birding field trip. Odd but true. I never realized people other than me went out looking for birds--together--until I went to college. I was thunderstruck that there was such a thing as social birdwatching. And I took to it like a coot to water.

gotta love this hat!

So we're tooling around the frozen impoundments at Back Bay with a freezing wind whipping through the open tram in which we're riding. I'm sitting next to my new friend Susan and her sister Annie and we're having a grand old time sharing an afghan. I'm shooting out the side of the tram.

Ring-necked duck and hen bufflehead take to the air.

A hen ruddy duck does, too. Her reflection is sharper than she is!

The famed tundra swans of Back Bay are consorting with a drift of snow geese, quite some ways away. The geese are in the foreground, but all the long straight necks you're seeing are swans.

Everywhere, we could hear the mellow hooting of the swans above the gabble of snow geese.
That beautiful sound took me right back to my first visit to Minneapolis when I was twelve years old, the first time I heard it. Skeins were going over downtown. I looked up when I heard their calls and there they were, the first wild swans I'd ever seen. I lit out down the crowded sidewalk, grabbing people's arms and pointing up. "Swans! Wild swans!! LOOK!!"

That was surely an epiphany for me. Not just seeing the swans, but finding myself absolutely compelled to get others to see and appreciate them, too.

Still at it, as you see. 

A rather forlorn sight: a flock of white ibis moping in snowy branches. I think they're rushing their push northward. There weren't any white ibis in coastal Virginia when I was a kid! You poor things should be in Florida or Georgia. Somewhere warmer than 20 degrees.

Find the forest fairy in this photo.
Might need to click on it to get a larger version.

but about that amazing thing I mentioned...

We're tooling along and there's a big flock of coots in a roadside ditch that somehow has remained open through the deep freeze. There were the usual disparaging remarks about the ordinariness of coots. But I was on fire. I like coots and I especially like coots in motion. These ungainly aquatic rails with their petal-lobed toes do a lot for me. Especially when they run.

As the coots pattered over the water and ice, I spotted a pied-billed grebe amongst them. "Grebe in flight! Grebe in flight!" I hissed to the group. Because you just do not get to see pied-billed grebes fly. Ever.
He's at the back, center. Look at that. Not to mention the fabulous thundering herd of coots.

My parting shot--grebe ballet. 

O beautiful.

My sincere thanks to the Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival for having me down. I had a blast from start to finish. Check it out next January. Terrific people, great birding, all kinds of fun. Do it!

National Gannet Gallery

On Sunday morning, January 20, I accompanied a group from the Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for some spectacular winter birding. 

The festival organizers had obtained permission from the local police to temporarily inhabit the three concrete and riprap islands between sections of bridge and tunnel. I highly recommend attending the festival so you can enjoy this rare opportunity to access the best birding on the Bay.

It was a beautiful day, cold though. We bundled up. Spotting scopes are a must for coastal birding, and I was so glad I'd brought mine. 

There were great rafts of surf and black scoters, with a lone pair of white-winged scoters. Gorgeous long-tailed ducks in basic (winter) plumage floated just beyond the scoters. Unfortunately they were all a bit too far out for me to do much with my 300 mm. lens, and I didn't have my digiscoping rig along. Must get that iPhone adaptor!

surf scoters

But the stars of the show were the northern gannets, who come from the frigid north seas to spend their winters along the East Coast as far south as Florida. They cut a striking figure, a sort of flying cross or fleur de lis against the sky. When they dive, they plunge like javelins into the sea, folding up into a fish-killing spearhead. Daphne du Maurier's short story "The Birds" opens with gannets dropping out of the sky, plunging those bills into people's skulls. Yow. These things are bigger than a goose. You wouldn't want that.  I suspect that image was a bit beyond Alfred Hitchcock's ability to simulate, so he went with nasty ravens, gulls and house sparrows for that notorious film. 

Sometimes I think that film did for birds what "Jaws" did for sharks. Nothing good.

Here is one of the islands we got permission to "land on," adorned with gannet. Meaning, with a police escort, we could get out of our vehicles and bird to our heart's content. Security out here is tight since 9-11.

I loved capturing gannets against unlikely backgrounds. They haunt the backwash of large ships for the fish and other sea life stirred up by the propellers. 

My best shot of a curious harbor seal. Seeing them made me miss Chet something awful. They always remind me of dogs. Dogs that swim and live in freezing salt water. Brrr!

One gannet decided to give us all a thrill.

It passed by, showing us its dagger-like bill, its dusty yellow head and sharp black primaries, and was gone again.

My friend Paul Spitzer calls the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel "The National Gannet Gallery." I think that's a much nicer name.

Snow, Kids, and Gulls on the Beach

Becalmed in Virginia Beach, happily so in a fifth-floor oceanview suite. They treated me right. The Virginia Beach Wildlife Festival organizers were so solicitous, so concerned for my welfare…but I told them that stranded without a car in a beach hotel in winter for a few days is actually my idea of fab. I could walk to restaurants; I could run on the boardwalk; I could work in my room and I could watch the waves and the birds and dolphins. Besides, Katie Whanger, the festival organizer with the mostest, had given me a bottle of Williamsburg-grown red wine. Life was good.

The ocean was like a dry-erase board. Someone was always writing something new there. I could hardly look away. The water was usually some shade of pastel or pale, and any perturbation, such as a fin breaking the surface or a merganser floating, appeared as a dark mark on the pale ground. I set up my scope and panned constantly.

One morning, nine bottlenose dolphins fished back and forth across my field of view for most of an hour. I trained the scope on them, becoming accustomed to their pace and rhythm and anticipating where they’d surface again. They were swimming in synchrony. When seven surfaced to blow at once, it was a thrill to have them in the scope, to see their kind, tired eyes and fixed smiles. What a miraculous thing, to see dolphins in a freezing sea. I gave up trying to photograph them and just abandoned myself to the watching.

Dolphin and calf roll

through sun's path, curved fins cogteeth

pulling my heart under

The weather deteriorated. It snowed. For the first time in my life I saw snow falling on a beach. I was mesmerized by the sand turning white and the white flakes falling against the leaden sea. Virginia Beach, having now snow removal equipment, not even salt and sand in most areas, shut down. The festival, being a city function, shut down with it. My keynote Friday night was moved to Sunday afternoon. Field trips for Saturday morning were canceled. And, thanks to the icy road, the city wouldn’t allow the festival to use their school buses to get people to Saturday afternoon events, so everyone had to caravan in their own cars. These things happen. You can imagine. I felt keenly for the festival organizers. At one point 175 people had pre-registered for my talk. It was Katie’s job to contact all of them via email and phone and tell them the talk had been rescheduled. I was very thankful that I’d made a mistake and scheduled a Monday flight home, not one on Sunday. Sometimes things happen for a reason. In scheduling my flights, I had just assumed, based on all the other festivals I’d worked, that there would be something going on on Sunday. Turns out it was to be my keynote!

The little voice, speaking. Me, listening, not even knowing it would save the day.

Saturday morning dawned brilliant and draped in snow. I felt exalted and humbled to be at the beach in the snow. Forget the field trips, the reshuffling--I was on my knees.  That's not white sand--that's snow!

There was a large Christian youth group, or perhaps a convocation of them, staying in the hotel Friday night. I was worried that they'd have to scrub their trip, but in they came shortly before the snow started. They were exuberant and boisterous but good, and I was thankful that they went to bed at a decent hour. Well, some of them were up most of the night, playing on the beach in the snow. In the dark. Because it snowed at the beach, and they really got how cool that was. The next dawn, there they were, probably having been up all night playing in the snow. 

I automatically like people who go outside in freezing cold just to experience the beach in the snow.

She takes a photo of a gull with her phone.

Morning's tracks told the tale. Those kids were like a bunch of sanderlings. 

I found them feeding the ring-billed gulls at daybreak. So cute.

As the light grew, I had an amazing photo op thanks to the kids and their popcorn. Indigo ocean, snowy beach, hovering gulls.

The tail pattern on this 10-month-old ringbill enchanted me. That's just a guess--but if it was born in April it would be less than a year old.

I think this is my favorite shot of the bunch, though. Three angels in the snow.

Many people take ring-billed gulls for granted. But I saw the birds making a connection with the kids, and I loved them for that. They drew them closer to nature, brought them out on the beach. They are also beautiful birds.

Fun at the beach, in the snow. Life's an adventure--you just have to roll with what it serves up.