Skimmerrama on Tybee Island

One good encounter can make my day. Or my whole trip. I had been yakking on the phone with a friend one sunny cool morning. I'd done my 5 mile run and my crunches and lifts and was thoroughly enjoying myself on Tybee Island, Georgia, when I saw a flock of several hundred black skimmers settle like ashes on the beach.



How deluxe it was to have so many. I threw on some clothes, hoisted the big lens and hurried out to act like the last thing in the world I cared about was several hundred black skimmers resting on the deserted beach.

I walked straight toward the water, watching them out of the corner of my eye, looking off to the side, out to sea.



I got closer and closer. The near birds: still sleeping. Good.



I mustn't get any closer. I couldn't believe my luck.  Such beautiful, beautiful birds.



They found a four-winged dinosaur fossil in China. Here's the modern-day version.



I don't know what corollary of Murphy's Law followed me around the beach at Tybee, but every time I had a photo op with cooperative birds, somebody came along and put them all up for me.
Even on a deserted winter beach, it seems somebody's always willing to walk plumb into the middle of a peacefully resting flock. No polite detours for us, nossir. Right smack through the middle.

Dum de dum de dum...buncha birds...whatever...never mind the woman lying on her side with a camera pointed at them, quietly cursing my complete lack of situational awareness.




Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack said the skimmers

and went up in a slice of black wings

delighting a little girl and

incidentally

me

Their shadows raced across the sand and I almost keeled over from delight at the perfection of the scene.

They wheeled and turned

strange terns that they are

I failed to get used to the sight of several hundred skimmers overhead. I don't think I ever could.

Birding with a Georgia Ornithological Society group, I looked up to see this flock going past Tybee Lighthouse. 

I couldn't help it.  I squealed and laughed and freaked out, shooting and shooting as the big black and white birds rowed easily over.

Someone in the group softly whispered the equivalent of "Jeez, take a powder!"

as if this were not the most miraculous thing that ever happened, having 600 skimmers pass just overhead. OK. Maybe you're used to this. Maybe you see it every day. I don't.

I was not embarrassed, nor was I about to apologize. I just felt sorry for anyone who couldn't fully appreciate a sight like this in the cloud-swirled sky, no matter how many times he might have seen it.

I turned to the group, smiled, and explained myself in only five words.

"This doesn't happen in Ohio."