Gone To The Beach: 05.14.2015

Thursday, May 14, 2015

The Gift of Beautiful Day

Hi!
The only treasure on the beach this day was ephemeral---no shells, no sand dollars, no seaglass. Only the gift of a perfectly beautiful early summer day. These photos were taken last week, on the first day I was out without a coat since November. Six months or more and now: freedom.

Yes we've gone from puffer parkas to flip flops in just a couple of days. I suddenly recalled that I need a new beach chair. I saw one in the village sundries shop in April, nice and cheap and lightweight, but I couldn't bring myself to buy a beach chair while wearing a down coat and snow pants. Silly girl, I need it right now.
This was a very low tide afternoon. The beach is still pleasantly empty of people.

The oystercatchers finally chose a nesting spot safely high above the normal tide line. This couple builds here every year. The eggs are always laid during the first week of May. click to enlarge

Here are her two speckled eggs the size of small hens eggs. The OCs don't continuously sit on the nest so I was able to get a photo from far away. (The sand is hot enough, on a sunny day, that the birds can leave their eggs and they'll stay warm and cozy in the sunshine.)

So far there is only one plover nest, marked by the large cage they are given.

There are a number of piping plovers running about, however, so maybe more will nest soon. Piping plovers are so tiny and so well camouflaged that you can't really spot them. I locate them by their fast scurrying across the shoreline..There's a piper in this photo, do you see him?

Me either! But here he is a bit above center, at the right edge of the small horizontal line. The little guys are very fast so it's blurry.

There were more pipers along the the edge of the gentle waves. They are about the size of sparrows but chubby, with tiny black beaks and toothpick legs and black neck ring. The rest of them is the colors of sand---tan, white, grey, nothing.