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EVE TUREK'S NATURAL OUTER BANKS
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| Wednesday, July 14, 2010 | | Scenes of Summer | Fellow Outer Banks photographer Ray Matthews, who I like to say has lived with this area’s light and landscapes longer than any of the rest of us, has learned over his nearly 40 years of photographing the ‘Banks that July typically produces three or four days that harbinger fall: cooler, crisper, with low humidity. I remember those days in late July 2007; Pete and I were headed out of town for a whirlwind overnight trip to pick up some equipment for the frame shop and we left during the best cloud show of the summer. We had that same weather pattern for July 4th and the few days around the holiday this year, and then the heat and haze and humidity returned. Yesterday we had what qualifies as big wind for summer, absent a real storm that is, and this morning has already produced one fleeting less-than-sixty-second rainbow over the sound, as the sun poked through clouds during what will be the first of several showers today.
Since my last blog, we’ve had all sorts of summertime happenings. The wild grapes whose vines have overtaken lots of the trees in the vacant lot across the street from our Colington house are now about the size of hazelnuts. More exciting, the Sea Oats have bloomed and their now-full seed heads show the pale greenish yellow that they sport right after emergence. Their straight stalks begin to swell with seeds right at the end of June or early in July and it does not take long for them to bend and move under their own weight in the least breeze. As hot and dry as it has been, I’m betting they turn their deeper and drier golden color before long. Many of the young osprey have fledged, although some late hatchlings are still in the nest. Their life cycle amazes me: Mom and Dad return in March, repair their nest, and Mom lays her clutch of eggs. By mid to late May, the baby osprey have hatched and are large enough to be seen peeking over the nest rim. Two months later, they rival their parents for size and take their first flight—that is where, or should I say when, we are now. These next six weeks or so are equally critical: babies must learn to feed themselves, catching their own breakfasts, lunches and dinners, as first one and then the other parent will leave the Outer Banks in August and September. Typically by mid September, the adults have all left, migrating south for the winter. The young birds will stay in the area a little longer but then will begin their own instinctive flight toward warmer weather as the days shorten and grow cooler. Young osprey will spend not only their first winter, but all of next year, summer included, on their wintering grounds. They won’t return here until they are two years old, and will then begin looking around for a suitable lifelong mate and a nesting site that will become their summer place at the beach for the rest of their lives. And how long might that be? Healthy birds can live 30 years in the wild! The nests I watch now may well be occupied by the same pairs when my grandchildren are grown with kids of their own. For all the change we see on the Outer Banks, the rebounding of the osprey is one of the most joyful.
Summertime means full, busy days too for those of us who work in any job that dovetails with our resort season rhythm. Getting time outside in summer is a special treat for us that is more usually reserved for the slower times of spring and fall. That said, I’ve managed to be outdoors on three different occasions in the past few days, for more than 15 minutes that is, and have some images to share with you below. As always, enjoy!
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click for larger image | I keep calling this a "gar" but I think it is a needlefish. Caught near Oregon Inlet Sunday. |
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click for larger image | Most of the osprey atop channel marker nests headed to Wanchese are flying too. Here is one still living at home, July 10. |
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posted by eturek at 10:03 AM |
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| Monday, June 28, 2010 | | Yes, it is HOT! | Anyone reading my weather notes years from now could be excused for being bored with the sameness of the entries: Hot. Very hot. No breeze. Still hot. HOT! You get the idea. Actually, the heat the Outer Banks has been experiencing just nudges the record books; we may have had record heat today, in fact. What is more interesting to me is not that the high temperature over the past two weeks has peaked in all different years, but that we have had this long a string of hot, humid, breathless days all in one year--and so early in summer. I’ve told folks for days, this is our August, not typically our June. Plants both native and imported are parched; sea oats are nearly ready to burst into full seed head and crepe myrtles have been in full bloom for days. I keep expecting late afternoon thunder squalls to break the heat and lower the humidity but we just haven’t had even that little relief. The forecast is calling for potential thunderstorms this coming week along with some air movement that could qualify as actual wind. We’ll see.
Spring ended with a doozy of a thunderstorm several miles to our south but no rain up our way at milepost 11. The squall made for some interesting cloud formations and the light of a late afternoon western sun reflected off the dark clouds in the east made the ocean look emerald-green for a time. Beautiful.
It has been so hot that Karen Watras (shellgirl) told me the mother osprey at
the Bay Drive nest near the gazebo in Kill Devil Hills has been hunkered down with her wings overspread to protect her two baby osprey from the heat. Unlike backyard songbirds, which can be found splashing and drinking at your bird bath, osprey are exclusively fish-eaters and get all the water they need from the fish they eat. I’ve been watching the Colington nests sporadically and all the babies are growing fast. A week ago, the largest of one brood was already on alert, first watching a pair of ducks waddling below, then a turkey vulture flying silently overhead, and finally calling out to an osprey who soared above, also whistling. Mom meanwhile just watched her babies watching the world.
I got up for the first sunrise of summer and the morning gift wasn’t the sunrise itself, gentle as that was. The gift was seeing one of the last long-netting families of the upper Outer Banks sorting through the night’s catch at dawn. Among the throwbacks were, I think, several dogfish sharks. Maybe some fishermen, like woodduck, can help me out here. Check out the three rows of teeth! And I thought my grandson’s puppy’s teeth were sharp! Speaking of my grandson, I think there were three generations on the beach around 5 a.m. I talked to a couple of the fishermen who said they they had been setting their net around 7-8 pm and coming back at dawn to haul it in. When it is not so hot, they told me they set the net in the afternoon. That morning they were sorting mostly bluefish but the haulout from the night before netted a large catch of Spanish mackerel. I bought some the next day at Austin’s; I felt good thinking I had spoken with the folks who actually provided my dinner. Pelicans mostly glided by without stopping to watch the sorting process, but a few ambitious individual birds did pause in their gliding to circle around once or twice and even dive in before heading on up the beach. Several osprey were more patient, biding their time and soaring in wide continuous circles overhead. When the fishermen left, they took over the fishing grounds. One source I read said that the male osprey can bring 3-10 fish per day home to feed the mother and babies. I guess knowing where the fishermen hang out would be good information if you are an osprey!
Increasingly I am a believer in the notion that, to quote a popular phrase, “what we think about we bring about.” Last blog I posted a photo of the mother gray fox whose home territory happily intersects ours and wrote that I would dearly love to see her babies. I’ve been thinking a lot about the baby foxes, before and since. A week or so ago, Pete and I had both gone to the gallery before our opening time. He called me from our parking lot on his cell phone to tell me Mama Fox had brought her babies out and they were playing in plain sight beside the frame shop! We watched five in all tumbling and chasing each other and playing hide and seek before they disappeared in turn into the thicket. They were tiny in comparison with their mother and we felt honored by the visit.
Summer’s first moonrise near sunset featured soft colors with the sun’s light filtered by clouds and glassy waves breaking right onshore—much like summer’s first sunrise, in fact. I didn’t actually see the moon’s disk until it was fairly high above the ocean, which was exactly the case with the sunrise. Maybe gentleness is my watchword for the season. It’s a good one, in any season.
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click for larger image | After the net is spread and the fish removed, the next task is to slowly load it back in the boat. |
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posted by eturek at 9:34 AM |
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| Thursday, June 10, 2010 | | Almost Summer | Although the calendar says that summer won’t arrive for another two weeks almost, all the natural signs tell me spring has yielded its baton on the annual circular track we call time. I’ve found several small, pale blue half-eggs in the past couple of weeks—the latest of these was on the front lawn (that’s a local-joke, read cactus field) of the gallery just this morning. I suspect it came from the nest of the Mama Starling who has been nesting for years under the soffit near our front door. Starling eggs and Robin eggs look similar; the one I found in my yard belongs, I am sure, to a now hatched baby Robin, since I see Mama most mornings and evenings, and have found at least one half-eggshell in that same spot every year since I can remember. I’ve seen two lightning bugs too, an exciting portent, since I go all summer some years without their happy flashes in my yard. These were daytime sightings so maybe they don’t actually “count.”
Wildlife sightings in general are more frequent again: right on cue, I saw the Mama Fox twice within the past week and Pete saw her once. The last time I was able to take a quick picture. Ever since Pete named the little fox that spent 10 days one June in our frame shop, all the foxes in our neighborhood respond to “Freddie.” One in particular will stop at our call and sometimes even take a few steps in our direction. I am firmly convinced all of them know how much we love them.
My artist-friend Elizabeth Corsa was with me for the first fox sighting of nearly summer, and she was also present when Pete found a small turtle in the frame shop the other day. I am beginning to think Pete is more of a critter magnet than I am! Anyway, by the time I could come outside to see, the little turtle had crawled off to safer spaces, but a couple of days later it was back and I took a few pictures before putting it back outside. Now this is a bit of a mystery turtle. I don’t think it was a young box turtle – the pattern isn’t quite right. I think it might be a three-toed turtle, so named for its three toes on its hind legs. This turtle definitely had three toes, not four, so that is a big clue. It might just be an escapee from some terrarium somewhere, which would explain why it keeps coming inside to be around humans, as this is not the normal range for three-toed turtles.
Folks who follow regular postings on the main message board here know about the small, not quite round, clear jelly-like somethings that have been washing up on the beach. For those who missed those postings, they are worth checking out. These little critters, called salps, typically form long chains in the ocean, gumming up fishing lines and providing an experience that one person compared to swimming in tapioca when they come onshore! You can read more about them and see pictures on the main message board.
We’ve had some typical summer weather patterns too, with thunderheads and late afternoon showers and what I like to call general rainbow weather. I went across the street the other afternoon right at 5 p.m. hoping to see a rainbow over the ocean; the conditions seemed right after a little misty rain, but instead I saw an interesting shape in the clouds to the west. A sundog was glowing in one particular spot, but the cloud shapes were even more interesting than the color, so I kept shooting the shapes. Looking at them later, I think I witnessed a fallstreak hole, something I had read about in my little cloud book, and wished to see in person. I’ve read several theories now about how they form: some involve sub-freezing particles forming ice and falling below the cloud while others contend that magnetic fields are responsible for the odd shape. Whatever the physics is, they are interesting to see!
We’ve had a few cooler days mixed in with hazy, hotter days. Folks tell me the water is getting slowly warmer.
My latest beach walk ended with what I guess was a dying ghost crab. Clue #1: It did not run when I walked up to it. Shucks, it did not even skitter. I hunkered down and talked to it and eventually it moved its legs a little bit. By this time I had taken several pictures and then figured out by its lack of movement that something was wrong. Clue #2: Once it began to move, it kept flipping itself upside down. I moved a piece of driftwood behind it, which in retrospect may have been a terrible idea. I finally walked on, having no idea what to do for it. The world’s experts on ghost crabs, Dr. Thomas Wolcott and his wife Dr. Diane Wolcott, happen to live right here in North Carolina and teach at NCSU. I’ve read quite a bit of what they have written about ghost crabs, particularly for nonacademic audiences, but I don’t recall any ghost crab EMS advice!
The Colington marina osprey babies are getting large enough to see well above the deep nest that is still their home. Osprey can fledge in as little as three weeks and considering the amount of wing stretching and flapping going on in the nest tonight, first flight won’t be long coming for the two oldest babies. While I was there, Dad flew in with a fish for dinner. The babies are feeding themselves now, tearing at the fish while Mom watches.
During this past couple of weeks, the ocean has been fairly calm every time I have walked over the dune. I find interest in the patterns of wave wash when the ocean barely ripples and one of those is below for you to enjoy. So, enjoy!
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click for larger image | This Ghost Crab might have become dinner for some Laughing Gull. Well, they have to eat, too. |
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click for larger image | Speaking of clouds, here's the fallstreak hole. Looks like something out of a scifi movie. |
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click for larger image | And check out this approaching storm. About 11:15 a.m. on Tuesday. Yes, it poured on yours truly right after this! |
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posted by eturek at 10:52 PM |
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| Monday, May 24, 2010 | | Baby Osprey & Eagles | An interesting thing happened in my brain the day I became a grandma, a sort of turned-to-mush kind of thing. The same thing happened when my son was born, but I did not expect to have those feelings all over again and so many years later. I have told both friends and strangers that I became, overnight, a puddle—and the gaga new love sort of feeling just grew over time. No matter that the oldest two tower over me now, or that the youngest will start school next year. Grandkids are like puppies, somehow always cute no matter how old or tall they grow (or how much they drive their parents crazy!) The truth is, I find great delight in babies in general (our neighbors have a newborn baby boy and the best-ever big brother). So of course, I feel this way about baby critters, especially tiny, fuzzy ones, and about tiny, fuzzy chicks—even if the chicks aren’t quite so tiny or so fuzzy. All this is to say that once again, we have babies!
The Colington marina osprey pair has three baby osprey, all big enough now for their little speckled heads to stick out of the top of the nest. I saw two clearly with my eyes and my long lens revealed the third, the smallest and youngest of the trio. Mom will feed the oldest and strongest first, but typically all three do grow, fledge, and undertake the long migration south that is their personal rite of passage into adulthood, otherwise known as their first winter. The Kitty Hawk eagle pair has at least one eaglet who is making the small hops from nest to branch that precede first flight, stretching its wings and grown now as large as its parents. The landowner from whom I have permission to watch the nest told me today that both she and her husband thought they had seen two small heads in the nest but that they have seen only one young eaglet at a time lately. None of us is sure what that means—we all find it unlikely that an eaglet fledged without their noticing, as they keep close watch on the nest, and the entire process of “branching”—first climbing out on a branch, then stretching and eventually pumping wings, then hopping from branch to nest and out again, then literally jumping up from the branch and settling down again, letting the air support the wings for brief seconds—can take days and days before a real first flight. If there were indeed two eaglets hatched, one may not have survived.
A show stealer today was a small woodpecker/sapsucker/flicker who, I think, had taken a bath somewhere after flying off from the perch where I first spied it. When it returned, not only was it wet, but it went through an elaborate process of fluffing its feathers, scratching, laying down on the branch and rubbing its back—all of this over and over. Even Pete laughed aloud when he saw the pictures, as I did when I watched in person.
We are off to Ocracoke for a quick day trip tomorrow and hopefully the weather will cooperate enough for my next blog to include some photographs from down the ‘Banks. Meanwhile, enjoy the babies!
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click for larger image | Although I know what to expect, I am still always amazed at how large the eaglets are at this stage. |
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posted by eturek at 10:36 PM |
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| Tuesday, May 11, 2010 | | Little Things (with Great Love) | What is a typical week like for me, naturally speaking? Well, typically, my weeks are full of little things. I always remember Mother Theresa: I can do no great things, she said, only small things with great love. I’ve been seeing the little-things signs of mid-spring all around this week, after the Great Things signs of a fogbow and immense cloud shows last week. If last week was spring’s crescendo, this week the spring symphony is mezzo piano, moderately soft, and its heralds are more ordinary—meaning, we have to pay attention. On their spring 1971 live album Four Way Street, Crosby Stills Nash & Young opened Find the Cost of Freedom with an acoustic guitar solo. David Crosby said (I can still hear his voice in my head and heart), “this is wooden music again, so you gotta be cool, otherwise you won’t hear it”. Thank you, David, for the reminder. In musical parlance, all the sights and sounds for me this week have been wooden music.
First came the dragonflies. I really am not sure if their first wave of migration has started, but I am seeing more of them all of a sudden both near the ocean in Nags Head and in the Colington woods. I spied a beautiful Saddlebags atop a twig Saturday morning in Nags Head. Okay, I am showing off, I admit it. Out of the dozens of dragonflies that live or pass through here, the Saddlebags is the only one I know for sure, and that is as much as I know. I get confused between the Carolina and the Black. The only reason I know about Saddlebags at all is that I found a wounded one in my yard near the end of its brief life several years ago, and I looked it up to see what it was. Later, I bought one of my many little guides to help me out in identifying what I see—Beginner’s Guide to Dragonflies, published by Stokes. It is a little more complicated than the “beginner’s” would lead you to believe and I bog down in trying to remember all the stuff they say you should notice: position of wings, whether the dragonfly mostly perches or flies and whether it holds its body out straight or bent down, and how many stripes it has in what order and color on its body—that sort of thing. I am mostly content to watch and take photographs and look it up later, as I did with this one. That is how I know it was a Black Saddlebags and not a Carolina, as I first thought, although the differences are subtle except to etymologists.
About 4 p.m. the same day, the little Yellowhouse bunny was reclining in the afternoon sun, first out front of the frame shop and then in its more customary spot, in the shade near my car. Two and a half hours later, at sunset, one lone puffy cloud glowed rose in the waning light over the ocean, a much more subtle, “wooden music” sort of cloud show than last week’s.
Mid-afternoon on Mother’s Day, here came a hoppy-toad, right across our beach road driveway; I saw one last week in Colington, and here was another one in Nags Head. Some years I go all summer without seeing a single one. He (she?) let me get pretty close but then turned around and hopped back under the old cottage that houses the Yellowhouse. There are plenty of ways under and out again; the bunny comes out from underneath sometimes, too. I saw a skink at that exact same in and out opening, but it moved way too fast for me to even think about getting my camera.
On Monday, I drove to the Colington marina parking lot to check on the nest there. The mother osprey, aka Grace, has been mostly hunkered down in the nest. She was there Monday, and this year’s nest is typically well-built and deep, as is customary with this pair. I still have not spied any baby osprey heads yet. However, when her mate flew in with a fish, I heard a great commotion and it sounded like baby osprey to me! Their little voices are much higher pitched than those of their parents, and their calls are urgent, almost staccato (to keep with our musical theme). Grace kept tearing at the fish that Henry had laid carefully at her feet and then stretching her neck forward and down, over and over. Her head was completely out of sight in the nest and I assume she is feeding a newly hatched baby—or babies. Stay tuned for all the details as I have them!
Today I had a little time to spare late this morning so I drove down to the parking lot at the now-renovated old Coast Guard station at Oregon Inlet and walked across the dunes there toward the beach. I was hoping that maybe the Black Skimmers had returned. Sure enough, a large section of the sand on Pea Island’s northern tip is roped off and I saw well over a hundred Black Skimmers there—with my long lens, I could focus in on a portion of the group but could not get all of them in one frame. The most I counted in a single photograph was 75. They sounded a little like Laughing Gulls when they called, which was not often. At the same time, I heard a much higher, squeaky sort of call but I could not spot the singers at first, they were so tiny and blended in so well with the sand and shells. A whole colony of Least Terns are using this area, too. I saw individual terns, males I assume, flying away; others (or the same ones back again) flew in with tiny baitfish; I saw one pair that was definitely a couple. None of the terns was sitting on a nest yet from where I could focus with my long lens.
I admit I had a myriad of mixed feelings and jumbled thoughts walking back to my car, sort of like an orchestra tuning up before the concert begins. I could discern individual tones and themes but the whole sounded discordant and out of rhythm. I wanted the notes to all resolve and for that, I had to move from my head to my heart. I look for hearts in nature; last week I spied one in a tree trunk. So this next bit is from my heart.
In 1988-89, I along with many others worked hard and tirelessly to obtain what became the groin at the north end of Pea Island. We were trying (in vain it turned out) to save the Coast Guard station from abandonment, and to protect the landing of the Bonner Bridge (which was successful). My job as county Public Info Officer was to help the county lobby Congress to allow the station to remain; we also coordinated with state officials, particularly with the Governor’s office and NCDOT, and with the Corps of Engineers who designed the structure, and with officials with the Department of Interior, who opposed its construction. Finally, in a compromise that was, I am sure, completely political, the structure was permitted and built. And it has performed exactly as the Corps predicted. The sand that has accumulated there by a combination of dredge spoil placement and natural processes has created habitat for birds, which the Corps contended would occur. Engineering provided a solution that satisfied all interests, despite the doubting. A human solution to a human problem wound up benefiting the wildlife, too. Had the “leave it alone” argument won the day, the birds would not be nesting there—there would be no “there” for them to nest, and the southern end of the Bonner bridge would have by now been severely damaged by erosion if not destroyed.
I am saddened that these tiny little Least Terns (and their larger counterparts the skimmers) have been dragged into the debate about public access to portions of the beaches of lower Hatteras Island. I am one of those who believe it is not about the birds. Not really. When Pete and I vacation in Florida, we are astounded and thrilled at the proximity of many of these same species within national parks and refuges there, along with other migratory birds and endangered species like the American Woodstork. In those places, people enjoy access and the birds and wildlife do well, too, having acclimated themselves to the human presence. I love our islands, love our people, love the wildlife. I truly believe we can all coexist and thrive here, as in Florida—but only if love prevails and if those who are moved by love, like me, speak out and say what we know and what we believe. Here is what I want to say: please don’t hate the birds. It is not their fault. It is not even about them; they are a convenient excuse. Find the deeper issues, focus there. Okay, that is enough speech-making for one blog. Enjoy the photos below—they made my days and I hope they make yours too.
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click for larger image | A Saddlebags dragonfly, so named for the dark spots on its wings near the body. This is a Black. |
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click for larger image | This little pink cloud really was little, in the grand scheme of the sky, and it really was this pink. |
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click for larger image | The first toad I looked up had the scientific name of bufo -- I guess it could be buff for a toad! |
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click for larger image | Notice how he is holding the fish for her. Notice, too, the size of the fishbones in front of the nest! |
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posted by eturek at 6:45 PM |
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