July 14: Sailing in sun and fog

My friend Jacob took me out in his sailboat today, a J40 named Ex Libris. We sailed from Rockland Harbor out to the Fox Islands Thorofare between North Haven and Vinalhaven, and then back to her home mooring in Camden Harbor. The fog settled in by the time we'd sailed past the Rockland Breakwater. We sailed on through it out to the islands, where it was a perfect, sunny summer day, then back through the fog bank to reach home, where the sun was also shining.

Sailing through the fog, with only the radar to tell you where you are, there's a sense of existing very much in the present. No geographic borders seem to exist and space seems transient, shifting with the waves and wind. I was reminded (in both a literal and figurative way) of the classical Japanese Buddhist concept of "the floating world," which refers to the ephemerality of our dream-like material existence.

No horizon here,

just sea and fog--

our own floating world.

Fog bank and clouds above North Haven

Camden Hills

Boat in fog

Approaching Camden Harbor

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May 10: Owlets

Took the boat shuttle across the harbor to Vinalhaven this foggy afternoon to meet up with our friend Kirk, who took us deep into the mossy woods on private property to see a Great Horned Owl nest with two fuzzy owlets in it. We also glimpsed both adults keeping a close eye on us, making sure we didn't get too close.

As if covered with lichen--

fuzzy owl nestlings

waiting in the fog.

 

 

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November 7: Cattle Egret

I rode the morning ferry out to the island of Vinalhaven to spend part of the day birding with a friend who lives there. A naturalist by profession, Kirk knows where to find the birds, and despite the rather bleak, chilly, and eventually rainy day, we had a good time looking. I've gotten out birding so infrequently lately that being able to spend a concentrated amount of time watching any avian life is welcome. So to be shown  a bird I hadn't previously seen in Maine within ten minutes of getting off the ferry was bonus.

Cattle egrets are a small white heron generally seen well south of Maine. Until today, the only ones I'd seen were in Florida and North Carolina. How this one ended up on an island off the Maine coast is one of those mysteries of migration. As I disembarked, I ran into one of the ferry captains who is also a birder--a birder who particularly enjoys chasing rarities. When I explained that I was out there so Kirk could show me a cattle egret, he complained, "Kirk never tells me anything!" An island resident had recently described to him seeing a strange bird, like an "all-white gull with a big yellow bill." It suddenly dawned on him that she'd been describing the cattle egret. He'd have to try to see it on a future trip.

Kirk and I headed off through town to "The Ballfield," where he'd photographed the bird not an hour earlier right next to his car. A woman driving past stopped to tell us that she had recently seen the egret following Wizard. Turns out Wizard is her horse. That made sense to Kirk, because the bird had first been spotted on Greens Island following a small flock of sheep. They got their name because they follow livestock, eating the insects such animals attract. So we went off to see Wizard. Before we got there, however, we spotted the egret hunched over in the middle of a lawn. Kirk set up his scope and we got great looks at this southern visitor.

We were soon joined by a neighbor who knew Kirk and who may or may not have been slightly inebriated. Even though we were clearly already watching the egret, he wanted to be sure we saw the bird, gesticulating wildly at it. "I knew you'd want to see it, because I know you like birds and sh*t," he declared. He had seen the egret earlier standing in a ditch full of minnows, eating. "It looked to me like a f**king big white sandpiper!" he said excitedly. "Is this rare? Because I've never seen a bird like this here before." Kirk assured him that it was very unusual.

You'd think that the rest of the day's birding would have been anticlimactic after that. But although I didn't pick up any more new Maine species, every stop had its highlights. At State Beach, a big flock of pale and lovely snow buntings flew back and forth above the pebbly shore. Horned larks hung out in the road with a single late-migrating semipalmated plover. A great blue heron croaked loudly as it flew in to land on the opposite shore. At Folly Pond, we spotted eight eagles, including a pair of adults perched side by side on a spruce bough, and a couple of brightly plumaged male wood ducks drifted past with a pied-billed grebe. At a culvert called The Boondoggle, a lone yellowlegs stood knee-deep in what must have been freezing cold water while hooded mergansers drifted and bobbed. The Basin offered up hosts of Canada geese and several more duck species.

Even the ferry ride home was not without adventure. My ferry captain friend invited me to ride back to Rockland up on the bridge, which offered great views of flocks of Bonaparte's gulls, a zillion more loons, big rafts of eiders, some surf scoters, and one gannet. He recounted the day last summer when he'd seen an albatross fly across the bow. The passage across the bay was a rough one, with swells rocking the ferry hard enough to knock over a chair at one point. The spray of whitecaps corrugated the surface of the sea. Thanks to turning back the clocks last night, twilight (and a cold rain) were settling in over Rockland Harbor as we pulled into the ferry slip. As we got ready to unload, a seal popped its head out of the water just off the port side, giving us all a long look as if wondering what we were doing out in this weather. Cattle egret, I wanted to tell the seal. And eiders, mergansers, and crossbills. I don't think it would have understood.

Brisk island wind, rain.
Egret and I share a look,
both visitors here.

August 6: Pelagic

Three birder friends and I had picked this day several months ago for a seabird trip from Vinalhaven with biologist John Drury in his boat Fluke. Who knew we'd have such luck? Today everything came together for the perfect pelagic outing: good people, clear skies, relatively calm seas, and lots of birds*.

There's something special about the birds you see when you're on the open ocean with no land in sight. Wilson's storm-petrels, small brown seabirds that dart among the waves like swallows, seemed to appear out of nowhere to flit past the boat and then disappear beyond the swells. Young gannets dropped from height, plummeting after fish head-first, straight down into the water like shining white arrows that always hit their target. Terns wheeled acrobatically on slender white wings, dipping into waves right alongside the boat for little fish to bring back to almost-fledged young. At one point we saw two jaegers in the distance and gave chase, but these big, gull-like birds that like to steal prey from other birds were quickly out of sight.

Sometimes we passed a lobster boat pulling traps, and each swell would half-hide the other boat from view. But these were long, smooth swells, no white-caps in sight, so not scary, just a little disorienting. It doesn't take long to get into the primal rhythm of the water, the rise and fall that every so often seems to come to life in the form of the dark fins of porpoises. A day like this makes me think owning a boat would be really cool, until I remind myself that days like this are truly rare.

Fog lifts. Swelling sea
carries us on its grey back.
We leave land behind.

* I would be remiss if I didn't somehow get in here that the real highlight of this pelagic trip was seeing a red-billed tropicbird on Seal Island, a life bird for me. This tropical vagrant is spending its sixth summer in Penobscot Bay, which it has apparently chosen as its home. John Drury, who knows the location of the bird's lair on the island, says he thinks it thinks it's a tern, but the terns don't want to have anything to do with it. This exotic summer visitor is, I fear, doomed to lead a lonely life, unless a fellow tropicbird of the opposite gender also happens to wander this far off course...

Tropicbird in Maine--
despite your lonely summers,
you keep coming back.

April 10: Mussel Shells

My friend Elizabeth and I have been enjoying our one full day on Vinalhaven for our alleged writing retreat. OK, granted last night we drank wine and read poetry to each other, but did we do any writing today? How could we, when after yesterday's fog we awoke this morning to a sparkling harbor and a day before us with no plans? Mid-morning we decided to walk around town. Before we could get far, the nice shop owner across the street (whom we met yesterday while doing our part to contribute to the local economy) offered to take us for a drive around the island. So we saw the relatively new Vinalhaven school, the Eldercare home where elderly island residents can enjoy the last phase of their lives without having to leave the island, a granite quarry that looks like an amazing summer swimming hole, a renovated old school that is now the town office, the launching place for boats to North Haven--which looks close enough to swim to from there--and the three giant, surprisingly graceful-looking new wind turbines, of which 99.9% of the islanders (according to our driver) are very proud.

Back on foot and on our own, we walked through town to Lane's Island, connected to Vinalhaven by a causeway. Most of the island is a Nature Conservancy preserve, so we wandered trails through bayberry and brambles along the windy water's edge and visited the old Lane family burial plot. We enjoyed views of a young harrier, a vocal male kestrel precariously balanced on the tip of a spruce, my first flicker of the year, a bald eagle, and my first north-bound yellowlegs. Also admired the architecture of many of the older buildings in town, as well as the colorful jumble of lobster traps, buoys, and ropes that I find so appealing in working fishing harbors. All that chilly wind and fresh air exhausted us, so Elizabeth is napping now to the white noise of the mill race on a falling tide. While she settled down to sleep, I stepped out to snap a few more photos as the light brightened, and that's how I came across today's haiku moment.

While wandering around the public pier next to our inn looking for photo opps of the harbor, I was startled to hear the sound of tinkling little bells. For a moment, I was reminded of a conversation I had this morning with a shop clerk about The Polar Express and how thrilled her young grandson was to receive a real "Polar Express" jingle bell for Christmas. It's not Christmas, but some sort of magic was making music in the bracing sea air. Upon close inspection of the detritus blowing across the parking lot, I realized with some surprise that sound was the result of tiny mussel shells--originally brought up on lobster traps now drying on the pier--blowing across the pavement. Here's one of the shells, in situ and larger than life (actually about the size of the end of my thumb):

With every brisk gust of wind, handfuls of these little shells skittered across the asphalt (which as you can see from the photo is not smooth), creating their own dynamic and exquisite wind chime.

Tiny mussel bells--
magic music of mollusks,
a living wind chime.

April 9: Island Ferry

My friend Elizabeth and I are spending the weekend on Vinalhaven, ostensibly for a writing retreat, though as she said when we saw the palatial room we're staying in, "I don't know whether to take a nap, curl up with a book, take a bath in that big tub, or open that bottle of wine and watch the fog." Here's our view to the left:

The skies are supposed to clear tonight, so maybe by tomorrow all the fishing boats will emerge from the thick fog.

The thing about visiting islands it that you have to take a boat to get there. The ferry ride from Rockland was about an hour and 15 minutes, during which time Elizabeth and I sat across from each other in the cramped passenger area, with just a wall of white out the window, and gabbed. When we landed, it was almost startling to be reminded that the rather dream-like ride was just the passage, the means to the end, and now we were where we had wanted to be and had to actually get up and do something about it. It was as if it was enough just knowing we were on our way to this island retreat--we could have happily remained in anticipatory limbo for hours more. I was reminded in a way of Elizabeth Bishop's brilliant poem "The Moose," which beautifully captures the lulling rhythm of travel. Our journey, however, was unpunctuated by anything exciting like a moose sighting. Just lots of fog, rain, water, and a handful of gulls washed clean.

Lulling wave rhythm--
our ferry takes hours in fog,
rocking in limbo.