Friday, October 29, 2004
A few crickets chirping here & there
A few crickets chirping here & there, probably more tomorrow as temperature gets up in the high sixties. Eventually they all dig in. I don't know if they "hibernate" or slow down by stages. I've watched gulls grabbing small crabs out of shallow water on bitterly cold days, the crabs moving their claws ever so feebly, neither fully awake nor asleep. A lot of shore birds appear to migrate only as far south as they need to; each noreaster & drop in water temp pulls some birds in from parts north & pushes others on south. One warm early January afternoon, an El Niño year, I sat on Cliffwood Beach by Raritan Bay, watching dozens of sand pipers working the shoreline, couldn't figure out what they were finding to eat, assumed they were from Maine, Nova Scotia or Cape Breton Island & our temperate Jersey weather was adequate for them, no pressing need to head for Delmara & a risky Delaware Bay crossing. Enormous rafts of various duck species winter over in Jersey's bays, which become much more lively than ocean beaches. Other local water fowl, the egrets & laughing gulls, disappear altogether by early October.
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
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