FERRY NECK & TILGHMAN, AUGUST 8-12, 2011: Sky-dancing Ospreys, fawns, Yellow Garden Spiders, and a few early migrants.
            AUGUST 8, MONDAY.  53 Turkey Vultures on the way down.  
            Present at Rigby’s Folly only from 2:45 P.M. onwards.  2 Royal & 1 Forster’s tern, an Osprey chasing a Bald Eagle.  Two Ospreys sky-dancing with fish, shrieking away from on high, as if it were the start of their breeding season in April.  Two hummingbirds flying across the cove to the N.  Soy beans up 6”; our fields always get planted last.  Very dry – Varmint Pool and Waterthrush Pond are bone dry.  A young Red Fox right in the yard, after grasshoppers.  A Gray Squirrel on the driveway and another has shredded a walnut on the front porch, with consequent stains on the bricks.  In the cove is the best growth of Widgeon Grass (Ruppia maritima) in years.  
            96-86°F. (86 at 8:30 P.M.), clear, NW 15 m.p.h.  Hot but not overwhelmingly humid.
            AUGUST 9, TUESDAY. 
            Dismal Swamp smoke: There’s a pervasive, blue-gray smoky haze everywhere we go in Talbot County today.  It is from a 2,500-acre wildfire in Dismal Swamp that has been burning for 5 days, started by lightning.  This smoke has traveled 120 miles to get here.  It is so intense that you’d think it was from a neighbor’s house or field.  In the Tilghman area we get 3 different stories about the smoke, all incorrect.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if, had we had a fourth story, we hear it was started by Martians.  I thank Bob Anderson and Nancy Lytell for getting it right for us.
            Several years ago in summer, with our windows open, there was so much smoke we thought something was burning in the kitchen.  That was from another Dismal Swamp fire.  Hard to believe.
            Prospecting down Tilghman way for an upcoming wedding: 
            McDaniel.  Two Cattle Egrets.
            Lowe’s Wharf: an immature Least Tern, a Great Egret, 2 Forster’s Terns.
            Harrison’s Chesapeake House for lunch.  37 Great Black-backed & one LESSER BLACK-BACKED GULL, all adults, 4 Forster’s & a Royal tern, a Green & a Great Blue heron, a Tiger Swallowtail, a Green Darner, and a Yellow Garden Spider.  The atmosphere is better than the food but the food is O.K.  
            Black Walnut Point B & B: 6 Ospreys, 2 Buckeyes, and 2 Monarchs.  What a view there is from here, prospects across 7 or more miles of water from a 330° arc.
            Watermark B & B N of Knapps Narrows: 7 Painted Turtles in the several small fresh water ponds here.    
            Back at Rigby’s Folly: A flyby Caspian Tern, first of the year.  Two Red Fox kits doze on the grass on the driveway in front of the house.  An adult Bald Eagle.  Two Green Herons.  Seven Diamondback Terrapin in the cove.  Finally some life-giving rain c. 6:15-7:15 P.M.  I sit out on the front porch enjoying it, almost as if this is a form of worship.  The rain pulses off and on from light to heavy, during which a doe and her two fawns graze unconcernedly 150 away on the lawn.  The resulting puddles sink into the dry earth, disappear before darkness.  Some thunder.  One bat.  One Yellow-billed Cuckoo.           
            Down at our rudimentary boat ramp there is plant news – a nice growth of Scirpus (Three-square) for the first time, but the little Hibiscus cluster, the kind with the small pink blossoms, is not blooming (yet?).  Our one Hibiscus with the big white blossoms has up to 10 of them now.     
            Fair, hazy, smoky, 80-92°F. (3:30 P.M.) diminishing to 79 in the rain at 7:15 P.M., wind variously E, SW, NW (up to 30 m.p.h. during the rain), calm at dusk. 
            AUGUST 10, WEDNESDAY.  Fifteen Ospreys in sight simultaneously, a high for this year, several of them sky-dancing, screaming and showing off their catch.  Ten deer, 2 of them fawns.  11 Diamondback Terrapin, which have made a poor showing this year.  Liz sees a tiny Five-lined Skink on the front porch.  Seven Black Vultures.  Two Pearl Crescents, 1 Monarch, 1 Red-spotted Purple, 1 Tiger Swallowtail – a poor year for butterflies here, too, and most other places I’ve been to; very few Cabbage Whites and sulphurs even. 
            An unattended planter, 15” across, has these “volunteers:”  Two Rose of Sharon Bushes, several Red Maples, 2 Loblolly Pines, and a Dandelion.  Nature does abhor a vacuum.  Spend 1.25 hours clearing the overhang along the driveway, another vacuum abhorred.  
            Clear, 79-92°F., hot but less humid, NW 10-15 becoming SW then calm.   
            AUGUST 11 ,THURSDAY.  Like the first day of fall.  41 species.  A gem.  Low humidity, sunny, light breezes, and the first pulse of fall migrants: 2 American Redstarts, 1 Bank &  Northern Rough-winged swallow, 5 Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, 11 Eastern Kingbirds, 4 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, 6 Killdeer, and 1 Great Crested Flycatcher. True, the last 4 species breed here, but I believe the individuals today are migrating through.
            On days such as this, when migrants are passing through in the fall, resident birds, inexplicably, become more visible, perhaps energized by the opportunity of joining mixed species foraging guilds, so we see 2 Downy Woodpeckers, 4 chickadees, and 3 titmice.  6 deer including a 6-point buck in velvet. 
            Also: 4 Snowy Egrets, 8 Black Vultures, 2 adult & 2 immature Bald Eagles (present simultaneously, one adult in a spectacular chase, forces an Osprey to drop its fish, then snatches the fish from the water’s surfaces and flies off, low and right through the neighbors’ yards on the other side of the cove), 3 Royal Terns, 5 Chimney Swifts, 3 Pine Warblers, a singing ♂ Blue Grosbeak and a singing ♂ Indigo Bunting.
            Out in the cove a Herring Gull swallows a 6” dead fish, then flies off, laboring away.  Liz and I cut a large Black Locust that fell across Irish Creek Trail during the big June storm.  It is 10” in diameter; we use 2 handsaws to get this done (I especially recommend the 24” Sandvik Force bowsaw, but for lighter work than this).  It was a tree I planted in 1970.  I do some additional clearing on this trail as well as the Olszewski Trails.  There are many more Yellow Garden Spiders this summer than in several years, with their arresting black and yellow coloration.  
            Butterflies: Variegated Fritillary, Tiger Swallowtail, Common Wood Nymph, Pearl Crescent.  Lovely, small bluets, (damselflies), rest on branches and exposed Ruppia at low tide in the brackish water as they have every summer of my life … that I can recall.
            AUGUST 12, FRIDAY.  Three does and a fawn in Field 2.  Chris and Tom Olszewski catch a bushel and a half of crabs this morning out in Irish Creek.  Two Green Herons at the little pond next to Rt. 309 and Rabbit Hill Road.  23 Turkey Vultures on the way home to PA.
             A REAL ESTATE HOWLER.  One scratches their head at the way developers give rustic names to areas that, as often as not, they’re despoiling: this or that run, chase, acres, meadows, etc.  In the August Attraction (p. 39) are 4 new homes for sale dubbed the avocet, the crossbill, the dunlin, and the … brandt.  Perhaps brandt was at one time a colloquial or obsolete name for Brant.  Or maybe the realtor was honoring Herbert Brandt, a wealthy banker and author of such splendid, sumptuous volumes as Arizona and its birdlife, Alaska bird trails, and Texas bird adventures.  It doesn’t seem likely.
            WESKE ON TUMPS.  In my previous posting I described the little marshy islands known as tumps.  John Weske then suggested that when Clump Island erodes down to almost nothing, which it most certainly will, one might then call it Clump Tump.  And a little place he knows of in NC, known as Tump Island, could likewise become Tump Tump.  “Tump” does not appear, in the sense used here, in the American Heritage dictionary.  
            The DeLorme NC atlas shows other places known as Outer Grass Lump, Inner Grass Lump, Newstump Point, Stump Sound, Tump Point, and Dump Island.  Here’s a chance for real estate naming rights.  Imagine the snob appeal, the drawing power, of “the Dump Island estates at Newstump Point.”  
            John recently, about a week ago, revisited Clump Island (Accomack County, VA), where 1,190 Royal Tern chicks were banded earlier this summer.  Lacking any helpers - everyone was committed to something else - he single-handedly herded the crèche of Royal Tern chicks into a chickenwire enclosure, an outstanding feat for one person, probably involving quite a bit of sprinting around on the sand and marsh, but in this mopping up operation no additional unbanded chicks were found.  
            He says it is often the case that such late nestings fail.  He then went on to band an oystercatcher, 41 Double-crested Cormorants, and 49 Brown Pelicans (2 of them adults) nearby out in the South Point Marsh, Accomack County, VA, area.                  
            This summer, in the central Chesapeake Bay, John, Dave Brinker, Steve Kendrot and others have banded 152 cormorant and c. 1,104 pelican chicks.  238 pelican chicks were banded at Holland I., MD, all the rest in the South Point Marsh, VA, area.  This coming Monday Dave and others plan to band chicks in the c. 138 pelican nests in Chincoteague Bay at Big Bay Marsh.  
            1,104 isstill a lot of pelicans but nowhere near the 2 or 3 thousand banded a few years ago.  One wonders where all these chicks of yesterday, when they mature, will breed (or are breeding), or if, as with Cattle Egret and Glossy Ibis, after rapid range extensions, the species will decline and/or its range will contract.      
            THANKS to the 7 of you who (re my previous field notes) brought me up to speed with (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer, pointing out that he was not a she, as was the case with ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ but not like the ebonics transsexual, Susan Be Anthony.  I now know that at least 7 of you read this stuff.  
            Best to all. – Harry Armistead, Philadelphia. 		 	   		  

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