This Month's Story
I once lived in a house by the water. It was a large, comfortable house, standing among several old live oaks and has broad verandas on its south and west sides. About 35 yards from the south veranda was a county road and across from this a sandy beach and the waters of the Mississippi Sound.
The Sound is a long, somewhat narrow, biologically rich estuary that separates the southern Coast of Mississippi from the Gulf of Mexico. On the south side of the Sound lies a long string of barrier islands that protect this coast from Gulf storms.
On a clear day I could see the trees on one of these islands, Cat Island, and we sometimes use this event as an excuse to call our neighbors to sit with us on the porch, enjoy a cool drink, talk and “watch the island.”
We called the house and the small gardens about it, Heron Home. The name came from the Great Blue Herons that resided in the area. During mating season, these large birds would stake out and defend territorial spaces in the shallows in front of the house.
I’ve lived other places, but I’ve lived there the longest. I’ve found that sitting on the porch of this house and watching the water was different from anyplace else that I lived. In the stories in the several months that follow, I will try to describe what that difference was to me.
Early one late fall morning, I noticed what seemed to be rough water far out in the Sound in front our home. From the porch, the rough water appeared to stretch for miles along the horizon in both directions. It looked strange. As I watched, the water, despite the distance, seemed to actually roil. I called to my wife, Stella, to come outside and bring a pair of binoculars. When she did and handed me the glasses, I heard her gasp.
Far out on the horizon, the water seemed as if it were smoke, slowly flowing in low, swirling streamers into the air. I held the glasses up to look closer. The streamers were ducks! Thousands of ducks! Thousands on thousands of ducks! I lowered the glasses, the broad view more impressive. The birds were rising in long dark swarms across the entire horizon. We watched and watched. Within a half-hour, all the birds were gone.
When we built our house, we had arranged it so that each room had a broad view of the Mississippi Sound. Almost immediately we began to see the rich diversity of the birds about us. We hadn’t been in the house long before two, and then three, then finally four binoculars were scattered for easy access about the house. Stella bought me a zoom spotter’s scope for my birthday that I mounted on a tripod. We were prepared.
We never again saw a migration on the scale of that fall day, but we have seen other migrations, some quite large, of ducks and other birds, and quickly learned to expect and savor their short time with us. We have learned to listen in the fall, for the distinctive honking, like a pack of dogs barking, of Canada geese. Sometimes these large birds will stay for a day in one of the two nearby ponds. Their call late in the day will have us running outside to see them flying high in the broad colors of the evening sky. At night, if the sky is clear and the moon has grown to more than half, they are impressive sights, beautiful noisy signals that the year has moved on.
But of more interest is our permanent population of birds. Beach birds, such as the terns, gulls, herons, egrets, pelicans, cormorants, and the occasional visitors, such as the large frigatebirds. Land birds, such as jays, thrushes, doves, mocking birds and, of course, the noisy crows. All of these birds we see around us every day. We have become used to them, and have found their presence an important part of the ambience of our daily lives.
Yesterday, as I was sitting on the porch, I caught momentary glimpses through the oak’s branches of seagulls drifting swiftly by, riding a strong wind that carried them rapidly to the west. Their wings held gracefully out, unmoving except for slight angle shifts, they went swiftly by, wave after wave of silent ghosts, sometimes in ones and twos, sometimes in five and tens. There is a very large flock of noisy gulls that normally moves about our immediate stretch of beach. If these birds were of that flock, they were being blown out of our area.
Today, however, I see a large flock of seagulls sitting on the beach along the water’s edge hunched up faced into a driving rain. Are these the same birds? If so, how did they get back? This flock seems larger. Is there a beach somewhere to our east that is missing its birds?
A strong wind has been blowing from the east since yesterday. A tropical storm is forming some 300 hundred miles to our southwest in the Gulf and the wind and rain squalls from the broad feeder bands have been pelting us since this morning. The water is at high tide and a beat-up crab pot, its float still attached, has washed up to join the other debris of the long wrack line on the beach. The sky on the horizon is a dark, almost black, blue. Heavier rain will be here in another twenty or thirty minutes.
And here these gulls sit, hunched down, facing the rain and wind. Who are they? Can a gull from another town, say Pass Christian, tell a Pass Christian beach from our Waveland beach? And if they can, why would they care? Our beach, to me, looks much like the beach over in the Pass. But then, I can’t even tell whose gulls these are — theirs or ours. So maybe I’m not one to judge. Just as long as the birds keep track, and it appears they do.
The rain is starting to fall a lot heavier and the wind has picked up a bit. There are some mutterings of thunder in the distance and Jennie, our Weimaraner, stirs at my feet under my desk. The dog is afraid of thunder. Her tail’s been docked a little on the long side and I hear it thump nervously against the side of the desk.
Through the window, I can see some frigate birds affixed to the wind in the sky above me. It takes a storm such as this for us to see these birds with their eight-foot-long, angled wings and scissors-like tails. They normally stay offshore, south of the barrier islands and marsh, and are only blown over us by winds such as these.
I see four of them soaring in a scattered grouping overhead. One glides slowly by the house, very low — if I were on the porch I could hit it with a stone. Now, it’s gone. Another hovers for several minutes in one place like a large kite, then breaking off, drops into a racing sideways slip across the sky, then recovers and resumes its hold on a new buffer of wind.
These large birds will soar over us for a day and then be gone, not to be seen for a year or two, and then always in company with a strong storm from the south. To them, like the gulls, storms are part of their normal lives, but unlike the gulls huddled on the beach, the frigates stay aloft, riding the gale winds. These great soarers live by the wind, playing on these currents of air to take them where they want to go. I have been a mariner all my life and I have seen them and other such birds far out at sea, feeding and moving about the sea surface, equally at home in rough storms or in fair weather.
But not all birds at sea are as comfortable with the winds and storms. Continental storms often push land birds way out to sea where they die exhausted, unable to return to land. I have seen many such birds far out in the Atlantic after a strong front has moved off the eastern seaboard. Exhausted, the birds rest on the ship, the only “land” for hundreds of miles. They stay a few days, then get blown away again by the winds to perish in the ship’s wake. While this is not a nice side of nature, it is the reason we find land birds on islands in mid-ocean and, when you stop and think about it, the rationale for the distribution of Darwin’s finches.
(to be Continued)
