Beachcombing series No.68: The Shore Path, November 3, 2012

The Shore Path, Bar Harbor, Maine; November 3, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.68)

Well now, here's the very last Beachcombing still life from 2012, number 68. After number 67 sat on my light table for six months I felt guilty, somehow, as if I'd been procrastinating on a process that should have been much more efficient. But when I finally got the test prints back, I really really liked the photo. It seemed brighter and more balanced and somehow more satisfying than many I did last year. And I like this one a lot. So maybe my object-arranging-mojo needed a break. I spent a lot of the winter inland, too. You'll have noticed there are photos of snowstorms and beavers and fox cubs and frog eggs, but there haven't been any beaches yet this year. It certainly wasn't a conscious decision, just that when I've wandered, my feet have been going into the swamps and the woods this spring rather than down to the shore. But a couple of weeks ago I took a mini-vacation with my sister and we spent two days walking along the coast in Ogunquit, Maine. It's taken me a long time to edit all the photos, but very soon you'll get a nice, long post full of views of southern Maine beaches. It was so exotic - they have sand over there!

Tadpoles

Spring is moving so fast I don't even have time to edit the photos from one day before something new and awesome happens on the next. I may do a bunch of posts that are long on photos and short on text. As if that were a bad thing!

The Wood Frog eggs we saw on April 16 in the Frenchman's Hill fire pond have hatched into tiny tadpoles about 1/4" to 1/2" long. They must have hatched at least a few days ago because they were swimming all over the place.

The eggs turned greenish a couple of weeks ago (which is normal) and algae has started to grow in the pond: see how much murk is in the water now?

When the tadpoles stop moving, they lie on their sides and you can see the translucent tail structure. There are two not-tadpoles in this shot; I think those are mosquito larvae.

The eggs we saw along the Hemlock Road on April 17 have also hatched:

This brood is younger than the Frenchman's Hill crowd: they are still clustered tightly around their egg sacs.

 And just to keep things interesting, a new crop of egg masses appeared sometime in the last week:

 They are big blobs of jelly and you have to look hard to see the eggs inside. I think these might be salamanders!

Baby Foxes!

It must be spring because every day brings another miracle, and I feel a bit dazed by all the marvels I get to see. This morning it was a mother fox nursing her kits. This particular fox family has had a litter every spring for several years in my friends' back yard, and this year I finally got to see the babies!

My friends are very respectful of their fox neighbors, so we watched from inside the house at least a hundred feet away. I'm sure the foxes appreciated our discretion, but my poor little 300mm lens was not quite up to the job. There's a lot of cropping and pixel-boosting in these shots, but I think you can see enough to be overwhelmed by the sheer cuteness.

Here she is nursing four babies:

If you look very closely, the middle baby is licking its nose off after nursing with a little pink tongue:

And just so we don't forget in the midst of all the cuteness that they are wild animals, here's Mama Fox carrying around a formely-cute-but-now-dead squirrel that Papa Fox brought for her breakfast.

 Even though the babies are nursing and not eating solid food yet, they are still running after Mama's squirrel.

My kids were like that, too, when they were little. "Whatareyoueatingisityummygivemesome!"

Wandering Beaver

I met a young beaver near the town dump, of all places. The stream there is broad and shallow and most un-beaverlike - I've only seen beaver in ponds or narrow streams that they plan to dam - so it was an odd and very unexpected meeting. I thought it was a muskrat at first glance and couldn't believe it was a beaver until I saw the tail. There is a slightly deeper pool right under a culvert, and I watched it swim around for a good quarter hour. They are unexpectedly graceful underwater.

The game warden told me that at this time of year the parental beavers toss the young ones out of the lodge to make room for the next litter of kits, so our friend here is probably house-hunting.

Good luck with the real estate, little beaver!

Frog Eggs

Round about this time of year T.S. Eliot's phrase, "April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land" gets bandied about a lot, although on Mount Desert Island we don't see lilac blossoms until late May. For us, April breeds Wood Frogs and Spotted Salamanders. I haven't seen a salamander in years, but I'm pretty sure these are their eggs:

 and here is a Wood Frog with masses of frog eggs:

I don't know how old the eggs are, but the embyos are just starting to elongate into vaguely tadpole-like shapes.

The photo at the top of this post shows the eggs against a white background so you can see the babies more clearly. We scooped an egg mass into a glass baking dish full of pond water and held it over white fabric. (These were eggs that the neighborhood kids had brought home in a bucket - I believe it is best not to detach frog eggs from any grass or twigs supporting them.) I'll try to get another shot in a few days when the tadpoles have started to develop.

Hulls Cove, October 26, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.67)

Hulls Cove, Maine; October 26, 2012 (Beachcombing series No.67)

The first new Beachcombing series in six months! I don't know why it took so long to pull together, but I've been moving these pieces around on my light table since early November.

It was a gorgeous October day, warm and sunny with deep blue skies and a cold wind. Most of the debris that caught my eye was typical of what I usually find: clam, crab, whelk and slipper shells, driftwood, fishing rope and shotgun shells, all of them anonymous. I do know where the white mesh disk and the half-burned piece of wood came from, though, and it's an odd feeling to find something on the beach and know its history.

The plastic disk is one of 4 million that were accidentally released from a New Hampshire sewage treatment plant during a storm overflow in 2011. They washed up on beaches along the Massachusetts and New Hampshire coasts for months. In spite of official attempts to recover them, at least 400,000 are still at large. Now they have entered the currents that circle the Gulf of Maine. Harry Johnson has an excellent report on tracking their migrations in his column for the Portland Press Herald. And just look at it - two full years in the ocean, and it's practically like new, only a little dirty. Forget diamonds - plastic is forever.

The piece of burned wood was probably washed down onto the beach after a fire earlier in the month at the R.L.White carpentry shop just across the road. Fortunately no one was injured in the blaze, but R.L.White's has been around since 1903, and they lost all their historic tools, moldings, and a large quantity of old-growth lumber that they had stocked back in the '30s, all of those irreplaceable today. Weeks after the fire the beach was still littered with charred wood and tremendous quantities of wood shavings.

The seagulls distracted me from my gloomy meditations. Three of them, third-year juveniles, were splashing in the shallow water. (Mature herring gulls have a pure white head. First-years are brown, like the one in the background above. These with the grey wings and the mottled head are in their third year.) They would energetically shake their wings in the water, dunk their heads way under, and then stand, spread their wings and shake all the water off.

If they were bathing, it was a very aggressive bath. There was a first-year juvenile watching, and sometimes the older birds seemed to be threatening it and sometimes trying to impress it.

Eventually the younger bird seemed to get fed up, and chased one of the others. I watched for a long time, but I never did figure out what they were doing. Any bird-watchers out there who understand seagulls?

I learned a new word

Waldeinsamkeit (German): The feeling of being alone in the woods.