Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

Memorial Day weekend has come and gone and I thought I'd share a quick update about some of my findings over the past week. I wanted to talk about plovers in particular. Why you might ask?  One reason is that they are ridiculously adorable. Another is that they are wonderfully talkative with their piping voices. Despite their notoriety and popularity with birders, shorebirds in particular are vulnerable to declines in population due to sharp declines in suitable migration stopover sites, food depletion, and in some cases, illegal hunting on their wintering grounds. Fortunately for us, many shorebirds species are still very common and the two birds I want to talk about in this posting are probably some of the more recognizable of the shorebirds (depending on where you live). They are the Killdeer ( Charadrius vociferus ) and the Piping Plover ( C. melodus ). I've talked about Piping Plovers on here before, but I don't think I've ever specifically focused on either my o...

Short post this week as I've been busy with job related things but I'll cover what I did the past few days. I visited my girlfriend over the weekend and helped her out with coastal waterbird monitoring in Westport. I got to see interesting Piping Plover ( Charadrius melodus ) behavior. The male's display flight is moth-like as he drifts over the beach, peeping like mad. I also got my first of the year Snowy Egret ( Egretta thula ), Least Terns ( Sternulla antirillum ), and Ruddy Turnstone ( Arenaria interpres ). I also got good footage of a horseshoe crab ( Limulus polyphemus ) puttering around under the water. It looked like a pancake with legs and a spiky tail, but the way they move kinda creeps me out.   Other than that, I've not done much else. I've been trying to work on some new wood working projects and figure out what's happening next in terms of employment and the future. I have a lot to think about, but hopefully it won't be too ...