Mother Nature This Week

So, we had an earthquake, a hurricane, and some tornadoes in Philly this week. Pretty unusual for our part of the world and certainly unusual back-to-back. The earthquake was really freaky. I was in my office in Center City and didn't know what was going on for a few seconds. At first, I thought it was Roxy under my chair moving around but then my coworkers started getting out of their cubes and looking at me like - "What do we do? It's an earthquake!". We all stood outside like dopes for 20 minutes (which is the opposite of what you are supposed to do in an earthquake) before returning to work.

The weather people sure played up Hurricane Irene to the point that Cape May was evacuated, Septa stopped running, etc, etc. and it turned out not to be that bad. Barbara, Di and I headed down to the shore on Sunday to see if the shacks were still standing - which they were - and to check out the "storm birding" scene. Not familiar with storm birding? Well, it is when birders rush out after a big storm to see rarities. It is a big deal with hurricanes since they tend to blow tropical birds far north so rare sightings are quite common.

Check out the scene at the Concrete Ship at Cape May Point. This is 2:30 PM on Sunday with 45 MPH gusts and sustained winds of something like 25 MPHs which sandblasted the skin off of my legs. That is why we are all huddled together next to the Sunset Grille (great grilled cheese sandwiches btw). Sadly, we can no longer deny being the nerdiest of nerds after seeing this photo.



Our deniability is also out the window since this scene was made public on both the Cape May Bird Observatory blog (that's me in the front looking through the scope, Di to my left in the red and Barbara to my right in the navy) AND The Philadelphia Inquirer (that's Barbara on the extreme left in the photo).

We got to see the unidentified large swift and all of the terns mentioned in the blog post. We were too late for the petrel and the tropicbirds though.

Brown Booby persists on the channel marker. I wonder when that bird will go south?

There's One in Every Crowd

Everyone knows one of those people who can pick up a new skill quickly, play a game for the first time and win, doesn't need glasses . . . Well that ended today for one of the nerds.

Barbara started out not wanting to purchase, borrow, or even use binoculars.  "No thanks, I can see that bird just fine" (eyes rolling and choice words being mumbled from the rest of us).  We practically begged her to borrow an old pair of binoculars so that she wouldn't stand out.  Ha. That's a riot.  We wanted her to wear binoculars on a "bra" in a shore town where others were wearing sunglasses and bathing suits so that she didn't stand out.

Barbara and I are signed up for the "Shorebirds with the man who wrote the book" workshop next week.  It will be 3 days of shorebird identification with Michael O'Brien who literally wrote the Shorebird Guide.  I was willing to go alone since shorebirds are notoriously difficult and frustrating and not cute like warblers but Barbara signed up too.  We have been discussing where to stay, what to take, etc.  I told her that I was taking our spotting scope for sure.  It is an oldie-but-goodie from Connie's dad - Bausch and Lomb circa 1960 something.  That was the unintentional bait.

She just casually mentioned that she did some research on spotting scopes and found a few that had high ratings and were not very expensive.  She sent me the list and asked what I thought. By telling her that she should really try them out in person, the bait was alluring. Then she asked if I would go to CMBO store to try some out.  The hook was set, now all I had to do was reel in the fish and not let her spit out the hook. 

We spent a long time looking through all of the scopes on display at CMBO Northwood Center.  The scopes that Barbara had researched weren't even on display.  They were laying at the bottom of a display case for losers.  The clerk obliged us and put them out for comparison.  It was like looking through the bottom of a vaseline jar compared to the Swarovski, Zeiss and Kowa top models. 

The Swarovski ATS-80 HD Spotting Scope with 20 - 60 mm eyepiece turned out to be the bait that finally caught the 5 foot, 7 inch Barbara. The Bausch and Lomb is now relegated to the backup scope which is fine with me.

The first bird viewed through the glorious Swarovski ATS-80 HD just happened to be the rare and glorious King Eider that has been hanging around the Concrete Ship for the last few weeks.  Pretty fitting.