herons and hawkweeds

On an overcast, cool, windy and drippy morning, there were few insects and no Barn Swallows at all over the marsh. The Purple Martins were in the air but all flying very high along with two or three twittering Chimney Swifts. Are there really so many insects up there? The martins and swifts must know! Only when I got around to the north side of the property -- the fixed part of our neighbor's dock opposite the mouth of the pond outflow with a view of the nearby Aldrich Boat Yard -- did I see one or two Barn Swallows and another of those neat little Bank Swallows that fly almost as well as the Barns.

From this observation post I could also see a Yellow-crowned Night Heron come flying in from the bay, landing on our creek shore just out of sight but then, as if to confirm the sighting, taking off again for another, closer shoreline spot. It's the first one of the season for a bird that I believe nests somewhere in the vicinity.

Speaking of herons, the Gulping Green was sitting in a pine tree nearby and doing a two-part, almost growling version of the gulp. As I walked back along the path on the west bank of the pond, what seemed like a second Green Heron came flying down the pond from the opposite side and then landed on the bank right underneath the dead cedar. I waited to see if it would climb up to the 'on guard' post at the top (as it did yesterday) but it only hopped up onto a low branch. It was silent and the Gulping Green in the woods -- if it was a different bird -- was also quiet. There's something going on with these great-looking Jurassic Park herons and I hope it's reproduction!

Besides following swallows and herons, I try to keep up with the sequence of flowering plants. Yesterday and today I noted that the locusts (the trees not the insects) had their full white floral sprays high above. And a few loosestrifes (a native species or a garden escape, I'm not sure which) have appeared on the ground by one of our right-of-ways. The stand-up dandelions in the field by the house, bright yellow all afternoon under a cloudy sky, belong to at least two different species. One has very hairy dandelion-like basal leaves, smooth stems (only occasionally branching) and fairly good-sized flowers, one to a stem (Cat's Ear perhaps). The other has less hairy, toothless, elliptical leaves in a basal rosette and smallish flowers in a little cluster on each stem (one of the hawkweeds no doubt). But the most spectacular vegetable appearance (if that's the right expression) was a bright yellow mold-like fungus spread across a rotting fallen log; like most fungi, it appeared overnight and like the yellow composites on the other side of the house, it adds a gay note of bright color to a somber day.

Eric Salzman