Flying Jelly Donuts
And Other End-of-the-Year News
I have about a zillion things I want to write about — animals I feel like I’ve started writing about and haven’t quite finished yet (yo, those rats) and stories I’ve just remembered and want to tell here (don’t let me forget to tell you the one about the the Lutheran lepidopterist and his windowless house!).
But to round out the year, I thought I’d take the opportunity to highlight just a few of the nature stories that I flagged but never mentioned this year and that, if I don’t mention now, will probably slip through my fingers like sand through an hourglass, which would be a shame, because who doesn’t want to see bat who looks exactly like a jelly donut.
You may remember when, earlier this year, birders in the Washington, DC region were knocked ass-over-teakettle by the appearance of a roseate spoonbill who got blown off course from his (or her? it was hard to tell) usual southern states habitat. Well, that was but a tempest in a teapot compared to the squawking over the appearance of an extremely lost, extremely large Stellar’s sea eagle in Massachusetts.
According to the New York Times, the Stellar’s sea eagle’s normal range includes China, Korea, Japan, and the eastern coast of Russia. Yet earlier this year, one of these enormous birds flew over the Bering Strait and appeared in Alaska, then in Texas (where it was so rare, locals assumed it a zoo escapee), then in Quebec (where most U.S.-based birders couldn’t go see it due to COVID travel restrictions), and most recently in Massachusetts, where many birders made hours-long treks to try to catch a glimpse.
The Birdist traveled from York County, PA and got this shot:
Incidentally, I find it interesting that the sea eagle appears to be trying to make friends with the bald eagles resting in the same tree (and also, wow, check out that size differential), kinda like how the roseate spoonbill, for lack of other roseate spoonbills around, seemed to hope that the nearby egrets would let him join in with any egret games. (In both cases, however, as with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the outsider animals seem tolerated at best.)
As far as I can tell from eBird, the most recent sighting of the Stellar’s sea eagle was on December 20th. By now it could be almost anywhere: still in Massachusetts, back in Canada, hitching a ride to Mexico, who knows. Keep your eyes peeled for the biggest bird you’ve ever seen, and if you see him, squawk!
And finally, sound a note of hope when I myself feel those notes can sometimes feel too rare, or too thin, or too quavery: 11.2 million oysters — those wonderful natural filters of everything gunky and gross, those terrific blobbed eraser-heads of our past mistakes — have been added to a section of the Hudson River off the coast of Lower Manhattan to try to restore the habitat there.
One thing I particularly love about this effort is that it involves the local community. Apparently oysters can build new oyster reefs on anything solid — and everything from cement to old porcelain toilets has been tried. But, for reasons that may seem kind of obvious, what oysters like even better than old porcelain toilets for their forever homes is using what they’ve always used to build reefs: the cast-off shells of other oysters. So, the current effort involves collecting half-shells from restaurants and the like and using those shells to build reefs on which the new 11 million oysters can settle.
(If you are in the New York area and eat oysters, clams, or scallops, you can recycle your shells! Or, if you’re eating out, you can ask the restaurant what they do with their shells and encourage them to donate them.)
I am so glad to see these efforts, both big and small, and to know how many people are wandering, and curious, and working, and hoping.
Love, love, love the heron photograph.
Wow, that eagle!