Greeting the Dawn

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. -- Marcus Aurelius

A few weeks ago my husband and I spent a few days on Cape Cod, the windswept peninsula of eastern Massachusetts sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean. We spent the daylight hours birding. One day our travels took us along the western coast of the peninsula, which faces Cape Cod Bay, far beyond which is the mainland.

This particular day we stopped at the many beaches, with a break for lunch. Our last stop, late in the afternoon, was First Encounter Beach in Eastham. What we found surprised us - not ocean birds blown closer to shore in the strong wind as we found at other beaches but a parking lot full of cars pointing toward the water. Even as we slowed down more cars came in behind us and parked.

We realized these cars were coming to watch the sun go down.

We have seen this in other shore areas. Find a west-facing beach and you'll see people arriving to watch the sunset. The sun lowers into the ocean and when it disappears people applaud. Then they drive home.

Sunrise, Florida, 2010 (Margo D. Beller)

First Encounter Beach was a perfect spot for locals, and maybe other tourists visiting or renting nearby houses for the summer. We got out of there before the cars would be departing on the one narrow road and were back at our room by dark. We returned well before sunset a few days later to do our birding, with few cars in the lot.

I don't understand why people want to watch the sun set, and why they applaud, as if this is a show put on for their benefit. When the sun sets the darkness comes and I am not a night person.

I prefer watching the sun rise. When I started birding and could do it only on weekends I'd leave the house early on a spring morning and drive to a particular location where the rising sun would be accompanied by bird calls. It is peaceful and quiet on a marsh and I would feel blessed to be alive to enjoy it. It's also peaceful and quiet early on a winter morning at my house.

In winter the sun comes up in a position to hit me full in the face as I sit in my chair on my enclosed porch. I watch as the light increases, shining on the steam rising from my neighbor's chimney. Then the sun slowly appears at the edge of my neighbor's roof and the light washes over me. At this time of year, when the sun rises later, I don't get the full benefit for very long on this porch. If I'm lucky I get five minutes of sun before its arc brings it behind a tree. 

As the sun rises the birds become more active at the feeders, the bigger or the more aggressive birds pushing others away. When the sun is at its brightest I close my eyes and enjoy the warmth while i can.

Perhaps the people applauding the sunset are just happy they made it through another day. Maybe they prefer sitting in their cars late in the afternoon to waking early to catch the dawn. Maybe they like the sunset colors or a feeling of fellowship with strangers, like sitting at a drive-in watching a movie.

That's their choice but not mine.

Montauk (L.I.) sunset, 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

The rising sun is a symbol of new possibilities and another day to exist while, to me, the setting sun means an ending. It is the same reason why I prefer to see the colors of the budding trees in spring to the gaudy colors of the dying leaves in autumn. 

Rebirth will always beat out death, even vividly colored death, every time.

A Change in the Weather

 Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get. -- Robert A. Heinlein

I am fascinated by weather, how one day can be picture perfect and the next cloudy and gray; 20 degrees higher than "average" one day and 20 degrees below the next.

When the local news is on I always pay particular attention to the weather segment.

Shearwater blown close to shore. (Margo D. Beller)

When I first contemplated this post, we had not gotten any significant rain since August. The ground was dry, brown and rock-hard, an amazing change from earlier in the year when we got a lot of rain. There was no forecast of rain for the following weeks, including the week my husband (MH) and I were to be away. Fires were raging throughout my home state of New Jersey and I feared some neighbor's stupidity in running a lawn mower or lighting a backyard fire pit despite a state burn ban would set the neighborhood ablaze, leaving us homeless.

So before traveling I gathered important papers, my laptop, prescription drugs and small artifacts I wanted to keep and packed them to bring with us. We left and I hoped for the best.

We drove to Cape Cod, which is the only area of Massachusetts that was not in significant or extreme drought - it is only down about 2 inches, as opposed to more than double that elsewhere in the state. Its geographical location - sticking out into the ocean - helps. The warmer ocean currents that may be a factor in New Jersey's strange weather kept Cape Cod warm and moist enough for flowers - mums and snapdragons among others at the motel - to be blooming long after my flowers became a memory.

Sheltered savannah sparrows (Margo D. Beller)

But being out in the ocean is not good when the winds start blowing hard from the north, as they did when we were on vacation. It became wintry in a hurry, although the winds that nearly knocked me down several times also blew ocean birds closer to shore where I could see them. It also forced the land birds I was seeking to gather in numbers in more sheltered areas.

When we returned home most of the backyard trees were bare, their leaves blown in clumps around the lawn. I had cut back and stored the cannas before we left but the coleus in the one pot I'd left outside was dead. The earlier darkness and the later morning light depressed me. 

Hard, dry ground at Greystone (Margo D. Beller)

This is when I contemplated this post, to try and make sense of this annual change that I find doesn't get any easier to live through. But then, a week after returning, something good happened - it rained. And when the temperature started falling it snowed, lightly.

It has been raining or snowing for two days now. After the initial runoff because the ground was so hard the soil has softened and is drinking in the moisture. The snow showers have prompted the birds to flock to the feeders in droves. When I contemplate Thanksgiving I do not fear my house will burn if we go away. The forecast is for two or three more soakings, including more snow, in the coming week. 

New Jersey is still in a drought, however, even with the current and forecast precipitation. Much of the northeast is also in a drought. We would need two weeks of rain like today's to make up the deficit. With climate change it is no longer predictable if we'll get enough rain, too much rain or no rain.

And during the time the northeast was drying up, the southeast was flooding, the west was burning and parts of the southwest had heavy snow. 

As I sat writing this post I wondered, why this wacky New Jersey weather?  Climate change, of course.

From the New York Times:

New Jersey is heating up faster than any other state in the Northeast, pacing a region with rapidly rising temperatures, according to data gathered by a nonprofit research organization

The cause of New Jersey’s dubious distinction is most likely a combination of factors, including the warming of the ocean bordering the coastal state and overdevelopment in some areas, experts say.

But what is certain, they added, is that the state — and the Northeast in general — will continue to see more heat waves like the one last month, as well as worsening storms and floods.

“New Jersey is ground zero for some of the worst impacts of climate change, including extreme heat and considerable increases in flood risk,” said Shawn M. LaTourette, the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection.

While average annual temperatures across the country have increased by about 2.5 degrees since 1970, annual temperatures in New Jersey have increased by roughly 3.5 degrees, said Lauren Casey, a meteorologist with Climate Central, the nonprofit organization that gathered the temperature data.

According to the group’s findings, New Jersey is the third fastest warming state in the country.

When we had less than half an inch of rain in early
November I took this picture of my back patio.
(Margo D. Beller)

What does this mean? More heat, more rain (when there is rain), more humidity in summer and less snow in winter. According to my state's climatologist, 80% of New Jersey’s warmest months have occurred since 1990. And there has not been a top-five coldest month in New Jersey since 1989.

In years past, during the worst summer heat, there would usually be one day when the humidity was low, the sun was out and the breeze was cool and pleasant. I would say to MH, I wish all the summer days could be like this.

Be careful what you wish for. After this year's long string of "perfect" days sucking us dry, I don't think this anymore.

Nuclear Death Row

I wrote this after waking from a terrifying dream. It has little do with birding per se but a lot to do with the world, which is why I posted it on LinkedIn and am reprinting it here because, well, it's mine anyway.

Last night I had a strange dream. It was inspired by the recent massacre in Paris, the revelation a bomb strong enough to blow a passenger jet out of the sky could fit in a soda can, and what I read in a 20-year-old essay by evolutionary biologist and prolific columnist (for Natural History magazine and others) Stephen Jay Gould.

In my dream, my husband and I were vacationing on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts - as we were recently. Somewhere in the world terrorists (let’s call them the Islamic State, which goes under a variety of names but here I’ll call it ISIL) detonated an atomic bomb powerful enough to obliterate the target and thrown enough debris into the sky to blacken it.

This toxic cloud was pushed east quickly on the prevailing winds. In each nation the ensuing darkness and the chemicals started killing people in huge numbers.

Being on one of the easternmost parts of the United States, I watched the reports of the inevitable death coming and felt helpless, as though I was on Death Row.

Worse, as the news reports continued nonstop, mayhem ensued.

Who cares about deadlines when we’re all gonna die anyway? Who cares about rule of law? Who cares about money? Just smash a window, take what you want. You don’t like that black guy? Forget social media, get a gun and shoot him. Blow up the mosques. Hang the Jews. Who cares?

Americans rampaged in the streets. And there was nothing the President of the United States, the politicians agitating to replace him, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the New York City police department or anyone else could do about it. Death was coming. This is when I woke up.

Where does Stephen Jay Gould come in?

I am reading his 1995 collection of essays, “Dinosaur in a Haystack.” One includes a 1994 account of the comet that hit Jupiter ago, creating huge craters and throwing up thick clouds of the gases from within that quickly encircled the planet. Gould ties these events to the then-radical theory dinosaurs were obliterated from the face of the Earth by a huge asteroid that hit the planet, blackening the skies.

Gould even asked the main author of this theory, Luis Alvarez (who won a Nobel Prize for physics and worked on the atomic bomb), how that could happen. He was told, and I quote from the book, “a bolide six miles in diameter would strike the earth with ten thousand times the megatonnage of all the earth’s nuclear weapons combined.”

That must’ve been some comet. The comet fragment that exploded 28,000 feet above Siberia in 1908, known as the Tunguska event, flattened 1,000 square miles of forest, Gould wrote. Luckily, it was in an unpopulated area.

The A-bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 did hit populated areas, causing death and destruction. The bombs ended that part of World War II but started the Nuclear Age.  We’re still dealing with the fallout 70 years later.

Could a terrorist group create an mega-ton A-bomb in a can? Maybe not now. But what if the geniuses who shrunk a computer to fit in a wristwatch were paid enough to develop one?

Politicians in both U.S. parties have no problem screaming for nuclear devastation of ISIL. “Bomb them back into the Stone Age” is a common theme in social media. Bombing civilian women and children along with the terrorist cells doesn’t seem to be a problem. “Nuke them all!” one normally rational friend said of al-Queda and all Muslims after the 9/11 bombings in 2001.

Gould died of cancer in 2002. He lived to see the change of decade, millennium and the making of war that could put all of us on nuclear Death Row at a moment’s notice. Nations don’t make war anymore, people - with the ideology, followers and especially the money and technology - do. Can they be stopped? I don’t know but the prognosis isn’t good.

In 1950, the folk singer Ed McCurdy wrote “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” a pro-peace song in which the world’s leaders came together and agreed to “put an end to war.”

A nice sentiment, but my strange dream shows nothing has changed.