Goldfinches at Sunset

Goldfinches gathered at my friends' bird feeder last night as we sat after dinner. You don't have to know much about birds to notice goldfinches in summer, with their flashy yellow and black feathers and their quick swooping flight. They fluttered six and eight at a time around the thistle feeder, then shot back to a crabapple tree overhanging my friends' yard.

I commented that I've always loved the arrival of goldfinches as a signal of spring, but Bruce told me that they're here all the time. It's just we don't notice them, because their color is drab until they molt in time for the breeding season. You can see the changes here. Then he pointed out a female, clad in an unassuming greenish brown with faint yellow highlights.

I suppose there's some sort of moral here, about how we tend to overlook the everyday in favor of the garish, but I didn't worry about it. As the sun sank lower, the goldfinches waltzed in formation overhead, dark against the sky--until they twirled, and their feathers caught the sun, sending a bolt of yellow to us who watched below.

Visting the Heron Rookery

Great blue herons nest on Wreck Island, just a few miles offshore. About once a summer, once the most delicate part of the nesting season has passed, we visit the rookery, riding out in our old converted lobster boat, the Granny II. This time we anchored fifty yards off the rocky beach, and the kids ferried us ashore in the round-bottomed dinghy.

The path to the rookery is inconspicuous in the underbrush at the edge of the rocks, but the raucous calls of the herons revealed the way. Soon we were among white-spattered bushes, looking up at dead tree branches spiking toward the sky. One tree had five nests, another three. The nests were a yard across, and in them the adolescent birds sat, hulking and entitled, grumbling loudly as they waited for their parents to come home bearing fish.

On the way home, we saw a minke whale, twenty feet long, arc out of the water. Farther on, twenty harbor seals hunted in a pack. In ominous silence, they slid toward a sloshing patch of water disturbed by jumping fish and jostling gulls.