Fatty Wampus, The Bruce, And Some Tomfoolery

Autumn in a beach house on the Cape is certainly different from Autumn in a lakeside retreat in the Land o' Lakes. Take the wildlife, for example. So far, we've seen a few varieties of birds around our house. Of course, there are the wretched seagulls. We've also seen ducks floating around, cormorants diving for seafood, and scoter birds, which I had never heard of and am not sure what they do.

The blasted seagull requires no introduction. A cormorant swims about and then ducks his head under water for, it seems, up to a minute a time, searching for food. A double crested cormorant looks like this:

Double-Crested Cormorant (Credit to Mel)

The surf scoters just showed up a week or so ago. They don't do much of anything, except swim around like the ducks. They are very cute, however. They remind me of puffins. A scoter looks like this:

Surf Scoter (Credit to Save Buzzards Bay)

And then there are the seagulls. I do not have a favorable opinion of them. Their aggressive acts of piracy are matched equally by their aggressive unwillingness to share the spoils of their criminal acts with their fellow avian bandits. I witnessed this firsthand when Christina was 3 years old.

In 1990, a few weeks after my mother had died from metastatic breast cancer, a/k/a MBC (😠), my brother and I took Christina to Maine for a week. We stayed in a small cottage just across the narrows from Mount Desert Island. On one of our 7 sad-but-happy days, we packed our lunch and drove to Acadia National Park for a picnic at the Summit of Cadillac Mountain. We perched on a large granite boulder where, with juice boxes and foil-wrapped sandwiches in hand, we presided over a glorious view of the Atlantic Ocean. I unwrapped Christina's half of peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which she gleefully removed from the foil. As she held the sandwich in her hand and prepared to take her first bite, from seemingly out of nowhere a seagull dive-bombed her and snatched it out of her little hand.  

The seagull's victory was a hollow one, as a few of his fellow avian scavengers prevented him from flying off into the sunset to enjoy his little feast dans la solitude. A mid-air scuffle ensued. I'm not sure how it all turned out because my little girl was crying over the theft of her sandwich, which had been rudely taken from her by a stupid bird without so much as a please or a thank you. As I held my devastated daughter, desperately trying to come up with just the right words to convey the perfect expression of empathy, my pragmatic brother took action. He handed Christina a Chips Ahoy cookie and said, "here, you can eat this for lunch." This put an immediate end to her deep emotional pain and a big smile on her face, thereby transforming the seagull story from tragedy to comedy.   

Like the seagulls in Maine, the seagulls in Sandwich also are lacking in charm and social graces. From what I can tell, they are very "Mean Girlish." A few weeks ago, a squabble of seagulls had gathered along the shoreline here in front of our beach house. One seagull was separate from the group, however. At first, I thought that perhaps, he was simply enjoying the sunshine while the others did their thing.

Squabble of Seagulls Along The Shoreline, Minus One

Then, the squabble flew off, but the lone seagull stayed behind. After some time, he stood up, and I noticed that he seemed obese. OMG! Were the other seagulls shunning him because he is fat? Poor bird. Eventually, he went on his way, and I forgot about him. The next day, Jim and I were on the beach, and there he was -- alone again, with the other bozos along the water's edge. I don't know why, but I just blurted out, in a sympathetic tone, "Poor Fatty Wampus." Yes, I've named an obese bird Fatty Wampus. That feels kind of mean on my part, but I don't intend it to be so. Indeed, Fatty Wampus is the only seagull I can abide.

"Curvy" Fatty Wampus,
Alone Again

In the Land o' Lakes, there were no seagulls. Instead, we had ducks. Cute little ducks. Mallards are the most obvious. These ducks basically minded their own business. They swam, dipped their heads under water to get their food, engaged in public mating rituals on the lake (always charming), and searched for places to nest in the woods between our yard and our neighbors'. Sometimes things got feisty between the males, but the raw aggression of the seagulls is foreign to them. Autumn brings the frenzied flight and sound of ducks taking flight and heading south. 

Ducks Enjoying Autumn on the Turtle Tree in our Lake

Here in Cape Cod, there's another form of wildlife that I have not had the -- shall we say "pleasure" -- of encountering, except in the form of a sign, located at the end of our street, warning everyone of its existence.

Speechless

Sharks. Seriously? Great Whites? Jaws? From 50 years ago? I remember when that movie came out, the idea of a killer shark terrorizing folks vacationing on the Cape was close to absurd. My mother assured me that, despite the movie, it was safe to swim in the Atlantic Ocean from New Jersey to Maine because, in reality, the water was "too cold" for sharks. I'm not sure that pronouncement was accurate. More likely, there were no Great Whites -- rogue or otherwise -- skulking about the Cape because there were no gray seals like the one depicted underneath the Great White warning in the picture above. Cute little thing. It turns out that, by the early 70s, the little critters were just about hunted to extinction. Well, as it also turned out, gray seals are shark food, and, thus, sharks all but disappeared, too. Things began to change after 1972 and the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Today, there are nearly 500,000 gray seals living in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. "Tens of thousands" make their home in the waters around Cape Cod. Naturally, now that the buffet is back in town, so are the customers. Voila! There's a shark problem around the Cape, and it's not just 1 rogue beast with the nickname Bruce. I'm glad I won't be swimming while we're here in the beach house.

In the Land o' Lakes, there are no sharks. The closest thing that comes to a killer beast in our waters was a snapping turtle, but they're fairly elusive. Instead, we swam with the minnows and sunfish in our lakes. They're friendly enough, as are the harmless turtles. We used to have a tree in our yard that leaned over the water. We called it the Turtle Tree because the turtles loved to sun bathe on it. (The ducks in the picture above were on the Turtle Tree.)

Red-Bellied Turtle on the Turtle Tree

The turtles on our Turtle Tree had no problem sharing space and getting along, as they often did.

Turtle Tree

At least one turtle was spotted doing what looked like yoga on the tree.

Tantric Turtle

And then there was the elusive Harvey the Heron. We didn't see him often, but, when we did, it was always a treat.

Harvey the Heron

All these beautiful, non-man-eating creatures were literally in our back yard in the Land 'o Lakes. We also had gentle visitors in our front yard. In late summer and early autumn, the deer meander about searching for sufficient calories to store up for winter. 

A Prospective Buyer?

These pretty creatures, with their Lyme Disease tick-riddled bodies, are practically domesticated. They don't even flinch when people and dogs walk past them. 

This House Is Mine, Buddy!

Sure, the bay is beautiful, but, some days, I can't help but feel that we're in the Truman Show, and someone's going to punch a hole in the horizon. It's as though the producers lack so little imagination that all they could come up with is a few species of birds to make life seem normal around here. But, that's just my New Jersey lake life bias chiming in. 

Oh, wait. There is one other species of bird around here. They are not on the beach, however. These guys hang by the cemetery at the end of the road that takes us to Route 6A. November is the perfect time to introduce these clowns, and clowns they are. They have no respect for the dead.

No Respect

The Land o' Lakes and Cape Cod are equally beautiful, albeit in different respects. Sure, the variety of wildlife on the lake makes things interesting, but, when winter comes, they all disappear. Here, when winter comes, we'll still have the bay outside our windows and -- I'm sure -- those blasted seagulls, but I don't think someone will punch a hole in the horizon, and we'll have a beautiful starry sky to observe at nights. Best of all, we'll have Christina and her family a little more than an hour away instead of 5-1/2 hours.

Life is good, and I am grateful for it.