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The Mast-Head: A Fine Week

Tue, 07/02/2019 - 12:38

This has been a fine week to be a bird. Judging from the noise outside the window before dawn, they are fat and happy — especially those that eat insects. This has also been a fine week, or year actually, to be a mosquito.

Record rainfall, perhaps boosted by a warming atmosphere that carries more moisture, has filled the freshwater ponds and swamps where mosquitoes reproduce. Along Napeague Meadow Road, swallows swoop, mouths open like basking sharks, to gobble a meal. Catbirds, multi-opportunity feeders, have their pick of beetles, moths, and other bugs thriving in a damp year.

Skin is red, lumps rise, where we have become a meal ourselves. At dawn, too, I can hear the sound of a distant helicopter dropping its toxic load in an attempt to keep mosquitoes down. And let us not even dwell on the ticks, which lurk in damp leaf litter, thirsting for blood.

The rain has made the seed eaters happy, as well. Where the roadside grasses are long, sparrows and finches wallow like cattle amid a wheat field. Rabbits and deer seem especially fecund, bringing their young into a green world where nearly everything is edible.

Dinner is never free in the animal world, but unlike us, creatures do not need to learn to cultivate soil or how a supermarket self-checkout works. They are like the children in Willy Wonka’s candy factory, a place where even the river was chocolate.

It isn’t all chocolate and roses, of course. Hawks and carrion eaters also delight in the abundance. Fat birds and bunnies make for fatter predators. And so it goes until the fallow time comes again. But the birds, mostly unlike us, can simply spread their wings wide and move on.

 


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