It's New England after all, and this is what we are famous for. One day you feel like you are in the Bahamas, the next day you might as well be in Newfoundland. The wind has obviously shifted, and for the last three days has been blowing in from the Northeast, giving us a three day long Nor’easter. Which, of course, is kind of cool.
Birders are always telling us to watch for these north winds, especially during fall migration. A sort of “Going My Way” opportunity for birds. They say, if you are lucky, you might just get to watch a whole flock of migrants delivered to your door- how convenient. But you must be out early enough to see it. On the first day of the coming storm, I, like the birds, was trying to get out ahead of the forecasted sheets of rain. And wow, just as they described, a flock of maybe 200 swallows, that were specks way up in the sky, suddenly pointed their little beaks earthward and in no time were swooping all over the bog again. Wow and double wow!
The bog has been swallow-less for a couple of weeks now, and to suddenly have the sky a swarm of swallows again is the kind of thing that makes me dance around, throw my hands in the air, thank God and delight in watching them. I watched how so many of them swoop back and forth, like a pendulum, probably their way of harvesting the sky of its insects. I watched how, once again, no one had any fender benders, no collisions though they were thick as flies over the slough. I listened to their tweets and chirps and thought maybe I detected a Canadian accent, “twout” instead of “tweet”. Of course, I am kidding, but the fact that they had been flying so high made me think these aren’t the swallows of the dunes, but ones that are just getting here from further North- not that I can be sure. But life as a naturalist is all about making your best educated guess, so that’s mine.
And the wild thing about this day was that I had already had a super-deluxe treat that had me transfixed and thanking God just moments before the swoop in of swallows. I was just coming up to the tracks when I heard a snort that I knew would be a deer, at least that seemed likely at this early hour. We aren’t overrun with deer, as say, you folks in suburban DC might be, but throughout the year I get a glimpse of a pair of deer and they usually produce a fawn or two each year. I see the little pointy tracks next to larger tracks that leap from the bog across the path and into woods.
But on this day, while I expected to see an adult, I also saw two fawns. And, here is the wild thing; the first fawn had hindquarters that were white with just a few brown splotches. Arresting, looked half deer, half Pinto, or half Scimitar Oryx if you want to think exotically.
Whom had this doe been dating after all? What I was seeing was a very rare, piebald deer.
Only 1% of the deer have this condition, which is a genetic one. Articles say that they can occasionally have other defects as well, but it looked sound. Although I must say, it didn’t seem the sharpest knife in the drawer, for it couldn’t find where it’s mom had jumped into the woods. Poor dear, it raced back and forth along the dike, then jumped onto the bog, then back again, giving me quite a show and I was so thankful my dog, rather incredibly, was missing this lengthy performance. Suddenly another fawn, normal coloration, and better at tracking mom, came across the tracks and entered the woods right where the doe had. Our little pinto fawn finally figured it out and reached the safety of the woods. Shew. Now I can wonder if I will ever have the good fortune of seeing it again. And praying it has the good fortune, not to be seen by hunters. You just know that a rare animal, rather than being left because it is rare, would be taken.
So, what a day it was, and now the rain has been coming down like something Biblical and more childhood verses spring to mind. Think you can stand another?
“The rain is raining all around,
It falls on fields and trees.
It falls on my umbrella here
And on the ships at sea.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
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