Day 70, Year 7: Cranberries and Buffleheads
Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Weather: Overcast and Rainy, Temps in the Upper 40’s
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, MA
We live in the land of cranberries and Buffleheads . . . or maybe Bufflehead
x Hooded Merganser hybrids. At any rate, there are loads of ducks and
cranberries in “these here parts.” This past weekend all of the cranberry
bogs that have been so brilliantly red and beautiful throughout the fall and
early winter were suddenly flooded and underwater. The flooding is done
intentionally to protect the plants from being frozen. They evidently
survive cold winter weather better when frozen water. And Fiddler’s Cove
has more than its share sea birds these days. My favorites are the little
black and white ducks that I think are Buffleheads. They like to winter in
small flocks on lakes and bays, and our flock chose Fiddler’s Cove. There
were a few here when we arrived in November, but the numbers have
multiplied. They are very shy and that makes it hard to get good
photographs. But I took a few pics today and will post them with this log.
I think they are Buffleheads, but if anyone has other ideas, please let me
know.
Our daughter Heather leaves tomorrow for a conference in North Carolina.
She will be gone until the early hours of Sunday morning. So Jed will have
both boys for the next few days. Mark and I will pick them up from school
and spend the afternoons with them as usual, and we will spend part of our
week gearing up for Sam’s 5th birthday this weekend. Our son Justin, along
with Jo and Ziggy, will headed to a conference in Las Vegas at the same
time. So it is a busy week for our kids. Mark found out today that his
follow-up appointment with his surgeon, Dr. Sylla, and the oncology team
will be next Tuesday at 1 pm. We are hoping that he will find out what the
plan will be for chemotherapy, but there might be other tests that have to
be done first. We just have to patient, but waiting is very difficult for
both us. In the meantime, Mark is regaining strength at an incredible rate
and is feeling great.
We spent most of evening on the phone. My Aunt Ethel who is 95 years-old
called to see how Mark is doing. She is a truly incredible woman. She
still gardens and cuts her own grass. If I am doing as well at 75 as she is
at 95, I’ll feel like I am a lucky woman. When we got our new Yamaha dinghy
motor in Malaysia we named it Aunt Ethel in hopes that it will run forever.
We then talked to my sister-in-law Conda who is battling cancer at the same
time as Mark. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy with an experimental
drug and so far, so good. She is feeling good and has an incredibly
positive outlook. And then I talked to my sister Patsy. It was truly a
marathon telephone night.
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120117 Day 70 Cape Cod, USA–Cranberries and Ducks |
Love your pictures of the beautiful cranberry bogs and the bufflehead ducks! Did you read my earlier comment about the movie, “Forks Over Knives”? I have an extra copy if you want it. Just email me and tell me where to send it.
Judy, I just checked my bird book and once again your bird identification is spot on. The interesting thing is, the book says that they “might be quite tame.”