I can count the number of times I’ve been eyeball to eyeball with Peregrine chicks on one hand and have fingers to spare. Those occasions number precisely one. This one.
The location of this momentous encounter was an esker beside a lake in the Northwest Territories. An esker is glacial scat comprised mostly of sand. The Northwest Territories are a political construct lying in arctic and subarctic Canada. A lake is a depression in the earth filled with water (and lake trout and northern pike and Common Loons and molting Canada Geese) but mostly water.
The Peregrine chicks, which numbered precisely two, were crouched in the crotch of a spruce whose trunk was configured like a tuning fork. All the spruces around it were shaped like shaggy spires. This one had a split personality. No doubt there is a story here but it’s not this one.
Existential singularity notwithstanding, the arboreal nature of the nest alone made it notable. Peregrines are, for the most part, cliff nesting birds. While not unprecedented, a Peregrine nesting in a tree is something of an anomaly. In fact, trees in this part of the world are more the exception than the norm. The nest site was about fifty miles north of treeline—the point where the boreal forest ends and continuous permafrost begins. The disjunct forest in which the falcon was nesting was esker-enhanced. The porous substrate made it permafrost-resistant and therefore tree-friendly.
Cliffs, in this highly glaciated corner of the planet, are also hard to come by. For this reason, and because the birds were the more forest-friendly anatum Peregrines, not tundrius, is why the falcons had taken up residence in a tree.
You’re wondering how this is rambling is going to get around to Cape May and ruination? I’m getting to that.
So there I was. Sitting on a sloping pile of sand. Eyeball to eyeball with a couple of pup Peregrines. Savoring the proximity. Appreciating the novelty. When a Semipalmated Plover called from somewhere overhead and…
I began to miss Cape May.
It started as a musing. I heard the plover (they were nesting locally). It prompted me to wonder when Semipalmated Plovers would start heading south. This in turn made me ponder the arrival date for Semi P’s in Cape May. Which in turn made me realize that it was, now, the end of July, the period that sees the peak of the adult shorebird migration through Cape May. And that I was stuck all the way up here in Northern Canada. With nothing to do but watch Smith’s Longspurs and Yellow-billed Loons and wolves and gorge myself on blueberries. And that I was missing the migration.
Not just shorebirds, either. In a matter of days, passerines would be migrating through Cape May in earnest. Yellow Warblers would be pouring through Higbee Beach. The wind-chime call notes of Bobolinks would shiver in the morning sky. Some lucky birder would be finding Lark Sparrows at Cape May Point State Park and Buff-breasted Sandpipers at South Cape May and Bridled Terns in the rips and it wouldn’t be me!!!
From New York to Washington, birders would be glued to the Weather Channel. Chewing fingernails and calculating the progress of approaching cold fronts. Adjusting work schedules. Faking illnesses. Dodging family gatherings.
Whatever it would take to be at Higbee Beach the first morning after the front passes.
But no amount of lying. No clever manipulation of my schedule. No recourse this side of death and reincarnation was going to get me to Cape May to experience this because I was stuck all the way up here at the beginning of the autumnal line, which is the end of the line when it comes to seeing migration.
And that, boys and girls, is how Cape May has ruined the world. No matter where I am, no matter what kind or manner of natural wonders I encounter, a corner of my mind is always wondering what I’m missing in Cape May.
Of course I could always go on line and find out. But that would only make it worse.
Fluffy white Peregrine chicks and newly fledged Harris’s Sparrows vs. infinite possibility. Oh, well. At least I’ll be back in Cape May in time to catch the Peregrine migration. That’s some consolation, anyway.