As I See It

Bill Sargent, The Daily News of Newburyport, Edition March 23, 2019

“December 27 was a bright clear winter day. I met photographer friend Sandy Tilton and we watched a well-camouflaged duck hunter as he set his decoys in a shallow lagoon, then hunkered down in tall grass with his gun resting on his outstretched knees.”

“It looked like his decoys were radio controlled because they paddled back and forth naturally in opposite directions. If we hadn’t seen him set the decoys we never would have guessed they were not real ducks.”

“But the hunter was going to have a long wait. Birders kept rushing over to snap photos of the ducks, never seeing their controller hidden behind a low dune. I suspect he was enjoying himself immensely.”

“The beach was crowded with beach-goers equally happy to have gained free entry to the refuge because of Donald Trump’s government shutdown. Who says our president never does anything right? But there were so many happy people on Sandy Point that we decided to walk to the less-crowded center of the island. There we found two birders staring intently through their spotting scopes. We figured they had found a snowy owl but they told us they were watching a baby seal that had stranded on the shore.”

“That didn’t make very much sense because it was too early in the year for there to be any newborn seals and any yearlings would already be close to adult size. And even without a spotting scope we could see that whatever it was far too small to be a seal, so we decided to walk down the beach to investigate.”

“As we drew close it looked like all we were seeing was a chunky piece of driftwood. One wave would wash it up the beach, the next would wash it back down.”

“Finally we realized it was a dead duck, but then we saw it was not dead. It could only move its head in the most pitiable manner and we saw the deep red gash where it had been partially decapitated by the razor-like beak of a snowy owl. But the owl was nowhere to be seen even though its attack must have taken place only moments before because the blood was still so fresh”.

“I wanted to make the poor creature as comfortable as possible but couldn’t decide whether it would feel safer on land or in the water.”

“Finally we decided that moving the duck would only add to its distress so we stepped back to let nature run her course. But I found it extremely frustrating that there had been nothing I could do to help the poor creature during its last few moments of life.”

“That night I reflected on the incident and came up with the hunch that what we had found was a single apex predator that had learned how to swoop down from the dunes and decapitate ducks before they had time to jump off the water and fly. It was markedly more healthy and better fed than its cohorts, who had to hunt for voles in their smaller inland hunting territories.”

“If my hunch was correct almost all of the sightings of snowy owls on Plum Island were from just two or three birds. Based on behavior, it was likely that this was the same bird we had seen the year before. She had been a first-year white female then, but now she had grown beautiful black bars on her back and breast and sported a distinctive barred widow’s peak.”

“She was definitely not the almost all-white owl we had seen on the northern end of the island in late October.”

“Last year a snowy owl became so enamored of human attention that it became lackadaisical in its feeding habits and tarried so long in the spring that it probably hadn’t made it back north to breed.”

“But this owl has a healthy disregard for humans bordering on outright disdain. Her all-business personality will hold her in good stead and she will probably go on to raise many more equally disdainful but proficient offspring. Such are the harsh odds of natural selection.”

“Judging from the number of decapitated – but uneaten – ducks, plus a northern harrier below the dunes, it is possible that this owl now hunts for the sport like the human hunter pranking passing birders with his RC decoys back in the Sandy Point lagoon.”

Copyright © 2019 The Daily News of Newburyport, Edition 3/23/2019