Yelow-bellied Sapsucker Sighted Here

For a pleasant Sunday afternoon walk, the wife and I, a favorite sister and Molly, our boxer, headed for bird-watching country. We started walking at East Stone Haven on South St. The entrance is through two swell-elegant cobblestone posts 10 feet high. The wife recalled shinnying to the top of both cairns just for the sake of being top dog for a "sec."

We saw a pleasant looking litter of fallen acorns. All we needed were some wooden matches without the brimstone and we could see ourselves in the pipe business, a joy we shared with many another growing boy a half century and more ago. It was one way of "smoking" that could never lead to emphyzema, which our dictionary describes as the "dry heaves," born in the weed.

Molly went a-snortin' and a-puffin' with her triple chin lallygaggin' on the dry sod. Then it happened. Not Molly but our sister. The wife and I and the beefy mutt usually pay little heed to the peeps of our feathered friends. But not our sister. All of a sudden she bleated, "There's a red breasted nut hatch on that tree!"

Maybe there was, but all we could see were the same green leaves, some turned rusty, that graced all the trees, the kind we have been raking and burning, and burning and raking, much to the distaste of certain of our neighbors. Not everyone fattens on the smell of smoky leaves like us.

And speaking about leaves, who should we come upon but Tucker Vye, who lives on this Rockport lane and who runs the Addison Gilbert Hospital. He seemed to be happy in his Fall harvesting of leaves and acorns. He admitted to a bumper crop of 20 wheelbarrow-loads, enough as he put it, to start a squirrel farm. His property abounds in boulders. He said his land is part of that noted terminal moraine that sprawls all over Cape Ann and helps skyrocket the cost of water and sewer system installations.

Sandy Bay was within a healthy stone's throw. The fog on the water was thick enough to cut, and we heard the Thacher's Island horn blowing its warning to passing craft. Which brought from Tucker Vye the comment that he missed the old two-tone groaner; there was a horn with character. We agree. So does another good friend, Carol Roehm, who lives just down the street and who called us in to visit. She even let the pudgy four-footer cross her threshold.

Through her picture windows looking into her garden, we really found Birdland. She is an authority on birds. The two birders pointed out a brown thrasher (we saw that one), a woodpecker, then the prize catch of the day, what they both agreed was a yellow-bellied sapsucker What amazed us was that it actually is a bird and not a standing joke.
J.P.C., Jr.