Nauset

The light at Nauset is hard by the Town of Eastham. It is more famous than other lighthouses on Cape Cod; the red and white tower is the logo for Cape Cod Potato Chips, sold in every convenience store from Connecticut to Maine.



Pat and I climbed down the wooden steps to the narrow beach where we set up chairs and the all-important umbrella. Pat took off her sandals, dipped a toe in the water, pronounced it freezing, and ensconced herself with cool drinks, and a new mystery novel in the shade of the umbrella to enjoy the beach in her own inimitable fashion. I can’t sit still on a beach and took off back up the stairs to explore the lighthouse and environs.

Cape Cod has always had a problem with its lighthouses. The coastal cliff that (technically a glacial scarp) forms a rampart against the ocean affords a free additional fifty feet or so of elevation at Eastham, but the remorseless Atlantic nibbles away at the cliff base with every wave and every storm, and the edge keeps moving ever westward and closer to the light. Every lighthouse facing the open sea is a replacement--sometimes second or third generation--of a light that went over the lip when its feet were cut out from under it.

The current Nauset lighthouse was built in 1877 as one of the “Chatham Twins”- old postcards show the keeper’s house flanked by identical fifty-foot tall white lighthouses. The right-hand tower was dismantled in 1923 and moved by barge up the coast to the cliffs, where it replaced the last of the “Three Sisters” lights. The Sisters were themselves wooden replacements for the three original brick towers, built in 1838, when the cliff stood about 800 feet further east. The last of the brick sisters slid over in 1892-what's left of the foundations are visible at extreme low tide. The “new” Nauset Lighthouse was operated by the Coast Guard until 1955, when it was sold out of service. The owner donated the light and the grounds to the National Park Service to be a part of Cape Cod National Seashore. That seashore kept moving closer to the base until, by 1996, the cliff edge was only 25 feet from the base of the tower. The light was moved 100 yards inland, waiting for the ocean to catch up with it. Nauset Lighthouse is run by the Nauset Light Preservation Society, who keep up the maintenance and do restoration, operating the light as a “private aid to navigation”. Boaters and fisherfolk use the red and white tower as a day mark and the alternating red and white aerobeacon lights can be seen up to 20 miles at sea.



The day we were there, Nauset Beach had more that its share of surfers, most on long boards, a good number sporting grey in their beards, and all but one in full wetsuits. Long boards handle better than hot dog boards on the small waves sloshing ashore. The waves were smallish but well formed and a surfer usually had the choice of left or right breaks. Long boards give a stable smooth ride and can better take bumps with rocks as well. The beach was littered with rocks from football to chair size; dumped there by the last glacier and eroding out of the cliff face when the glacier retreated (gone back, as the locals say, for more rocks). A pair of surfers were standing up on wide Hawaiian-style paddle boards, looking like gondoliers in wetsuits with their long single oar, and were catching more curls than most.



When I was fifteen or so, I happened upon a book entitled The Outermost House by Henry Beston. I still have it; pages yellowed and corners folded, the 95 cent price tag still in the corner. Beston, a burnt-out magazine editor and bon vivant built a two-room vacation shack on the dunes at Nauset Beach and found himself unable to leave one September. Beston spent a year on Nauset Beach, recording his experiences and thoughts in longhand on a kitchen table. He wrote of storms and shipwrecks, bird migrations and fishermen. His few visitors were mostly Coast Guardsmen from the local station or the lighthouse. Beston always offered them coffee, or something a bit stronger, on winter nights. I can still remember long quotes from the book, some passages, like long-ago memorized poetry stick in my mind. It would have been nice to have visited the house, which was dedicated as a "National Literary Landmark" in 1964 by the then Secretary of the Interior, but the house was demolished by a howling Northeaster (the lady in the local bookstore called it hurricane)in 1978. The foundation and the commemorative plaque are gone as well, the beach and dunes changed, the cliffs pushed back by the constant waves and the patient sea.

Private Viewing

Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one around paying attention. I was walking around dusk in Old Town Alexandria a couple of weeks ago, when my attention was drawn by a chittering overhead. The sound came from a flock of chimney swifts wheeling around the unused smoke stack at the old Courthouse Building on Washington Street. Having raised their babies, and prior to migration for the rain forests of the upper Amazon, swifts spend the rest of the summer feeding on the wing and forming communal roosts in (guess where) chimneys. Before the European invasion of the Americas, chimney swifts roosted in standing hollow trees, but chimneys are even better and it is rare to find them in hollow trees anymore. The wheel in the sky grew as more swifts joined and the sound level intensified. I like to think they were swapping stories of where the best spots are for the tastiest bugs and about the one that got away.

Roger Tory Peterson in his Field Guide to Birds East of the Rockies, describes swifts as "a cigar with wings". Swifts are related to hummingbirds and move their wings almost as fast. Rather than the blur you see with hummers, swifts seem to flap their wings alternately; it's just an optical illusion from the rapidity of movement; your brain interprets it as alternate movements. Swifts have tiny feet; early biologist who should have known better, thought the feet were missing altogether, leading to the group name Apodidae (no feet). Their small feet and weak toes leave swifts unable to perch on a horizontal surface as do other birds. Chimney swifts prefer to find a rough vertical surface and hook their claws into some irregularity and roost like upside down bats.

The wheel reached out to half a block in size, and it seemed as if every swift in Alexandria was circling the chimney and chattering up a storm. At some point, known only to the birds, critical mass was reached and the entire mass spiraled down the chimney like smoke going backwards. It was like some sort of magic trick, which I guess that’s really what it was. From the first circling birds to empty sky, the whole show was over in less than five minutes. The truly amazing thing was that, as I stood there, agog in astonishment at being privileged to see such a spectacle, nobody else along that busy street even bothered to look up. I mumbled a thanks for the show to Whoever might be listening, and rejoined the throng, hurrying towards my destination of the evening.

Chatham; Hammerheads and Horseheads

Pat and I spent a long weekend on Cape Cod. Rather than go through a blow by blow, I am doing a series of vignettes interspersed with the usual stuff. Intro done, we commence.

Chatham Lighthouse sits about a mile down Main Street, just outside of Chatham, Massachusetts. It perches on a cliff overlooking the approaches to Chatham harbor. The light was built in 1881; one of a set of twin lighthouses, and part of the third set of twin lighthouses in Chatham. The original lights, as well as their replacements, slid into the ocean as the cliff slowly eroded away. In 1923, one light was moved up-cape to Nauset to replace a set of aging triple lights. Chatham light was taken over by the Coast Guard in 1939 and is still an active Coast Guard station.


Coasties were known on the Cape as Hammerheads. They got the name from an elite military unit set up during the days of Prohibition. Hammerheads went after rumrunners smuggling liquor from Canada, smashing contraband whiskey barrels with sledge hammers and spilling the contents overboard, much to the delight of the local lobster population.

Pat and I drove to the lighthouse after a leisurely stroll through the town. We were taking in the view from the cliff top and contemplating a trudge down the wooden stairs to the beach when a couple came past and asked if we had seen the seals. Really? Where? They had lunched up the road and had seen seals sporting in the channel. I scanned the area with my binoculars and came up with nothing. Then I checked out the tiny island off the point. No bigger than a sandbar, it looked covered with logs. Which moved. Eureka. I dug out the 20x spotting scope that Pat had me bring along (thanks, Pat) and focused in. The sandbar was wall-to-wall seals. Gray seals the size of sofa beds along with smaller, lighter harbor seals lay cheek by jowl on the beach looking for all the world like a crowd of summer sunbathers. I half expected them to be passing the Coppertone. I decided to hike out to the point to see if I could get some pictures. Pat elected to stay on the cliff top with the scope. She asked anyone who passed by if they wanted to see the seals; most people were blase about it until they got their eye to the lens. When I got to the bottom of the stairs and looked back up, Pat was doing a land-office business - she could have sold tickets. Pat says she didn't offer a look to the bikers who roared up soon after I left. Too bad, she could have swapped a view of the seals for some free legal or accounting advice.


Local fishermen call Gray seals “horseheads” from their long rounded heads that poke out of the water to stare at you with huge soulful puppy eyes.


Grays and the smaller harbor seals have ballooned in population in the past 30 years until their numbers are approaching 6000 along the Cape. With the increase in the seal populations, have come (cue up scary music here…Da Dum…Da Dum..) their major predator, the Great White Shark. There have been reports of shark attacks on seals off Chatham for several years and the occasional seal carcass washes up showing half-moon bite marks the diameter of garbage can lids. A Great White, estimated to be 14 feet long, was observed killing and eating a seal just off the beach not 2 months ago. Chatham Town has issued an “advisory” telling people not to swim with seals. It seems to me that swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match, is only slightly less foolhardy than swimming with an animal possessing a head the size of a grizzly bear’s with teeth to match AND knowing that something with the firepower to eat it may be nearby. The good news is that Great Whites rarely attack humans; when they do, it is usually a case of mistaken identity - a swimmer or surfer on a board looks an awful lot like a seal on the surface. Seals have a thick layer of blubber (read: calories) that the shark can detect when it hits. Humans are too skinny and not worth the effort to digest; a shark will spit you (or whatever part of you it took off) back out. The bad news is that the first bite is enough to ruin your day.

Pat and I drove back to the lighthouse in the evening after a good seafood dinner in a local restaurant. Chatham Light sent its double beams out into a clear black night, broken only by the lights of passing cars on the main road. The Milky Way was visible, with the Pleiades hovering, and Orion climbing over the horizon like a fat man getting out of the tub. The cries of migrating shorebirds punctuated the darkness over the empty beach with summer past and a north wind rising.

Far Travelers

Saturday morning Pat and I saw a sight few people witness; Freshwater jellyfish in the pond at Locust Shade Park in Prince William County, Virginia. Scattered far and wide, freshwater jellyfish have been found on every continent except Antarctica and on many oceanic islands including Guam and New Zealand. They are not particularly rare, but like the pookah in Harvey, they "appear here and there, now and then, to this one and that one (and how are you Mr. Wilson?)". Freshwater jellyfish may show up in a pond one year and not be seen again for the next twenty, if ever, although they have been reported from the pond at Locust Shade for the past three years. A big reason that few people see them is that almost nobody looks. Freshwater jellyfish are not very high on the average person's list of things to see. Craspedacusta sowerbii, although not a true jellyfish, is close enough so as to make no difference; a few slight anatomical differences put freshwater jellyfish in the same group as hydras (tiny stalked critters resembling miniature sea anemones). However, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck...Actually freshwater jellyfish don't quack or walk and they don't swim like duck either, but you get the point.

These are interesting little blobs of protoplasm. They swim, like their saltwater cousins, by pulsating the bell and trailing their tentacles to pick up small plankton such as water fleas and daphnia. Stinging cells on the tentacles kill prey which the tentacles pass up to the mouth for digestion. The stinging cells on freshwater jellies are too small to penetrate human skin, so if you really wanted to, you could pick one up with impunity. Like sea nettles, fifty miles east in Chesapeake Bay, freshwater jellyfish are 90% water. They have an inside layer of cells and an outside layer of cells and in between, they contain gelatinous mesoglea (jelly) which gives them buoyancy. Since they are basically animated water, jellies are nearly clear with an X-shaped set of gonads standing out in white. The biggest ones are about the size of a quarter, with nickel-sized specimens far more common. Pat described them as "swimming edelweiss".

Freshwater jellyfish undergo alternating generations. Colonies of polyps, the stalked form, grow on the bottom, reproducing by branching off clones. The freshwater jellyfish part, or medusa, is the sexual generation, produced by the polyp under favorable conditions. The polyp clones several copies, stacked up like saucers, each of which separates off swims away. Once the medusae release eggs and sperm, they die. In winter, polyps go into a resting state, called the podocyst, which withstands cold. These resting cysts are picked up on bird feet and feathers and move from pond to pond, a few miles at a time, until freshwater jellyfish are found all over the world. Podocysts jump across oceans probably by hitching a ride long-distance migrants which can traverse whole hemispheres. Being a clone species has advantages; the same species of freshwater jellyfish is worldwide and is therefore unlikely to become rare. On the other hand, the medusa stage seldom bears fruit, since all the freshwater jellyfish in a pond are likely descended from a single podocyst and the medusae are all males or all females. Only when podocysts are from different ponds, of different sexes, and both clones manage to survive to the medusa stage, do genes get mixed.

Some researchers postulate that jellyfish represent an early "experiment" of life, unrelated to anything else. Indeed, fossils of jellyfish-like creatures show up in some of the oldest rocks with any traces of life. Called the Edicaran fauna (after some god-forsaken spot in the middle of the Australian outback), they were thought by some to show no affinities to any other known life forms although recent research seems to disprove this theory.

Jellyfish have always seemed to me to be too ethereal to be real (except when I get stung). Maybe it's the ghostly coloring and the unhurried pulsating swimming that makes them seem as if they really are not of this earth. Indeed, the late Carl Sagan, in speculating on possible life forms that could exist in the thick clouds of Jupiter, used jellyfish as a model. He never mentioned if they got there on bird feet.

Paw Paws

I was walking the banks of the Potomac on a warm late summer Saturday morning, looking for dragonflies and assorted other targets of opportunity to photograph. As I rounded a bend in the trail, I suddenly had a mental flash of "Juicy Fruit", as in the gum. They say the sense of smell taps into your deepest memories and creates the strongest associations. So why was I thinking of a chewing gum that I haven't even cared for since I was a kid? A short bit of looking turned up a forest floor littered with ripe paw paw fruits. Paw paws are middling-sized understory trees, usually found on the rich flood plains of streams and rivers. They have large leaves, always in threes, and the flowers in early May look like those of wild ginger, even though the two plants are not remotely related.


Paw paws are the northern representative of what is a huge tropical family of trees, including the tropical custard apple, which my old economic botany text book calls "the queen of tropical fruits".


Paw paws are loaded with aromatics; crush a leaf and you smell green peppers. Cut open a ripe fruit and you get a whiff of sweet potato and banana. The taste is the same; sounds kind of ghastly, but is surprisingly good on the pallate. Just make sure the fruit is fully ripe - green ones can be mouth puckeringly astringent. Paw paw leaves are the only food plant for caterpillars of the zebra swallowtail butterfly, and the Potomac valley is well known among lepidopterists as the best place to see this hauntingly beautiful species.


The late Euell Gibons, in his Stalking the Wild Asparagus, gives a recipe for paw paw chiffon pie, although you would be hard put to find enough ripe fruits to give it a try; I only found enough unchewed fruit to fill a baseball cap. Everything in the woods, from bears to mice, eats paw paws. Paw paw seeds are the size of nickels, and as hard and brown as mahogany. They are designed to be gulped down with the sweet pulp and (ahem) deposited some distance away from the parent tree. Dan Janzen, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania writes that these fruits, along with those of persimmon, honey locust, and others, were originally dispersed by Ice Age megafauna such as mastodons and giant sloths (or as those in the business call them, BHMs - Big Hairy Mammals). If that is true, when you enjoy a ripe paw paw, fresh off the forest floor, you are fulfilling a role once played by extinct beasts. Just remember to swallow and do like the bears do.

Bluegills, Satellites, and Sneakers

Ask any angler what was their first catch and, nine times out of ten, the answer will be "bluegill". Bluegills are perfect pan fish. Small enough for a kid to handle, aggressive enough to bite on any bait, and abundant as anything that swims. They are also very scrappy at the other end of the line. There is a whole subculture of fly-fishers whose art is devoted to the deception of bluegills. The local sporting goods shop sells more artificial flies designed for bluegills than for trout. Trout in this area are fading aristocrats; the last local population of native brook trout vanished when the town of Reston was constructed and the last self-sustaining population of brown trout is in danger from a planned highway. Bluegills and their many cousins, however, proliferate in any body of water bigger than a a wading pool. I have netted bluegills from a golf course pond no bigger than an average suburban bathroom.



Bluegills are are related to the perches and are members of the family Centrarchidae, which includes large- and small-mouth bass. Centrarchids are an ancient North American speciality; found coast-to-coast and from Mexico to above the Arctic Circle. They have survived the dinosaurs and have been transplanted by humans to all parts of the globe. Bluegills (and their cousins the basses) are native to the Mississippi River drainage system and were brought to the Atlantic rivers in the late 19th century. Bass were taken to California in the water tenders of steam locomotives almost as soon as the Golden Spike was driven. Now that the Potomac has been cleaned up, thanks to gazillions of your tax dollars (thanks!)and the introduction of an aquatic weed that thrives in polluted water, it has become a major stop on the Pro Bass Fishing Tour. Yes, there are professional bass anglers. One of the cable channels carries pro-bassin' programs. I guess it's entertainment, but watching someone else fish is slightly more boring than watching paint dry.

Bluegills are colonial breeders, meaning all the bluegills in the pond will be nesting at the same time. From about late June until now, if you haunt ponds, lakes, slow moving creeks, and other assorted wetland areas, you will see what looks like a series of small bomb craters lining the banks in water about a foot or so deep and going out into deeper water. These are bluegill nests. Given the limited area for nesting, competition is fierce. Males stake out hexagonal territories, build a round depression in the bottom, and stand guard with all their breeding colors showing. A bluegill in breeding fettle is as pretty as any exotic fish from the rain forests that you may see in the local aquarium store. Males build and guard their nests fiercely; they will attack anything encroaching into their territory and a small lure trolled near the surface is sure to get a strike. Females flit from nest to nest, sizing up the males and deigning to lay a few eggs in whatever nest whose male strikes their fancy. One female can produce up to 50,000 eggs, but she will distribute them around several nests, mating with several males. A single nest can hold up to the same number of eggs produced by a single female, so the numbers even out. Eggs hatch in about a week, and the young spend their first year or so hiding in weeds or submerged brush. Two- and three-year olds begin breeding and five-year old bluegills are rare. Nests near the center of the colony are preferred and males compete for them, the bigger guys ousting the smaller ones. Nests on the edges are more heavily preyed upon by catfish and surprisingly, snails, which may account for up to half the egg losses. A closely related sunfish, the pumkinseed, is a solitary nester. Pumkinseeds feed on snails and may cruise around the bluegill colony hoping to pick up a quick snack.

It may seem that the big alpha males have all the advantages in colonial nesting, but they are not alone in the sweepstakes to get their genes out to the next generation. Aside from other alpha males constantly patrolling the colony, hoping to take over an established nest(any male you catch will be almost instantly replaced), two other male types; satellites and sneakers, also lurk the shallows. Satellites are males, but with female coloration and some their behaviors. When a couple begin to go into their breeding behavior, a satellite will come into the nest and join in, mimicking the female. This is the stuff of Penthouse Letters for the alpha male and he happily and blindly sets forth. When the real female releases her eggs and the alpha male begins to fertilize them, the satellite also releases a cloud of milt to mix in. Up to half the eggs in a nest may be fathered by satellites. Unless the sneakers get into the act as well. Sneakers are dwarf males, hanging around the edges of territories, looking inconspicuous, and staying out of trouble. At the right moment, a sneaker will dash in upon the happy couple, release his milt, and be gone before the alpha male realizes what's happening.

Bluegill population genetics are such that neither satellites nor sneakers will ever get too abundant; both populations are dependent, almost parasitic on a good number of territorial alpha males who stake out territories and defend the nests, eggs, and young. Even so, next time you take a kid fishing, don't forget to ask your catch "Who's your daddy?"

Happy Birthday, Carl Linnaeus, the Man Who Saved the Loch Ness Monster

This year (June actually) marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who invented the system of biological nomenclature. An excellent article by David Quammen on the man and his achievement (Quammen calls him the first "information architect") may be found in the June, 2007 National Geographic.

Without going into the detail so well described in the Geographic article, let me present, for your amusement, a couple of stories told me by a taxonomist and member of the Linnean Society.

It seems that Carl was either a) possessed of an extremely dry wit, or b) a cranky old fusspot. The Norway rat (actually from the steppes of central Asia) was named Rattus norvegicus by Linnaeus because, as a Swede, he despised Norwegians. He must really have had it in for Germans since the German cockroach (Blatella germanicus) is really from tropical west Africa.

Linnaeus named both the house mouse (Mus musculus) and the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Here we have one of the smallest of mammals and the largest creature who ever lived, both sharing a name. One wonders why...perhaps a joke? "Hey Sven, go get me a musculus"; leaving poor Sven to wonder if he needs a jar or a harpoon.

Linnaeus' legacy is the orderly system of naming living things (he tried it for minerals, but gave it up as way too complex). The foundation of the system is the genus and species. All living things must be named according to the rules set forth by the rules of nomenclature. Plants must be described in a scholarly journal in Latin, and a specimen, called the type specimen, must be deposited in an accredited institution. The type and associated description ultimately are what all members of that species are measured against when taxonomists try to determine what ever it is they may have in hand. The rules for animals are pretty much the same with the exceptions that the description need not be in Latin, and the type specimen may be a part or even a photograph of the animal. If you discover a new species, you get to name it. Linnaeus described and named us; Homo sapiens. Guess who he named as the type specimen? Himself. We are all held comparable to a middle-aged Swedish man. Go figure.

On to the Loch Ness Monster. In the 1970's, a plan was hatched to depth-charge Loch Ness in an effort to bring some closure (dead or alive) to the myth of the Loch Ness Monster. To thwart this, Sir Peter Scott (son of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, of Antarctic fame, and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund) and Robert Rimes co-published a paper in the journal Nature, describing the beast. They named it Nessiteras rhombopteryx (Greek for "the wonder of Ness with the diamond shaped fin"), "affinities uncertain". As a type specimen, the authors used a pair of blurry photos, purported to be of the Nessie, one showing what could be imagined as a squarish fin, the other just a blob. Under the rules of zoological nomenclature, the photos counted as a type specimen. Nessie was placed on the British list of endangered species and saved from a cruel fate. Some skeptics have noted Nessiteras rhombopteryx is an anagram for "Monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Robert Rines responded to these critics with his own anagram: "Yes, both pix are monsters, R."