Wildlife.
Seabirds have taken over my shell beach in Jolly Harbour. Lots of seabirds.

Seagulls in Nova Scotia are ubiquitous - big, white, soaring elegant birds, with a haunting call - part and parcel of the mystery of what makes living by the sea just so darn romantic and fraught with "mood." "Shit-hawks," Randy calls them, or sometimes "Air Rats." Part of growing up in a fishing village I assume. Somehow the romance is lost...He doesn't understand "fog" and "beach" as a romantic combination either.

Springtime in Antigua is Laughing Gull central. Small, pretty gulls with black heads, white bodies and gray wings. Noisy. Just now, there's a lot of them, and a lot of small terns and they fish all together in the bay with the pelicans and the frigate birds. And the osprey, a few white-cheeked pintail ducks, green herons, night herons, egrets, and the occasional kingfisher.

But it's not just a bunch of seabirds diving. The giant, prehistoric-looking frigate birds don't actually hit the water or land or dive. They wait until some other bird has a fish, and then they harrass it in the air until the poor bird drops the fish or barfs it back up again. Charming.

But the Laughing Gulls are even more irritating. They target a pelican. Dog it until it dives for a fish. Land on its HEAD and scream while trying to grab whatever is sticking out of its beak. I watched a pair this morning close to the beach. The pelican dove, got a mouthful of fish, a gull lands on his head, and the pelican wouldn't play, just kept his beak buried in the water up to the eyeballs. After a bit, during which time you could just see him thinking "screw you little buddy," he did a quick 360 turn in the water so the gull had to jump around a bit to stay on his back, and when the time was right, he upped his beak, swallowed his catch, dumped the gull and flew off. I wonder that the pelicans don't try to snap the heads off the gulls. Size-wise, it would be the equivalent of having a screaming four-year-old on your shoulders during dinner. That would make me snappy.

I suspect that the smaller shorebirds, of the tern and plovery kinds, are getting ready to nest on the beach. The beach is loaded with the tracks of large lizards in the mornings, and there's a couple of regular dog-walkers, so it's pretty amazing that they keep coming back to this beach and more amazing still that they reproduce. Last year, I found a clutch of three eggs in a small depression just above the water line. Same colour as the rocks and the sand, very pretty, wreathed around with a few strands of dried turtle grass, for comfort? for camouflage? I was so relieved that I hadn't squashed them flat with my bare feet. Bad karma. This is why I saunter around on beaches like some sort of slow sloth. I'm looking out for eggs.

More wildlife. We have a turtle in our neighbourhood. It surfaces about every 5 minutes or so, takes a gulp of air, and gone.

This is why we spend so much of the day parked in Nancy Dawson's big old cockpit under the awning, binoculars at hand. Oh god, we're birdwatching. Twitching! Time to come home!

Less than two weeks until we haul. See below for new pics.