Blue-themed

The beach plums are ripe out at Jamaica Bay. My mother used to make beach plum jam, but I’m afraid I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the stuff. I was crazy for the strawberry jam she made, though. Which of course ruined me for life, since now I know what real jam tastes like, and most store-bought jam isn’t.

August is a busy time at Jamaica Bay. The water on the East Pond is let out, opening up mud flats for shorebirds heading south for the winter. Yes, in August, the shorebirds are already heading south after their lightning-quick reproductive activity in the north. This past weekend, in fact, was the Jamaica Bay Shorebird Festival, which meant there were almost as many birders out there as shorebirds. Almost: the number of swans, semipalmated sandpipers, least sandpipers, semipalmated plovers, short-billed dowitchers, lesser yellowlegs, black-bellied plovers, double-crested cormorants, glossy ibises, snowy egrets, great egrets, and co. was high. You could really tell that when the peregrine falcon zipped over the pond, scattering flocks of little birds. The exotica — for instance, Wilson’s phalaropes, marbled godwit, and white pelican — were not numerous, but they were what everybody was searching for.
There was, as always, much else to see. This bluet damselfly was one of many enjoying the drier edge of the mud flats. Twenty-seven species of bluets are found in the northeast, and several must have their terminal appendages examined under magnification to be told apart, so “bluet” is, I’m afraid, the best you’re going to get out of me.

At one point, we heard the oddest noise. It sound like an electrical wire buzzing, and this in a place where the only sign of electricity is the A train hurrying by unseen and JFK jets overhead. It turned out to be a cicada that had somehow gotten onto its back in the water. My dearheart suggested I rescue it, but the deep, deep boot prints in the murk along the edge of the pond told me that my hiking boots would have been overtopped. If you’re going to JBWR this time of year, you really need knee-high waterproof boots.
Shell and claw of a blue crab.