Movies and Oysters and "Butter Butts"

It was an eventful weekend in Atlantic Beach , starting with our eight-mile run on Saturday morning.  The temperature was 39 degrees, but the wind had died down to five miles per hour so it was pleasant running.  I checked the weather in Highlands and discovered it was snowing there, and Martha saw on Facebook that there were many cars that had slid off the slick roads.  We would not have been running eight miles in such conditions.

The Beaufort Picture Show was continuing its excellent series of films this weekend, all of them critically acclaimed and a far cry from the movies showing in the Atlantic Beach and Emerald Isle cinemas this year, although we have enjoyed those venues in the past.  This afternoon we returned to Beaufort for a showing of Paterson, which was absolutely wonderful, starring Adam Driver as a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, who also wrote poetry.  "How do you make a whole movie about the mundane that doesn’t stay mired in the humdrum? You enlist a filmmaker and an actor who are both so attuned to the poetry of the everyday that they seem like a match made in cinema heaven," the movie review in Rolling Stone Magazine said.

Sunday morning, we attended the Methodist Church once again and were treated with a sermon by Pastor Powell, one of his finest in the series:  The Way, the Truth, the Life.  What a wonderful church this has turned out to be for us.  I don't always fit comfortable in a church pew, I like to say, because of my long legs, but this church fits me well.  We learned that all of the churches on Main Street in Highlands had cancelled services due to the snow.

After Church, we returned to Beaufort for an event we discovered last year.  On the Sunday before Valentine's Day, the Beaufort Historical Association welcomes the public to enjoy food and fellowship at the Beaufort Historic Site, where several historic buildings have been restored.  It was a sunny day, just like the Sunday afternoon last year when we had attended this same event.

Local restaurants had donated a wide variety of food.  And on long tables beside the historic Apothecary building, two men were dumping oysters onto a table, some of them raw and some of them steamed.  "These are the best ones!" one man told me as he expertly slid his oyster knife into a raw oyster and popped it open.  I held out for the steamed ones; all of them were local North River oysters, that body of water that lies between Beaufort and Otway.

 

This morning I awoke at first light, well before dawn, because we planned to attend another Bird Hike at Fort Macon, something we have done now for three years or more.  It seemed as if the whole world was in a perfect state of equilibrium when I went onto the dune-top deck for my morning Tai Chi.  The sun was rising in the east, and the full moon was setting in the west, both of them visible from my little platform on top of the dunes.  And the wind was exactly zero miles per hour, balanced for a few brief hours between a south wind and a north wind coming later in the week.  The warmer temperatures seemed to be encouraging birds, which I suppose had been huddled in shelter during the high winds last week; I could hear them chirping and twittering all around me.

The bird hikes are led by Head Ranger Randy Newman, who is both enthusiastic and very knowledgeable.  He carries a battered and well-thumbed copy of Peterson's Field Guide to Birds in a little pouch by his side, and it is uncanny how quickly he can pull it out and find the right page.  "See, this is the red-breasted merganser.  This time of year it looks like this.  It doesn't have its colorful plumage until mating season."  Randy also has a collection of interesting facts that he shares in an off-handed way.  "Now, mockingbirds all call three times, and brown thrashers twice; we call them the second cousins.  And catbirds one time - first cousins."

I always attempt to take photos of the birds we see on these hikes and blow them up afterward, but usually without success.  We saw red-winged blackbirds and yellow-rumped warblers (which one couple in the group said they call "butter butts" in Indiana), but they were too small to be seen except through our binoculars.  An exception was this pair of white ibises in the leafless trees standing over the swamp west of the Fort.

This is a popular places for ibises to roost.  Two years ago, we came along this path and saw dozens of them roosting in the trees, which was a sight to behold.  It was my 69th birthday, I remember, and Martha reckoned there must have been 69 of them.

We also saw this shy night heron, his back turned to us, down on a little island on the other side of the swamp - well-camouflaged in this photo, but perfectly clear in our binoculars with its delicate green legs.

Then we crossed over to Beaufort Inlet and walked along the ocean, spotting mergansers and bonaparte gulls and gannets, and a king bird high in a red cedar tree, none of them visible when I checked my photos later.

The gannets have black tips on their wings, and I had always thought they were sea gulls.  "They come down here this time of year but nest in Newfoundland," Randy told us confidently.  All told, we spotted (well, Randy spotted) 26 species of birds on our hour-long hike.

Martha overheard a woman from Jacksonville ask Randy how long he had been there, and if he had done the loggerhead turtle program in the past.  He said he had been there for 35 years and always did the turtle programs.  "Then you must have taught the turtle program to a class of children I brought here 20 years ago!" she exclaimed.  "It was so interesting!"  That must have made Randy feel good, to be remembered for so long.

While we were walking along the channel, I spotted this starfish at the high tide line; everyone else was gazing through binoculars at the sky and ocean, and I nearly stepped on this little fellow.

I scooped it up on a shell and hurried to where the others were gathered, and the woman from Jacksonville was especially thrilled to see one.  "Would you like to have it?" I asked.  And she cradled it in her hand on the shell for the rest of the hike.

On the way back to the Fort, we walked past the newest exhibit, a 150 mm cannon, circa 1918, used here in World War II for coastal defense.  Most people think of the Fort as a part of Civil War history - it was bombarded by Union forces in 1862 - but it also served a defensive purpose in the early 1940s.

It was mid-morning by the time we returned, so we quickly dressed out and went for a short run - three miles for me, four for Martha - on a sunny, warm, windless day.