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| Piping Plover |
Friday. Fog still, but I walk about a mile north onward on the beach.
The sea is still running considerably. It is surprising how rapidly the water soaks into the sand, and is even dried up between each undulation.
The sand has many holes in it, about an eighth of an inch over, which seem to have been made by the beach-flea. These have a firm and as if artificial rim or curb, and it is remarkable that the waves flow two or three feet over them with force without obliterating them. They help soak up the water.
As I walk along close to the edge of the water, the sea oscillating like a pendulum before me and each billow flowing with a flat white foaming edge and a rounded outline up the sand, it reminds me of the white toes of blue-stockinged feet thrust forward from under the garments in an endless dance.
It is a contra-dance to the shore. Some waves flow unexpectedly high and fill my shoes with water before I am aware of it. It is very exciting for a while to walk where half the floor before you is thus incessantly fluctuating.
There is frequently, if not for the most part, a bar just off the shore on which the waves first break and spend more or less of their violence, and I see that the way to land in a boat at such a time would be to row along outside this bar and its breakers, till you came to an opening in it, then enter and row up or down within the bar to a comparatively safe place to land.
I turn up the first hollow. A piping plover peeps around me there, and feigns lameness, — though I at first think that she is dusting herself on the sand, — to attract me away from her nest evidently.
Return inland. The poverty-grass is fully out, in bright-yellow mounds or hillocks, more like painted clods than flowers, or, on the bare sandy hills and plains of the Cape, they look like tufts of yellow lichens on a roof. They indicate such soil as the cladonia lichen with us. If the soil were better they would not be found there.
These hillocks are about as big as a large ant-hill — some have spread to eight or ten feet in diameter, but are flat and broken more or less — and commonly dead in the middle or perhaps one side, but I see many perfect dense hemispheres of yellow flowers. As the sand gathers around them, they rise above it, and they seem to bloom and flourish better when thus nearly buried in sand. A hemisphere eighteen inches in diameter would rest flat on the surface for six inches in width on the outside and be rather loosely rooted in the middle, for you could easily lift it all up.
The Hudsonia ericoides is the most common, and the tomentosa appears to be less in hillocks, i. e. more broken and dead.
The poverty-grass emits a common sweetish scent as you walk over the fields. It blossoms on the edges first. You meet with it in Plymouth as you approach the peculiar soil of the Cape.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 19, 1857
A piping plover peeps around me there, and feigns lameness . . . See July 11, 1857 ("The piping plover, as it runs half invisible on the sand before you, utters a shrill peep on an elevated key (different birds on different keys) . . ."); July 11, 1855 ("See young piping plover running in a troop on the beach . . .."); July 7, 1855 ("The piping plover running and standing on the beach.")
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