A late-June early morning at Conestoga Lake. Jessa was here for mulberries...
...as was this oriole.
I was here for bluegills.
Fox squirrels, eastern kingbirds, prairie milkweed, and elderflower were just bonuses...
...but eventually we had to run away and go home; neither of us tolerates heat well. Which made the mulberry sorbet all the more refreshing later...
"Pics or it didn't happen." Yeah, yeah. But I know we saw a minke whale. A female, according to the captain, and I make a point of listening to the experts. "Despite its relatively large size, the minke whale is very fast," notes one source, "and their surfacing can be sporadic and hard to follow." We can vouch for that last bit. The uncertainty of knowing where she might rise next, combined with our camera's slow trigger speed, may have prevented us from documenting our encounter with Balaenoptera acutorostrata, but the mental snapshots will not soon fade.
We went out with Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch, operating out of Provincetown. From P-town, their boats head out to Long Point, around to Race Point, and then line out to the Stellwagen Bank, an underwater plateau rising north of Cape Cod to within about a hundred feet of the surface. The surrounding waters are considerably deeper, and when ocean currents encounter the steep sides of the Bank, minerals and organic nutrients well up from the bottom, feeding an abundance and diversity of life that would not otherwise concentrate to the same extent.
Slightly more cooperative than the minkes were grey seals. Once nearly extirpated from Massachusetts waters, the seals have made a dramatic comeback over the last several decades. The Cape Cod population is estimated at thirty to fifty thousand.
We intend to return to Cape Cod, and will certainly go on another whale-watching outing when we do—perhaps, if we can afford it, a shark-watching expedition as well. For now, though, that's all for this trip.
Boats
Dunes
Beaches
One thing that struck Jessa and me about Cape Cod is how different it is from the coastal regions where we grew up. We have noted many similarities between southern Louisiana and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, and one of the most fundamental is that they are both on the coastal plain. Not so Cape Cod: it is essentially a terminal moraine, deposited by a glacier only sixteen to twenty thousand years ago, and not nearly so flat as our more familiar coasts.
The last ice age left behind plenty of granite, and lichens grow seemingly everywhere; even the dunes and marshes are littered with reindeer lichen. A sampling...
