We went to Maine on Saturday instead of Friday evening because we had stayed home for Halloween. We stopped first at Salisbury Beach state park to look for birds. We didn’t see much in the grove, but on the way out I did spot some birds we were looking for — a flock of snow buntings gleaning seeds from the weeds growing through cracks in the pavement of one of the big beach parking lots. We’ve seen them there before, so I looked hard and sure enough, there they were.
Snow buntings are another of the birds that you wouldn’t give a second look to if you weren’t interested in birds. They’re only about sparrow sized, fairly drab white, tan, and brown. They’re here in Massachusetts because they went south for their winter vacation. In the summer they live in the arctic. In fact, the Inuit consider them a sign of spring when they show up on the shore of the Arctic Ocean after being in Salisbury all winter. I guess you’re not going to find out what they look like from this picture, but those white dots are them, flying to another crack in the parking lot.
We took the slow road, 1A, up the New Hampshire coast. If you’re not strong on New England geography, take a quick look at a map and you’ll see that there’s about 15 miles of coastline that’s in New Hampshire between Salisbury MA and Kittery ME. Usually we breeze past it on I-95, but there are many state beaches and some very pretty spots to stop and look at the little harbors and the ocean.
