We stopped in Newburyport (waving to Julia as we went through), first at the Mass. Audubon Joppa Flats visitor center, then at the Parker River Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island, then, well, not really Newburyport but Amesbury next door at the Chain Bridge.
The Audubon place at Joppa Flats is a couple of years old by now. It’s at a wide place on the Merrimac River where there are always loads of birds. Today most of the birds were Canada geese and herring gulls, but you never know. They have a weather station there with instruments that can download their readings to a computer terminal on the front desk, so visitors have a current reading of temperature, wind, and wind chill. One of the volunteers at the desk showed me a book they keep of graphs of the temperature, etc., through the month.
On Plum Island we went to the end of the paved road through the sanctuary, where there’s a lovely boardwalk through the dunes. It goes up and down lots of steps, so it’s much more exercise than you would expect for a .6 mile trail. There are views over the ocean and the marsh on the mainland side of the island. The temperature was above freezing today, but the wind was fierce up at the top of the dunes and it was good and cold with the wind chill. We didn’t see any birds to speak of, but in the interests of completeness I’ll say mourning doves, song sparrows, whitethroats, and tree sparrows.
One of the main attractions (from the birding point of view) of Newburyport in the winter is bald eagles wintering along the end of the Merrimac. One fairly reliable place to see them is the Chain Bridge, connecting Newburyport with Amesbury. We didn’t see any adults (with the bright white heads and tails) but there was an immature eagle sitting in a tree in the backyard of a house along the side street we parked on. It just sat there, looking around, with an immense eagle beak that made you happy to be on the far side of a house from it.
We had lunch in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Salisbury and continued to Salisbury Beach State Park, right at the mouth of the Merrimac. There were lots of eiders flying from the ocean up the river, (and I didn’t say we had seen some goldeneye on the river on the way to the chain bridge) but not much else. We stayed in the car rather than walk on the beach and be sandblasted in that wind.
We stopped at the Crate and Barrel outlet in Kittery, since it was still early and we haven’t been there while they’ve been open in a while. We got lots of towels, a good table lamp, and a couple of kitchen gadgets.