After-Work Safari: The Presumpscot River

For the last few weeks, a bald eagle has been hanging around the Presumpscot River estuary, on the border between Falmouth and Portland. The other evening, on my way home from work, I managed to take a couple of lousy photos of it as it flew upriver:



I swear it's an actual eagle, and not an eagle-shaped smudge on my point-and-shoot camera lens. It was more impressive in person, maybe you had to be there. Hopefully this picture can at least convey that bald eagles are very large birds.

In spite of its surroundings (a freeway on one shore, and Falmouth's sprawl of over-fertilized trophy lawns on the other), this tidal basin attracts a lot of wildlife. The Route One bridge from which I snapped this photo is an excellent spot to see critters, fish for stripers in the summertime, or watch the shipping traffic in the harbor. And it's only fifteen minutes by bike from downtown Portland, which makes it an excellent after-work safari destination.

The Cosmopolitan Winters of Corvus brachyrhynchos

Here in Maine, we get thousands of migrants who arrive here every summer and stake out their own tiny territories in seaside cabins or camps in the woods, turning Maine's quaint villages into far-flung suburbs of New York and Boston. And every fall, as the days get darker, they flock back south to console themselves against the cold and the dark with the social opportunities of cities.

As it happens, the common American crow does the same thing.

Around this time of year, all over the country, huge swarms of crows flock across the skies and mob the trees at city parks every afternoon and evening. Here in Portland, they seem to start around the northern end of the Eastern Promenade, then they flock over to Lincoln and Deering Oaks Parks before settling in for the night near the new Mercy Hospital buildings near the Fore River.



A few months ago I started working at Maine Audubon, and I asked the staff naturalist, Eric Hynes, what these crows were doing. He told me that, essentially, they're just socializing. While crows are fairly territorial in the summer, in the winter, when food is scarce and predators are more of a threat, they prefer the company of other crows. Thousands of other crows.

It's not all for fun: "They get together every afternoon and check each other out," said Eric. "They might say, 'hey, that guy looks fat and happy today, we'd better follow him and find out where he's getting his food.' Or, 'that one looks sick and scraggly, stay away from him.'" When it gets dark, they bed down together by the thousands to provide safety in numbers against predators.

Crows have also figured out that they're safer in cities, where their biggest nemesis, the Great Horned Owl, is less likely to venture. As a result, these wintertime social flocks tend to gravitate towards urban areas.

To see them for yourself, head out to your local city park this afternoon around 4 pm and walk towards the noise of a thousand crows cawing.

Cryptozoology

I've just learned that THE International Cryptozoology Museum will be opening a permanent exhibit space just two blocks away from my apartment in downtown Portland, Maine.

(logo courtesy of Loren Coleman, www.cryptomundo.com)

Local cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has an impressive collection that includes life-sized Bigfoot replicas, lake monster models, and a Coelacanth, among many other curiosities. These objects had been crowding his living room (BoingBoing wrote about a visit to his home two years ago), where he'd offered private tours of the collection by appointment. The new museum space on Congress Street, in the middle of the city, will give his exhibits a more prominent, public display.

Coleman, the museum's founder, also blogs about cryptozoology at the website www.cryptomundo.com. A blog post announcing the new museum was published two weeks ago:

The mission of the museum is to share the many items I have collected during the last half a century, with tourists, teachers, researchers, scholars, colleagues, students, documentary filmmakers, news people and the general public...

[the collection includes] hundreds of cryptids toys and souvenirs from around the world, one-of-a-kind artifacts, a life-size 8 feet tall Bigfoot representation, a full-scale six-foot-long coelacanth model, over a hundred Bigfoot-Yeti-Yowie footcasts, jackalopes, furred trout, along with such Hollywood cryptid-related props as The Mothman Prophecies’ Point Pleasant “police” outfit, the movie P. T. Barnum’s authentic 3.5 feet tall Feejee Mermaid, the TV series Freakylinks‘ 11 ft long “Mystery Civil War Pterodactyl,” and some of the movie Magnolia’s falling frogs.

The museum is also looking for donors: "For any patron who wishes to send in a donation of $1000 (one thousand dollars) or more, I shall be sending to you ~ anywhere in the world ~ a first generation copy of an Orang Pendek footcast," writes Coleman. If you're interested, follow this link.

Coleman at his home, which he had been sharing with the museum's collections. Photo by Amber Waterman of the Lewiston Sun-Journal.

Coleman seems aware that his field is substantially influenced by pop-culture silliness, and to his credit he seems OK with that.

But cryptozoology is really interested in making new zoological discoveries, and there's still plenty we don't know about the world's biological diversity. A recent post on Coleman's blog heralds the official scientific description of a new deepwater species of ghostshark, and the museum's logo (above) features a Coelacanth, a species known only from prehistoric fossils, and believed to be extinct, until fishermen caught a live specimen off the South African coast.

If modern science can discover a living fossil, who's to say it won't someday discover the real Abominable Snowman?