New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Counting ducks this way and that.

Tuesday 01/10/2006

This is the time of year I am into counting ducks by land and by air! This morning it was by air in the Fish and Game Department's fifty-first year of counting by air. It is a morning I look forward to each year in many ways, but always with some reservation. Lets face it, we are in a small aircraft skimming the cold waters of Great Bay, then way, way out to the Isles of Shoals. If something should go wrong. It will be dead wrong. But 51 years is a pretty good record of doing things right.

Biologist Julie Robinson and myself met at the Concord airport this morning under a clear, cold and calm sky. It looked like great conditions for this flight. Except that past experience has shown that an overcast day allows us to see ducks on the water better. The ground from Concord to Great Bay was snow covered and all the lakes and ponds appeared to be frozen. I always tick off familiar sights as we fly eastward. Fort Mountain in Epsom slides under the aircraft as well as Pleasant lake in Deerfield, then we dodged Pawtuckaway Mountain to its north. This volcanic protrusion clearly shows the rim of the volcano and the center spire. Oh to have been there a million years ago when it was spewing boiling earth into the sky. This morning it was placid beneath it's mantel of snow. Still, a fiery eruption captures my imagination as we sweep by it.

Great Bay was wide open again this year. The pre-Christmas freeze of parts of the Bay and the rivers has given way to three weeks of a thaw. Water, water every where as we settle down to spiraling the perimeter of Great Bay in a counter clockwise sweep of it's shore line. Julie calling out numbers of geese " Four, eight, twenty, four" And on and on. Geese were spread over the whole Bay this morning.

Pilot Dick Myers gained altitude to 3,000 feet as we cast off from shore out over the steel gray sea towards the Isles of Shoals. I'm always glad to get there and just a little more glad when we arrive back over the coast a half hour later. For some reason this morning it was during the maneuvers around the Isles that really soured my stomach and head. Most years I fare pretty well, but this morning some really tight turns over the Bay, of many that were needed, had me wishing I were some where else for a while. Not a seal on the Islands this year. Plenty of eiders though dotted the islands edges bouncing in the seas. Thankfully the return trip settled my stomach for a bit.

The coastal trip from Odiourne Point down to Seabrook had only a few ducks, but surprisingly for the first time I can remember, Julie rattled off some more goose numbers. Way there were geese hanging out along the beach this morning is beyond me. The Hampton Marshes were practically bare of ducks again this year. But with the open waters along most of the coastal rivers I think they were not driven to the coast yet. We swung lower than usual this year and took a look at the mouth of the Merrimack River where we were told this week that numbers of eiders sometimes congregate. Not this morning.

Our return trip to Concord took us up towards Bear Brook State Park and over a nearby proposed several hundred housing development. I took a few pictures of the vast open forested land that will no doubt be covered with houses in years to come. Houses that will impact the wildlife in this 10,000 acre state park.The landing in Concord felt real good to me this morning. I was beginning to feel like a Martian again... just a little green.

I concluded the day by some ground surveys of inland waterfowl. In just two stops in Allenstown and Bedford I counted another 1,200 ducks. They never looked better!