"Welcome To The Sand Lance Buffet!" Common Terns, Double-crested Cormorants, Harbor Seal

Common Tern with a mouthful of Sand Lances

Common Terns, adults and juveniles feasting on Sand Lances. "Mom! Got any tartar sauce for these?" 

Double-crested Cormorants patrolling for Sand Lances  

Everybody wanted in on that action! This Harbor Seal showed up while I was photographing the birds.

    The same day that I photographed the gulls hawking the ants, there was another kind of feeding frenzy going on in Totman Cove: Welcome to the Sand Lance 'all-you-can-eat' Buffet! Sand Lances are a slim, elongated, schooling fish. Although they are eel-like in their shape and movements, they aren't a true eel. There are eighteen varieties of them found across the globe. They range from eight to eighteen inches long. The ones in these photographs were the short ones. Nonetheless, it would gross me out to be swimming with them. I have a phobia about the bottoms of bodies of water when I can't see what's down there. Just the idea that these creatures could be around my legs creeps me out severely. Give me a clear, swimming pool or at least an actual snake or spider that I can see.
     Sand Lances are an important food for forty-five species of predacious fishes, some invertebrates, twelve species of marine mammals and forty species of birds. I watched seals, ospreys, cormorants, gulls, and terns feeding on them. Even an eagle showed up and lurked in the trees. It didn't try for any of the slithery little fishes, but did seem very interested in all the action. I suppose for an eagle it would be like eating a fistful of French fries, hardly worth the bother. The ospreys that were diving for them were juveniles. The fish, barely visible in the big birds' talons, were probably crushed to mush by the time they got to a perch to consume them. The eagle gave chase to an osprey; gulls and terns chased the eagle and the osprey; terns and gulls dove on the cormorants when they surfaced with the Sand Lances and God only knows what was going on below the surface. See? That's why I don't like swimming in there! Horrible horrors! A person could get mauled in the melee.
     Sand Lances aren't eaten here, but I can imagine them lightly breaded, fried and eaten whole - bones and all like Smelts. Yummy! Now you're talkin'! A generous squeeze of lemon and some home-made tartar sauce, a side of Cajun curly fries and cole slaw............get the nets! I'm ready for 'em. See how easy I am? If I can relate a thing to anything with mayonnaise, I'm okay.

If you would like more scientific information about Sand Lances, click here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_lance

If you want recipes, see me on The Food Channel!

Seal Of Approval

Harbor seals are common in Maine. I saw this one on our last boating day. It was in the New Meadows River, which isn't a river at all. The New Meadows is a tidal tributary. I have no idea why it was named as a river. There is seaweed all the way to the northern most reaches, seals, horseshoe crabs and jelly fish, to name but a few of the ocean dwellers. So, no one would ever have confused it with a river. For about eighteen years I lived on the northern end, so I would know. I did see a beaver in the water there  one spring. I would not have thought I'd ever see a beaver in salt water, but I did. It was playing with a cat on the bank. The beaver had a bunch of sticks in the water from which it had stripped the bark. The bare wood was pale in the dark water and the beaver was flipping it  around as it worked off the bark. The cat seemed to think it had tied into the biggest rodent it had ever seen. Several times, it crept to the water's edge and batted at the beaver, then jumped back. The game ended when the beaver circled around in the water so that its tail was toward the cat, which was hunkered down in the mud as if about to pounce. The beaver slapped its tail on the water and doused the cat which took off, humiliated, no doubt. I've never seen a cat try to play with a seal. I'm waiting. I haven't kept count, but it seems to me I've seen more seals this year than ever before. I saw a Gray seal in our cove two days ago, which is highly unusual. They come from up north and aren't usually around here, certainly not in our warm cove. Harbor seals are still seen easily at the mouth of the Kennebec at Popham and generally, they are all but gone at this time of year. This seal has wiskers any cat would admire.