Book I: Edge of the Sea. Chapter 1: Flood Tide.
So many characters! But unlike Dickens’ Bleak House, I won’t find a list of them in Wikipedia.
Rynchops, the black skimmer, is the only named living creature, though Rat makes an appearance. Rynchops is the first part of the black skimmer’s scientific name, Rynchops niger.
Rat eats the eggs that the diamondback terrapins so carefully buried in beach sand. Carson wrote this in the late 1930s, and some of my instincts are of my time as I read her careful text. No, don’t eat the turtle eggs! Where are the citizen protectors?
I had no idea about the conflicts between pound net and gill net fishermen, nor about those between eels and gill net fishermen.
The book tells of migration patterns, but Rynchops’s flight hasn’t captivated me yet. Yet I certainly detect “the strong smell of fish and of water weeds in the air” that he passes through.