Chapter Two: Spring Flight
Carson’s chapters are like detailed paintings. How can I enter them? I am not sure where to focus, and sometimes I lose track of the setting. Slow reading allows me to find the information I need to comprehend the whole.
Setting: 24 hours on the beach on Ship’s Shoal, a barrier island off the North Carolina coast.
Characters:
- The shad at night “passing through the inlet and into the river estuary” (p.18)
- Sanderlings, including Blackfoot, the four-year-old leader, and Silverbar, a yearling
- Sand bugs or Hippa crabs, sanderling favorites
- Other shore birds: terns, sandpipers, plovers, skimmers, herring gulls, dowitchers, laughing gulls. (Carson mentions earlier migrations by snow geese, mergansers, canvasbacks, the brant, teal, and whistling swans.)
- a ghost crab hunting beach fleas, fiddler crabs
- a white heron, curlews
- humans using a haul seine
- a channel bass
- Wilson’s petrels or Mother Carey’s chickens, a jaeger
Admirable sentence: “With their little spoon claws the crabs felt busily among the sand grains, sorting out the microscopic cells of algae.” (p. 24)
I did not know that sanderlings migrate from Tierra del Fuego all the way to the Arctic Circle and back each year.
Each chapter illustrates the meaning of ecology by describing the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Carson narrates these creatures’ quest for food and their instinct for survival.
I am reading the Library of America edition of Under the Sea-Wind, book one of The Sea Trilogy by Rachel Carson.
