Prince Charles and Dolly of Swan Creek

Tuesday morning finds us back at Swan Creek. We could have chosen a different anchorage and a change of scenery but we know this anchorage. All we have to do is motor up to the spot we anchored before and plop the anchor.

When I motor into a new anchorage I first choose a spot to drop the hook. I don't like to have boats windward of mine because I don't know how well anchored they are. We've had the experience of having a boat drag down on us at 3:00 am and I'm not willing to repeat it. After I choose a spot I check the chart to see the composition of the bottom. Mud and sand are good for holding an anchor. Weeds, rocks, and gravel are not. I check the depth of the spot by motoring over it and watching my depth sounder. If it's deeper that 10 feet I'll move on. When the time comes to leave, I don't want to haul a 40 lb anchor (we call it weighing an anchor) and 50 ft of chain any more than I have to. After finding the best place to drop I motor a circle around the spot where my boat might swing. If I find a shallow area where my boat could go aground if the wind shifts I again look for another place. I avoid all of this by simply anchoring where I have anchored before.

This spot has a couple of resident seagulls who greet every boat that enters the anchorage. They are an odd couple being that she (we are guessing at her gender) is a short but chesty Herring Gull which are common here and he (again guessing gender) is a stately looking Ring Billed Gull which are not common here. Ring Billed Gulls sometimes winter here in the Chesapeake Bay having flown from the icy waters of Alaska and the Labrador area. A Chesapeake winter is like a vacation to Key West to him.

These two gulls, engaged in what seems an unlikely romance, are never far apart. Dolly takes the lead. She swims with her tail feathers high in the air. This is because her chest weighs her down so that she looks like a tug boat that has been overloaded in the bow. She plows the water, squawking a shrill call, demanding food. She believes in entitlement programs for needy gulls. Never mind that this creek teems with fish, crab, turtles, and eel. She doesn't want to work. Hunting for food is for the dumb gulls.

Prince Charles is never far behind her. He swims in a stately fashion with his head high in the air. He never lowers himself to begging but if a child (like Mandy the sucker) were to toss a few chips his way he won't turn his beak up. When Prince Charles looks your way, you might think that you are looking at the head of an eagle. His head is not roundish like Dolly's but structured like a bird of prey. His eyes amaze me. They are human-like. Unlike Dolly's round black dots, Prince Charles's eyes are, well, shaped like people's eyes. They have an iris and a pupil which have color like my own. Prince Charles's eyes are greenish to me, yellowish to Mandy. When he swims close by and looks at me, I feel a little freaky. "Holy crap grandpa!! Did God send you back as a seagull?"

It's curious to me. These two critters are of different species but the same genus. Are they the same gender and if not will they mate? Can they mate? I'd have to ask my friend Tommy Thompson who wrote "Birding in Ohio". He knows about all birds.

But if all gulls can and do mate, why aren't they all homogenized by now into one mutt-like gull? Over the thousands of years of their existence they must have resisted inter-breeding among species otherwise there would be no distinct species anymore, just one genus of mutt-gulls.

This makes Dolly and Prince Charles even more curious to me. We have anchored here four of the last five nights and we see them together everyday. Maybe I should quit analyzing them and just let them be what they are; mates, play-mates, gay-mates. Not for me to say.