Shrimp, Grackles, and Dogs, Oh My

Here in Brunswick, we often awake in the wee hours of the night to hear a disturbing sound. Some nights, I swear that I hear a crackling fire burning in the main cabin. Or perhaps I am hearing Mandy, up in the middle of the night, wrapping Christmas gifts with stiff paper. Mandy says she awakes to hear what she thinks might be me trimming my fingernails. The crackling, snapping, crinkling sounds are shrimp. Locals tell me that they gather along the hull of the boat and snap their tails against the marine growth that collects on the surfaces below the waterline to dislodge it for a quick grassy snack. It's not a loud sound but unfamiliar enough to awaken us even though we are undisturbed by the sounds of trains that run throughout the night on the tracks that adjoin the marina.

Another unfamiliar sound was the invasion of a plague of grackles. That's what a flock of grackles are properly called; a plague. I can see why. The air was still as I sanded the varnish on Foxglove in preparation for another coat when they suddenly arrived screaming and squawking--thousands of them--just like in the Hitchcock movie, "The Birds". In less than a minute they covered every elevated perch in the marina. Every boat's masthead, shroud, forestay, backstay, and spreader, was covered with a thick coating of black, iridescent, grackles. They sat talking and squawking their peculiar song. "UH-oh", a grackle at the head of a nearby mast warned me, over and over. "OH YES" I squawked back at him, over and over.

Grackles have also have a peculiar custom to match their peculiar song. They 'ant' themselves; that is, they capture and cover their feathers with insect juices to serve a variety of functions such as an insecticide and a bactericide. This area of Georgia has no shortage of insects and every evening at dusk, millions of bugs of all types stream from the salt marshes in search of people like Mandy. Mandy is a bug favorite, tasty in every way. As long as she is nearby, I never get stung, bitten, or chased. They all want Mandy's exquisite interstitial fluids--the best and tastiest known to all of bugdom. The grackles were there for a few days to save her from some of the bugs by consuming a large portion of the nightly swarm.

We also have the usual boat yard dogs to greet us wherever we go and, as boat yard dogs often do, greet us in unusual places. Mandy had just entered the marina shower one morning and prepared to step into the shower when Jackson, an Apple Headed Chihuahua, scampered under the doorway and became infatuated with Mandy's toes; so infatuated that Jackson wouldn't stop licking them. Jackson is the pet of one of the marina dockhands and has free run of the place as boat yard dogs always do. I have story about a boatyard dog named Rusty. I'll tell it to you sometime.