The Globe reports:
The gulf oil spill may scuttle the long term effort to protect the migrating piping plover:
Plovers are beginning to fly south as part of an annual migration to gulf shores now fouled with oil. Two weeks ago, bird specialists found the season’s first two piping plovers on the remote Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana, where oil has already washed up. More birds will arrive in the next month and stay on gulf beaches through the winter.
“We are very worried,‘’ said Scott Hecker, a coastal water bird specialist and executive director of the Massachusetts-based Goldenrod Foundation, which works to protect barrier beaches. "These remote beaches along the gulf are where the birds go, and they are the places that get the oil first and the most.’’
The bird is the latest in a series of New England species — bluefin tuna and sea turtles are others — whose populations may suffer because they spend part of their life in the gulf.
More here on the birds’ status.
Piping plovers have been listed as a "threatened’’ species since 1986 because they are "likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future.’’ But they have vulnerable neighbors, the least terns — grey, black, and white birds that also nest there and have been listed as a species of special concern by the state Department of Fisheries and Wildlife.
And then, there is the return the great white shark off the coast of New England . Let’s hope life does not imitate art this weekend. “Jaws” showed up at “Amity Island” — known here as Martha’s Vineyard — on July 4.
That’s right. Return with MetroDesk to 1975 when “Jaws,” filmed on Martha’s Vineyard, made swimming feel like a scary proposition. With that in mind, here are some of the relevant lines from this very-quotable movie, courtesy of the Internet Movie Database:
Mayor Vaughn (speaking to Chief Martin Brody): Martin, it’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.
Brody (to Mayor Vaughn, after the shark attack on July Fourth): Larry, the summer is over. You’re the mayor of “shark city.” These people think you want the beaches open.