The many flat roofs of downtown New Bedford host a nesting colony of Herring Gulls. By this time in the summer, the young birds have been out of the nest for some time, and they’re trying to figure out how to make a living. Some of them still cry at the adult Herring Gulls, trying to coax an adult into regurgitating up some nice fish. Herring Gulls are not particularly social, and the adults want nothing to do with the young gulls once they’re out of the nest. The young gulls turn to foraging for garbage. I was driving up Acushnet Avenue the other day. A young gull stood in the middle of the intersection with William Street, trying to tear open what looked like one of those brightly colored bags fast food comes in. I tooted my horn and slowed down, expecting the bird to fly, or at least hop, out of the way. It didn’t, and I narrowly avoiding running it down. The young gulls haven’t yet learned to avoid cars and trucks. On my walk today, I saw two corpses of young Herring Gulls, one in the middle of the swing-span bridge with one broken wing pointing up, and another one completely flattened in the middle of Route 6. From what I’ve seen along the sides of the roads, this year’s crop of Herring Gulls will suffer its highest mortality rate over the next few months; the ones that survive will have learned to hop out of the way of cars, no matter how enticing the smell that comes from the brightly colored paper bag.
Category Archives: New Bedford, Mass.
Classic car night in New Bedford
On summer Thursday nights, the classic cars roll into downtown New Bedford. The city blocks off parts of Acushnet Ave. for some of the cars, and there are more parked in the Customs House parking lot. Most of the cars are from the 1950’s and 1960’s Of course there are DJs playing rock and roll songs from the 1950’s and early 1960’s.
“One o’clock two o’clock…” “…my loooove will…”
From our apartment window, I can watch as people walk back and forth from where they parked their cars, to where they can see the classic cars. Lots of families with children. Lots of people a decade or two older than I am, which means they are going to look at cars from their childhood. For our apartment window, I can hear two different DJs about equally well, which leads to some odd combinations of lyrics…
“…hey Mickey…” “…under the Boardwalk…”
If you want, you can walk around, look at the cars and talk with their owners, and buy fried dough and hot dogs and lemonade, and wander past the booths where you can buy all kinds of tchotchkes. Now it’s starting to get dark, and you can hear the DJs winding it down over there. Maybe I should have gone over and checked out the scene, but I decided to eat dinner at home instead of having hot dogs and fired dough.
“bah-bah-bah-bah-bahbahbahm….” “…whoa-oa-oa oooh…”
There’s always next Thursday.
Swan
Carol and I stopped in at “Swan,” a new store on Union Street just across from First Unitarian. A woman said hello to us as we walked in.
“Are you the owner?” said Carol to the woman.
“No,” she said, laughing, “but we’ve known each other for years Our sons grew up together. Starting with T-ball, and now they’re in high school. I’m Lisa.”
We introduced ourselves. Lisa told me she appreciates the Wayside Pulpit sign in front of the church, with its changing sayings and proverbs.
“It makes my week,” she said. “I look forward to seeing the new one.”
“I’ll tell Arthur, the sexton, that you like it,” I said, “tell him to pick out good ones for you.”
Lisa said she has talked to the owner about opening the store on Sunday. That led us into a discussion on why downtown New Bedford is so empty on Sundays. Carol and I see people wandering around the downtown on Sunday, having finished with the museums and the national park, looking for something to do. If all the store owners decided to open up, eventually the downtown would probably generate enough additional pedestrian traffic to make it worthwhile to open up. But only a few stores stay open, and when they don’t make a success of it, everyone says that downtown New Bedford is dead on Sunday. And so Carol and I see those people wandering around the downtown, looking for something to do.
Which took us into a discussion of downtown rents.
“One downtown landlord is charging $14 to $17 a square foot,” said Carol.
Lisa shook her head disgustedly.
“I know,” said Carol. “You can charge those kind of rents in Cambridge, maybe, but not here.”
“My grandmother owned a triple-decker in Boston,” said Lisa. “Her philosophy was you don’t need to get top dollar for rent. It’s better that you find good tenants that you can trust. She’d say, I’d rather have a good tenant who takes care of the place, someone that I can depend on, than get a high rent.”
“Some New Bedford landlords should pay attention to that,” said Carol darkly.
We spent some time looking around Swan. They have some great things — funky furniture, collectibles, prints, odds and ends. Carol almost bought a bowl, and I was eyeing a framed print, but in the end we didn’t buy anything. I suspect we’ll go back soon though….
Update: As of August, 2006, Swan is gone…. closed for good.
Good news, bad news
Bad news
The rain let up at about 5:30, so we walked out to the end of the State Pier. We were chatting away, looking out at the harbor, when Carol gasped and said, “Look!” The old New Bedford lightship, a kind of symbol of the harbor, has been listing to port for some time, but this afternoon it was over on its side….
The cherry red hull of the Lightship New Bedford shone like a beacon on the waterfront yesterday after the 133-foot vessel flipped on its side because of a leak.
Good news
The Green Bean, home of the best coffee in the downtown neighborhood, has settled in to their new digs on the corner of Purchase and Union streets. Carol and I went up at 4:30 this afternoon, as we both took a break from our writing projects. We got our coffee from one of the friendly owners, and sat down to drink it. It’s a great place to sit and watch the people and the cars pass by on a drizzly Friday afternoon — much nicer than their old location.
M-F 6:30 am – 5 pm, Sat. 8 am – 2 pm
More good news
Tomorrow, Saturday, June 3, at 7:00 p.m., there will be a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” in honor of the poem’s 50th anniversary. A number of New Bedford noteables, including former poet laureate of the city Everett Hoagland, will be reading.
See ya there — Gallery X, 169 William St. (the old Universalist church).
New in the neighborhood
“New B International Market” opened up this week two blocks from our apartment, on Purchase Street near Union (in the Bristol Building). Carol and I stopped in yesterday as we were walking home.
A young woman was talking with the man at the cash register, as he rang up her groceries. They seemed to know each other pretty well. She was telling him about a trip she had just taken.
We walked around the store to see what they carried. They had just opened, so there were still empty shelves. Lots of Latin American specialities. Some nice-looking fresh fish at reasonable prices. A modest selection of produce. Milk and eggs. Some frozen food. I got a big jar of green olives for $1.89, a head of garlic for $.49, a box of tea bags. Carol checked out the cans of sliced jalapeno peppers and refried beans, but searched in vain for sangria-flavored soft drinks (her favorite).
The young woman was still talking to the man at the register.She seemed to know him well enough to call him by his first name, Jose. We didn’t mind waiting; it was a friendly kind of store.
The man rang up our purchases. Carol asked him when the store would be open. “Seven to seven, Monday through Saturday,” he said, and then apologetically, “one to six on Sundays. Do you live in the neighborhood?”
We said we did, and promised we’d be back, that we’d been waiting months for this little grocery store to open up.
“That store has a very particular selection,” said Carol as we walked away. “I guess it’s Cape Verdean, I don’t know.” It did look like the little flag behind the cash register was Cape Verdean.
“Yes,” I said, “but they have milk and eggs and produce and all the little things you need in the middle of the week but don’t want to drive all the way to the supermarket to get. And their prices are quite reasonable for a convenience market.”
She was just peeved because they didn’t have sangria-flavored soft drinks. We love being able to walk to buy groceries.
Eat your vegetables
I got fresh locally grown rhubarb on Friday. Cooked up a big pot of it. Put some local honey in it, but not too much because I kind of like the bitter taste. Had stewed rhubarb on toast for breakfast today. Had a rhubarb sandwich for lunch. Had chilled rhubarb for a midafternoon snack today when the temperature got up to eighty-five. And I feel virtuous about eating what seems like a dessert three times today. Because rhubarb is really a vegetable. I’m just eating my vegetables.
Coyotes
Rob sent email reporting a coyote sighting near Rural Cemetery here in New Bedford, not far from the Dartmouth town line. He writes that he followed it for a short distance until it disappeared into the housing projects nearby.
So the coyotes have definitely moved into the area. New Bedfordites, make sure your cats stay indoors at night.
Nests
Sublimity consists, in part, of direct confrontation with unknowable mysteries of life and death. There are places in downtown New Bedford where you can stand at a window or in the open and look down on surrounding rooftops. The flat roof surfaces are always littered with shell fragments left by gulls, mostly Herring Gulls, dropping shellfish in order to break them open so they can eat the soft bits inside. The peaked roofs often show a coating of whitewash, gull guano, spreading down the peaks from where the gulls like to perch, facing into the sun. Midafternoon I was standing in a place where I could see down on half a dozen different rooftops. The sun broke through the clouds, and there was blue sky above, although the fog and low clouds wouldn’t let me see the mouth of the harbor, or even the steeples of Fairhaven across the harbor. With my binoculars I looked down on one Herring Gull, who was sitting on a pile of brown dead leaves and stalks, a pile which also included bits of green including a couple of dandelion leaves and bits of white trash or litter. It all looked too carefully piled up to be anything but a nest.
The Herring Gull casually stood up in the sun, stretched its wings out a little, and wandered off a few steps to where it was hidden from my view. The pile of leaves and litter had been hollowed out in the middle, and down inside I could see two olive-green eggs spotted with brown.
Since we moved here last August, I have been pretty sure that there’s a Herring Gull nesting colony on the rooftops of downtown New Bedford. With all the Herring Gulls in the neighborhood all year long this should not be surprising. A hundred years ago it would have been surprising; in Birds of Massachusetts, Richard Veit and Wayne Petersen write:
Before 1900, Herring Gulls were not known to breed south of eastern Maine. In the summer of 1912, the first nesting in Massachusetts was recorded by Allan Keniston on the south side of Edgartown Great Pond, Martha’s Vineyard, and, between 1919 and 1920, 20 pairs were found breeding on an ephemeral sandbar called Skiffs Island off the southern end of Chappaquidick Island. At the time, the prospects seemed so remote that Herring Gulls could ever establish themselves in Massachusetts in the face of the expanding human population that Forbush was prompted to state, “It is improbable that the Herring Gull can maintain itself anywhere on the coast of southern New England.” Defying Forbush’s prediction, the Herring gull underwent one of the most remarkable population expansions of any New England bird. The growth of the population between 1930 and 1970 was almost exponential until about 1965, when it leveled off. The slackening in the rate of increase may have been due to the refinement of garbage disposal, sewage treatment, and fish-processing practices because space for nesting sites does not seem to be a limiting factor. [p. 219; references removed for readability]
The fish processing plant off Route 6 on Fish Island regularly attracts Herring Gulls and other gulls, when the plant pumps blood and byproducts into the harbor; I’m sure they also frequent the other fish processing plants nearby. Gulls also sometimes flock after incoming fishing vessels, and they obviously eat shellfish that they find. Food sources may well be the limiting factor for the Herring Gull population in our neighborhood, since there are plenty of suitable rooftops on which to nest. As I stood watching this afternoon, I found only one other definite nest, and one possible nest, although I saw plenty of gulls in adult plumage who did not appear to be nesting. I stood looking down at those olive-green eggs for five or so minutes, and never saw the adult return to the nest.
Storm
Another period of heavy rain last night awakened me. The storm has been with us for three days now: low clouds so dark we’ve had to turn on the lights in the middle of the day; periods of heavy, even torrential rain followed by longer periods of no rain at all. Yesterday we saw the sun for a few minutes in the afternoon, but then the low clouds closed in again.
The weather service reports only five and a half inches total for this storm in New Bedford. It feels like we got more than that. It feels like it’s been raining for too long without a real break. But then I hear the reports of flooded streets and houses in Middlesex and Essex counties, where they’ve received twice as much rain as we have; at least it’s not that bad here. But it’s not the rain that’s wearing on me so much as the gloom.