Salt Marsh Nature Center--Redux

Salt Marsh Nature Center might become my new favorite place. I rode over there again this morning via subway and bus.  35 species, including 8 Marsh Wren, 2 or 3 of which I was actually able to view pretty well. Plus both yellowlegs, both semi-palms, a Black Skimmer, and a Common Tern.

Coming back on the bus I was thinking well maybe buses aren’t so bad, this is pretty easy, doh-de-doh, look at this traffic on Avenue U though, a lot different than on Sunday, FedEx truck in the bus stop, double-parked delivery truck (total aside: Why does “Purveyor of Fine Meats” sound incredibly sleazy?), it’s like the driver is doing a slalom event weaving around all these vehicles, be pretty funny if he had an accident and just as I’m finishing that thought BANG!—we’re rear ended. A jolt travels back to front on the bus. No one appears hurt. Not hit hard enough to get whiplash—I hope.

Oh man, I think, now I’m stuck, they’re going to make us fill out a bunch of forms for their insurance coverage and the cops will come and we’ll be witnesses and I’ll never get home. How naïve of me. The bus driver opened the door and said there’s a bus behind us, we should get on that. About 20 of us file off the bus and walk back a half block where the 2^nd bus is of course stuck in the traffic jam that the accident has caused. As I pass the rear of our bus I saw that liquid was pouring out the back—probably some kind of coolant—and a woman in the SUV that hit us was on her cell phone, holding her forehead like she was containing her brain from bursting forth.

Meanwhile the following bus is not letting on passengers, the driver waving us off. There seem to be 2 schools of thought as to his action—one, the optimistic view, is that he’s trying to back up so he can squeeze through a slot in the traffic and that once he does that to secure his position he’ll open the door. The 2^nd, pessimistic, view is that he’s a bastard who doesn’t want any more passengers. Some of the passengers are trying to persuade the other passengers to get out of the street so he can complete his maneuver, while a couple of the passengers who think he’s trying to slip away stand in his way daring him to run them over. It’s all very amusing. I calculate that worse comes to worse I can walk about 10 blocks to the Q train and get to downtown Brooklyn somewhere since I have no idea where that train goes with the new schedule (not that I ever knew where it was going on its original route).

Instead of watching the Brooklyn Debating Society try to resolve the question of whether the bus door will open (“If he doesn’t open them, we’ll take his number and report him the depot”—oooo, the depot—scary), I decided to walk up 2 blocks and catch the bus when he finally squeezed his way out of the traffic jam. Two blocks away happened to be Ocean Avenue and just as I got there, so did the bus, with my former fellow passengers. I assume they didn’t have to pay the extra $2.25 that I did, but then, the extra fare was worth not having to listen to them anymore.

And so my journey continued to McDonald and U without any further excitement. I’ll still take the bus, but I’m dubious.

The List:

Salt Marsh Nature Center--West

 Number of species:     35

Canada Goose     33
Mallard     8
Double-crested Cormorant     4
Great Blue Heron     2
Great Egret     8
Snowy Egret     10
Osprey     1
Semipalmated Plover     9
American Oystercatcher     8
Spotted Sandpiper     1
Greater Yellowlegs     5
Lesser Yellowlegs     1
Semipalmated Sandpiper     2
Laughing Gull     10
Herring Gull     50
Common Tern     1
Black Skimmer     1     skimming at mouth of Gerrittsen Creek
Rock Pigeon     5
Mourning Dove     30
Chimney Swift     6
Northern Flicker     2
American Crow     6
Barn Swallow     8
Marsh Wren     8     Seen AND heard.
American Robin     30
Gray Catbird     7
Northern Mockingbird     8
European Starling     25
Yellow Warbler     2
Common Yellowthroat     1
Song Sparrow     2
Northern Cardinal     2
Red-winged Blackbird     1
Baltimore Oriole     1
American Goldfinch     1