Serendipity is...

Glancing out the window at work while in the middle of a discussion about bird feeding and seeing this:

The less dramatic but non-seasickness-inducing version:

I have seen far more dead River Otter in Cape May County than live otter. The peninsula isn't, or wasn't, ever truly solid ground; many creeks crossed and criss-crossed the land and in some places they still do. Unfortunately, highways now cross the creeks, and otter are only one of the many victims.

So when I looked out the window and saw a live otter, I perhaps screamed a bit. Not too loudly (I'm trying). I knew this oversized pond had otter although this isn't where I had my one live sighting. But to learn the lake also had American Eel was icing on the cake. (A frantic rush to Wikipedia jogged loose what I had learned a long time ago about eels: I knew that for some part of their life cycle they lived in fresh water and headed out to sea the other half but I couldn't remember which way they went. Adults in fresh; spawn in salt. Catadromous, if you wish to get technical about it.)

We used to occasionally catch small eels in our minnow trap off our dock in Avalon, about a foot long and maybe half an inch in diameter and I remember my great uncle used to catch and eat (blech!) much larger ones. I watched a Double-crested Cormorant swallow an eel about the size of this one (couple of feet and inches around) just a year or so ago, but those eels were all in the brackish tidal zone of the back bay salt marshes, not an apparently land-locked little city lake... Wow.

Apologies for the shaking video (iMovie actually was able to stabilize it a bit) and grainy photos (which I had to screen-capture).

Clean-up Crew. [Warning: slightly grisly photos]

It has been estimated that most young living things have a pretty lousy chance of surviving their first year. (Roughly 10-50% depending on who and what is calculating/being calculated.) The odds go up significantly if you can make it through that first critical year, and often increase with increasing experience/age.

This young laughing gull wasn't one of the lucky ones. (That's ok; with the world's largest breeding population of the lovely, if annoyingly loud and behaviorally obnoxious--they never stole pizza off your plate when I was a kid!--birds right here in our very own backyard, we won't miss a few.)

But this school of mummichogs (big, fat, mud-colored minnows that the young fishing-with-grandpa girl in me still thinks of as "bait" and the biologist thinks of as adorable-in-their-ugliness little fish) won the lottery.

Marshland is a marvelous place. Everything is sooooo interconnected, from the moon to the mummichogs. Dead bird in high marsh, tide comes in and floods what was once dry (relatively speaking) ground, little fishies get to eat, clean up the mess, and continue the cycle. Awesome.


[Click on photos to enlarge a bit. Check out the fishy with the tidbit in the last shot and its neighbors, wondering if they can snitch it for themselves.]