NB: For the best video experience, I highly recommend hitting “play,” then clicking on the 360p button that appears in the lower right of the video player and choosing 480p instead. Also click the adjacent box with the four outward pointing arrows to go full screen. At the end, just hit the same box, which will now have an X, to get your screen back, or hit the escape key.

Liz and I spent Memorial Day afternoon at Slaughter Beach, DE, with Errol Webber, Jr. and Erik Yount of Host Our Coast, as well as our friends Carrie & Ella Samis, and Jim Rapp. We were all there to witness the horseshoe crab spawning and attendant bird and terrapin feeding and were not disappointed. Though the vast majority of the northbound shorebirds had already departed for points north, we had a great couple of hours enjoying one of our region’s weirdest yet most enchanting spectacles.

I wound up being the interviewee, which was fun, though I wish there had been room for others to appear on camera with Errol as well (there was a lot of talent and enthusiasm in that group, but alas, time is always short). I’m always a little queasy about seeing myself onscreen, but I have to admit, Errol and Erik did a nice job of editing things and I think I came off looking pretty good. See what you think.

If you haven’t been following Host Our Coast, it’s well worth your time. This year especially, as Errol and Erik are manifestly talented young filmmakers. Errol, in fact, was cinematographer for this year’s Oscar -winning Best Documentary Short Film, Music by Prudence. Pretty cool, huh?

For more information about horseshoe crabs, check out ERDG’s horseshoecrab.org site.

While I certainly intend to keep putting up blog posts when I have something that fits better here than elsewhere, if you’re interested in keeping up with what I’m doing, for now, Facebook is where I am. There’s a badge at the upper left of the page that you can click to find my personal Facebook profile and send me a friend request.

There’s also a badge where you can become a fan of Peterson Field Guides and I would appreciate it very much if you would do that. At the moment, the PFG fan page is, well, it’s me. But only in that I’m responsible for posting content there and serving as moderator. Like all things social media, it is meant to encourage interaction. And in only a week and a half, we’re already seeing a great response, with fans sharing their own photos and experiences.

Of course, I’m honored that the people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have asked me to take on the PFG fan page. It’s an opportunity to share a lot of great content from the Peterson vaults, create my own, and to have other interested naturalists share theirs. I’m especially pleased that we’ll be covering the vast range subjects of natural history that are featured in Peterson guides, though you can expect that birds will feature most prominently. I know it will be a big opportunity for me to learn, which is wonderful.

As an example of the kind of things I’ve been doing on the PFG page, below is a video I made and posted last week. It’s just a quick sequence of calling Spring Peepers, but I think it’s nice, especially if you haven’t been out and actually watched this classic sound being produced.

You can also click here to go to the HD version of the video on Facebook itself. It’s much better looking in HD, to say the least.

So, that’s where I am these days. I don’t know if six months from now Facebook will be over and we’ll all have moved on, but at the moment–most of the time–it feels like the place to be.

But please, keep this blog on your RSS subscriptions…or check back every once in a while, if you don’t do RSS. You never know when I’ll have something that only fits here. Thanks for stopping by!

Approaching Fowler Beach this morning, I glanced at the interpretive sign declaring it a Horseshoe Crab sanctuary. I thought back to the height of the crab spawning in May and thought how much more placid things felt now, as the frenzied activity of spring slowly melted into the comparative quiet of midsummer. It would be almost another year before I saw many Horseshoe Crabs again.

I was yanked from this reverie by the sight of several dozen horseshoe crabs. What were they doing here in July? The short answer, it quickly became apparent, was that they were dying. We’ve just passed the full moon and I would hypothesize that there was a late-season push of attempted spawning.

Whatever was going on, it hadn’t turned out well for these individuals–they were stranded, on their backs, and the July sun was climbing into the sky even faster than the cornstalks currently erupting from the fields just inland.

I quickly commenced a round of triage by toe…gently nudging each crab to look for signs of life.

Nearly all responded with the universal Horseshoe Crab sign of sentience–they raised their telsons (the tail-like appendage that many people fear will sting them–it won’t) high into the air. This maneuver is part of their ritual for righting themselves if and when they are overturned, a calamity that seems to occur fairly frequently, at least when they are negotiating the perilous boundary between beach and bay. If they land on their backs in the wrong substrate and are isolated by the receding tide, they often die, their book gills slowly drying out as they are set upon by hungry gulls and gravid flies.

But these guys (smaller HSC I’m about to pick up) and gals (larger one in back) were in luck. I went through and carefully returned all the survivors to the cool dark waters of Delaware Bay, leaving the sliver of beach I could access HSC-free.

I didn’t keep count, but I would guess I picked up between two and three dozen of the creatures. It took the better part of an hour, to great dismay of my dog, Brecon, who silently implored me to cut the good samaritan act and get back to more important things, namely, our eternal game of fetch.

I don’t know if my flipping these Horseshoe Crabs did any good, beyond providing me with a little wave of good feelings. As I’ve said here before, I reluctantly tend toward skepticism about these kinds of things, though in this case, there are many, some well informed, who say it is helpful. So that’s good. In any event, it’s hard to imagine what it could hurt. Heaven knows, we provide the gulls and flies with plenty of other dining options.

So I’ll keep flipping, whenever the opportunity presents.