And the Birds Came

I am on the beach at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and I have been quietly watching a fisherman catching and processing two Florida pompano. 

There followed a perfect lion kill tableau, complete with marauding hyenas and jackals, all disguised as a fisherman and a few innocent-looking Florida beach birds.

I got down on my knees and shot and shot quickly as the birds quarreled over the pompano carcasses. Macabre? Perhaps, but no more than my own species’ quick rendering of a beating heart and frantic eye into freezable filets.

First and boldest is the ruddy turnstone, here in winter plumage. I adore turnstones, smart opportunistic little brawlers that they are. They aren’t afraid to challenge a gull ten times their size if good food is at stake. 

While a ring-billed gull chokes down a morsel of fish, the turnstone darts in.

A ringbill tugs at a fish’s entrails as a boat-tailed grackle sizes up its chances of joining in. The low-angle evening light lends an epic quality to the tableau, with small hillocks in the sand reading as a dunescape.

The scene constantly changes from one carcass to the other. A laughing gull strides up to scatter the turnstones and a lone sanderling. I’m intrigued by the gull’s posture; it adopts the head-tossing, hunch-backed profile of a juvenile begging from its parent. Odd—is it begging the turnstones for a chance at the pompano? Does the sight of food just set off this juvenile behavior in a mature bird?

 A ring-billed gull swoops in and holds forth over a carcass.

It'll have to get what it can before the boat-tailed grackle steals it.

The ringbill manages to free some food before a herring gull and then a great black-backed gull swoop down and end its picnic.

Not many birds argue with a great black-backed gull, pirate of the sea. The herring gull manages to hold it off for awhile

until a young great-black-backed joins in.

and when they are done there are fragments, just enough for the boat-tailed grackles

little black coroners, pronouncing the pompano dead at last. Oh how I love this shot.

Used up, all the way up, by Homo sapiens, who took the lion's share,

 followed by four species of gull, two shorebirds and an icterid. Eight species all feasting on a silvery lavender blue pompano rimmed in lemon yellow

who only minutes before had been swimming in light surf on a warm evening on Cape Canaveral

whose eyes looked into mine and found me unable to help

but willing to swallow hard and document its final hour.

The fisherman packed up and went home, pompano filets swinging in a grocery bag

leaving me amazed and standing on an empty beach

wondering at the circle of life and death, the beauty of fresh food from the sea, hand-caught;

the stories in every little thing that happens,


 which are there to be shared by the spirit

left open to the thrust of grace.*

I turned back to find my children still playing in the same warm surf

and walked back to join them


rinsed clean 

thinking about everything and nothing at all.

                                                                                                       *Bruce Cockburn, of course.

Requiem for a Pompano

Confession: As a Leo, beaches make me want to walk more than swim. I love to pace along the ocean’s edge, but I’m not the Amazon who rushes into the waves, peeling clothing as she goes, then dives like a porpoise into the sea’s watery embrace, bobbing up slick as a seal and laughing. Nuh-uh. The sea delights me visually and conceptually, but unless the water’s bathtub warm I’ll leave the frolicking to those who are better at it.  

So while Phoebe and Liam dared the waves I walked. On a beach, I tend to pick a visual point, be it bird, carcass, pier, or fisherman, and walk toward it.     

I noticed a small flurry of bird activity near an orange-clad fisherman, and made that my destination. Wheeling back occasionally to watch the kids through binoculars, I finally reached him and sat a respectful distance away photographing the gulls, grackles and shorebirds attracted to his station. He made a crack about being the birds’ agent and demanding I feed them before photographing them. With that little gesture, he set me at ease and let me know it was all right for me to share his space. I thought I detected a native Floridian in his easy demeanor and that hunch was confirmed. I really just wanted to find out what was happening between him, the sea and the birds. I figured there was food involved, and was intrigued by the assemblage of eight species he’d attracted: sanderling, ruddy turnstone, boat-tailed grackle; great black-backed, laughing, herring and ring-billed gull.

Soon enough, I noticed a couple of sand-covered Florida pompano Trachinotus carolinus (Jack family, Carangidae) 

 breathing their last on the beach, and the little assemblage of avian undertakers suddenly made sense. The fisherman was winding up his day, and he took the fish down to the waves to wash them before processing them. Pompano is said to be delicious, commanding the highest price dockside of any fish. Sadly, I wouldn’t know, never having been in pompano country.  I'm in farm-raised catfish country :-/

One pompano had departed this mortal coil, turning ghostly silver-white in the process. Still it was a gorgeous creature, with touches of yellow on tail and fins. I turned to the live one. It shimmered with blue, lavender and rose, the colors playing across its impossibly satiny, fine-grained skin. 

I wondered what it was thinking as it glared at me, this huge hominid pointing a black box at it, and it made a mighty flex of body and tail as if in response. If you aren’t going to kill me, throw me back, idiot; I’m dying here.

It was a tricky moment for a compulsive helper of the helpless. I don’t know what the pompano knew at this sorry nadir in its short life; whether it perceived me as a possible savior or just another awful spectre in its dimming eye. What I’m sure it couldn’t appreciate is that I was a guest in this state; on this unmarked spot on the beach. It wasn’t my place to take dinner out from under the Florida native who so genially tolerated my presence.

I am sorry, so sorry. I can’t help you. I could throw you back and take off running down the beach, I suppose, but this man has been here all day waiting for you to take his lure, and you struck it, and this is what happens when you make the last and worst mistake a fish can make. Besides, whether I throw you back or not, you are done for, my silvery friend. You’ve been too long in the thin cold air.

You are never going back home to the waves.

 I screwed my heart’s porthole closed again and kept shooting. While I’d been talking to the still-living fish, the fisherman had filleted the dead pompano.

The fisherman came and got the live fish and washed it in the surf. I pointed out the lavender, blue and rose still playing across its skin. I asked him if they always turn white when they die and he said he’d never noticed. He held it up to let me admire it for a moment before deploying his filet knife.

And with the first cut, he quickly turned a living being into food. 

So this is how it's done.

First he cut the muscle off one side, then he flipped it over and cut the other.

He cut two smooth filets off its sides, leaving the head, spine, ribs and organs in place, taking all the muscle the fish had and leaving nothing, really, and I wondered as I watched with dry amazed eyes when in the process the fish finally died. He dropped the filets into a plastic bag and I felt a little envy because at that moment they looked like very nice food to me. We had been eating out in a bland, unimaginative sort of way for several days and the cook in me was yearning for something fresh to prepare. I asked him if the two small pompano would be tonight’s dinner, and he said no, if you came out here expecting to catch your dinner a lot of times you’d go hungry. He would put them in the freezer for later. For some reason that made me feel bad. I hoped his freezer wasn’t like mine: a place where meat lies in state until it’s fit for offering to the vultures.

And then he unceremoniously tossed what was left of the beautiful pompano to the birds.  

I kept watching, of course...