The sky was foreboding and maybe overdoing it – a two-tone wall of gray and darker gray moving closer and closer to where we sat. Between us and the weather were a few boats not quite ready to pull the anchor yet, and a few boats running full throttle toward their marinas.
The weird light gave the turquoise of the water a charged-up glow, like it was lit from beneath or something. It was a summer drama, not early spring drama, and felt premature, if strikingly beautiful. There was thunder but no lightning.
This was at Keys Fisheries in Marathon. I was up there with two artists who were residents at The Studios of Key West this month: Maxim Loskutoff, a novelist from out west, and Carolyn Monastra, a visual artist doing a long-term project about climate change and potential avian extinctions.
Max and Carolyn were dutifully impressed by the tarpon roiling just off the seawall, and slightly perplexed that Florida lobsters don’t have claws.
We had all ordered lobster reubens, and were waiting for them to come out.
We weren’t alone in the restaurant. There were quite a few people, and also a small cadre of ruddy turnstones perched on the bow of a moored-up center console. There were also two or three patrolling the edges of the seawall, just outside the rope railings, looking for scraps.
Keys Fisheries is one of the more reliable places in the Florida Keys to see ruddy turnstones, largely due to the large volume of french fries they serve. Despite the signs every few feet politely but clearly asking people not to feed human food to the birds or fish, a few fries periodically end up on the floor – usually, I like to believe, by accident.
Ruddy turnstones are handsome birds. One of the reasons to love them, besides their good looks, is that they generally live up to their name. They are ruddy, at least if you are willing to accept that orange is red the same way red hair is red. (Ginger turnstone would have been a less dynamic moniker.) Also, they turn stones, at least when there are stones around.
The stone-turning thing isn’t because they are vandals or cucumber-sized agents of chaos. It’s because under the turned-over stones is often food.
Turnstones are Palearctic breeders, Palearctic being a fancy term meaning the northerly cold parts of Eurasia and North America. But when they are not breeding, they can be found on the beaches of every continent in the world – excluding Antarctica, a continent not generally known for its sandy coastlines.
Ruddies can be found in the Keys year-round, though there are bigger numbers in the winter. Like most shorebirds we see here in the summer, it’s unclear why they don’t migrate. Maybe they’re opting out of the whole migrate/breed/migrate life cycle. Maybe they aren’t healthy enough to fly 2,500 miles. Maybe they’re just taking a year off and don’t need the hassle from you.
Since the turnstone’s name was derived from their behavior on the stony beaches of England, I was curious what their names meant in other languages. It turns out the names translate to literally the same thing in Russian, French, Chinese, Dutch, German, Japanese and several other languages. They are the common rockhopper in Basque, the stone-flipping bird in Thai, the stone mason in Persian and Punjabi, the stone roller in Estonian and the stone tartar in Latvian, tartar most likely referring to the foot soldiers of Genghis Khan, not the calcium buildup dentists have to scrape off your teeth.
Things get a little further afield in Portugal, where they are the sea roller; in Puerto Rico, where they are the Turkish plover; in Sweden, where they are the rosary; and in Georgia, where their name means “I am voting.” All this according to Google Translate.
Ruddy turnstones are sexually monomorphic, though the females are said to have slightly duller plumage than the males. The parents have slightly atypical breeding strategy.
The females do about 70% of the brooding for the first few weeks. The males visit more frequently and get more attentive in the week or so before hatching, though they don’t up their brooding effort.
The chicks are precocial and can walk a few hours after hatching. A day after the last chick, usually the fourth, has hatched, they abandon the nest as a family and move on to more productive feeding areas. The chicks have to feed themselves from the start, but may learn from watching the parents. They increase in body weight about 700% over a period of three weeks. The mothers abandon the family after nine or 10 days and the fathers stick around, protecting their small flock until the fledglings can fly and take care of themselves, at around 19 days, and may remain protective for another two weeks.
In their breeding territories, ruddy turnstones survive primarily on a diet of insects in the fly family, supplemented by the occasional spider, berry or butterfly. But once they move south, their diet gets more expansive, widening to include crustaceans, mollusks, muscles, small fish and the occasional purloined fast-food item.
If a beach doesn’t have a lot of stones, they seem just as happy turning over sticks, shells and seaweed in the pursuit of sustenance.
Up at Keys Fisheries it wasn’t us, but someone must have dropped a fry or a crust of bread or something on the floor, because a turnstone suddenly darted out from under one of the picnic tables and out over the water as if it had just shoplifted something from a candy counter.
It was confronted immediately by a sharp-eyed gull, then two gulls, then 10 gulls, a screaming flock that chased the turnstone around the marina like a feathered tornado. The bird shot left, then right, then left again, finally dropping out of our line of sight behind a boat, the gulls descending upon him.
The gulls rose up as a group a few minutes later, and flew slowly out of the marina.
I have no idea who managed to gulp what down, but I was rooting for the turnstone.
