Cormorants

Hi kids!

Well, after sailing sixty miles yesterday it felt good to sit still in
a marina. It was finally warm enough to enjoy the whole day outside.
And I finally got a shower. After sleeping in my clothes under five
blankets to stay warm for days it felt really good to get hosed down
and get some of the bugs off. We did laundry and dried out the boat by
opening the portholes (windows) and lockers (little things like
closets where we store stuff). One thing about cold weather like that
is condensation. As the astute young thermodynamicists among you
already know, if you cool moist air, water condenses. That's what
makes the outside of a glass of ice water get wet. It also makes the
inside walls of a cold boat wet because people breathing makes
moisture and the cold walls condense it. This is the truth. You can
ask the teacher if you don't believe me.

The marina has a line of trees along one side. The trees are like half
white. I'm like, "Weird."

Then I found out why. In the late afternoon the trees filled up with
roosting cormorants. A cormorant is a bird that likes to eat fish.
They don't pluck fish from the surface like an eagle or osprey. They
dive into the water, swim underwater and chase the fish down on their
own turf. In the process they get really wet. Eventually they get
soaked and have to go hang out in the sun to dry out. We have
cormorants in Maine and I used to see them there all the time but they
hung out in the sun on rocks a few at a time. These guys all gather at
end of day and roost in trees by the hundreds. That's what makes the
trees white. Bird doo doo from hundreds of birds day after day.

The birds land in the trees and the boss birds get the top branches.
If a boss bird sees a less boss bird on a high branch he comes in and
knocks the less boss bird off the branch by yelling at him then biting
him with his beak and whacking him with his wings. The less boss bird
sometimes gets knocked literally out of the tree and winds up flapping
and flopping right down into the water below, squawking all the way
down. This is called "the pecking order" among birds. Boss birds peck
less boss birds, who peck even less boss birds and so on.

This also happens in corporations, academia, politics and prison
populations. And grade schools to some extent, as I'm sure you know by
this point.

Well, kids, be good, study your thermodynamics and remember who's the
top of your pecking order-THE TEACHER!