A Brant Goose
Brant Geese, our faithful winter visitors, will soon be flying to the northern coast of Greenland for breeding season. Many Brant use Narragansett Bay as their winter residence. Near the end of this month, these diminutive waterfowl (smaller than Canada Geese) will make an amazing journey of more than 2,500 miles across the frigid Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay.
Here along Narragansett Bay, rafts of Brant feed on eel grass, often staying close to shore, where they create a cacophony of gabble. As I recently watched them on Gaspee Point, in Warwick, R.I., the chilly wind was rattling through leafless trees behind me. Brant swim close and parallel to shore because they need sandy grit to aid their digestion of eel grass. Their white rumps bob like corks, and they never seem to tire from swimming directly into waves.
As I looked far to the east, the tugboat Morgan Reinauer was pushing a barge from Perth Amboy, N.J., north toward Providence, where it would soon dock at the Motiva terminal, near Corliss Cove, close to Allens Avenue.
John S. Long lives in Warwick, R.I.
