Backcountry Notes

Haeckel, "Trochilidae." Click on image for source information. I spent a pleasant hour on the side porch watching the hummingbirds. We host a colony of native ruby-throated hummingbirds every summer; they like to feed on the vine flowers which grow there. Typically we have 2 or 3 nests on the west side and another one on the east. It is nesting season, so the males busy themselves fighting over territorial boundaries while the females slip away for a sip of nectar as often as they can.

Big Girl didn't return this year -- I hadn't expected that she would, considering that she had dominated the west side yard for about 5 years. Big Girl was the biggest, boldest hummer I've ever seen -- it didn't matter what she spotted in her domain, be it shrew, cat, chipmunk, dog, or tortoise, she would hover eyeball-to-eyeball and cuss it out. Our big half-Maine-Coon-Cat Tom has side porch privileges because he won't climb down into the yard. It was my privilege to be present when he made the acquaintance of Big Girl one sunny July afternoon. He crouched and growled on the railing at a point 14 feet off the ground; Big Girl hovered about a yard from his nose, cussing incessantly for at least a minute. Tom dare not jump owing to the height and she seemed to know it. They were fun to watch.

When we were kids, our family moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and beginning in 1956 we frequently visited Virginia Beach, building sandcastles and chasing sand fleas in the surf. From time to time we would find tar balls on the beach -- not many, and usually they turned up following a storm. The typical tar ball was about the size of a tennis ball. They were well-rounded with an outer layer heavy with sand.

At the time, their origin was a mystery -- none of the available adults knew the source of the tar balls. The usual response to my inquiries was, "throw that nasty thing back into the surf." It was many years later -- long after I had seen the last of the Virginia Beach tar balls -- that I discovered their origin.

The tar balls of Virginia Beach were relics of the early years of  World War II.  In 1942, a largely-hidden marine war took place off the shores of the Carolinas and Virginia as German U-boats lay in wait for unprotected merchant shipping northbound from the Gulf of Mexico. Merchant vessels carried all manner of strategic war materials from New Orleans and other Gulf ports -- foods, grains, meats, manufactured products, cotton, leather, and -- of critical importance -- petroleum and petroleum products. New England and old England alike were dependent on heating oil and coal from the American South.

Germany knew how vulnerable England was and directed its U-boats to attack merchant shipping across the Atlantic even to the shores of America. It was a well-kept secret that this gambit came very close to defeating Great Britain as the U-boat attacks choked off supplies of food and fuel.

In America, the government's response to the U-boat attacks was to go with denial and minimize the impact. Instead of raising alarm and taking all possible precautions, the Roosevelt administration opted for keeping the station as secret as possible. Thus there was no blackout of Virginia Beach and the lights glowing along the beachfront provided a well-illuminated backdrop against which U-boat captains could detect ships.

Many of the merchant vessels sunk off the Virginia and Carolina beaches were tankers taking petroleum from Texas and Louisiana to refineries in New Jersey and points north and northeast. Sometimes tankers went down with their cargo intact and when they burned the heavier, asphaltic components survived and went to the bottom still in the ship's hold. Over a period of years, the heavy petroleum fractions leaked from the wrecks and dispersed over the sea bottom, forming balls of petroleum tar. Currents eventually took some of these ashore where we found them in the Virginia Beach sands.

It seems likely that tar balls from the BP leak will continue washing ashore onto Gulf of Mexico beaches for years and even decades to come, to be found by curious children whose parents will tell them to "throw that nasty thing back into the surf."