Right Whales Moving Into Cape Cod Bay

Massachusetts has rites of Spring, just like Iowa, Arkansas and Colorado do. Some of our rites involve whales coming for a visit at a certain time of year, just like they don't in Iowa.

North Atlantic Right Whales are entering our waters as we speak. They come in after plankton, using some primordial algorithm to know when the water temperature is just right to chow down on the microscopic organisms.

Right Whales are as rare as it gets, and are especially rare for both large whales and marine mammals in particular. There are only 500 left in the world. At the moment, 71 of those have been recorded as being in Cape Cod Bay as of Wednesday.

A mother and her calf were spotted in the Cape Cod Canal Tuesday, and another mom/baby were seen in Cape Cod Bay about halfway between Provincetown and Marshfield. Experts expect many more in the upcoming weeks.

 The whales cruise the surface, filtering tons of plankton into their tummies. They often work very close to shore, and are visible to beachwalkers. Set up on a cliff (Manomet, Cedarville, Scituate, Saquish) if you can, height always helps when spotting. It involves more "getting lucky" than me getting laid, but even a bad day staring at the ocean is better than most good days.

It goes without saying that you shouldn't hassle these whales. They are very rare. Boats are required by law to keep a few hundred yards between them and any righty. A collision between a whale and a boat could take an endangered species off of the charts.

It's also good sense for the mariner. Look at how things ended for Captain Ahab, Quint, Joshua, Samuel L. Jackson... you don't want to mess with anything that can fit you in their mouth.

Southeastern Massachusetts Nature Blitz

S'up?

We encounter a lot of nature in our travels, and that's no bull. Well, technically, that IS a bull, but you know what I mean...

All of the livestock in this article came from some farm on Old Sandwich Road in Plymouth.

"Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves."

That is either a buffalo, a bison or a shaggy cow... Old McDonald, I am not.

If you catch the cow as it walks in front of the bull, the cow looks like it has a big curved Unicorn horn on her snout.

Alpacas are pretty friendly, as it turns out. I swear that the alpaca in the top shot of this article was way across the field from me, beyond the range of my shoddy phone. I simply had to go "Hey, you, a little closer, please," and he came running over just like this and posed for the top shot.

"You don't work here, and I'm going to greatly resent it if you grab my udders."

Hey! Back in the turkey article with you!

There are several foxes in my neighborhood, to the point where I have named them. This is Samantha Fox, her sisters and brothers are named Alicia, Vivica, Meghan, 20th Century and Redd. Redd is the patriarch, his wife Elizabeth has passed on.

Every coyote in my neighborhood, regardless of gender, is named "Wild E."

The Trillion Cran March

You know that a publication named Cranberry County Magazine is going to bombard you with burgundy as Thanksgiving nears. Our photographers were all over eastern Massachusetts, seeing who had the goods. 

We focused heavily on Plymouth, Carver and Wareham. You could also draw a triangle running from Duxbury to Freetown to Yarmouth Port, and assume that we stumbled through every bog in it.

Cranberry County University mathematicians estimate that our photographers captured 1,000,000,000,000 cranberries on film. That's a trillion, babe....

Even a rotten photographer like Stephen can do OK if he works with acres of berries directly in front of him where he can't miss them.

The urge to push him in from behind while he was taking this shot was almost overwhelming.

I totally want to wade two strippers into that and have them wrestle for three rounds while drunks throw money at them.

Let's roll through the cranberry harvest process. First, you get a cranberry bog.

Then you flood it, and hire this dude to roll through it with his cranberry-loosening tractor which probably has some technical name that I'm unaware of.

Once he's done, you have acres of floating berries.

Enter the workers...

Cool man, rotten shot...

Sorry for the blurry, but this is the tube which sucks up all the berries that the Cape Verdean guys pulled into a pile.

I think this is where the water goes after the berries are sorted out of it, or it's where they're getting the water. I don't know this farm stuff that well, I was raised in f*cking Dorchester until it was too late to make a farm boy out of me.

The cranberries then get pumped up into a big truck, where they get sent off to Ocean Spray.

The big truck in question.... you would need a corresponding truck full of sugar to create a 15000 sq foot serving of cranberry sauce.

Sometimes, the truck spills some cranberries, people run over them, and you get roads that look like this. This is in Carver... and, no, it's not the Cranberry Highway. That's in the 'Ham.

Cranberry Jones got his nickname at Yale, where he spent his freshman year eating nothing but cranberry products in an attempt to turn his skin burgundy. It didn't work, he had the runs for 7 months and he's now our organized crime contact.

We've got the boys working hard, and we'll be back over the weekend with some more shots.

Cape Cod (and some Plymouth) Fall Foliage

Cape Cod is pretty much the last in line for autumn foliage in New England. We don't really start peaking until November. I was down there last week, I thought that I missed peak time, but I was actually too early. I went out yesterday, and things were more fall foliage-ish.

Our basic route for today's foliage drive was up Route 6A, from Bourne to Brewster. I was going to run through the whole Cape out to the tip, but I got a call in Brewster that I was supposed to be at a meeting in Hyannis.. so I had to bang a U.

I'll sacrifice some Clarity if the picture has some bright red. I also blocked some traffic for this shot (this blurry, wasted shot), so I was going to use it even if my thumb was over the lens.

Blurry cameras make it look like the tree is on fire, not something that you worry about if you own a house made of stone. The third little pig planted whatever he wanted, an ease of landscaping not afforded to the little pigs who made their houses of sticks and straw.

I probably should have fired off a few of these, maybe got a pic that isn't all blurry. That's a good burst of color, however... especially for Cape Cod.

This is in the Ponds of Plymouth, which made it into a Cape Cod article because we needed some Marylou's for the trip, and we went to the Cedarville one.

All of the basketball games at the University of New Hampshire should be played in this setting.

This looked redder when I was driving by it... but was less so when I got out of the car. I immediately thought that it might be a trick, maybe a Yeti or the Blair Witch, but I got out of the area safely.

The first time that I ever stopped the car in Brewster.... nothing against Brew Town, just how things shook themselves out. I'll be back!

This must have been a tough Ask at the tree-selling store or wherever you go to get trees... "In October, I want a single tree, and I want it to be green, yellow, orange, maybe a touch of red..."

A lot of Cape Cod foliage tripping involves single trees in some dude's yard.

Fear not this November date if you are worried about missing out on Cape Cod's peak foliage season. They don't really peak until after Halloween,. and you can see quite a bit of color if there hasn't been a mean October wind storm to knock the leaves off of the trees. By mid-November, you're lit out of shuck, player.

I'm a trailblazer in the "leaning out of the car window with a shabby Wal-Mart camera" photojournalist motif.

I like when the tree moves past Aquaman-style orange into more of a near-red scenario.

Cape Cod was bangin'... so we may be back. Be sure to check out our leaf-peeping on the South Coast and South Shore from previous articles.

Happy Halloween From Cranberry County Magazine!

As we await the Great Pumpkin, let's check out some Halloween decorations.

He's actually breathing fire, but my camera was frightened into blurriness.   

Witches are considerably more cheerful the further south you get from Salem.

Our Halloween special was shot in broad daylight and will be published close to the Witching Hour.

I was going to wear my twenty foot electric blue avenging angel costume, but this guy beat me to it.

Mayor McPumpkin of Wareham

They say that, during zombie apocalypses, the guys who tidy up cemeteries are the first to die.

"The line to get at them jugs on her starts at the left.... in fact, you're the first guy in it."

Let's see... a coward, a dummy, some trash, a girl leading them.... Hillary rally?

A couple o' guys wearing sheets, led by some strange orange-tinted evil creature.... Trump rally?

Some decorations get a forward lean if October is trending windy.

You can open a cemetery in your yard even if you have a small lawn, but you can only cater to midgets.

Same to you!

Yeti pretty much have to dress as Frankenstein. It's tough to play a witch or a princess when you're 8 feet tall and furry.

Most people go Scary when they decorate for Halloween, but this house went Cute.

I'd hit that...

When you're as famous as Frankenstein is, you can just grab girls by the pelvic bone,no consent needed.

That's pretty much how it works when I need a lawyer...