going back a few days

last wednesday and thursday, i attended the sanctuary director's overnight meeting on cape cod. as i mentioned last year, the good thing about the meeting is it takes place on cape cod, after the busy summer season is over and before the weather gets rotten. the bad thing about the meeting is pretty much the whole meeting part of it. this year, the sanctuary directors went on a field trip to cape cod's south beach (significantly different from miami's south beach), where most of the directors were fixated on birds.

i, however, became fixated on the cases of some kind of invertebrate organism that were all over the beach. they looked like either a delicious yet delicate cookie or a lovely dangly earring (recall, if you will, that i suggested making something else into earrings at last year's SD meeting- which is funny because i have been wearing the same pair of earrings since august 2004- it's not like i am in the market for new earrings and therefore thinking about them constantly- let's see, what can i make into earrings today?)


the cases were one grain of sand thick, making it unlikely that they could be made into earrings in the absence of massive amounts of shellac. but somehow they managed to hold together enough to protect whatever organism fashioned them. i asked bob prescott, sanctuary director at wellfleet, where they came from and he told me it was the case of a "gold tooth worm." he said this with complete confidence and not a moment's hesitation, but i have not yet been able to find any information on gold tooth worms in wikipedia, repository of all the world's knowledge.


so maybe bob was totally making it up. but it doesn't matter. i was delighted to have something to look at while everyone else was watching the birds- getting all excited about some sort of woodpecker with an ivory-colored bill or whatever. i even managed to turn some other folks on to my little obsession.