Old Scituate Light

We checked out Old Scituate Lighthouse recently. We love lighthouses, and we'll get to every one in the area soon enough... 

Old Scituate Lighthouse dates back to 1811, for the low-low cost of $4000. That's a lot of $5 bills to be throwing around, especially when the guy on the $5 bill was still Thomas Jeffersoning. (Editor's note: Tommy is on the $10 bill, Stephen)

We happened to see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar there, and he was nice enough to pose in the foreground, provide some scale and make the lighthouse look bigger.

Steve, listen... if the article is called "Old Scituate Lighthouse," do try to not chop off part of the actual lighthouse (Editor's note: Steve claimed that the lighthouse moved at the last second when he shot it). It ain't that hard.

They need an Army Of One to hustle down and clean up the Army Of Two sign. The Army Of Two is probably the South Shore's best military story.

We'll do an article on it later, but the short version is that the lighthouse keeper's two daughters scared off a British raiding party in the War Of 1812. The British were coming to burn Scituate to the ground.

The girls thwarted that sh*t by hiding behind the dunes and playing a fife and drum. The British, thinking it was militia, turned tail and beat a red-coated retreat back to La Hogue.

The lighthouse is 25 feet tall and stands 71 feet above Sea Level.

She was deactivated in 1850, as Minot's Ledge Lighthouse made it redundant. Other than a brief reactivation when MLL was destroyed in a 1852 gale, it was inactive until 1994. It fell into disrepair, and only looks as good as it does now because of citizen effort. Her light still shines, as a private aid to navigation.

If you can't wait for our Army Of Two article to drop and want to research it yourself, the two sisters are known as either The Army Of Two, The American Army Of Two or The Lighthouse Army Of Two.

If The Bates Sisters aren't enough history for you, the lighthouse is also near where the USS Chesapeake and the HMS Shannon traded hands. The U lost that one, but the dying words of Captain James Lawrence- "Don't give up the ship"- became the battle cry of the US Navy.

But wait! There's more! This is also where the Etrusco ran aground in a 1956 nor'easter. The crew were rescued, and kept in various houses around town until they could get home. The ship was stuck there for several months, before being refloated, repaired and returned to service.

It tolls for thee...

Workers Break Stop & Shop's Corporate Greed...A Bit

Stop & Shop tried to get cheap with their labor force, which brought about a strike.

With no workers to stock the shelves and with Teamsters refusing to make deliveries, the cupboards are bare. Automated tellers can't stock the shelves... although I'm sure someone's working on that.

Automated tellers can't shop, however. Locals were loathe to support a large employer in town screwing their workers over. S&S lost $20 million a day during the strike. 

Even the Easter Bunny wouldn't cross the picket line, which may have had a role in the store caving in to the workers.

Easter In Duxbury

We hope that your bunny is as generous as ours.

We clicked the camera a few times as we drove around Duxbury.

Forsythia, for you.

"Cherry Blossom" is Treespeak for "Easter."

I'm not that religious, so Easter is more of a spring thing for me, hence all the flowers.

Parkin' on your curb, takin' pictures of your flowers...

I like to get pictures of a second cherry blossom tree, let her slug it out with the other one.

You have to come correct on Easter with the Big Kat.

Time to head to the beach.

It was a foggy day, with visibility low enough that we had to get most of the way across in order to have something other than a grey wall of fog in the background.

Fog was rolling in off and on, lowering visibility to about 150 yards. We mention this because, when someone says "Easter," you immediately think "I wonder what the sea level coastal visibility was at 10:34 AM."

Surf Check! There actually was a coastal flood statement on my weather thingy, but that was South Coast. This was the biggest wave that I saw in Duxbury.

I don't really like kids all that much, and I like taking creepy stalker pics even less... but that is a cute family.

Gotta head back to town to check something...

Draco had a baby!

Easter is probably the wrong time to point out that "draco" is Latin for "giant serpent." They would apply this term to any large reptile, and not necessarily a myth/monster. I don't know how many anacondas Julius Caesar ran across, but I know he called it a draco.

My Latin is dodgy, but most of us know this term by the Romanian dracul, which totally means "dragon." Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad The Impaler, was the son of a guy known as Dracul, the Dragon. The diminutive of that is Dracula, sort of the Bobby to the Bob for bloodthirsty Carpathian warlords. This name was jacked by Bram Stoker for his infamous vampire novel.

Either way, Baby Draco may actually be a Dracula. Trying the "it's a girl dragon" dodge gives us Draculetta, which I'm pretty sure is a porno flick. Trying to Latinize it gives us Dracola, which sounds like those lozenges you take for a sore throat that lets you yodel after. That's worse than the ghoul name, if you ask me.

Bourne Bridge Holiday Lane Closure Concerns

Is a bunny-themed repeat of the Mothers Day Massacre upon us?

The MDM was a legendary Cape Cod traffic jam back in 2012. Work on the Sagamore Bridge featured lane closures, which resulted in traffic being backed up for miles.

That's not unusual in the summer, when the population of Cape Cod doubles and we are swarmed with day-trippers. It is very unusual in late Spring, when it is still too cold to go to the beaches.

Cape Cod, or at least the Upper Cape, ground to a standstill. People still talk about that jam (and an even worse one as Hurricane Bob approached) when speaking of landmark traffic events.

Cape Cod is stuffed full of old people. Old people, due to travel difficulty considerations and the fact that Grandmas tend to cook better than Grandchildren, often are the hosts for family holiday celebrations.

That's why the song doesn't go "Over the river and through the woods, I'm making my 87 year old mother drive through Boston traffic to my house she goes."

No, it is easier if you go to Grandma's. She usually lives in the sticks, too. This leads to less traffic... generally.

The reason we bring this up is because today is Easter. It is a major travel day.

And lanes are closed on the Bourne Bridge.

I called the Army, but they don't take calls at 6 AM on Easter morning. The Bourne Police told me that there will be lane closures today.

They have been working triple shifts on the bridge, so it's not like they're slacking. While lane closures on Easter are no fun, they can't do this work in snow, and it is better to close lanes on Easter than it is to close them on the 4th of July.

We are just informing you, not complaining to you.

We are quite uncertain as we go to press as to whether or not today will be problematic, and there is division among our staff.

The pro-jam staff simply say, "Holiday lane closures on one of the two ways on/off Cape Cod." They then rest their argument.

However, some aspects will work against the odds of another landmark jam. The Bourne Bridge gets about half of the traffic that the Sagamore Bridge gets. It seems to be pretty murky today, and that will limit day-tripping. Easter is a major holiday, not a minor, don't-get-work-off holiday like Momma Day, and that will significantly lower volume.

There is only one way to find out. As they say in fantasy football, "That's why they play the games, folks."

If we get that way today, and we just may do so, we will provide an update. Otherwise, we would like to wish you and yours a Happy Easter.

Piping Ain't Easy: Plovers, Foxes and Eradication In Duxbury

Duxbury Beach has a breeding population of Piping Plovers. They also have a thriving population of foxes and coyotes.

Piping Plovers are threatened with becoming endangered. There are about 6500 left in the planet. Half of them are on the Atlantic seaboard, a good portion of that half (estimated 600+ pairs) are in Massachusetts and a good chunk (24 breeding pairs) of that portion are on Duxbury Beach.

Piping Plovers are cute, McNugget sized birds who have one really huge flaw. They nest in the sand. There's nothing wrong with that, if you are of a large population which can withstand an owl snatching a few of your kids or a losing encounter with a Duxbury Cadillac.

It doesn't work if those deaths occur among a worldwide population of 6500. 6500 isn't that much, perhaps akin to Black Republicans or Chain Smoking Marathon Runners. Those losses lower the numbers, and increase the risk of inbreeding.

If the coyote has a good hunting season- and we know from cartoons that coyotes generally have catastrophic experiences when chasing fast birds- that's all she wrote for the P Double population on a particular beach.

Coyote don't use ACME products when hunting plovers, are therefore not involved in many explosions and subsequently have a far greater success rate than a fan of Road Runner may have been led to believe.

Foxes have about the same luck, as do hawks and even crows.

People also crush a Piper from time to time, either by stomping on them or running them over with SUVs. Piping ain't easy, as the rappers say.

Duxbury Beach is a popular destination for people, carnivores and Pipers. This brings forth "two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for dinner" allusions that are most uncomfortable for the Piper.

The Duxbury Beach Reservation inherits the responsibility for protecting these vulnerable birds. I'm not sure what the penalty is for letting an endangered species die out in your town (or who applies/enforces it), but it must be a substantial one, because the DBR spends a lot of time/effort/money looking out for these little f***ers.

Part of that effort involves fairly unpopular acts like limiting beach access. Another part involves the wildly unpopular act of a fox cull. It is called either "mitigation" or "eradication," depending on who you ask.

The DBR, whose hands are tied by environmental regulations, is paying somebody (we asked, we'll see if they answer) to shoot the foxes and poison the predatory birds on Duxbury Beach. A similar cull went down last year, killing several coyote, foxes and birds.

(Update: the USDA APHIS Wildlife Services employs the shooters. If I lived on King Caesar Road, I would do nothing at all in the east-facing side of the house on Eradication Day.)

Outrage, started after a series of Facebook posts began spreading around, was immediate and intense. 5000 names went on a petition calling for an end to the cull. There was a protest at a Duxbury supermarket.

A supermarket full of edible animals seems like a funny place for a save-animals protest... but to be quite honest, I got into journalism as a sportswriter, and often miss those forest/tree things that book-learning type people see almost immediately. One also thinks that at least one of the fox cull protesters has a stole at home, perhaps innocently.

The DBR has few options. Electric fencing, which is used on some North Shore beaches, is not cost effective on Duxbury Beach. The DBC is a dynamic beach, with shifting sands and various surf/fetch heights. It is also, to my knowledge, the longest stretch of uninhabited coastline in Massachusetts west of the Outer Cape.

Electric fencing also poses a threat of frying the Pipers, although the cruel part of my brain ponders the possibility of having a 20 piece McNugget meal made from wildly endangered birds. The King's going crazy!

Ironically, and unlike the bumper stickers tell us, Piping Plovers do not taste like chicken. Few shorebirds do. Their flavor, I'd imagine, is more like Duck and quite possibly like Gull. Maybe somebody at the Ming Dynasty can work with that, but the only small-bird recipe I know is the swashbuckling "four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie."

I bet Stacey would know. She's French, they have a recipe for everything. But I digress...

There isn't much a person can do to stop this. The DBR is fixed on this course. You can't go to the government, as they are the ones mandating the cull. Redd Foxx is dead.

Even terrorism would be ineffective.

We kicked a few ecoterrorism ideas around, and came up with nothing better than A) identifying the day of the hunt, B) going down to Saquish with as many people/dogs as you could gather X hours before the shooting starts, C) forming a skirmish line, D) marching towards the seawall neighborhood on North Duxbury Beach, which is where the Reservation power ends and where the foxes den, and E) flush every fox into the relative safety of Marshfield. You can't shoot what ain't there, even that Bradley Cooper guy from the sniper movie.

This seems like a good idea, save for a few flaws. The DBR would most likely call in Johnny Law, and the charges range from laugh-it-off Trespassing to some obscure Interfering With A Government Operation federal charge that gets you in the Big Boy Prison. "I butchered a gang rival," said the Latin King to his new cellmate. "What are you in here for?"

Flushing foxes into Green Harbor also puts them on roads, in a panic. That may kill as many foxes as a cull would. Kits would be just as orphaned if Mom got shot by Bradley Cooper, run over by a Mini-Cooper or mauled by Cooper the German Shepherd.

People think of Man as not being natural, which is a mistake. We are just monkeys who climbed down from the trees and eventually figured out things like fire, oil and apartment buildings. We have become dominant on this planet because of the advantages that nature gave us, and because of our ability to adapt to any scenario.

Plovers are at the other end of this scale. They are one of nature's mistakes, fatally flawed, "never even considered for mass production." 

The foxes and the SUVs can't get to the eggs of the birds smart enough to nest in trees. The birds who nest in trees have more offspring survive. Plovers are dying out.

Foxes, who humans have tried to wipe out before, are now flourishing. They flourish because they can adapt. They are perfectly functional around man and his housing. If he eats a plover egg, he is doing exactly what nature designed him to do.

You have to just let nature take her course... even if nature herself is angling the unadaptive shorebird towards Extinction.

The Battle Of Marshfield

As we approach April 19th, it is easy to view the American Revolution as a US vs. England thing... even if most of the Americans still thought of themselves as English (Paul Revere never shouted "The British are coming!" during his ride, entirely because of this phenomena. Paul actually was shouting the less poetic "The regulars are out!") when the fighting started.

The US/England thing is easy to understand now, a few hundred years after the fact. What is less-known is that there existed considerable static between towns during the pre-revolt period.

The basic cause of this discord was the issue that would launch the Revolution. Some people thought that the colonies should break free from the crown, while others thought that we should remain in the kingdom.

As that famous American we know as Mel Gibson once said, "an elected legislature can trample your rights just as easily as a king can."

Others disagreed with Mel, and there was thick tension in the air throughout the 1760s and 1770s. If you voiced the wrong political opinion at the wrong tavern, you might be chased from the town by a mob.

... and maybe hung from this tree.

Here are a few examples of what would happen to you if you failed to say "Screw The Crown" quickly enough in pre-war New England. Its a lot of reading, but it should prove entertaining.

- "At Taunton also, about 40 Miles from Boston, the Mob attacked the House of Daniel Leonard, Esqr.,3 one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace; & a Barrister at Law. They fired Bullets into the House & obliged him to fly from it to save his Life."

- "Peter Oliver Esqr., a Justice of the Peace at Middleborough, was obliged by the Mob to sign an Obligation not to execute his Office under the new Acts. At the same Place, a Mr. Silas Wood... was dragged by a Mob of 2 or 300 Men about a Mile to a River in Order to drown him, but, one of his Children hanging around him with Cries & Tears, he was induced to recant, though, even then, very reluctantly."

- "The Mob at Concord, about 20 Miles from Boston, abused a Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex, they making him pass through a Lane of them, sometimes walking backwards & sometimes forward, Cap in Hand, & they beating him."

- "All the Plymouth Protestors against Riots, as also all the military Officers, were compelled by a Mob of 2000 Men collected from that County & the County of Barnstable to recant & resign their military Commissions. Although the Justices of the Peace were then sitting in the Town of Plymouth, yet the Mob ransacked the House of a Mr. Foster, a Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, a Man of 70 Years of Age, which obliged him to fly into the Woods to secrete himself, where he was lost for some Time and was very near to the losing of his Life."

- "A Jesse Dunbar, of Halifax in the County of Plymouth, (was) ordered it into a Cart, & then put ... into the Belly of the (slaughtered) Ox and carted him 4 Miles, with a Mob around him, when they made him pay a Dollar after taking three other Cattle & a Horse from him. They then delivered him to another Mob, who carted him 4 Miles further & forced another Dollar from him. The second Mob delivered him to a third Mob, who abused him by throwing Dirt at him, as also throwing the Offals [innards] in his Face & endeavoring to cover him with it, to the endangering his Life, & after other Abuses, & carrying him 4 Miles further, made him pay another Sum of Money. They urged the Councilor’s Lady, at whose House they stopped, to take the Ox; but she being a Lady of a firm Mind refused; upon which they tipped the Cart up & the Ox down into the Highway, & left it to take Care of it self. And in the Month of February following, this same Dunbar was selling Provisions at Plymouth when the Mob seized him, tied him to his Horse’s Tail, & in that Manner drove him through Dirt & mire out of the Town."

- "In November 1774, David Dunbar of Halifax aforesaid, being an Ensign in the Militia, a Mob headed by some of the Select Men of the Town, demand[ed] his Colors [flags] of him. He refused, saying, that if his commanding Officer demanded them he should obey, otherwise he would not part with them: upon which they broke into his House by Force & dragged him out. They had prepared a sharp Rail to set him upon;12 & in resisting them they seized him (by his private parts) & fixed him upon the Rail, & was held on it by his Legs & Arms, & tossed up with Violence & greatly bruised so that he did not recover for some Time. They beat him, & after abusing him about two Hours he was obliged, in Order to save his Life, to give up his Colors."

- "A Parish Clerk was taken out of his Bed in a Cold Night & beat against his Hearth by Men who held him by his Arms & Legs. He was then laid across his Horse without his Clothes & drove to a considerable Distance in that naked Condition. His Nephew Dr. Abner Beebe, a Physician, complained of the bad Usage of his Uncle & spoke very freely in Favor of [the royal] Government, for which he was assaulted by a Mob, stripped naked, & hot Pitch was poured upon him, which blistered his Skin. He was then carried to an Hog Sty & rubbed over with Hog’s Dung. They threw the Hog’s Dung in his Face & rammed some of it down his Throat;"

- In Freetown, they used to paint Loyalists yellow, as "the Mob found that paint is cheaper than Tar and Feathers."

- "Patriots from Duxbury did kidnap Marshfield Loyalists Paul White, Dr. Stockbridge and Elisha Ford, and carted them to the "Liberty Pole" in Duxbury. There they were "forced to sign recantations" of their Tory sentiments, likely in response to mob violence."

By 1768, the crown deemed it necessary to send 4000 troops to pacify Boston, which was also getting ugly. Other than the potential for a Lexington-style suburban incursion by British troops, the countryside was (mostly) left on her own.

You know how it went from there. In 1770, the redcoats fired on the colonists, in what is known as the Boston Massacre. In 1773, the Boston Tea Party went down. In 1775, on April 19th, warfare broke out at Lexington/Concord.

As you can still see in modern occupational wars like Iraq or Afghanistan, the occupiers tend to stick to the cities. You have airports and docks to move supplies in, and cities usually sit astride rivers and highways that other trade flows through. The countryside tends to belong to the rebels.

This was the case in Massachusetts. Remember, the Revolution didn't start until the redcoats marched far enough out into the countryside to find farmers crazy enough to pick a fight with the world's best light infantry. While they may not use exactly those terms, every schoolkid in America can tell you the basics of Lexington/Concord.

What they can't tell you about (unless they read this column, of course) is the Battle of Marshfield. There's a good reason for this... there was no Battle Of Marshfield.

The non-battleground from this non-battle.

However, history is often drawn by tricks of fate, coincidence, miscalculations and itchy trigger fingers. An itchy trigger finger set off the Boston Massacre, started the Revolution, and was still happening when the National Guard went hippy-hunting at Kent State almost 200 years after the redcoats landed in Boston Harbor. If Marshfield in 1775 had been visited by ol' Mr. Finger, our history lessons would have been very different.

While an apt high school kid could tell you that Boston was occupied by the redcoats before the Revolution, they might not know that Marshfield also bore this status. Marsh Vegas, as it was then not known as, was a Loyalist hotbed. People in Vegas had no problem at all with the crown, at least the ones with the money and influence. They preferred change through diplomacy over revolt.

Even noting the fact that Marshfield patriots in 1773 had their own Marshfield Tea Party (on Tea Rock Hill), Marshfield was the most Loyalist town in New England.

This put them at odds with the neighboring towns. Duxbury and Plymouth were hotbeds of Patriot activity, and you saw with the Dunbar brothers how Halifax handled Loyalists. Not wishing to be mashed in Hog Dung, the loyalists in Marshfield sent a letter to General Gage, who was in charge of Boston. They demanded protection, and Gage complied, sending 100 men and 300 muskets on two schooners (the Dianna and the Britannia) down to Marsh Vegas in 1775. They were under the command of future Parliament member Captain Nesbit Balfour.

These redcoats disembarked at the mouth of the North River and marched 6 miles to the Nathaniel Ray Thomas estate. He was only the second most famous occupant, which is why you know it today as the Daniel Webster House. It looked a bit like a smaller version of the mansion from Django Unchained.

The redcoats set up camp on the grounds of the estate, and proceeded to piss off the locals. They would go to taverns or private homes in Duxbury and Plymouth. They behaved well enough, but they would have been hated in Duxbury even if they walked across water to get there. There is at least one story of a mob chasing a British officer into a Plymouth store, and not letting him out until he surrendered (and they broke) his sword.

Naturally, the entertainment in Boston served to get the locals' moxie up. Duxbury had already hosted Stamp Act protests, burned a dozen Englishmen in effigy and kidnapped loyalists for Liberty Pole parties. The presence of 100 redcoats a town over was, as they liked to say then, intolerable.

You didn't see a lot of South Shore people at Lexington. Paul Revere went west, not south. By the time that word of Lexington/Concord got to Duxbury, they would not have had time to get up to Boston for the battle. We did send some men up to Lexington/Concord, but most of the South Shore got off no shots at the redcoats fleeing Concord.

They didn't need to march up into the Metro West area to get at the regulars... they had 100 of them right there on the South Shore, sleeping on the lawn of a Marshfield mansion.

The South Shore towns had militia, and they had been training for this moment. They dropped everything on April 19th and gathered at what is now known as the John Alden House in Duxbury, under the command of  Colonel Theophilus Cotton.

No one knows what went on in the John Alden house that night, nor on the day of the 20th, when a council of war was held. What we do know is that Cotton, of Plymouth, failed to attack. He may have hoped that the British would leave on their own, or he may have feared a rabble-vs-regulars fight or he may have been waiting for more people.

He got more people quickly enough. Companies arrived from Rochester, Middleboro, Carver and Plympton to join the Duxbury, Plymouth and Kingston patriots. Fishermen from various local harbors, always fixin' for a fight, threw themselves into the mix. Colonel Cotton soon had five hundred men, five times the number of the British that they wished to oust from Marshfield. Other estimates give him 1000 men.

They marched to within a mile of the British regiment, not without some argument.  The cautious Cotton still refused to attack. A company from Kingston (led by Capt. Peleg Wadsworth), perhaps seeking to atone for their now-unfortunate town name, advanced without orders to within firing range of the British camp. Ish was about to get hectic.

However, there were no British to kill. The British garrison, who would have surrendered if fired upon, had instead run like a scalded dog.

The schooner Hope, along with two smaller sloops (the sloops had been "prest" into service, and were two of the first AmRev prizes taken by the British Navy) arrived at the mouth of the Cut River in Green Harbor. They gathered up the soldiers and whatever Loyalists they could find and fled for Boston. The citizens of Marshfield alerted the British to the arrival of the ships by firing guns from Signal Hill. These were the only shots fired in the Battle Of Marshfield.

Then, the ass-kicking began. The South Shore is interesting, if not unique, in that our violence goes down after the troops leave.

Escape route...

Marshfield had 1200 people at the time, and only a few of them could get on those ships. Everyone else was left to fend for themselves, as the British Army and Navy were busy up in Boston.

Marshfield, a Tory town without the necessary Tory army to keep it safe, exploded in an orgy of assaults, tar-n-featherings, jailings, property confiscation, business boycotts and exile. Whoever could afford a boat ride to Nova Scotia fled. Everyone else stayed, and suffered abuse for it.

"Our fate now decreed, and we are left to mourn out our days in wretchedness. No other resources but to submit to the tyranny of exulting enemies or settle a new country," said Sarah Winslow of Marshfield not too long after the British surrender at Yorktown. Her father said, "I was the butt of the licentious, and had received every species of insult and abuse, which the utmost rancour and malice."

Those who did get away weren't always welcomed back. A ship from Nova Scotia, loaded with returning Marshfield Tories, was refused permission to disembark in the Neponset River by the town of Milton. The Tories eventually were let off at the North River, where they were promptly arrested.

Marshfield, much like someone tied to the Liberty Pole or being made to run a Gauntlet, finally caved in. Three months after the British Army was chased from Green Harbor, a town meeting resulted in Marshfield agreeing to support the Revolution. They sent their men off to fight, just like other towns.

Marshfield, for a long time, had more subdued celebrations of July 4th than neighboring towns did. Some years, they didn't celebrate the holiday at all. This sort of got played out in the 1950s and especially 1970s, as the demographics of the town were wildly altered by urban immigration. The incoming Bostonians loved July 4th, and by the time of my childhood, the Vegas coastline represented as hard as anyone.

Plymouth County towns contributed mightily to the cause. Taking the 300 British muskets they found at the Thomas estate, they marched to Boston and joined up with George Washington. South Shore men were involved in fortifying Dorchester Heights, which forced the British out of Boston. Unlike just about everyone involved in the Siege of Boston, the South Shore men had already seen the British Navy flee before them once by the time the Limey Poofters sailed away from Boston.

South Shore men served with George Washington at Valley Forge, and fought with him at Germantown and Monmouth. Washington was known to favor the fishermen of coastal Massachusetts as rowers. South Shore men also manned a fort built out on the Gurnet. It saw no action in the Revolution, but they got to let off a few shots during the War of 1812.

It is interesting to ponder how the Brits would have reacted if Capt. Wadsworth had decided to charge the overmatched regulars. We know how the immediate battle would have worked, as Captain Balfour told us himself. The Brits would have surrendered with the first Rebel shot.

There's a difference between 100 soldiers and the entire Royal Navy, however. As we saw during the Battle of Wareham in 1812. the British would sail a squadron into town and burn every ship in the harbor for piracy. How wold they react after the loss of a whole garrison, especially if the battle which lost them turned into a massacre? Probably not well.

Duxbury did not embrace shipbuilding until after the Revolution, but they did need their harbor, and had nothing beyond a crude fort to keep the British from sailing in to set the whole town ablaze. Duxbury was a backwater, perhaps not meriting an invasion, but Plymouth was a high-profile revenge target.

Taking Plymouth would effectively cut off Cape Cod and the South Shore from contributing to the war effort, and would have the Brits very well positioned for a march on Rhode Island. The South Shore would have almost certainly got some Grey's Raid kind of action... never drink Earl Grey Tea, it's associated with the son of the Grey's Raid captain who attacked Fairhaven, New Bedford and Martha's Vineyard.

The Battle of Marshfield may have indeed proved to be a Phyrric Phirryc Pyrrhic costly victory, and the whole war effort may have been jeopardized by the desire of some Plymouth County farmers to seize a contested Marsh Vegas front yard.

However, all of that never happened. Colonel Cotton, viewed by many as a wussy, was actually a fine leader. He went all Sun-Tzu on the English, not moving to attack until victory was assured. He cleared out one of the two English-occupied towns in Massachusetts, and he did so without wasting an ounce of gunpowder.

Colonel Cotton is actually twice-famous, as he led a group of patriots in 1774 who tried to move Plymouth Rock to a better viewing area. He split the Rock while doing so, and you can still see the split today. That's a story for another day.

So, as you do something 'Murica today to commemorate the Patriot actions in Boston, Lexington and Concord, don't forget to lay back and twist one in honor of the 500 South Shore bad-asses who chased the British away.

Even the house is crooked... or the photographer.

Aggressive Turkeys Running Amok

You may or may not have noticed the Turkey Aggression going on around you.

Turkeys are not a creature that you should fear, and that headline up there is more me not knowing what else to write than an attempt to start a Mercury Theater-style panic. A turkey can injure you, make no mistake, but we'll get to that later in the article.

In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, and half or so of the turkeys are male. Love is in the air if you're a turkey, as it is mating season. I'd like to meet the person who scientifically named the turkey's mating season "the Gobbling."

Gobbling starts in mid-March, the peak runs mid-April through May, and broods start appearing in June. Turkeys get a bit aggressive during mating season, and can also be touchy when the Bay Bays are around.

Take that, tie it into our headline, and you'll see where we're headed today.

I know that broods aren't supposed to appear until June, but this guy started early and had his Bay-Bay payoff before Tax Day... unless those are hens, at which point I apologize to the turkeys in question.

Turkeys are native to America, and the nation of Turkey has no native, primordial population of them. That's nobody's business but the Turks.

Turkey/country lent her name to Turkey/bird via the European poultry trade with the Ottoman Empire. 

Opinions vary on the specifics (colonists may have mistaken American turkeys for Turkish guineafowl, which was imported all over the Mediterranean from Constantinople/Istanbul), but that's the basic etymology.

Massachusetts was crawling with turkeys by the time the Pilgrims arrived, and the Native Americans were eating them by 1100 AD or so. European explorers introduced the turkey to England in 1550.

As the Other White Meat sailed over from Europa and expanded across Massachusetts, they cut down the forests and used the leftovers for farmland. Turkeys, being both a forest-dwelling bird and a tasty bird, did not fare well following the arrival of Mr. White and his family. Turkeys did not survive the 19th Century in Massachusetts, with the last native one being killed (on Mount Tom of all places, wokka wokka wokka) in the 1850s.

Farmland began to revert to forest in Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution, as farm goods were imported into the state by the new railroads. This presented an opportunity for turkeys to return, although resettlement efforts in the first 70 years of the 20th Century failed in Massachusetts. Part of the problem is that these efforts involved farm-bred, Butterball style turkeys, and they fared poorly upon their release in the wild.

1972 saw the importation of wild turkeys from New York, and these 37 birds (and overflow from neighboring states) prospered into the 15,000 or so thought to exist in Massachusetts today. They were fully situated in SE Massachusetts by the time of a 1996 study.

Remember, kids... you can run down and have one of them, or you can walk down and have EACH one of them.

This talk of turkey resettlement means little to you if you stay out of the forest, at least for most of the year. However, just like humans, turkeys get a bit sloppy during their mating season. This leads them out into your neighborhood, and potentially into your lives.

First of all, they are promiscuous. They are not monogamous... when business is concluded, Tom Turkey is raisin' up off the cot. Toms may mate with every hen in the area. Hens will mate several times a season, and egg incubation takes a bit less than a month.

Early batches of eggs only have a bout a 40% survival rate, primarily due to weather and egg/hen predation.  25-50% of hatchlings survive, with foxes, hawks and chilling spring rains offing the other offspring. Like many rural families, they have large families in hopes of having offspring survive to succeed them.

This is why Tom Turkey is so busy about gettin' busy, folks. He has offspring odds to offset. Pimpin' ain't easy, as the rappers say.

This means that from March through May, the party is on in Turkeytown. Much like high school kids, they care little if business takes them into your yard. This leads to increased human-turkey interaction.

Turkeys get a bit cocky around Easter, as they aren't a major menu item for this holiday. He wouldn't be Doin' The Butt at my photographers in November, I can tell you that.

Turkeys live by a code known as the Pecking Order. Turkeys assign everyone in their lives a role in their pecking order, and this role usually involves attempts to assert dominance. Humans fit into this pecking order, and the turkey assigns a sex to a human based on his/her perception of the human's behavior. A "male" human may be challenged (or deferred to) by a tom and followed by a hen.

Being followed by hens is flattering in a way, but being challenged by a Tom is a bad thing. Turkeys can give out a painful peck, and one turkey attack victim described it leaping into the air and doing a dropkick-style move with the talons.

An adult human should be able to beat down even the angriest turkey, but it won't be a pretty fight and you're probably going to come out of it with some scars. A child or an old person may be less equipped to fight a large turkey.

Don't be afraid to stomp an aggressive turkey. It ends the immediate threat, and it teaches the other turkeys who the dominant primordial beast is. Turkeys are dumb enough to attack their own reflections (they are not thought to be self-aware), and one good smackdown is worth a hundred good arguments with that crowd. The sooner they learn it, the sooner they will regard humans as the turkey-sandwich-eating dominant species.

This might save them from a scenario where they would have to be "removed" from a neighborhood. They don't do trap-n-release with nuisance turkeys. Trapping methods used by hunters in the forest don't work on Elm Street in Suburbia, USA. Suburban turkeys who become a nuisance get the ol' Smith & Wesson haircut.

It takes a village of people beating down turkeys to make a positive change. Everyone has to do it, and they have to be consistent. If you get the neighborhood bully to go beat down the baddest bird, the turkeys will learn to fear just the bully, rather than humans in general. If the next human they see looks like a sucker, the turkey aggression begins anew. If they are chased from neighborhoods, it lowers the risk of human/turkey interaction.

S'up?

Two of my own photographers have suffered turkey attacks this April.

Jessica shot the bottom picture in the article when a flock of turkeys marched right through urban traffic and attacked her car. She informs me that it was very Hitchcockian, but the turkey fled in a minute when she pulled out some Stove Top.

In the picture just above, a turkey attacks the home of Cranberry County Magazine photographer Karen.

Unfortunately for this turkey, Karen has two Rottweilers named Fury and Wrath, they roam the yard from time to time, and they enjoy fresh poultry.

Nature is a cruel mistress, and one man's mommy might be another man's sandwich meat. Ideally, we'd each have our own realm to roam. However, as we noted earlier, the nation of Turkey is full of people...