The beach attracts creatures of every sort: two-footed, four-pawed, finned, furry, feathered, scaly, slimy, slithering. With local animal trackers, I’ve trailed rabbits and raccoons, geese and gulls, deer and otters to observe how they “do beach.” But I never thought of looking at humans in the same way.
The streets where I live are named for California birds: Heron, Gull, Swan, Osprey, Loon. When I tell people my address, some ask if I ever see real pelicans on their namesake loop. Indeed I do. From early summer into fall, Brown Pelicans glide over our neighborhood almost every day.
In The Blob, a 1958 horror movie, a gelatinous people-eating alien terrified a small town as it devoured residents and grew bigger, redder and more voracious. The film became a drive-in favorite and a sci-fi cult classic. More than half a century later the entire West Coast of North America faced a very real and even more dangerous Blob. In the winter of 2013/2014 a “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” of high pressure, as meteorologists described it, clamped over the north Pacific like a lid, stalling winds and blocking storms. Warmer-than-normal waters spread, eventually covering about 3.5 million square miles from Alaska to Mexico—an area larger than the contiguous United States.
