There’s a baby boom on the northern California coast.
Cliffs and offshore rocks that seemed almost lifeless through winter are teeming with seabird families. Through my binoculars, I watch tiny Western Gulls wobbling on spindly pink legs, secretive Pigeon Guillemots ferrying fish into invisible nests, and Common Murres preparing their youngsters for one of the most astonishing leaps in the bird world.
The mission: Construct a home for soon-to-be-born offspring.
The rules: Use only scavenged materials. Carry them to the site in your mouth. Employ nothing but your appendages as tools. Ensure shelter from wind, water, and roving bandits.
The seabirds in love introduced in a previous post set to work. As monitors for the Seabird Protection Network on the Northern California coast, we watch and wonder: Where can these parents-to-be, who spend much of the year over open water, find safe haven on our rugged shore?
Forget Fashion Weeks and designer salons. Every Spring, seabirds along the Northern California coast stage their own spectacle of high-flying couture—with stakes far higher than any catwalk. These oceanic aviators dress, not for success, but for the survival of their species.
The chartered fishing boat plows through the swells due west from the Sonoma coast with nary an angler on board. Birders—sheathed in slickers, binoculars slung around their necks—line the railing. As my maiden voyage begins, cryptic cries erupt around me.
Once again they are on the wing. Along the Pacific Flyway—a 4,000-mile corridor stretching from Alaska to Baja— millions of birds of many feathers and forms are flying south to warmer climes. But none dazzle the eye and stir the soul more than raptors, meat-eating birds of prey that include falcons, hawks, vultures and eagles.
The streets where I live are named for California birds: Heron, Gull, Osprey, Loon, Kittiwake and, in my case, Pelican. When asked if I ever see real pelicans on their namesake block, I am delighted to say “Yes!”. From early summer into fall, briefs–—also called squadrons, pods and scoops—of Brown Pelicans glide majestically overhead.
Over the last 175 years, common murres (pronounced murrs) have been pushed to near-extinction by greed, pollution and a warming ocean. But in a remarkable turn, the “penguins of California” are establishing new breeding colonies and laying eggs on rocks and outcroppings off the Sonoma coast.
Despite their name, common murres are anything but ordinary. On land they waddle in dapper black-and-white plumage. Under water they dive like torpedoes. In the air, their short wings—better suited to swimming than soaring—beat furiously, whirring like wind-up toys. About the size of a football, murres spend most of the year over open water. But each Spring they return to the stony sites where they were born to cluster in densely packed colonies.
They appear like mirages in the dark of winter, burst into full-throated glory in Spring and fade away with the summer sun. Vernal ponds remind me of Brigadoon, the Scottish village in the classic musical that comes to life for one day every hundred years. The first time I came upon a gleaming pond in a field that had been dry just weeks before, I was as stunned as if a bag-pipe-playing Highlander had suddenly materialized.
As I swerve along California’s Route 1, a small brown rodent darts across the road. Looking up, I hear a piercing shriek and see a broad-winged bird hurtling from on high. A few feet above my open-top convertible, the avian assassin, talons outstretched, tail fanned and beak gaping, brakes to a mid-air stop, flounces its feathers and jets back to the heavens. I watch, utterly enraptured.
“So you’re an ecologist?” a doctoral student on a field trip asks.
“No, I’m not a scientist,” I hastily reply. “I’m just trying to get to know my neighborhood.”
With a patient smile, she informs me that “ecology” comes from the Greek words for “study of” and “home” or “place to live.” By this simple definition, I qualify–as, at the least, an accidental ecologist.
