Native tribes called the Sonoma Coast the “place of churning waters.” The mighty Pacific never stops splashing, crashing, snaking into fissures, wearing away cliffs, grinding rocks into stones, stones into pebbles, pebbles into sand. But the force that parts the seas and moves the waters comes from the wind, which propels the seasonal explosion of life known as Upwelling.
In Greek mythology Iris, goddess of rainbows, carried messages along multi-colored arcs from deities on high to the underworld. Every Spring her namesake blooms usher in a cavalcade of wildflowers that splash shimmering colors upon the earth. Their gifts extend far beyond beauty. In addition to attracting pollinators that ensure survival of their species, Spring’s living rainbows enrich the environment in distinctive ways.
Years ago I learned to sail by the wind on a 26-foot sloop in San Francisco Bay. After the initial terror, I came to relish the exhilaration of skimming across the water, rocketed by gusts and tugged by currents. At times I’d imagine endlessly drifting on the open sea with the sun and the stars as my only companions.
Velella velella (from the Latin for “veil”), commonly known as “by-the-wind sailors,” live this fantasy. Ancient mariners found in oceans around the world, they have no need for seaworthy vessels. They are shaped like exquisite toy sailboats.
On a blustery March day, a squad of volunteers and researchers from the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve take up grabbers and gloves against a sea of microplastics. Our mission: Clear trash from a local beach and document the prevalence of plastic on the...
“Let’s meet in Bodega Bay,” the seagrass researcher suggested. It wasn’t until I saw him waving from thigh-high waters that I realized he literally meant in the bay. Since that soggy first encounter, I’ve acquired both waterproof waders and a deep respect for an overlooked, underappreciated and vitally important marine habitat. Seagrass may, in fact, be a silent savior of the ocean—and the planet.
Blues are bigger; fin whales, faster; humpbacks, more acrobatic. But the nobly named Eschrichtius robustus (aka Eastern Pacific Gray)— splotched, blunt-headed, stout and muscular–is nothing less than amazing. World Whale Day, celebrated the third Sunday of February, is an ideal time to celebrate their awesomeness.
“Do you know what whale breath smells like?”
Our captain doesn’t wait for a reply.
“Rotten broccoli!” he bellows as a humpback spouts a few yards from our boat.
Awed by its size and unexpected stench, I almost forget that these majestic giants are, like us, air-breathing, warm-blooded, baby-nursing mammals. But unlike us, some whales have bodies as long as two school buses, tongues that weigh as much as an elephant and hearts the size of a small car, with an aorta (main artery) wide enough for a human to slide through.
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.
I’ve looked at redwoods from both sides now. For decades I lived amid, hiked through and gazed up at northern California’s iconic trees. But it wasn’t until I ziplined to their heights that I realized that they are citizens of sky as well as earth, rooted in soil but soaring into the heavens.
As a little girl watching a Blue Planet video, Madeline Frey dreamed of becoming a scientist and discovering a never-before-known animal.
“I wanted to find what no one else had looked at before,” she recalls, “to study what no one else had.”a nice post-turkey-day surprise.
Frey didn’t expect to identify eleven new species by age 20 — nor did she imagine that they would be slippery, slimy, alien-looking ribbon worms at the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve on the Northern California coast.
