Mud sucks—literally. On land, it squishes underfoot and slimes your shoes. In seaside shallows, it clutches your feet and tugs with the ferocity of an angry alligator.
I know. Wading back to shore after fieldwork with Bodega Marine Lab scientists in Tomales Bay, I lost my balance and plunged into what felt like slow-hardening concrete. Every time I tried to pry my foot loose, I lurched back into the sludge. A graduate student reached out to help—only to skid into the ooze next to 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.
‘Tis the season, not just for spooky ghosts and goblins, but far scarier creatures that prowl along the California coast. During Sharktober, which extends from September to November, great white sharks, the largest predatory fish on the planet, are on the hunt.
Every year these lords of the deep migrate more than a thousand miles from a zone east of Hawaii known as the “White Shark Cafe.” Their destination: the Red Triangle, a swath of ocean stretching from Bodega Bay in the north to the Farallones Islands in the west and Monterey Bay in the south. The cold, nutrient-rich waters of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary nourish a rich array of marine life, including seals and sea lions that lure great whites eager to feed heavily and build strength and stamina for the winter months.
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.
The carnage began in 2013. The victims were the multi-armed, jewel-bright sea stars that glisten along the West Coast of North America. They suffered a gruesome decline: oozing lesions, arms twisting into odd shapes and sometimes breaking away, bodies dissolving into a mucus-like white goo.
As vast colonies vanished, ocean floors resembled macabre battlegrounds, strewn with detached limbs and pulpy flesh. Not even those in captivity were safe. Sea stars died in public aquariums, visitors’ centers, university laboratories. By 2017, Sea Star Wasting Syndrome had spread from Alaska to Mexico, with the toll soaring from millions to billions.
The first time I held a white abalone, its muscular foot pressed into my palm, its shell lifted, and two googly black eyes and flexible tentacles emerged. But even more remarkable than the endearing appearance of this iconic sea snail is its survival.
In the 1960s and ’70s, white abalone—prized for their tender meat and iridescent mother-of-pearl shells—were overfished almost to extinction. Today, there are more in captivity than in their home waters off the coast of Baja. But a sudden cutoff of federal funding to the keystone breeding program has put this mollusk at risk—again.
The tracking circle—artist, scientist, librarian, rabbi, teacher, writer—gathers around our leader’s open palm. With unwavering focus, we train our collective curiosity and intellect on what a kindergartener would call poop. We use the scientific term: scat.
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.
A mussel bed along Northern California’s Dillon Beach is as healthy and biodiverse as it was about 80 years ago, when two young graduate students surveyed it shortly before Pearl Harbor was attacked and one was sent to fight in World War II.
Their unpublished, typewritten manuscript sat in the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory’s library for years until UC Davis scientists found it and decided to resurvey the exact same mussel bed with the old paper’s meticulous photos and maps directing their way.
We were born to track; it’s hardwired into our brain. We just have to re-load the software–and slow down.
Seeing takes time. Listening takes time. Thinking takes time. Beauty takes time. Making meaning takes time. Tracking is not a contest or a race. You have to move slowly enough for your brain to sort the appropriate meaning out of what you are encountering. And you will find that you encounter a much bigger world when you slow down. This is a first step toward expanding that world.
