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.
The King Tide comes to conquer. Amid fury, foam and thunderous claps, its forces roar on shore and devour everything in their path. White-fringed waves swirl across jetties, smash against cliffs, engulf beaches, inundate mudflats, pummel piers. The unstoppable invader extends its watery domain so high that it seems to be creating the world anew.
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.
Fire up your imagination, and buckle your seat belt. Archaeologist Breck Parkman is sweeping us back 18,000 years to the peak of the last Ice Age.
Deep winter had frozen so much ocean water into glaciers that sea levels dropped by 400 feet. The “California Serengeti,” as Parkman christened it, stretched from Monterey to Mendocino. This vast fertile plain, thatched with grasses and tree-lined streams, “was probably the most spectacular place in the world for wildlife. Think of thousands of animals moving together, living together, feeding together, sometimes feeding on each other. It would have blown our minds.”
Today it sounds almost unimaginable: A 325,000 kilowatt nuclear plant looming upon majestic Bodega Head, within a quarter-mile of the restless San Andreas Fault. An emissions shaft belching steam. Heated water spewing into the Pacific. Electrical cables draped from steel towers along Doran Beach. Six decades ago this seemed the inevitable fate of Bodega Bay, then a remote fishing port with more seabirds than citizens. What stopped PG&E’s plan for an “Atomic Park” was an unlikely band of citizens-turned-activists who became known as the Hole in the Head Gang.
