“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.
“Have you heard of Frank Zappa?”
Visitors touring the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Reserve often seem surprised by my question. Baby-boomers call out answers: Guitarist. Composer. Had a band called the Mothers of Invention. Named his kids Moon Unit and Dweezle. For those too young to recall, I explain that shaggy-haired, iconoclastic Frank Zappa (1940-1993) released more than sixty albums and rocked the music world in a career that spanned three decades,
The first time I spied newborn Western gulls, I instinctively wanted to scoop the downy, dotted hatchlings up and away from a sea and sky of dangers. I needn’t have worried. Their parents had the job covered.
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.
A mile offshore from Bodega Head in 120 feet of water, the captain cuts the engine. The 65-foot chartered research vessel pitches from side to side in steep swells. Ten men, one young woman, and I take our stations at the railing.
“Lines down!” a voice booms.
Not until this moment do I realize that I probably should have considered my gender, age, size, and complete lack of fishing experience before volunteering as an angler for the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program. My life goals immediately winnow down to three: Do not fall off the lurching boat. Do not join the miserable retchers chumming the waves with their breakfasts. And prove to be of some scientific value by catching at least one fish.
Love is in the air—literally. Song birds chorus. Doves coo. Along the northern California coast, ocean-going birds court and breed. Our mission as volunteers for the Seabird Protection Network is to monitor their numbers, nests, eggs, and chicks. But when visitors ask what I’m looking at through my binoculars, I simply say “seabirds in love.”
The purple sea urchin I’m holding doesn’t look like an environmental terrorist—more like a domed pincushion bristling with needle-sharp spikes. I can’t look this echinoderm (pronounced ee-KINE-o-derm), a cousin of sea stars and sea cucumbers, in the eye. It doesn’t have any. Nor does it have a brain, heart, backbone, or blood. Yet urchins, among the most ancient animals, date back 450 million years and inhabit every ocean on earth.
To me, Jim Sullivan seems a combination of Davy Crockett and David Attenborough: A scientist by training. A landscape designer, newspaper columnist, and college instructor by various career twists. An environmental activist, pleine-aire painter, philosopher, author, and drummer by personal passion. A living legend among the hundreds of tracking students he’s trained.
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.
