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.
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 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.
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.”
