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.
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.
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 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.
The mission: Construct a home for soon-to-be-born offspring.
The rules: Use only scavenged materials. Carry them to the site in your mouth. Employ nothing but your appendages as tools. Ensure shelter from wind, water, and roving bandits.
The seabirds in love introduced in a previous post set to work. As monitors for the Seabird Protection Network on the Northern California coast, we watch and wonder: Where can these parents-to-be, who spend much of the year over open water, find safe haven on our rugged shore?
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.”
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.
On a wildflowers hike at the Jenner Headlands Preserve in Northern California, Ranger Jill Adams of the Wildlands Conservancy asks what we expect to find.
“Sex,” a voice calls out. Giggling like school kids, we turn to a small woman in a tan bucket hat and sensible boots. “My father was a botanist,” she explains. “He taught us that when you go into the woods to look for wildflowers in Spring, you’re going to see lots and lots of sex.”
