Adventure #14 -- Harbor Seals Are Not the Brightest Worms on the Beach

Adventure - Heather

Description: Wherein we set out to fulfill Heather's training in seal counting, at Drake's Estero.


(Marty's Report):

Now, I wouldn't normally go play voyeur to seals, but my Wife Unit has taken up volunteer work with the park service that watches over the seal populations. Apparently, seals, because they are near the top of the food chain (they are predated on by sharks and the occasional orca, and coyotes will go after the pups), the health of their groups indicates the health of the ecosystem. So the park folk need people to go keep an eye on them, which means schlepping out to relatively remote spots on the Marin coast, and doing the schlep work of environmentalism: counting them.

We got up early--well, historically 7am is early for Heather, but with recent morning shifts with Baker Places, she no longer thinks the crack of dawn smells like ass. We got our morning coffees from Javaholics on Balboa, our neighborhood joint where we are recognized by the regular barristers, and where we've spent many Sunday mornings. Heather, who used to be so snooty about the imbibing of the "blood of the bean" ("battery acid" in her pre-fallen vernacular), now has surrendered to the dark lure of a caffeinated life. And since I've fallen off the wagon after a period of righteous abstinence, we sin together.

So fortified, with me in Zippy's driver seat (see here for a full account of our meeting and naming of our current vehicle), we headed up through the morning fog, over the Golden Gate, and into the Green and Verdant Lands of Marin. I don't remember if the fog and overcast continued for the whole drive, but it certainly was there at the coast, as we drove across the rather bleak lands to the north of Pt. Reyes. This the route I'd driven once before with James, out to the Pt. Reyes lighthouse. But we went to the parking lot at Drake's Estero, a long empty beach next to bluffs, that lead to a sizable inlet about a mile south of the parking lot.

We arrived at the same time as Heather's mentor. To do this volunteer work, you have to go with an experienced counter to each site, and in the case of this site, twice. Heather had made it out once, but hadn't been able to find anyone to take her out again. I counseled her to email the mentors and offer to take someone out for dinner if they'd go with her to the site. I don't know if she did that, but she emailed and Ruth responded.

So when we pulled up, Ruth and her cousin Bruce had just arrived in the empty parking lot, the colors of the ocean, beach, and scrubby hills washed out into different shadings of gray. They greeted us warmly and functionally, which was a nice tone for the whole outing, everyone there to do a job, and therefore not much reason to be very chummy. We got the gear together, consisting of lunch and some binoculars and, um, unioculars, and started down the totally empty beach. I was reminded unpleasantly of the 6 hour whale watching tour Heather and I did, through a world of gun metal and sweatshirt grays, sans whales. And vomiting and nausea only second to skydiving. I averted my eyes and walked on.

Then we cut up and started what seemed to me to bushwhack through the tall grass, but Ruth seemed to be seeing a path. Either way, we ended up cresting a bluff and heading down to the observation point, about a quarter mile away from the sand spit where the seal colony had "hauled out" (I'm learning all this new seal terminology). Meaning, the place where they like to squirm their unarticulated worm bodies up onto the beach and plop down for a good nap.

While Heather and Ruth and Bruce busied about with the setting up of tripods and scopes, and then the first round of counting (which Heather can describe in detail--basically it's a clicker and trying not to count), I dug out a novel written by Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Laurette for Literature from the 80's (I think he's deceased). Heading off to Egypt next year, I've been wanting to go prepared, so I got a random novel of his from the library and started it up on a cold-ass hill next to a gray ocean, with a lot of sand. So not much difference, perhaps.

It's a strange book so far, reminding me of Marquez' and Allende's books, allegories about suffering which strike me as at least tedious, if not self-indulgent. I'll keep plugging away at it, if nothing else than for anthropological reasons, but as a personal experience it's not doing much so far. (When I got home I returned to reading my delightfully trashy Elizabeth Peter's novel about Egypt, written by a modern British woman. Telling, I suppose. I've not found yet a way to relate to such novels. It almost feels like I'm having to translate developmental levels, which is a strange process.)

Then I napped, finding a relatively unbumpy 6 foot stretch of grass, until Heather stood over me and accused me of not be adventurous enough. I got up and ate while they clicked away, and then checked out the environs and seals through the scopes. Initially the contraptions confounded me, till I saw how they are focused, at which point the experience of watching the seals took on an amazing quality. The clarity of the image was so great that I felt almost that I was hovering above the critters.

And what strange critters they are. Heather says they are schizoid, meaning they don't really have much use for each other, not even touching like the seals at Pier 39 do. Watching from afar, it seems like just a group of vaguely distinguished dark shapes, but "up close," they're squirming and worming around the sand, including one who was, for no known reason, flopping around in a circle like a dog chasing its tail, but more befuddled about why. Not that a dog knows why, it just pretends it does for the audience.

My adventurousness, however, was drawn at actually counting the critters, despite Heather's seeming idea that it would be fun. There were maybe 700 of them at several "haul out" sites, I was told. OK, good for the frisky buggers.

From there, more bushwhacking, and a walk down along the beach, where we saw cormorant babies up in the Cyprus trees, and a little golden finch in a beachside meadow. Oh, and a mangled headless seal corpse.

When we got back to the parking lot, I got a cup-o-joe at the 12 dollar hamburger joint on the beach, we said goodbyes to the mentor and cousin, and headed back off through Petaluma, stopping at the cheese shop that probably everyone who's gone along the Petaluma-Pt. Reyes Station route has stopped at. I say, I do like cheese.


(Heather's Report):

Poor seals. Either popular and cute or called silly worm-like creatures.

But Marty is correct. They are the best population to count (since it's rather hard to have regular volunteers to count sharks or such) to find out what might be happening in the ecosystems "below" them. Bad fish year, the seals will be affected. Bad plankton year, the fish will be affected, thus affecting the seals... you get the idea. Including human impact, even hikers, oyster farming, possible environmental pollution, etc.

Since I've been toying with this whole environmentalism idea, I had decided to volunteer somewhere to get a taste. Unfortunately, my taste was like a tiny appetizer since it's just been a rather crazy time considering right when I signed up to volunteer is about when I got hired at Baker Places for relief work. And out the window went my time and many possibilities to finish out my mentorship/training. Bah.

But I love being out there, the few times I made it. Drakes Estero is apparently a very hard site to count, huge and with several "sub-sites" that are difficult to see even with the scopes. It is a heavy pupping site as well and pups can be hard to differentiate from the other seals when they get a little older, which is very quickly. 700 at this site is, from what I've heard, low. I take it there can be over a thousand at this site.

So how do you count a thousand seals, let alone 700? You don't. Well, you don't actually count them. We have little clickers for counting. So you learn to take in groups of seals at a time visually and as you (try) to look at each seal in the grouping, you don't attach a number, you just click your clicker which keeps count for you. It was very hard in the beginning for me. Plus having to recount to double check and being so slow at it and then losing your current "grouping" and having to start all over again.

This time, I was a bit more swift and able to hold the groupings in my head more consistently. My counts were similar to my mentors which was a bit gratifying. My first time out I was usually off by a hundred and there were only 350 or so last visit.

But all that aside, Drake's Estero is an extremely gorgeous area, to me anyway. It's quite wind swept and scrub bushy, see out across the hills and ocean. Quiet. I like quiet. I like that sort of quiet that's more quiet in the back of your brain not just in your ears. There's no city buzz in the background. There is only the wind, nature sounds, the seals (they make the occasional snortling (that's half snort, half chortle) and mewing sounds from the pups). There's something calming to me about being there.

I don't know if I'll get to go out again this season, considering the craziness of my work schedule and the fact that the season is winding down but I'm hoping to continue the work in some form or another (maybe raptors next year!!) and possibly looking into classes on conservation.