Stephanie and I leap out of her car, race to the end of the dock and call to the 45-foot sailboat that is pulling away. We are 23 years old, one year beyond graduation (me with a degree in plant ecology) and with the vigor and impulsiveness of youth we had spent the night wandering around San Francisco. But we got lost looking for the marina in the morning. Probably not a great first impression on the three passengers standing on the rear deck of the sailboat as it turned around and came back for me, Stephanie hugging me goodbye and waving me off before she returned to Palo Alto. Also, not a great impression on the captain who had so generously offered his sailboat and his time to ferry us on the six-hour, 30-mile trip from San Francisco to the Farallon Islands. The Farallons, also known as the "Galapagos of California", are a breeding colony for 13 species of seabirds; the largest in the contiguous U.S., with over 300,000 birds spending their spring and summer there every year. The islands and their avian inhabitants are all managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service with assistance from Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO)[1]. We four volunteers were going to be helping two paid biologists from PRBO monitor the progress of the breeding birds on the largest of the two islands, Southeast Farallon Island ("SEFI" in my journals and letters home). Manuel, a fellow Stanford grad, had volunteered on the island the year before and enthused about the experience. Although I had never studied marine biology, I was an avid bird watcher, so I thought "why not"? I sheepishly board the vessel, apologizing effusively and accepting a breakfast of muffins and apricots from the captain. As we sail under the Golden Gate bridge, the wind picks up, the sea turns rough and the boat starts to jerk and roll. It's not long before I am crouched on the deck, gripping the lifelines and puking up my breakfast. Seasick, cold, tired and lonely, was I now regretting my impulsive decision to abandon my search for a forestry job for a volunteer gig in marine biology?
We pull into a tiny bay on the east side of Southeast Farallon and I climb shakily to the deck to get my first view of what is to be my home for the next six months, March to August. The island rises steeply to a height of 350 feet, bare gray granite topped by the turning mirror of the lighthouse. The 70-acre terrace stretches a quarter mile from the base of the lighthouse hill to the intertidal and is covered sparsely with a pale green low-lying spongy plant I only remember as "Farallon weed". An orange inflatable skiff motors towards us, piloted by Bill Sydeman, one of the PRBO biologists. He has a goatee, dark hair curling around his ears, and wears a navy pullover stretched over his belly. The four of us transfer from the sailboat to the skiff, timing our leap to the swells that rock the two vessels in an asynchronous dance. The captain hands down duffels, groceries and other supplies. As we motor away from the sailboat towards the shore, I notice that there is no beach to land the skiff on, just a steep 30-foot wall of sea-soaked granite.
"What now?" I think to myself, holding back tears.
As we near the rocks I see a 15-foot crane mounted at the crest of the rock wall, with a slight, red-haired and -bearded figure standing beside it. Steve Emslie, the other PRBO biologist, turns on the crane and the boom swings over the skiff as we bob in the swells. Bill fixes the heavy metal hook to a ring on the metal cage framing the skiff which in my woozy state I did not notice when I stumbled on board. I take a sharp intake of breath as the skiff lifts off the water, startled by the abrupt transition from sea to air. We float towards the top of the rocks and are gently set down on land.
"At last", I sigh to myself.
The six of us unload the skiff and carry the gear up the path away from the landing. Western Gulls wheel and call in the pale blue sky above the terrace. The quarter mile walk from the landing brings us to the field house, formerly the light house keeper's family residence (the light is now remotely operated and does not require in-person support). The house is peak roofed and two-storied, with walls of weathered cement blocks, built sturdily to withstand ocean gales. Steve and Bill point us to the balustraded staircase, and we carry our belongings up to the three bedrooms. George and Bev, a couple, take the back bedroom whose windows look up the cliff face directly behind the house. Laurel, a friend of George and Bev's, and I take one of the front bedrooms, with a view across the terrace out to sea. Steve and Bill had arrived a few weeks earlier and were already set up in the other front bedroom. I choose the bed in the far corner away from the door, set my bag down and breath a sigh of relief at having arrived.
"Wow, it's really beautiful here", I say to Laurel as she places her bag on the bed against the opposite wall.
"It is, we had a great time last year", she replies, not unpleasantly, but I was angling for a bonding moment. "We should go downstairs and see what's up".
Steve and Bill explain over lunch at the large round table in the kitchen that our volunteer duties are to assist them with collecting field data on the seabirds - such as when they lay their eggs, how many chicks hatch, how often they are fed by their parents, if any chicks die, and when the chicks leave the nest to feed on their own.
"Cool", I think, "I get to be a Curious Naturalist", referring to the book by Niko Tinbergen that my stepmom, Pat, gave me earlier that year because it had inspired her at a young age to take up birdwatching.
Finishing up my cheese sandwich and tomato soup, I am keen to get started and naively confident that I will be able to learn all the seabird species, and the terminology and techniques required of me - even though I have only ever collected field data on plants up to this point. But, as I quickly come to appreciate, plants will sit still while you count or measure them, whereas seabirds will not.
*
I am developing a headache, and I feel like my eyes are crossing as I squint through binoculars. I have been trying, for the past 30 minutes, to read the numbers on the metal leg band on one of a pair of Western Gulls standing near the numbered wood stake that marks their nest site. But the damn bird keeps turning away from me. I let the binoculars drop and resist the temptation to fling my field notebook to the ground. Blinking back tears of frustration, I abandon the effort and head back to the field house where George and Bev have taken their turn to make lunch. Birds shriek and wheel above me, as I pick my way among the gull nests, careful not to step on any of the three-egg clusters in the shallow bowls of Farallon weed. One seemingly extra large and ferocious gull starts diving on me - I have probably stepped too close to its nest. The evil creature squawks shrilly as it swoops down towards my head and then lets loose a load of slimy, putrid guano all over my baseball cap and the back of my raincoat (worn precisely for this purpose, the sky is clear of clouds). I can no longer hold back the tears as I scurry away from the nests. I open the front door of the field house, take a few deep breaths, wipe my eyes and hang up my jacket and cap on a hook in the entry way. I tentatively approach the kitchen table and quietly take a seat. Laurel has followed me off the terrace into the house and now joins us with,
"Score! I got the numbers on 10 birds this morning".
I sit morosely and do not mention my tally of 3 birds. I remain withdrawn through the rest of the lunch break, the free-flowing conversation eddying around me - birds seen in other field locales and stories from previous seasons on the island. So many quips and jokes that I can't follow because, I pout to myself, I have never done this kind of field work before, I haven't been to any cool places, I'm so young and stupid.
*
Of all the species breeding on the island, Common Murres not only ranked first in abundance, but they also held primary rank in my affections. In my imagination, they were the penguins of the north. Like most penguins, they are a largeish (around 17 inches head to tail) with a long slender pointed bill. They even have the tuxedo plumage! I also was tickled by the way they arrow their bodies through the air. They are not flightless, like penguins, but are close to it. I spent many hours that spring and summer perched on cliffsides watching murres fly to and from the island with short, thin wings held out stiffly from their football-shaped bodies, whirring into a blur. But when I would see them dive below the water's surface, I imagined them darting, swooping and gliding, seal-like as their now perfectly designed wings propelled them efficiently through the sea. It amazed me to know that they regularly swim to depths as great as 50 meters (165 feet) to feed on small fish.
To see my murre friends, I had to climb the steep slopes backing the island's fifteen-story cliffs. Like many seabirds they breed in dense colonies on rock cliffs, which affords themselves and their chicks protection from mammalian predators such as foxes, rats, and otters. The sight of a winged predator, however, such as a gull or a falcon, would cause them to scurry to protect their chick and me to squirm with anxiety. I also admired the bond between the parents, many of whom reunite year after year and occupy the same site in the colony. And I appreciated their egalitarianism. Different from terrestrial birds like sparrows or ducks, wherein the male takes off and leaves the female to raise the young, murres share equally in the caring for their one egg and chick, as do most seabirds in fact. Murre eggs are a beautiful deep turquoise with black speckles, pear-shaped to prevent an egg fumbled by the brooding parent from rolling off the cliff ledge. After the egg hatches the parents take turns feeding the fuzzy creature that has emerged. Perched shivering on windy cliff faces, I watched single adults leap from the ledges while the other stayed with the chick. And I saw them careening back to the cliff to feed their hungrily peeping offspring, a single fish carried head down in their bill, just the tail protruding from the beak's tip. After a few weeks of practice, I could identify the species in the murres' bill from the tail alone - herring, sardine, or sand lance; or juveniles of larger fish such as rockfish, pollock and cod. By the end of the breeding season, I came to especially appreciate the male parent - he alone stays with the chick after it has fledged the nest and left the island. I was raised by a single father myself, so the dedication of the murre fathers warmed my heart. The miniature murre sticks by the side of their dad as they paddle across the sea, being protected and learning how to catch fish in feeding areas far offshore, not to return to land until the next breeding season.
If you haven't been on an uninhabited rocky island, or far out to sea, you probably have never laid eyes on the Common Murre. I count myself lucky to have had their company throughout my seagoing career from California to Alaska. They have been a familiar sight and have provided many data points. I see them in the hundreds dotting the surface of the ocean as I steam by stationed on the bridge of a research vessel, binoculars in hand, punching their numbers and behavior into a ruggedized field computer. Or I see flocks of chunky dark figures streaming by the ship's bow in purposeful, direct flight. Or I see the fathers shaking their bills and squawking as I motor by in a skiff; bending their head down to their chick as they paddle away from me.
*
I duck out of the wind and climb into a 6-foot square plywood box perched at the top of the northwest cliff of the island, 150 feet above the sea. I shut the hinged, chest-high door of this blind overlooking the murre breeding colony, catching my breath from the climb up the steep slope and relaxing into the relative calm and quiet inside. I sit down on the plywood board that serves as a bench, removing a thermos of tea and a clipboard from my daypack and settling my binoculars on a strap around my neck. I twist the wingnuts holding the piece of plywood that covers a foot wide square cut into the side of the blind. I carefully remove the cover and place my face in the opening, cautious not to startle any of the thousands of breeding pairs of birds below. I breathe deep of the cold salt air and then my nostrils are assailed by the sharp ammonia of guano underlain by the stench of decaying organic matter. My eyes tear up in the stiff wind and my nose runs. Nevertheless, I spend a minute gazing at the expanse of sea, letting the ultramarine blue of the water and the cerulean blue of the sky fill me like a deep calming breath; and another minute grinning fondly at the murre parents and chicks. The grownups are raising a cacophony of growls and bleats as they shake their heads at their chicks or their neighbors. I reach for the clipboard and pencil, fill in the date and my initials on the labelled grid printed on an 8 1/2 X 11-inch sheet of waterproof paper known as “rite-in-the-rainTM" and settle in to identify and count the pairs of parents and their single chick. A subset of pairs has their locations mapped on another sheet of "rite-in-the-rain" posted on the wall of the blind. We have been observing them daily since their arrival at the colony - through egg-laying, egg incubation and hatching. By now, early July, all the eggs have hatched, the chicks have shed their down and grown feathers. I similarly am feeling like I have matured from a naive chick into a fledgling seabird field biologist. Little families of three share the flat ledges arranged across the 75-foot breadth of cliff below me. There are no discernible "nests" as one imagines of a Robin in a tree, but the birds must have somehow identified and maintained their space on the ledges. I record the presence of the numbered pairs and chicks on the data sheet, or their absence - pairs whose chick has presumably fledged since I was there the day before.
The numbers of murres and chicks on the island this year are typical, Bill had told me over breakfast a few days ago. Apparently, a few years ago, in 1983, there were hardly any murre chicks - only 5% of the parents successfully raised one. That year was an El Nino and spring upwelling was stunted. Upwelling, Bill explained to me, is caused by strong spring winds and brings nutrients to the surface and the sunlight, kickstarting the spring phytoplankton bloom which fuels the rest of the marine food chain. The winds were weak in 1983 and upwelling basically didn't happen. This year, 1989, it is plenty windy, upwelling is occurring as usual and the ocean is productive enough to support several hundred thousand breeding seabirds, in contrast to that bad year of the 1983 El Nino. So, I reflect to myself, this is why we care about how many murres, gulls and other seabirds are on the island and whether they successfully lay, hatch and raise chicks - their reproductive success tells us something about the ocean.
"How cool is that?" I think to myself, seated in the blind.
How the seabird parents fare at producing a chick is the sum of the winds, currents, microscopic plankton and the little fish that feed on the plankton. The birds' reproductive success is an indicator of the health of the ocean, much as the S&P 500 is an indicator of the health of the economy. Lifting my gaze to the expanse of ocean stretching from the island to the horizon, I think about how all those hidden processes below the surface are manifested in the fidgeting and squalling mass of birds below me.
After about 45 minutes of being engrossed in my work with binoculars and clipboard, my attention is distracted by agitated shuffling near the edge of one of the ledges. A chick is pumping its legs up and down and flapping its stiff little wings, repeatedly approaching the edge and then backing away. One parent, the female, is on the ledge with the chick gesturing with her head toward the edge. The male parent is now in the water below the nest, peeping urgently just outside the swells that dash against the rock. My excitement turns to anxiety as I see a Western Gull circling, eyeing the scene for an opportunity to snatch the chick when it is away from the protection of its parents. The chick balances on the precipice, it's wings a bumblebee blur of motion and after a few lurches forward and back, it makes the leap, tumbles through the air and disappears into the sea froth at the base of the cliff. I gasp and hold my breath until I see the tiny black head pop up at the foamy surface. With tears in my eyes, I watch as the male paddles lickety-split up to the chick and the two turn and make their way out of the turbulence into calmer seas. I am filled with love and gratitude for the bond between murre fathers and chicks, and between dads and daughters. Would I have become the person and scientist I am today without my father's unconditional and unwavering support? Encouraging me throughout my child- and young adulthood to pursue my ideas and interests? Instilling in me a sense of curiosity and adventure? And most recently, offering a roof over my head between volunteer gigs and field jobs? I say a silent "thank you, Dad" and turn back to the murres.
*
On the chalkboard hung on the wall dividing the front room from the kitchen, is a graph shaped like an "L" with the bottom line longer than the upright line. The horizontal axis (the bottom line) represents time in years. There is a point at each year that represents gull population size on the island that year. Some years the point is up high, lots of gulls; some years the point is down low, fewer gulls. A line connects the points so you can trace the ups and downs of the gull population from left to right, past to present.
Larry stands at the chalkboard, contemplating the graph. He is a newcomer to the field house, having recently arrived on the island to collect data for his research on Western Gulls. He wipes the chalk dust off his hands on faded and tattered jeans, pushes his trucker's cap back off his forehead and strokes his handle-bar mustache.
He says to Bill and me, seated on faded easy chairs facing the blackboard in this living room-turned-office, "There's this downward trend starting in the 1979, maybe because upwelling was weak that year"?
Bill considers this with a tilt of his head and counters, "Yeah, but how do we know the trend isn't an artifact of birds breeding later in the season? That would affect how many birds we count in April. Do you have a correction factor in your population model for shifts in the timing of breeding "? This may have not been the exact content of the discussion, but it went something like that.
Larry and Bill continue to study the graph, pointing out peaks and valleys, scribbling equations on the chalkboard. I lose the thread of their discussion and turn my head towards the window, looking over the flat reach of the island terrace, covered sparsely in ground-hugging tatty green Farallon weed. I can see the remains of the gull nests that at the peak of the season spread from the intertidal up the terrace to the base of the steep slope that rises to the lighthouse behind the house.
"I should head out and check on the Rhinos ", I say when there is a pause in their conversation.
It's the tail end of the seabird breeding season and the rest of the volunteers and Steve left the island a few days ago. Having no plans, no job or relationship to return to, I thought "why not?" and agreed to stay on the island and help wrap things up. There are a handful of breeding birds left to monitor - to record the fledging of their chicks and the parents' subsequent departure for fall and winter-feeding areas offshore, including the Rhinoceros Auklets (a.k.a. "Rhinos").
Bill and Larry nod to me distractedly, not taking their eyes off the blackboard and I get up from the chair and move out of the room to the front entryway. I put on my faded forest green raincoat and my equally worn Seattle Mariner's baseball cap, both stained with bird shit, grateful that this late in the season the gulls have finished breeding and left the island. I don't miss those aggressive assholes (literally), with their squawks and sprays of guano - one had even drawn blood as it extended its feet at the last minute to strike me on the back of my head. I grab my 3x5 inch pocket notebook and a pencil and open the front door of the house. I descend the three stairs and turn to the right along the path through the Farallon weed, stretching out my arms and shoulders, taking long strides, contentedly turning my face to the wind coming up the terrace from the ocean and breathing deep. I head towards the 50-foot cliff where the six remaining pairs of Rhinoceros Auklets are nesting. Rhinos are relatives of my favorites, the Common Murres, and share their blocky body shape, less-than-graceful-flight, strong swimming ability and preference for fish. They lack the tuxedo plumage and long graceful bill of murres, however, but instead have a small horn-like projection on their stubby yellow bill that resembles, to some imaginations apparently, the horn of a rhinoceros. "Nesting" for a Rhinocerus Auklet means tucking themselves and their chicks into crevices in the rock face. I find a spot with a clear view through binoculars of the Rhinos' cubbyholes and wait for an occupant to poke out an eyebrow-tufted head.
"Why can't I understand what Larry and Bill were talking about back there?" I think with a slight scowl to myself. "I love it here, but I don't know, I really don't care about all that population modeling stuff. What Bill told me about El Nino was cool, though". I sigh and then, "Oh! There's one of the Rhino adults".
I watch for a few minutes more and the second of the pair pokes his/her head out (the males and females are indistinguishable). I wait a few more minutes, but no sign of the chick, it must have fledged. I note the date, time and write "RHAU (the abbreviation for RHinoceros AUklet), site 14, 2 adults, 0 chick". After another 30 minutes of peering through binoculars towards the cliffside and recording data on 5 more pairs (two of which still have their chick), I turn back to the path and head towards the trail that leads up to the lighthouse and the Pigeon Guillemot nesting sites.
"Ha, I think, I feel like a farmer checking on her livestock. Taking care of chores".
It's a deeply satisfying feeling. And again, there is the ocean. I recall some lines of poetry by Adrienne Rich (who my dear friend from Stanford, Andrew Shields, introduced me to):
The ocean twanging away there
and the islands like scattered laundry --
You can feel so free, so free,
standing on the headland...[2]
*
Larry Spear was my favorite person on the island and turned out to have a significant impact on the direction of my career. Larry was a world-renowned expert on gulls but looked more like a California redneck than a bird nerd. He was a bit below average male height, yet broad-chested and muscular, with scruffy shoulder-lengthened brown-blond hair. His strong-chinned face featured laughing eyes, an easy smile and his signature handle-bar mustache. He wore formless, faded jeans and loose t-shirts, sleeves cut off at the shoulders during warm weather. Larry lived in a trailer home parked in the woods of Bolinas California, one wall of the main room lined floor to ceiling with cubbies housing his guinea pigs - a small population of exotically plumed and furred friends. As a guinea pig collector, he was avid and deeply knowledgeable, holding one after another out to me when I visited after that Farallon season as he explained its heritage and pointed out its unique features.
Larry joined us on the Farallons late in the season to document the number of "Larry's gulls", Western Gulls that he had tagged as chicks on the island with a metal leg band imprinted with a unique number to identify them. He was now following his gulls throughout their typical 15-year span from birth to death as they migrated back and forth between the colony during the breeding season and the mainland in the off season. This laborious and painstaking endeavor resulted in invaluable data on the life history strategies of Western Gulls - the overall pattern the birds follow through their lifetime to survive, grow, and reproduce, shaped by evolution to fit their environment. Larry had been tracking his gulls for upwards of a decade, traveling up and down the west coast from San Diego to Seattle in his beat-up Mazda pickup looking for gulls in likely feeding areas. He told me stories of scanning garbage dumps near San Francisco with his binoculars as gulls fought over chicken necks. I am sure he also found his birds in more pristine environments, such as river deltas, but that doesn't make as good a story. Larry occupied his days combing the terrace where the gulls had nested, looking for the numbered metal bands on the legs of any of his gulls that remained on the island. In the evenings, back at the field house, he would hunch over a desk in one of the front rooms and pour over his 10 plus years of data.
But it was not just his passion for science that endeared Larry to me. It was also his passion for life. One calm, sunny afternoon in late August, when I was the only volunteer left on the island, he approached me as I drank tea at the kitchen table, and said, with that broad, mischievous smile,
"Libby! Let's go look for abalone!"
Now, I have an inkling that harvesting abalone on this US Fish and Wildlife Service managed island was not permitted, but who was to know?
"Here!", he said, handing me a heavy 16-inch-long screwdriver, "We'll use these to prey them off the rocks".
Off we bounded out the door, across the terrace, and down to the barnacle-encrusted rocks of the intertidal. Despite my nearly 5 months on the island, I had spent little time on the shoreline, and it felt like an adventurous excursion. Leaping from rock to rock, we peered under those that overhung the water until we spotted the 8-inch ear-shaped shells in mottled earth tones of brick red and olive green.
"Okay! Now, slowly, slowly...", said Larry as he crouched within arms length of his target and extended his screwdriver towards the shell. "You just quickly...", and lightening-fast he thrust the screwdriver into the small gap between shell and rock, preying the animal loose before it reacted and clamped down tight.
I had one failed attempt before I was victorious, looking up from my crouching position on the rocks, laughing into Larry's smiling face and proudly holding up my prize for him to see.
We skipped back across the rocks to the house with two abalone in our possession. I managed to light the barbeque grill in the ever-present wind while Larry removed the abalone meat and pounded the stiff muscle into thin patties which we grilled with butter and garlic to sweet perfection. Somewhere a bottle of white was found, and the wine (perhaps also not permitted), the sun, the wind and Larry's laughter had me glowing in a way I hadn't much experienced since coming to the island. I hadn't forgotten those lunches early in the season when I felt so awkward and out of place. But now, late in the summer I was feeling more confident and comfortable having proven my ability to name bird species correctly, record the numbers on their leg bands, identify fish in the bills of parents bringing food back for their chick, and climb 150-foot cliff faces to tally birds perched on ledges or tucked into crevices. And this golden afternoon, I felt joyful in the company of a new friend.
*
When I think about that season on Southeast Farallon, I ask myself: What was it about that place and time that began the pivot of your attention from plant biology to marine science? Was it the wide-open sky over the expanse of sea? Was it the ocean swells spanning your view from the island to the horizon? Was it the plume of a gray whale snagging your eyes as you scanned the panorama with binoculars? Because it wasn't the data that captivated you. Sure, you thought the murres and their brave little chicks were adorable, but be honest, you weren't all that interested in life history - the patterns in seabird births and deaths. It definitely wasn't the squinty-eyed, guano-spraying, screeching gulls. Was it the ocean itself? Its power, even on calm days? Its hidden depths and secrets?
*
When Larry asked me if I was interested in volunteering to assist him on a two-month research cruise from Seattle to Hawaii and back, I didn't hesitate to say "yes". Yes, even though the most time I had spent at sea up to that point were the day long fishing trips off Westport Washington with Dad on small, chartered salmon boats (not to mention the uncomfortable transit to the island earlier that spring). The research jobs I had been applying to at the US Forest Service to study the evergreen forests of Washington and Alaska weren't panning out, so I guess I figured "why not?".
[1] https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Marine/MPAs/Southeast-Farallon-Island
[2] (The Parting: I. Adrienne Rich "The Fact of a Doorframe. Poems Selected and New 1950-1984". 1984. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.) *
* Cited works by Adrienne Rich are relevant to the subject matter of this memoir; however, her views on transgender questions are fundamentally at odds with the author’s values and should not be taken as representative of the author’s position.