Coming Up for Air

What a whirlwind over the past six months. I’m happy to provide an update from my last post: Dave Upthegrove won the election for Washington State Commission or Public Lands. This is good news for our state forests and possibly good news for the endangered Marbled Murrelet. Dave’s first action in office was to place a six-month moratorium on logging of certain structurally complex mature forests—the kind these seabirds typically nest in.

Speaking of seabirds, I’ve just finished writing a book on the Pigeon Guillemot, the wild-and-crazy cousin of the shy Marbled Murrelet. My book takes a deep dive into the natural history of the guillemot (pronounced gill-uh-mott) and the work of the Salish Sea Guillemot Network. Since 2013, I’ve been a part of this network, which runs a community-science program focussing on the guillemots during their summer breeding season in the Salish Sea. I’m one of some 250 volunteers in the network who spend an hour each week watching the guillemots at their breeding sites in the bluffs, on the beach, and in the nearshore waters.

Over many summers, I’ve learned so much about the guillemot and discovered a deeply satisfying way of birding. I’ve never been drawn to checklisting, but love birding with a group of enthusiastic, curious, and dedicated Guillemoteers. My book is being published in April 2016 by the wonderful Mountaineers Books.

Yes, Pigeon Guillemots is a detour from my plan to write a book on lakes and lake swimming in Washington. But the guilllemots were calling.

Pigeon Guillemots on high alert. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Smith)

The Original Wild Swimmers

What happens when you join other writers and communicators at the Bayshore Preserve to experience the peak of the chum salmon run is that you find yourself, strangely, at a loss for words.

At least this is what happened to me while standing on the banks of Johns Creek staring down into the shallow water watching fish after fish after fish swim upstream to spawn. 

Being at a loss for words as such a time has its benefits. If you’re not chatting or asking questions, you can close your eyes and listen for the chum, which are sometimes hard to see unless their dorsal fins rise above the surface like a shark’s in the ocean. With your eyes closed, you can hear the difference in the sound of the splash of the creek flowing downstream and the thrash of the salmon heading upstream. The sound of a wild fish—its tail driving its whole body against the current—is distinctive. When you hear it, you open your eyes and look for the fish slicing through the water in an energetic burst that lasts mere seconds.

Listen carefully. (Video by M.M Ruth)

Being at a loss for words means you can stand, awestruck and amazed, taking in the sheer improbability and significant risk of such a long and difficult migration from the open water of the Pacific Ocean, through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and through the labyrinth of inlets and passages to reach Johns Creek. 

It’s thanks to the Capitol Land Trust that the public can reach Johns Creek, too. The Capitol Land Trust (CLT) purchased the 74-acre property on the western shore of Oakland Bay just three miles northwest of Shelton in 2014. Most of the property was a golf course back then, but slowly the fairways and putting greens are returning to native habitat through painstaking restoration efforts that also includes creating new tidal channels.

The annual chum salmon run drew many visitors to the edges of Johns Creek this fall, but the Bayshore Preserve offers delights and discoveries year round. Now--as we slouch toward the winter solstice and deck our halls with twinkling lights and flickering candles--is the perfect time to walk the preserve’s trails. Now is the perfect time for a quiet ramble to observe the subtler spectacles of nature—the grand profiles of the bare Oregon oaks, evergreen Douglas-firs, and bright-barked madrones; the newly planted oaks; the shorebirds and harbor seals; the eagles, hawks, heron, and gulls. 

Gulls festing on salmon in Johns Creek (photo by M.M. Ruth)

The preserve includes 27 acres of salt marsh habitat described by CLT as “pristine.” Indeed, when you follow the trails through the preserve and look out over the Oakland Bay marshlands, you may feel as I did that you are in a real place, an original piece of Puget Sound, a living landscape untouched by anything but water, wildlife, trees, clouds, wind, and tides. 

The Bayshore Preserve is open dawn to dusk year round. For directions and for more information on the preserve, visit https://capitollandtrust.org/conserved-lands/conservation-areas/oakland-bay-goldsborough-creek-watershed/bayshore-preserve/

Atlas of the Lost World

This is the 1981 edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World. It is one of several fine atlases I have by the NGS. I keep mine on a bookshelf in my kitchen because it isn’t a Ruth Family Dinner unless we bring a reference book to the table. When my sons lived at home, that book was usually the dictionary; now that it’s just me and my map-making husband, it’s often a map or an atlas.

We are sticklers for a good map key—the explanation of the symbols used on a map. Keys usually appear in a little box in one of the corners of the map. The key to this particular atlas was printed on a single separate card (5 x 16.5 inches)— that works with each map and doesn’t take up space on the maps themselves. The card fell out of the atlas a few weeks ago. I studied it. I have looked at it every day since. And it is heartbreaking given how much the world has changed in 40 years.

Here are the three of the sections of the key and my notes, with all due respect to the NGS editors and cartographers who knew the world back then.

Prolonged drought and global warming has lead to ice-cap melting, coral reefs bleaching, intermittent lakes vanishing. The new limits of drift ice has stranded polar bears; the limit of unnavigable polar ice is shrinking and opening up new passageways. The pale blue color we use to symbolize water is turning green with algal blooms. Global ocean currents are moving in strange ways.

In the forty years since this atlas was published, so many boundaries have shifted or disappeared. We have lost so much of our Tundra, Ice Shelves, and Glaciers. And though Tree Line is associated with elevation or latitude, its is hard not to see these little red trees as symbols of trees lost to wildfires. Below Sea Level is used to be just a matter of elevation of land. Why did it take us so long to think about the social equity and racial justice component of sea-level rise? Our focus should have been on the elevation of human beings,

To list Oil Fields, Oil Pipelines, and Oil Pumping Stations as Culture seems wrong. Other than Parks, there seems to be no culture in the world at all. “Site” has promise but it hardly hints at Culture, especially when listed at the very bottom of the key with Ruins and Battles. Wouldn’t it be great if the battles to save our planet (perhaps symbolized by a green tree or a happy face), should cover the pages future atlases.

Big Basin Heartbreak

The news of the CZU Lightning Fire in California hit home for me this past week as the fire swept through Big Basin Redwood State Park—California’s oldest state park and protected habitat of the endangered Marbled Murrelet. This robin-sized seabird comes inland from the Pacific Ocean to the mature and old-growth forests during the summer to nest on the wide branches of the trees. Big Basin Redwood State Park was the center of the discovery of the murrelets’ nesting site in 1974 in a 220-foot-high Douglas-fir, the kind—and perhaps very tree that held that famous nest—that are being burned and scorched now as the fire engulfs 78,000 acres of Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties. Many of the redwoods will survive—there is some good news here from KQED.

While writing my book , Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet (Rodale 2005 and Mountaineers Books 2014), about this extraordinary bird, I spent much time in this spectacular “big-trees” state park visiting the site of the nest discovery, camping with my family under the very tree where the nest was found, and hiking the park trails under thousand-year-old trees and feeling as if I had walked back in time.

Photo of the author at Big Basin Redwood State Park (by M.D. Ruth)

Big Basin Redwood State Park’s historic Headquarters and Visitors Center burned to the ground (details and photos here) and there is extensive damage in the historic core of the 18,000-acre park, including the popular campgrounds. The headquarters building was the site where the park rangers and historian gazed down on a strange downy chick, saved by a tree trimmer in the August 1974, that they identified out as a marbled murrelet—the first confirmed and later documented scientific evidence that these birds nested in trees. Now this historic building is gone.

The remains of the headquarters building at Big Basin Redwood State Park, the site where park rangers solved the great nesting mystery of the marbled murrelet in August 1974. Image by Randy Vazquez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News Via Getty Images

The 1974 discovery eventually placed the murrelet on the list of federally threatened and endangered species and helped project much of its nesting habitat from logging—the single biggest threat to this bird’s survival. While the redwoods and other conifers are thick-barked species and adapted to withstand fire, the murrelets themselves are not adaptable. Their populations in California and throughout their range (north to Alaska) have been declining precipitously. The increased frequency, intensity, and duration of wildlife is not merely a “threat” to these and other birds and wildlife. These fires are happening now.

Please consider making a donation to the Sempervirens Fund to help restore Big Basin Redwood State Park. The Sempervirens Fund is a non-profit land trust dedicated to the conservation of forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. To the first 20 of my readers who donate $50 to help restore Big Basin Redwood State Park, I will send you a complimentary copy of my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet. Just send me (mariaruthbooks@comcast.net) a screenshot of the to of the email acknowledging your donation and your mailing address. Thank You!

Send me a screen shot like this (with your name in the To field and I’ll send you a copy of Rare Bird!