Claire Peaslee

  • home
  • writing
  • nature
  • action theater
  • current
  • contact
  • sightingsBlog

An ocean-life-death conundrum on an August earth holiday

8/2/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
This borrowed image resembles our sand-crab phenomenon (though our handfuls contained no medium-large individuals).

Comparisons fail; opposites tumble together into the same thing; emotions collide.


On August 1st we walk the path to Abbotts Lagoon, eager for anything we might encounter, glad to be alive. We are three friends, almost alone in the landscape on a weekday morning. The marine layer is overhead – a soft fog-overcast.

Everything along the way is fine, excellent. At the lower lagoon we are met by a lively assembly of white pelicans and Caspian terns, cormorants gulls ravens and more birds. The sand-dune garden is alive with color and texture.

Then we arrive at the ocean’s edge, where a bizarre number of boats are fishing just offshore and some  vultures are attending to a dead pinniped farther along the beach. Our glad wonder persists, even as we inspect the multiple windrows of textured white along the high-tide line: countless tiny exoskeletal bits, bleached and braided into ribbons curving into the distance, dotted with by-the-wind-sailers that are mostly cleaned to cellophane sailboats.

Then we go wading into the waves’ edge, to feel the water oddly warmed by the early strong arrival of the southerly countercurrent. And behold! Come toe to toe with a novel, ultimately perturbing event in the life of the littoral. Our feet detect this phenomenon as we sink up to our ankles into the saturated coarse-grained sand that tumbles in the steep swash* zone along Point Reyes’ great beach. Movement! Tickle! A swarm of living beings agitates among and across our tarsals and metatarsals. Yelps are uttered, and a quick hop executed to free feet from the matrix of... sand crabs. Tiny ones, a thick multitude tumbling about as they try to regain purchase inside the substrate, so many and so small, and evidently at the mercy of a terrifying habitat.

For a while we mess with them, first in marvel and delight, then becoming steadily dumbfounded at the magnitude of this miniscule-mole-crab event. A double handful of sand lifted from the swash seems to yield more tiny crustaceans than sand, by volume. Once set back down, the little beings wave their parapods about and then just lie there, unable to get right with their place. So we try to smooth sand over them, generally succeeding only in revealing a few dozen more individuals to the open air and imminent waves.

Speculation then begins in earnest. What does this hyperabundance of mole crab productivity say about previous generations hatching from beaches into the sea? About the sheer density of these creatures’ larval-stage existence, awash in the California Current? About events in the sea and season that have brought so many, so very very many of them, to the right age and size for settling out on this vigorous, sometimes violent, open-ocean beach. Where they are tumbled and killed and ground up into chunky detritus along the shore, becoming the curvilinear crustacean high-tide memorial.

Point Reyes Beach is ten to thirteen miles long, depending on who’s talking. Standing as we are at its mid-point, the great umbilicus, Abbotts Lagoon, we gaze left and right as if we might calculate the expanse of this mole-crab horde.  Let’s see. Ten miles times about two meters (the width of the waves’ wash) times... how many individuals per unit squared? Here the mind stops working.

Instead, it turns to the question why, and our imaginary science keeps rolling out scenarios. Perhaps there’s been a spike in reproductive output here and elsewhere along our coast. Extraordinary survival of larvae in the plankton flow. Off-kilter currents tossing way too many ashore at one time. Not nearly enough predation here and now. (Where are the sanderling willets and godwits? oh right, mostly up north still.)

Pondering all this, as well as the indelible sensation of a struggle going on atop our toes in the watery sand, we waffle between wonder and mild horror ‒ amazement at both the life energy and the death-in-progress here. There is not really capacity inside us for these feelings. So we stop talking and go sort of slack.

Some time later on we are retracing our steps inland, having spent time admiring a truly great egret foraging in the marsh and an otter mater leading two kits along the upper lagoon. The ocean is behind us, the rim of the overcast visible in the east. We talk of Lammas and the turn of the year. Today is a cross-quarter day that marks the time for winnowing and weeding – discarding whatever is in the way of the most abundant harvest. We name what we are bringing to fruition this time ‘round the sun.

Meanwhile, about a half-mile behind us, there is unspeakable winnowing under way in the oceanic year – death in the swash. We try to embrace the dilemma of tiny mole-crab beings weakly struggling to persist. Failing at this, we speak of the nutrients returning to seawater as so many billions of individuals die and dissolve in the soup.  

Untold numbers blur into a single organism. A huge pulse of bio-vitality merges with annihilation. Cruel accident conflates with the elegant strategy of mole crabs’ life history. Death is generative. We are aghast and encouraged, all at once. We wonder and we pray.

There will be future walks along a gentler beach, watching as gravid female mole crabs hug their harvests of apricot-colored eggs to their abdomens, only to toss them away when the time is right, releasing them into the surge to renew the potential for another crop.




* Swash is an actual term for the section of a sand beach that is washed by remains of waves. It constantly shifts ‒ with the wave height, shore profile, and tide. Its upper limit is the curving line where sea water stops flowing up the shore and turns to wash back into the sea again. See “The Sand Swimmer” in West Marin Review no. 5, 2014.
0 Comments

Digging Restoration

3/1/2012

2 Comments

 
Picture
This week on a levee bounding the north shore of San Francisco Bay... on one side, marshland recovering from abuses suffered over the course of 150 years... on the other -- below sea level -- plowed agricultural land and beyond that rolling green hills of Sonoma County.
In the foreground, 70 children from two quite different elementary schools... to the west, from San Anselmo, fourth-graders from Brandeis Hillel... to the east, from Richmond, sixth-graders from Perez School which they pronounde peer-ease.
All digging and planting and packing and shouting out in unison "plant inspection" and smiling at their own successes and hauling buckets and mulching and going to another flagged location in this restoration design. From California sage and monkeyflower bushes, to yarrow and even saltgrass at the base of the levee, these were Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed.
Nearby, dozens of long-billed curlews foraged on the low-tide mud, occasionally churring and piping excitedly. Harriers and kites over the grasslands, gangs of sparrows ripping around the mature shrub patches. Rain clouds building, welcome.
2 Comments

Wet Sierran meadows.

6/23/2011

1 Comment

 
Last week I spent seven nights on the bank of a classic California mountain stream, where big brown trout  reputedly lurk (wild, meaning they're impossible to catch) in a deep smooth channel filled with snowmelt. The long, broad meadow bisected by this creek was too soggy and spongy and soaked to walk across, but on the far side was a so-called spring reputed to have been and be sacred to Mountain Maidu people. So I went there, the roundabout way, through warming pine groves redolent with scent and over a fence that keeps out the few remaining cattle in the valley. Found a bog, waded through grasses growing out of water, paid due respect. Elsewhere, praised the goddess at springs bubbling up through red mineral rock and soil, drank sparkly pure water. Heard the one (reputedly) Willow Flycatcher on territory in the valley since cattle were removed from most of the land in 2000. Fitz-bew to you, little guy. Thank you, powers that be, for admitting me to this heavenly setting. Earth: what a beauty!
1 Comment

rainbow phenomenon

11/28/2010

2 Comments

 
Day after thanksgiving (yesterday) at Abbotts Lagoon:

Changing weather energy spawned a forceful squall that flung icy rain against our backs. As it raced away inland, the disturbance shone a fine bright rainbow in its wake. Both feet of the little arch (clearly doubled) were planted clearly IN the water of upper Abbotts Lagoon and, glimmering on the water's surface there, visible.  
Picture
2 Comments

quirky Surf Scoters

11/20/2010

 
Picture
As promised on today's West Coast Live radio show (host=Sedge Thomson; website=wcl.org), here's an occasional record of encounters with nature-laughter.

On the subject of Surf Scoters, those natty black-and-white sea ducks that frequent our bays and beaches, the ones you see riding foamy turbulence in the shallows at sand beaches, or calmly swim-flying" right through breaking waves: It turns out they can come ashore to forage, as witnessed five days ago at the Fish Docks area of outer Point Reyes. Normally scoters dive in water up to 20 feet deep and haul in mussels (ripping them right off of substrates), herring roe (ditto), and crustaceans (furrowing them out of the sand). On the day in question, evidently the tide was just right for mole crabs, Surf Scoters' favored tidbit inside Drakes Bay, to concentrate at the water's edge. Two adult male ducks, bright black with white headgear and outrageous bills, came waddling into web-deep water and higher. Occasionally, one would  slurp its entire face into the saturated sand. Or sink  down on his belly an inch or so deep, lean forward, and immerse his head in the mole-crab bisque. The little prey items may have the last laugh, but that's another story. Bon appetit, everyone.

Forward>>