Ron and Joe have been heroes this week. So has Pica. So have a couple hundred other people working with the Bay’s wild birds. (Heroism is about showing up and doing the work. It’s not about catching bullets in your teeth. It just feels like it sometimes.) You can see some of the work in this Newsweek.com video featuring conclusive proof that Ron’s camera-shyness is utterly unjustified.
Before I bailed and went to the Mojave last week, destined to meet my own little ecological if less tragically literal bêtes noire, I stopped down at Keller Beach to see if any victims were there. There were: a couple of grebes. I called them in, then sat a few yards away reasoning that slight habituation to non-threatening humans would make them easier to catch. Not that they’d have been difficult. One wasn’t getting up, just watching me. The other tried to walk out to the water, swam a few feet and then was tumbled by a two-inch wave. It staggered back to shore.
I called them in to the Oiled Bird center, and told a county hazmat guy about them, pointed them out, and then left, screaming homicidal abuse at my windshield, feeling like I should be canceling my trip to chase sick birds and drive them to Cordelia. I didn’t do that. Thanks to Ron and Joe and Pica and all those others who did.
Instead I went to visit a few other destroyed landscapes. Writing about them is forthcoming.
Tomorrow I go meet the fabulous embee for a quick coffee and perhaps a cookie or two, and then I walk into the woods above Sherwood’s place for an afternoon. I suspect that Sherwood has, today, had a day that may well have been rough in many respects. Any good wishes you have for me to relay, I’ll wish at the Harrington abode from my perch well above it in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Or you could deliver them yourself, because, well, that will actually work.
Update: Oh, and Kat has some news.
