Bay Nature Jul-Sep 2011 Sample

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BayNature

JULY–SE P TEMB ER 20 1 1

A N E X P L O R AT I O N O F N AT U R E I N T H E S A N F R A N C I S C O B AY A R E A

Small-Time Predators, Big-Time Impacts Launching the Bay Water Trail Homecoming for Harbor Porpoises Romancing the Stone with Doris Sloan

$5.95

you see gArbAge SealS See food marine mammalS die becauSe of plaStic every day

the

waShed aShore

exhibit

plAstics, seA life And Art june 25 – october 15

See how a community art project haS turned the ugly reality of ocean traSh into beautiful SculptureS of the marine life we Strive to Save. free admiSSion. docent-led tourS available. visit MarineMammalcenter Art.org to learn more.

generously sponsored by:

c o n t e n t s

july–september 2011

Features

William Keener/GGCR

John Karachewski, geoscapesphotography.com

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© 2009 Yamin Bilal, chochenyonature.com

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THE M I D D L E WAY S m a l l - Ti m e P re dators wi t h Bi g - Ti m e I mpac t s

SAFE HARBOR Welc oming the Por pois es Back to San Fr a ncis co Bay

Grizzlies may be long gone and mountain lions few and far between, but many smaller predators are thriving in Bay Area wildlands and even in cities and suburbs.

Some, such as raccoons and skunks, are doing quite well. Others, such as badgers, have struggled to adapt to the large human footprint. Either way, midsize predators are major players in local ecosystems, so next time you hear the late-night clatter of garbage cans, give a nod to these scrappy survivors.

by Glen Martin

When William Keener got a report of a harbor porpoise inside San Francisco Bay in 2008, he knew this was big news: They had been absent since World War II. Now, Keener’s group of researchers has turned the Golden Gate Bridge into a world-class wildlife observatory where anyone can see porpoises in action. Why have they returned? Did Bay cleanup efforts make the difference? While we can’t know for sure, we can celebrate this rare case of a large mammal reintroducing itself into its former habitat.

by William Keener

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Bay Nature Interview

A LIFE IN GEOLOGIC TIM E Lear ning the Lan d s c a pe with Dor is Sloan In the 1970s, mother and peace activist Doris Sloan was working a nonprofit desk job in a basement office in San Francisco when she got into a UC Extension Sierra field class and fell in love with geology.

The rest, as they say, is history. Over the subsequent three decades spent teaching, writing, and leading field trips, Sloan has done more than anyone to make the complex geology of California and the Bay Area comprehensible and fun for those of us without PhDs. Interview by David Loeb

Departments 4 Bay View

10 Conservation in Action

Letter from the Publisher

5 Letters from Our Readers 6 Ear to the Ground News from the conservation community and the natural world

by Aleta George

8 Signs of the Season And this little spider stayed home.

by David Lukas

Save the Bay sows the seeds of restoration.

by Juliet Grable

On the Trail 12 From Mild to Wild Paddling the Bay Water Trail Enjoy the fruits of a grassroots regional effort to help boaters and paddlers rediscover San Francisco Bay as a destination in itself.

by Andrea Pflaumer

36 Families Afield: Exploring Nature with Kids Hit the beach and watch for hidden life in the sand

by Sue Rosenthal

37 Ask the Naturalist Seven-gill sharks, the Bay’s top predators

by Michael Ellis

38 Naturalist’s Notebook Jail birds make a living on “the Rock”

by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.BayNature.org

s ign s o f t h e se aso n

And This Little Spider Stayed Home We’ve all heard that California is an ecological hot spot, with some of the highest rates of biological diversity and endemic species in North America. A lot of that has to do with the state’s complex geological history, written in steep hills, fault valleys, and other dramatic landscape features all around us. Surprisingly, researchers are finding that this history is also written in the genetic codes of some animals, including a common local spider called the California turret spider.

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Marshal Hedin

Turret spiders are part of an ancient lineage of arachnids called mygalomorphs, which swing their fangs down like pickaxes rather than pinching them in from the sides like most modern spiders. Tarantulas and trapdoor spiders are also part of this group, and California turns out to be one of the world’s epicenters for myga­ lomorph diversity. (above) Turret spiders— It takes a trained eye to related to tarantulas spot turret spiders because and trapdoor spiders— are found only in they’re only three quarters of an inch long and they hide California. (right) Turret spiders spend most of in the ground. But once you their lives in silk-lined learn to spot their burrows burrows. Watch for their you might notice they are distinctive turrets next astonishingly abundant. time you’re walking in Although they live in the moist woodlands. ground, each spider makes its own “turret,” a silken tube held erect by field” because the spiders lurk just inside soil and plant materials, that rises up to the entrances of their burrows, rushing an inch above its underground burrow. out with incredible speed and venomous Turret spiders are found only in Califangs when they feel the vibrations of fornia, and only in moist woodlands, approaching prey. But competition for and nearly always on north-facing slopes. food probably means that many spiders Look for them on hillsides along trails, go months without a meal. on stream banks, or along road cuts, Vincent discovered that turret spiders where their burrows (turrets) can be so end up in such dense congregations be­dense that 15 might be found in an area cause they are highly susceptible to dehythe size of this page. dration, so young spiderlings build burLeonard Vincent, a professor at Fulrows immediately around their mother’s lerton College who studied a population burrow. The alternative is roaming in of turret spiders for two years, notes that search of new homes and likely dying if an insect falling on the ground amid these they’re forced to cross an opening in the burrows would find itself “in a mineforest. Once settled in their new burrows,

females are thought to live 16 years, and they never wander nor even leave their burrows. Males only leave their burrows once, in August or September of their eight or ninth year, when each one makes a heroic effort to find a female and mate before he dies.

It is turret spiders’ reluctance to wander that has caught the attention of Marshal Hedin, an associate professor at San Diego State University, and Jim Starrett, now at UC Riverside. “These spiders are like rocks that don’t move,” Hedin says, and because they split off from their closest relatives 80 to 100 million years ago, the distribution of their extremely sedentary subpopulations has become like a fine-tuned map of California’s paleohistory.

Analysis of hundreds of genetic samples reveals that instead of a single species, there are at least eight species of California turret spiders, and even these eight species can be further divided into distinct subpopulations separated by obstacles in their environment.

What is most intriguing is the way that these populations reflect prehistoric events no longer apparent in the modernday landscape. For example, the turret spiders in Monterey match those found around Chico, and it is thought that they rafted downstream on an ancient paleo-river that emptied to the ocean near Monterey. And a Pleistocene embayment that once cut across the San Francisco Peninsula through the Colma Gap on the south side of San Bruno Mountain at Colma is now vividly mirrored in a sharp genetic separation in turret spider populations to the north and south of the gap, even though there is no visible reason for the split now.

The work in Hedin’s lab is ongoing and much remains to be learned, but if one easily overlooked spider can reveal so many hidden secrets about California’s ancient past, just imagine what else is waiting to be discovered.

Marshal Hedin

by david lukas

Delta EcoTours

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by juliet grable

co n s er vat ion in a c t i o n

Juliet Grable

Sowing the Seeds of Restoration

Students from Hillsdale High School transplant

Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline is a sliver of green fringing San Leandro Bay. Cheek by jowl with Interstate 880, the Oakland airport, the Coliseum, and Alameda, it’s about as urban a setting as you can find. Yet the marsh here supports some of the highest densities of endangered California clapper rails in the entire San Francisco estuary.

This park is home to Damon Slough, site of the first restoration project under­ taken by the nonprofit Save the Bay. Tucked nearby is one of the group’s two native plant nurseries, created to supply seedlings for the group’s five restoration projects around the Bay. On a blustery day in April, a dozen volunteers stand in the garden’s shade house bundled up in sweatshirts listening to Dylan Chapple, Save the Bay’s restoration specialist. “This year Save the Bay turns 50,” he begins. “If we had tried standing next to San Leandro Bay 50 years ago, it would be a little stinky — sewage flowed directly into the Bay.” Both the Bay and the organization have come a long way since then. Today, 10

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monkeyflower seedlings at Save the Bay’s Palo Alto Baylands nursery.

several flats of sticky monkeyflower seedlings wait on the nursery’s benches.

Volunteers will separate the fingernailsize plants and transplant each one to a long yellow tube called a stub. Next winter the plants will go into the ground.

Save the Bay’s restoration sites mostly target the transition zone just uphill of tidal marshes. These narrow regions support a variety of species and shelter creatures seeking refuge during high tides.

Since 1850, 90 percent of Bay tidal marshes have been lost, but development destroyed even more of the transition zone. And unlike tidal marsh, which can recover with little more than a breached levee, a degraded transition zone will remain so without intervention.

“The stuff around the edges needs our help,” Chapple explains. “Our first goal is to get the soil back in shape to support natives.”

Between its Oakland nursery, established in 2002, and another at Palo Alto

Baylands, established in 2004, Save the Bay grows 33 different species of native plants, most from seed hand-collected in the watershed associated with each project. Last year staff and volunteers transplanted 25,000 seedlings to the field.

The program’s reliance on volunteers can’t be overstated. This year, over 5,000 individuals will donate 20,000 hours, the equivalent of 10 full-time employees.

The volunteers at the Oakland nursery are a mix of veterans and newcomers, hailing from Oakland, Berkeley, Moraga, and Alameda. Mary Beth Tanner and her son Ben are here for the first time. Ben, who is volunteering as part of a student service project at Campolindo High School, says the public tv documentary Saving the Bay inspired him to choose a project focusing on environmental restoration. “You can’t have good economics without a good environment,” he says.

Alan Tong started coming to the Oakland nursery five years ago. “I realized I wasn’t getting out much, so I decided to combine trips with doing positive work.”

The following Wednesday, a different group of volunteers at Palo Alto Baylands gets to test-run the newly constructed greenhouse, which should ensure better seedling survival rates.

Volunteers here are also transplanting sticky monkeyflower. High school junior Maroun Abiramia teases out a tiny seedling with impressive roots. “You have to be gentle with them,” he says, holding it up for his friends to admire. He and his classmates from Hillsdale High School are happy with the hands-on work. “We should be doing things other than just absorbing information.”

Dorothy Bair agrees. She and a colleague are repeat volunteers from Arden Realty, which grants paid time off for community service. “The fact that we get outside is wonderful,” says Bair.

At the end of the day, Chapple thanks the volunteers, invites them back, and urges them to share what they’ve learned.

“That’s really the most important thing you can do,” he says. “If people don’t know about something, how can they care about it?”

Learn more at savesfbay.org/volunteer and savesfbay.org/50years.

View from Windy Hill © 2007 Karl Kroeber

preserve open space close to home

Peninsula Open Space Trust 222 High Street, Palo Alto, California 94301 (650) 854-7696 www.openspacetrust.org

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Daily Hawkwatching 10am—2pm Hawk Talks at Noon (Weekends, Sept.–Oct.) Learn about raptors, see a banded bird, and more Details: (415) 331-0730 www.parksconservancy.org The Golden Gate Raptor Observatory is a program of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in cooperation with the National Park Service.

Red-shouldered Hawk by Walter Kitundu

j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1

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habitats of

the East Bay Regiona l Parks This story is part of a series exploring significant natural habitats and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), many of which are encountered in other parts of the Bay Area as well. The series is sponsored by EBRPD, which manages 65 parks, reserves, and trails covering more than 100,000 acres in Alameda and Contra Costa counties (ebparks.org).

by Glen Martin

T

he Middle Way

The first encounter is likely to be olfactory rather than visual: You’re driving along and suddenly the car fills with an odor so rank, so palpable, it seems like a physical presence, a creature with black claws raking at your sinuses. Only one thing smells like that, of course—as the old Loudon Wainwright song put it so eloquently, it’s a “dead skunk in the middle of the road, stinking to high heaven!”

(above) Skunks are adaptable insectivores that do quite well in urban environments, where lawns and other landscaping make fine feeding grounds. (left) Raccoons are omnivores that have adapted to eat pet food and other leavings of humanity, though this one in Mount Diablo State Park could be getting by the oldfashioned way. (right) For opossums like this one, there is no old-fashioned way in the Bay Area—they were introduced here in about 1910.

© 2009 Yamin Bilal, chochenyonature.com

Small-Time Predators with Big-Time Impacts

Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

And for most Bay Area residents, that’s where it ends. Roadkilled skunks are generally nothing more than minor if unpleasant distractions, gory little reminders that nature occasionally intrudes on our well-ordered suburban lives. But these highway casualties point to something larger. They are reminders of a great flux taking place at the edges of our awareness, one shaping our parklands, open spaces — even our backyards.

Striped skunks are mesopredators: carnivores of intermediate size. So are raccoons, opossums, gray and red foxes, feral cats, and coyotes — all Bay Area inhabitants. When considered singly, the impact of mesopredators may seem minimal. They don’t have the cachet of cougars or black bears. TV cameras don’t show up when a raccoon or opossum raids a garbage can. But what they lack in size, they make up in sheer abundance. They shape basic ecological processes by what they eat and by where and how they live. They demand our attention — even our respect and admiration — for their resilience and toughness. This, after all, is their time: In an increasingly urbanized world, the mesopredator reigns supreme.

In a 2009 article published in the journal BioScience entitled “The Rise of the Mesopredator,” the authors describe a phenom-

enon known as “mesopredator release”— the rapid population growth of intermediate-size mammalian carnivores in the absence of larger top predators. The Bay Area is an epicenter of mesopredator release. Mesopredators are happy to live with — and off — us. Our homes are often, quite literally, their homes. They thrive on our garbage, on the pet food we leave on our back porches, on the mice and rats our refuse attracts. For many mesopredator species, we are indulgent benefactors. For others, we are easily circumvented obstacles.

“One thing’s for sure,” observes Doug Bell, the wildlife program manager for the East Bay Regional Park District.

“We have healthy numbers of them. In general, they are superb culture followers — we provide them everything they need. They flourish in urban interface areas, in our buildings and gardens.”

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f all the region’s mesopredator species, none is thriving more extravagantly than the raccoon. This is pretty evij u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1

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Joseph E. DiDonato, Wildlife Consulting & Photography

Trish Carney, trishcarney.com

dent to anyone who has driven Bay Area roads, lived in a Bay Area suburb, or even left a bowl of dog food on the back porch.

“We get lots of raccoons — about 150 a year,” says Susan Heckley, wildlife rehabilitation director for Walnut Creek’s Lindsay Wildlife Museum. “That’s way more than any other species.”

Reginald Barrett, professor of wildlife management at UC Berkeley, says the research on Bay Area raccoons is scant: Most of the work has been done in the Midwest, focusing on the species’ impacts on waterfowl.

But Barrett does recall a recent senior thesis that at least sketches the general dimensions of the local raccoon situation.

“The student gathered several years’ worth of information on raccoon roadkills in Berkeley’s city limits and combined it with mapping and field research,” he says. “The bottom line is that Berkeley needed a minimum population of around 800 raccoons to support the annual mortality rate. The student discovered many if not most of them were living in storm drains. He’d shine his flashlight in a drain, and there’d be all these beady little eyes looking back at him.”

Heckley says our neighborhoods might be even more raccoonfriendly than open lands.

“Subdivisions are simply an expansion of their preferred habitat,” she says. “Sheds and crawl spaces give them the dark, quiet places they need to hole up. They get food from pet dishes, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees, water from swimming pools and birdbaths. I think we have higher raccoon density in the suburbs than in our local parks and wildlands.”

And many Bay Area residents are active — or at least complicit — in raccoon care and feeding. Most people suffer a few raccoons feeding opportunistically on pet food left on the back porch. But other folks purposefully spread a groaning board for raccoons; they are besotted with the little masked predators.

“One woman who lived near Tilden Park was feeding about 30 raccoons a night,” Barrett says with a sigh. “That would have to be considered an artificially high population under any circumstances.”

(left) This pair of bobcats (male on left, female on right) was seen at Sunol Regional Wilderness, not far from the parking area. (above) Though coyotes thrive alongside people, roads do pose a danger to them, as they do to other mesopredators. (below) Lowslung and hard to see, nocturnally active badgers seem especially susceptible to becoming roadkill.

Like raccoons and opossums, skunks are relatively fecund breeders, with sexually mature females producing one litter a year of one to five kits.

They are solitary animals by nature — which is just fine with everything else that shares their habitat. Virtually all mammals give them a wide berth. Barrett has been involved in a remote camera project around water sources on San Benito County ranchlands for several years, and he notes it has been particularly instructive when it comes to striped skunks and their interactions with other animals.

“We’ve recorded virtually all the region’s major [mammalian] predators, including mountain lions, coyotes, and badgers,” Barrett says. “But when a skunk comes down to water, everything else disappears. A skunk with its tail up is a signal everything

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accoons have a couple of peers in the Mesopredator Success Sweepstakes: opossums and the aforementioned striped skunks. The only North American marsupial, Virginia opossums — as their name suggests — are not native to California. Introduced to the state in the early 20th century, they have since spread to all but alpine and desert habitats. They are prolific breeders and feed on everything from carrion to small mammals, insects, and fresh fruit. They also dote on garbage and pet food and find crawl spaces, outbuildings, and old cars congenial habitations. Not surprisingly, they are abundant in the Bay Area.

Bruce Finocchio, dreamcatcherimages.net

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David Jesus, davidjesus-naturephotography.com

(right) A long-tailed weasel

understands.” (The exceptions to this rule, Barrett adds, are great horned owls, which prey on skunks with enthusiasm.)

While striped skunks will eat pet food occasionally, they are largely insectivorous. But habitat disruption can play to their favor; suburban landscaping constitutes a convenient buffet.

“Lawns are ideal foraging habitat for skunks,” Heckley says.

“They really like to dig around in them for grubs and beetles.”

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Bruce Finocchio, dreamcatcherimages.net

ven those mesopredators that require environments somewhat more expansive than a suburban backyard are thriving in the Bay Area, thanks to the region’s abundant open spaces — national, regional, county, and state parks and protected watersheds. Among these are two species that were de facto apex predators here 20 years ago: bobcats and coyotes. They have been “demoted” to mesopredator status in the past couple of decades only because of the reappearance of mountain lions.

Of the two, bobcats are the more elusive, but their populations are healthy, particularly in the East Bay and North Bay. “They’re seen fairly often,” says the park district’s Doug Bell. “In some areas, they seem unalarmed by humans who aren’t acting in a threatening way.”

If bobcats are reasonably numerous, coyotes are positively ubiquitous. They’re common in most of the large parks and open spaces of the East Bay, North Bay, and Peninsula and are seen with increasing frequency in the Bay Area’s smaller parks, particularly those with riparian zones. They are often spotted foraging for voles, pocket gophers, mice, and ground squirrels on grassy hillsides, in croplands, even along highway medians.

“When I was with the [East Bay] parks, most of our [wildlife] complaints came from two species,” recalls Joe DiDonato, a consulting conservation biologist who served nearly 20 years as a wildlife biologist with the East Bay Regional Park District.

“First were black-tailed deer. Then came coyotes. I certainly don’t consider them a big public threat. But they’d follow hikers, chase dogs — and they’re especially hard on cats. We had one in particular, a flop-eared guy that worked the parklands around El Cerrito. He killed at least 30 cats — and those were just the ones we knew about.”

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ndeed, cats — feral cats — also make up a significant portion of the Bay Area’s mesopredator biomass. This is worrisome for biologists, given that Felis catus is an introduced nonnative species and public enemy number one for songbirds, particularly groundnesting varieties. “Cats have a significant impact [on native wildlife]” says DiDonato, citing a University of Wisconsin study that concluded feral and domestic cats kill at least eight million wild birds in the state annually. The issue is further complicated

in a culvert near a resi­ dential area in Danville.

Weasels are ferocious predators—one biologist who tried to handle them described them as “greased lightning.”

Though not commonly seen, they are relatively plentiful near wetlands. (below) Gray foxes, on the other hand, prefer uplands, and are even known to climb trees.

by the emotional bond many people share with cats, domestic or feral. House cats are often dumped at parks by owners unable or unwilling to care for them, and some feline advocates feed feral cats despite specific proscriptions against the practice in many jurisdictions. Attempts to eliminate feral cats on pub­lic lands are often met with fierce resistance by animal rights activists.

The Audubon Society has long been at forefront of the feral cat battle, but these days it’s emphasizing education more than confrontation. “It’s a basic fact — people are deeply concerned about their pets,” says Gary Langham, the director of bird conservation for California Audubon. “Are feral cats a problem? Yes. But in suburban and urban environments, mesopredators in general, introduced or not, can have significant impacts on birds. Proportionately, there’re more of them than there would be in a ‘natural’ system, and you see the impacts on their prey species. So to achieve more balanced ecosystems in areas top-heavy with mesopredators, more apex predators are needed.”

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he Bay Area supports two fox species: the indigenous gray fox and the larger nonnative “lowland” red fox. The latter was introduced from the eastern United States for fur farming and sport hunting in the late 19th century and was well established in the Bay Area by the late 1970s. (The Sierra Nevada red fox is native to California and is endangered across its range.)

Grays and reds vary markedly in genetics, appearance, and behavior. The gray fox is smaller and prefers to forage in uplands.

It is the only North American canid that can climb trees, often j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1

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C

avallo Point at Fort Baker

is not just a place to watch sailboats go by as the morning sun illuminates the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s also a great place to watch the water surge in and out with the tides.

And with a little patience, you might see a black dorsal fin cut

Welcoming

the swirling water, followed by another, smaller fin. A mother harbor porpoise and her calf are rolling at the surface, entering the Bay. In the calm of a slack tide, if they come close enough, you can hear them breathe: two sharp chuffs.

William Keener/GGCR

The old sailors called them “puffing pigs.” Even the word “porpoise,” from the Latin porcus piscis, means “pig fish.” Of course, they are neither fish nor pig; they are marine mammals or, more precisely, cetaceans (the family that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises). Blunt-snouted and stocky creatures, they have plenty of blubber to keep them warm. But they are agile in the water, with powerful flukes that propel them easily through swells and currents.

Standing on this rock at the southern tip of Marin County today, you can often see porpoises swimming past in groups of two or three. From the much higher vantage point of the Golden Gate Bridge, you might count as many as 20 or 30. Through the green water you can watch them traveling, or loafing, or spinning on their sides as they make a dash for a fish, then pop up beneath a flock of excited gulls.

(above) Focusing on a porpoise more than 200 feet below, Isidore Szczepaniak is a cofounder of Golden Gate Cetacean Research, a team of marine biologists studying the animals from their boat and the Golden Gate Bridge. (right) A harbor porpoise surfacing beneath the bridge gets the attention of a flock of western gulls and a Brandt’s cormorant looking for the chance to catch any fish the porpoise might drive to the surface.

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Such sightings are all the more remarkable because for many decades porpoises weren’t seen inside the Bay. Now, however, the Bay Area is one of the few metropolitan areas in the world where you can see cetaceans every day.

More than a wildlife spectacle, the presence of these shy animals could be telling us something positive about the health of the Bay ecosystem. Big mammals, especially carnivores, are in decline everywhere. Unless humans intervene, as with the wolves reintroduced to

Porpoises Back to San Francisco Bay

by William Keener

Yellowstone, they rarely make a comeback. Yet it’s happened here— the porpoises have “reintroduced” themselves to San Francisco Bay.

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o one predicted the return of the porpoises. Ever since I started whale-watching here in the 1970s, I had only seen them west of the Golden Gate, mostly as they fled our approaching boat. In the late 1980s, I was on a team of biologists hired to conduct a census of

William Keener/GGCR

Safe Harbor

harbor porpoises in the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. During three years of boat-based surveys, we never spotted a single porpoise east of the bridge.

But we know they used to be here. Bones found in the Emeryville shellmound suggest the local Ohlone people consumed harbor porpoises in small quantities for some 2,000 years. In a mid-19th-century report, West Coast whaler Charles Scammon said of harbor porpoises, “They feed upon fish, and are occasionally taken in seines that are j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1

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n a t u r a l i s t ’s

b y 38

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