It was only a few years ago, I think in 2021, during an outrageous heatwave that was blistering the Pacific Northwest, when my friend and colleague, poet Randall Potts, said to me, “We don’t have a climate anymore. We just have weather.”
Lately I’ve been thinking of that. It rhymes, you could say, with Nietzsche’s words: “nothing is true; everything is permitted.”
This weekend, about two weeks into noticing the long awaited Super El Niño impacts, including Kelvin waves and loss of nutrients for marine life across the spectrum, sea lions to anchovies, microbes to pelicans, the tide was high at 7 am. At 1 pm, still no low tide. At 4 pm, the bay was a vast expanse of water. We can see the mudflats of the bay from our facility at least once a day at low tide, often twice. But today, no. Yesterday, no. Low tide is so last epoch. No longer in style.
Earlier this season we’d posted about the grim forecast for winter sea conditions that we were prepared to face. Warmer, stormier water means more injured and starving seabirds. Preparation means stocking up on fish, maintaining our seabird pools, and using any lead time to teach new volunteers some of the skills needed to treat emaciated aquatic birds.
Well, first off, as we all know simply by looking out the window, or driving across the Samoa bridges, or reading the local news, the Super El Niño has arrived on the North Coast. Local ocean conditions have been unusual and dangerous for the last two weeks, well before the rain came.
What’s more, for some reason this fall has seen very large numbers of Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) along the North Coast. I first noticed this in late September when a rescue mission took me to the mouth of the Mattole River, at the time more of a lagoon. A pelican who couldn’t fly had been reported. When I arrived the river had thousands of pelicans roosting who took flight circling the wide lagoon, some landing in the water, some choosing another spot behind me, some staying aloft until I retreated. Thousands. They were a sight for sore eyes. Sore, tired, end of summer eyes.
Within a day Humboldt Bay suddenly had many more Pelicans as well, and we began to admit the stray injured adult here and there, – Guthrie Creek, Centerville, Samoa, Ma-l’el, Mad River mouth, Trinidad, Klamath, Crescent City and into Oregon… Interestingly almost all adults with bad injuries – not a surprising number of them considering the thousands we could see every day all around us – but interesting in that everyone was in good condition other than their terrible wounds – hefty even. Given the mass mortality of starving seabirds on the central and southern California coasts, it was encouraging that here on the north coast there is fish to feed us all.
Of course this was in October. By the end of October we were experiencing king tides two months early and unusually big seas. I sat on the the dunes of Manila October 31 and counted 3500 pelicans in an hour surfing along the incredibly big waves breaking the length of the peninsula. Since the first of November we’ve admitted 32 Brown Pelicans with mostly traumatic wing injuries, we presume from the rough sea and surf.
One of the most recent admissions was an anomaly for this year: a starving juvenile. None of those who live in Crescent City and will go and check out reports were available so we drove north to rescue him on Friday the 13th (a very lovely day for those of us who celebrate). The rescue was easy enough. He was right were he had been reported, down an embankment off 101 on the north side of town.
About ten of the pelicans we’d admitted already had come from Del Norte, especially from Crescent Beach on the south end. And seeing the ocean there it was no wonder. The break was right on the beach rolling up to the barrier to the parking along the highway where the RVs like to roost. The surf was a chaos of huge waves ricocheting in every direction, between the beach and the breakwater that makes the south side of the harbor. It was unnerving to see. And to see the pelicans fighting the wind and knowing they had to fight the sea added nothing but dread and worry for them.
But likewise the tide that won’t leave the Bay! Where are the egrets and shorebirds supposed to forage now? For how long will these conditions persist?
Obviously there is a forecast, but as anyone that follows the weather knows, DOGE has messed up meteorology. However whatever happens, as we’ve always done, we’ll be here. No matter, we’ll be here to help the injured, and of course to count and mourn the dead.
It’s hard to discuss money in these times, and someday we simply won’t because clearly the machine intends to kill us all, but in the meantime, seabird pools require, water, food, electricity and a competent and well-trained staff to make them go. Please help us provide those things. Thank you.
bonus: a link to a poem I wrote 22 years that has some emotional resonance for me today: the beginning of california
