Where the Wild Things Are
Our job on San Nicolas Island was part of an ongoing project, restoring the natural habitat along a three-mile stretch of roadside terrain. The Navy dug up it to replace the water pipe that runs from the Navy's desalinization plant up to the main water tanks on the highest point of the island. Channel Islands Restoration started the project by collecting seeds from all around the island and growing them in a nursery built near the base, and now it was time for planting. The hope is that the plants will grow and propagate, until the entire roadside is full of native plants.
One evening, we got to see an earlier project that had been nicknamed "the Google Site," because the Navy Resource Manager in charge had said he wanted to look up the island on Google Earth and watch the planted area grow from year to year as the plants multiplied. Naval Base Ventura County, which includes San Nicolas, just won an award for natural resource management among the nation's military bases. This guy is serious about what he does.
Like many of the other Channel Islands, San Nicolas is essentially a plateau that was thrust out of the ocean, that the ocean has been nibbling away at through the ages. Almost all the Navy installations are up on the plateau area, leaving the many cliffs, canyons and beaches to the native plants and animals. In fact, the entire southern region below the cliffs - "the San Nicolas Badlands," as one of my team leaders called it - is closed to everyone but a few archaeologists and environmental scientists. But that still gave us plenty of fascinating places to visit after a hard day's planting. We visited four beaches in all, marked by the red boxes on the map above.
Most of the beaches were sandy, as you might expect, but one of them, the "Swim Hole," was carved and molded sandstone, full of weird shapes and shallow tidal pools. Some of the shallower depressions are full of salt crystals, where the seawater has evaporated away. Other, deeper ones, have little dark spiky things, the purple urchins, along with a few blobby sea anemones. And if your eye is sharp enough, you might spot an endangered black abalone lurking under the rocks.
(None of these photos are mine, of course. I had to pluck them off the internet.)
The beaches belong to the Northern Elephant Seals. You'll also see California sea lions, but the elephant seals are bigger and more numerous. You can tell them apart because sea lions have discernible ears and they can rotate their front flippers to "walk" on land. Elephant seals have to wriggle along inchworm-style, although they can be very fast when they want to be. On one beach, we saw a female seal chugging along at an impressive clip, although she had to stop and rest after each thirty seconds of it. We never figured out where she was going.
Most of the seals on the beach were yearlings, not old enough to make the swim to Alaska yet. They came back to San Nicolas to molt, and spent much of the time lying around. We did our best not to spook them, and had to turn back from some spots because of that risk. From time to time, the seals were watching us, but they didn't seem bothered. At the Swim Hole, we were looking at urchins when a big male seal suddenly popped its head and tail out of the water just offshore. Before I could stop myself, I started shouting excitedly about him. He turned and looked at us, and then went back below the waves. At the Keyhole, another big male seal was sliding around on the rocks just below the surface, as graceful in the water as he is clumsy on land.
But the true owners and rulers of San Nicolas Island are the foxes.
I had to laugh at myself at one point as I glanced through my notes, because I'd written down so much about my fox sightings and other things I heard about them. San Nicolas is too barren and too far out to sea for golden eagles, so the foxes there were never endangered like their northern cousins. The number one danger they face is the automobile. You can find them anywhere. A number of them hang around "Nicktown," the Navy base residential area, but I also saw fox tracks in the sand at Red Eye Beach, way over on the western end.
The foxes were scarce for my first few days on the island. I only had a couple of sightings near the plant nursery. (Foxes hold territory as mated pairs - I only saw one at a time, but I don't know if it was the same one.) Then on Sunday, my next-to-last day, I was in my room fixing lunch when I turned and saw a fox sitting in the middle of the courtyard, staring back at me through my window. It stayed there a good twenty minutes, not being chased off even when the hotel manager came out and stuck his cell phone (he's a permanent employee, so he's allowed one) in its face. Then, not five minutes after the first fox left, another one came trotting in. I could tell it was a different one because it had one mangled ear (male foxes tend to beat on each other's ears when they fight over territory) and had a lame hind leg. It was just as bold as the first one, though, and was still sitting out there as we left for the afternoon.
On our last day, things got ridiculous. The foxes were everywhere. While we were planting, we saw two of them come out of their den and go on their morning forage. When we got back to Nicktown, we saw another fox dart between two of the buildings. Back at the nursery, as we were cleaning up and stowing our gear, I spotted the local fox watching us from the bushes. As we worked, we were told to keep the doors to the vehicles and the storage shed closed, because the foxes had jumped in them before. And finally, as we were leaving the Keyhole and driving to the airport, we had to slow down for a fox that was standing in the middle of the road.
There were plenty of birds around, too. I learned what a meadowlark sounds like, and what an oyster catcher looks like (black with bright red bills). Some of the smaller birds watched us working, waiting for us to leave so they could eat the bugs we were digging up. Other birds were not so welcome. There's a population of chukar partridges on the island, big fat birds that take dust baths in our plantings and tear up our plants. They're not native to San Nicolas. Someone brought them there for sport, to give tourists and sheep ranchers something to hunt back in the old days.
I would have loved to take photos of all these critters, or just had more time to watch them. Maybe I will someday. But for now, it's good to know that I was there. They were good hosts for this island visitor.
One evening, we got to see an earlier project that had been nicknamed "the Google Site," because the Navy Resource Manager in charge had said he wanted to look up the island on Google Earth and watch the planted area grow from year to year as the plants multiplied. Naval Base Ventura County, which includes San Nicolas, just won an award for natural resource management among the nation's military bases. This guy is serious about what he does.
Like many of the other Channel Islands, San Nicolas is essentially a plateau that was thrust out of the ocean, that the ocean has been nibbling away at through the ages. Almost all the Navy installations are up on the plateau area, leaving the many cliffs, canyons and beaches to the native plants and animals. In fact, the entire southern region below the cliffs - "the San Nicolas Badlands," as one of my team leaders called it - is closed to everyone but a few archaeologists and environmental scientists. But that still gave us plenty of fascinating places to visit after a hard day's planting. We visited four beaches in all, marked by the red boxes on the map above.
Most of the beaches were sandy, as you might expect, but one of them, the "Swim Hole," was carved and molded sandstone, full of weird shapes and shallow tidal pools. Some of the shallower depressions are full of salt crystals, where the seawater has evaporated away. Other, deeper ones, have little dark spiky things, the purple urchins, along with a few blobby sea anemones. And if your eye is sharp enough, you might spot an endangered black abalone lurking under the rocks.
(None of these photos are mine, of course. I had to pluck them off the internet.)
The beaches belong to the Northern Elephant Seals. You'll also see California sea lions, but the elephant seals are bigger and more numerous. You can tell them apart because sea lions have discernible ears and they can rotate their front flippers to "walk" on land. Elephant seals have to wriggle along inchworm-style, although they can be very fast when they want to be. On one beach, we saw a female seal chugging along at an impressive clip, although she had to stop and rest after each thirty seconds of it. We never figured out where she was going.
Most of the seals on the beach were yearlings, not old enough to make the swim to Alaska yet. They came back to San Nicolas to molt, and spent much of the time lying around. We did our best not to spook them, and had to turn back from some spots because of that risk. From time to time, the seals were watching us, but they didn't seem bothered. At the Swim Hole, we were looking at urchins when a big male seal suddenly popped its head and tail out of the water just offshore. Before I could stop myself, I started shouting excitedly about him. He turned and looked at us, and then went back below the waves. At the Keyhole, another big male seal was sliding around on the rocks just below the surface, as graceful in the water as he is clumsy on land.
But the true owners and rulers of San Nicolas Island are the foxes.
I had to laugh at myself at one point as I glanced through my notes, because I'd written down so much about my fox sightings and other things I heard about them. San Nicolas is too barren and too far out to sea for golden eagles, so the foxes there were never endangered like their northern cousins. The number one danger they face is the automobile. You can find them anywhere. A number of them hang around "Nicktown," the Navy base residential area, but I also saw fox tracks in the sand at Red Eye Beach, way over on the western end.
The foxes were scarce for my first few days on the island. I only had a couple of sightings near the plant nursery. (Foxes hold territory as mated pairs - I only saw one at a time, but I don't know if it was the same one.) Then on Sunday, my next-to-last day, I was in my room fixing lunch when I turned and saw a fox sitting in the middle of the courtyard, staring back at me through my window. It stayed there a good twenty minutes, not being chased off even when the hotel manager came out and stuck his cell phone (he's a permanent employee, so he's allowed one) in its face. Then, not five minutes after the first fox left, another one came trotting in. I could tell it was a different one because it had one mangled ear (male foxes tend to beat on each other's ears when they fight over territory) and had a lame hind leg. It was just as bold as the first one, though, and was still sitting out there as we left for the afternoon.
On our last day, things got ridiculous. The foxes were everywhere. While we were planting, we saw two of them come out of their den and go on their morning forage. When we got back to Nicktown, we saw another fox dart between two of the buildings. Back at the nursery, as we were cleaning up and stowing our gear, I spotted the local fox watching us from the bushes. As we worked, we were told to keep the doors to the vehicles and the storage shed closed, because the foxes had jumped in them before. And finally, as we were leaving the Keyhole and driving to the airport, we had to slow down for a fox that was standing in the middle of the road.
There were plenty of birds around, too. I learned what a meadowlark sounds like, and what an oyster catcher looks like (black with bright red bills). Some of the smaller birds watched us working, waiting for us to leave so they could eat the bugs we were digging up. Other birds were not so welcome. There's a population of chukar partridges on the island, big fat birds that take dust baths in our plantings and tear up our plants. They're not native to San Nicolas. Someone brought them there for sport, to give tourists and sheep ranchers something to hunt back in the old days.
I would have loved to take photos of all these critters, or just had more time to watch them. Maybe I will someday. But for now, it's good to know that I was there. They were good hosts for this island visitor.
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