Santa Barbara Coastal Plain and Terraces

The 2024 EPA water quality assessment has added five coastal segments to the impaired waters list — from Coal Oil Point east to Rincon, including Arroyo Burro Beach, Hammonds Beach, and the stretches where Mission Creek and Sycamore Creek meet the ocean. These are not transient exceedances; they reflect persistent conditions that now meet the threshold for federal designation.The trigger is seasonal and predictable. July's low creek flows concentrate whatever pollution the creeks carry — nutrients, bacteria, sediment — into a narrow plume at the shoreline. But the underlying problem lies inland: both wastewater treatment plants serving this coast remain in significant non-compliance with EPA standards. Until those facilities bring their operations back into compliance, the beach closures and swim advisories along this stretch are likely to persist through summer and early fall.

Stand at the water's edge near Montecito and watch the surface. The Pacific is flat and bright in mid-summer, and if you wait long enough, a brown pelican will fold its wings and drop. The bird hits the water at an angle, bill first, and the whole body follows into a brief explosion of white. A second later it bobs back up, tilts its head to drain the pouch, and swallows.Brown pelicans are here in numbers right now, and what drives that is fish. After the breeding season ends on the Channel Islands, pelicans disperse along the coast in all directions, and the nearshore waters off Santa Barbara County are a reliable mid-summer feeding ground. The birds work in loose groups, sometimes in a line, sometimes scattered across a quarter mile of surface. When one dives, others nearby often follow, which is not coincidence. A diving pelican pushes fish downward, and the disturbance can compress a school from below while the surface birds hit from above. The fish that matter most here are northern anchovies and Pacific sardines, both small, oily, schooling species that move through shallow coastal water in dense aggregations. A single dive can yield several fish at once. The pelican's pouch holds roughly three times the volume of its stomach, so it can take a large haul, drain the water, and swallow the catch whole.The relationship between pelicans and these schooling fish is not one the pelicans control entirely. Anchovy and sardine populations cycle with sea surface temperatures and upwelling patterns, and in years when those fish run thin, pelican condition drops noticeably. Breeding success on the islands tracks fish availability with a short lag. Right now, in mid-summer, upwelling along the California coast is pushing cold, nutrient-rich water toward the surface, and that supports the plankton that anchovies feed on, which in turn concentrates the anchovies in the nearshore zone where pelicans can reach them. The pelicans are, in a sense, reading the oceanography. They locate fish by sight, scanning the surface from several meters up, and they target schools near the top of the water column. Their plunge dive is shallow by seabird standards, rarely more than a meter below the surface, which means they depend on fish being up high, not running deep.Heermann's gulls are almost always nearby when pelicans are actively feeding. These are not casual bystanders. The gulls land on the water close to a pelican that has just surfaced and attempt to steal fish directly from the pouch before the pelican can drain and swallow. The pelican typically turns away or raises its bill, but the harassment is persistent. Heermann's gulls breed almost entirely on a single island off Baja California, then disperse north along the Pacific coast in summer, arriving here in numbers at roughly the same time the pelicans are most actively foraging. The overlap is consistent enough that the two species are rarely seen far apart in this season.Double-crested cormorants work the same waters but differently. They dive from the surface and pursue fish underwater, using their feet to drive them down to depths a pelican cannot reach. Where a pelican takes a single strike at a compressed school near the surface, a cormorant may chase a single fish for several seconds through the water column. Both strategies produce fish; they just access different parts of the same resource.Look out now at whatever water is visible from where you are. If there are pelicans working, you may catch the pause before the dive, that brief stall in forward flight when the wings half-fold and the bird tips its bill toward the surface. The water below them is full of fish moving in directions you cannot see.

Carpinteria Marsh sits at a dangerous juncture this June: the water is federally impaired for low oxygen, and two wastewater plants upstream are operating in significant violation of their discharge permits. Warm, shallow estuaries in early summer are already prone to oxygen crashes when water circulation stalls — the pairing of poor water quality and regulatory lapse is the kind of stress that can trigger a swift ecosystem collapse.Brown Pelicans and Heermann's Gulls have been recorded here in the past two months — five of each species — suggesting the marsh still holds fish enough to feed diving birds. But that forage base depends on oxygenated habitat. The margin between what these birds need and what the marsh currently offers is narrowing.

Late-blooming Mariposa Lily (Calochortus fimbriatus) peaked in mid-June alongside woolly bluecurls and scarlet larkspur—a sign this chaparral remains ecologically intact. The lily's midsummer bloom is the latest of any California lily, a phenological edge that helps it avoid spring frosts and exploit the last window before the dry season closes the hills. Seven observations across a single week captured the peak of bloom.The Chumash knew this plant well: the bulbs were gathered strategically in the waning weeks before summer drought, timed to avoid damaging the ecosystem's recovery. That intimate knowledge of timing—when to harvest, when to leave—was built from millennia of attention to this landscape's rhythms. To see these lilies flowering now is to witness the persistence of that relationship, even if the people who tended it are no longer here to direct the harvest.

The air carries the sweet, musty scent of elderflower through the oak woodlands near Montecito. If you step outside now, breathe deeply and listen for the steady tapping of woodpeckers against bark, the quick calls of titmice moving through branches overhead.Blue elderberry stands reach fifteen feet here, their broad clusters of cream-colored flowers just beginning to darken into small green berries. The transition happens gradually through summer's peak. Some flower heads still hold open blooms while others show the first purple blush of ripening fruit. This timing serves the birds perfectly. Acorn Woodpeckers arrive at the elderberry in pairs, their red caps bright against the pale flowers. They work methodically through the clusters, taking both the protein-rich pollen and the early developing berries. The birds need this concentrated nutrition now. They are feeding nestlings, making multiple trips each hour back to cavities they have excavated in nearby oaks.Oak Titmice move differently through the same elderberry. These small gray birds hang upside down from the flower clusters, their bodies no bigger than your fist. They pick at insects that come to feed on the elderberry nectar, and they take the flowers themselves. A single elderberry bush can support several titmouse families through the most demanding weeks of summer breeding. The birds cache some of the berries as they ripen, wedging them into bark crevices for later retrieval. California Scrub-Jays also depend on elderberry now, though they approach more boldly, stripping entire clusters of ripe berries and carrying them back to their territories. The jays can swallow dozens of berries in a feeding session, processing the fruit quickly and moving on.Elderberry produces this abundance because summer's long days and warm nights accelerate both photosynthesis and fruit development. The plant channels energy into reproduction during the season when its bird partners need food most urgently. This synchronization has shaped both the elderberry's flowering schedule and the birds' breeding cycles. The relationship runs deeper than simple feeding. Birds that eat elderberry berries disperse the seeds in their droppings, often miles from the parent plant. The seeds that pass through bird digestive systems germinate at higher rates than those that fall directly beneath the bush. Oak Titmice and Acorn Woodpeckers create new elderberry groves throughout the oak woodlands, extending the habitat that will support future generations of both plants and birds.Close your eyes and listen for the soft rustle of leaves as birds move through the elderberry canopy. The sound is constant now in peak summer, a quiet testimony to the energy flowing between plant and animal in these long, warm days.