(Anarhynchus nivosus nivosus) are hatching now along Coal Oil Point and the UCSB campus beaches — newly mobile chicks emerging onto the open sand just as summer crowds reach their densest. The chicks are precocial, walking within hours of hatching, but they are sand-colored and nearly weightless, almost invisible to anyone moving quickly along the wrack line. This fortnight is among the most dangerous stretches of the breeding season, when a careless footstep or an unleashed dog can undo months of careful nesting.
Coal Oil Point Reserve remains one of the most significant nesting sites for this federally threatened bird on the California coast. Its relative wildness, shaped in part by the natural petroleum seeps that gave the point its name — the same seeps the Chumash once gathered to caulk their tomol plank canoes — depends now on human volunteers and rope exclosures standing between the chicks and the summer crowds.
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.
