These remarkable journal entries were submitted by Bay Crossings reader Bill Coolidge. A fuller version will appear in the Spring issue of Wildlife Journal
Published: February, 2001
Journal, March 6, 2000
"The poet’s challenge is to find something in culture that isn’t already defined as poetic and make it poetic." Robert Pinsky
Miles of deserted concrete,
acres of unoccupied
housing, twelve feet tall anchor fence. Once a week I sail past this forlorn patch of neglect in the midst of a beautiful bay, blankets of white sails, and majestic bridges.
Last year in Monterey, the guide said that she hadn’t seen any in years. "On the endangered list." In January I visited the Palo Alto Baylands reserve, and the guide said "not yet, but I’m hoping."
Of all places to land and fight against its own demise, the Least Tern has found her way to the old Navy air runway in Alameda, long abandoned. In the midst of concrete as far as the eye can see, the Least Tern has found a home. Almost in the middle of runway number one, where grass is eking out a slim existence, the Tern is building her nest. A green oasis, where all human life left years ago. I noticed them late last winter, when they came swooping down the estuary and into my canal, grappling fish with ease, like a juggler throwing balls up. The minnows seemed to spring out of the air. Coots and Grebes stood by and watched. A spectacular show, swift and lean and gone in a few seconds.
Island residents have recognized their return and have now put up another fence around their breeding ground to protect them from any stray dogs that lurk. Hope abounds that this sanctuary among rubble of concrete will be successful and that soon they will be off the endangered species list.
But I wonder just how these Least Terns decided to land on that abandoned runway and make a home. It’s akin to the Catholic Worker House where I used to live, situated among bulldozed blocks, decaying apartment buildings, grass and rubble and old cars, and needles everywhere. A home for the homeless, we had a little sanctuary of a courtyard. Each week I mowed the lawn. Took me five minutes. I watered the flowers. We found the backseat to an old car and put it out there for people to sit, be quiet. A sanctuary for another kind of endangered species: the homeless who were HIV positive.
Journal, March 31 2000
Today I sailed by the Least Tern homestead. They have up and gone, migrated already, on the long trip north. That’s my guess. They run their life on intuition and instinct. Maybe in the fall they will make a return and Palo Alto or Monterey will be blessed. Or maybe they will return to us for another season. Some Coots have already left. But I still have my eyes out for that slender white sleek flying bird, black head making its own landings on what was once abandoned.
The Least Tern, diminishing and homeless makes a home, almost in my backyard. Way beyond what I believe to be true about life. Doesn’t need human effort. Is beginning to multiply if people and dogs stay the hell away. The sharp "kit, kit or kseek" of the tern as she captures a fish is poetry to my ears. Like Robert Pinsky said, we need to find and develop poetry in the most unlikely places. The Least Tern is my resident poet.
What must I do to stand on the edge of knowing and confess that I don’t know? And don’t know what to do. Providing shelter and food, writing prose and poetry and paying attention. Seems so meager on many days. I have spent a lifetime of being out of doors and watching quietly, often writing on what I see, what I feel and the images that flow. But somehow until now, I have not connected that with doing. With being productive. It was just something I was called to be engaged with, passionately. Be quiet and be attentive. And it led me down new paths, not without pain. Streamwatching, years ago on the river in front of my farmhouse, showed me there were no more otters and no more big clams. Picking up trash along my country road led me to witness a dismaying increase in the volume of plastics and bottles, but this time the Least Tern has led me to a new openness of what is possible, not what is bearing down. Sprigs of grass, making home, new imaginal properites of the resident poet, out on runway number one.
Journal, Apri1 21, 2000
The snippet of arrival. Caught me off guard. Low tide, I’m on the lee side of the island. Checking for the great blue heron. Been missing her for a month or more. Paddling quietly through the relics of old steel boats, skeletons now, ribs protruding through placid waters. All that is left. Seagulls perching. Invoking life to that which was has lived below the surface for a century. Like wind kicking up shirts on a clothesline, this smallish bird whips up on one wing and then swoops down on the other. At ease, as if wind blown. But I know differently. She is hunting for breakfast, those tiny silvery morsels, available now at low tide. Gently swaying in the shadows of this old hulk.
Bingo! A left turn, swoop, then skim. Magically this bird scoops a wiggling twig out of the estuary and then lets out her signal of success:
"ki wit, kit wit, kiwit." Pelicans, Cormorants,Eegrets, Herons and Grebes all have to dive. Expend effort for their fish. Not the Least Tern. Like her cousin, the Skimmer. She, as if practicing aerial feats or acrobatics, flips and dives, catches her food almost effortlessly, with so much grace. But I am more than bemused. I thought the Least Tern had flown the coop.
Gone north, more than a month ago. It’s almost May and here she is. Returned. Maybe never left. Or yearned for her birthplace, this estuary. No matter, I grin and utter a soft word of thanksgiving for her presence here. A needed complement to the more ponderous gathering of food by these other sea birds. Her alacrity captures my fancy.
Green canoe on blue water, splattering of golden rays fringing the peaks of small steady waves as I cross back from Coast Guard Island and slide into my dock, to the boat slip where I live, work, and at special times, like today, go canoeing or sailing. Steady Westerner about fifteen miles an hour. Not an easy paddle.
I’m making coffee, looking out my window at the activity beyond the stern of my boat. Mallards have first choice of all tidbits. Lately though they have been escorted by the Coots. These wonderful black birds, with white nodule on head who make headway by paddling and moving their heads and neck forward in the same direction. Like a hobbyhorse with a child rocking away. Steady and undramatic, but a joy to watch.
Cormorants and Grebes complete the fishing picture this morning. All paddling against wind and tidal current in front of me when this surfacing, splashing head appears. Flutter of wings, quacking and movement out of the range of deepening ripples. I stare out in wonder. It is! A Harbor Seal!
My favorite mammal, precisely because she comes up, head first and then does a three hundred and sixty circumference gaze at what is happening on top of the surface. Almost hyper vigilant but not quite. Curious. Very curious. Her head is gleaming dark gray toward black. Slowly she sinks back down. I used to do this as a kid in the bathtub, pretending I was going to submerge, be out of sight. Hold my breath and slowly down I would go, like a submarine. She does this and I am left with only a fifteen second glimpse. But her face stays with me, unfettered with the worries or fear of life above the surface. She chooses her descent at that intersection where my canal meets the estuary .
Always a good sign for me, especially when I head out the estuary to go sailing. Like in the ocean or bays of the East Coast, when a dolphin or two would accompany me. A companion, much like a tug keeping a freighter safe in the closer shallower waters.
Journal, April 28, 2000
I go to the phone and call up Donna, the local expert on the return of the Least Tern. Donna works with Friends of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge, a project of the Golden Gate Audubon Society. "You’re right some returned back in late March, but many more have just returned".
"From where I ask?" Wanting to know more about their migration pattern. "We don’t know, they have never been tracked. "
" Are they still endangered?"
"Oh they have been endangered since the list began in the early seventies. But the biggest colony on the West Coast is out on the Naval Base."
So I learn there is a small group of people with the assistance of the Navy watching out for the Least Terns. But where they go and why they are endangered remains a mystery. I sit and look out, waves rippling, strong westerly, boat rocking and this ballet like figure comes twisting and turning by. I glimpse her, just for a second, but I hear her song much longer. "Ka wit, ka wit, ka wit."
Before environmental impact statements, before grass root organizing, before we even knew we had mystery approaching, the Least Tern made a comeback, all on her own, in the midst of what we had given up on and forgotten. Donna tells me that Saturday there will be a workday, out on old runway number one: "to clear the brush, fix the fence, keep these little wonders safe from predators,. More like a partnership to me: we help them now but even before we "discovered them" they already were among us as singers, poets, dancers and seers of what is possible when all we see is the impossible.
