Boatpost_007 - Spying on Ospreys at Tomales Bay

This past Monday, I turned 35, so for my weekly Going Outside I decided to just go fuck around in Tomales Bay with no plan, because it is the best place.

I woke up before 6 am, took a train-and-a-bus-and-a-bus, and 3.5 hours later, I was in Inverness.

It was a gloriously foggy morning. These are my absolute ideal conditions on Tomales Bay – high 50s/low 60s, calm wind and water, gray as all hell. This makes it worth the 5 am wake up time.

I enjoyed a few minutes of bliss in the cocoon of fog, but the sun quickly came out and burned it all off.

Making my way north on the bay, I began to see ghostly moon jellies blobbing their way through the water. I know I'm coming up on Heart's Desire beach when I come upon the Jelly Gyre - It's interesting to me how some combination of natural forces concentrates the jellies in Tomales Bay to a pretty confined area. I've never really seen them outside here.

When I'm holding my phone to record and not my paddle, I have about as much locomotion control as the jellies do. One of these days I want to get a waterproof GoPro or maybe just put my phone in a ziploc or something and try to get underwater footage of them. They're a highlight of my trip any time I'm out here.

I also saw lots of brown pelicans, even more than usual. This video is the single biggest group of them I've ever seen. On multiple occasions, I heard and felt a "whoosh" right above my head, and looked up to see a smaller group of them flying low overhead. They look prehistoric; there are many things about Point Reyes that, when it's a slow enough day with few enough people around, make you feel like you've been transported back in time a few hundred million years ago.

The part of the blog post where I talk at you about ospreys for several paragraphs

As I paddled up the coast, I kept hearing unfamiliar bird calls, loud ones, so I consulted the Merlin app. They were ospreys! I decided to paddle around and see if I could spot them; it sounded like there were several.

Eventually, I saw a massive nest way up in a chopped-off old tree. I really wish I had brought my binoculars, but from what I could tell it was a nest with a few young, maybe even older juveniles, and two parents. The adults circled overhead and everyone called back and forth periodically, echoing off the hillside all haunting-like. If you turn up the volume you can hear them in the video below.

Ospreys are a bird that weren't ever on my radar until very recently. Osprey is the brand of my backpacking backpack. I assumed ospreys lived somewhere else, somewhere more exotic. I didn't know much about them.

I wrote about this in another post, but a couple of months ago, I was hiking on Point Reyes, and ran into an older couple who had a scope set up looking at an osprey's nest, a few stories high in a tree.

Hikepost_008 - Over the ocean and through the woods

This Thursday I wanted to go on a nice hike to the beach in Point Reyes so that’s exactly what I did. I won’t try to shoehorn this into any kind of narrative or story; enjoy some nice photos of the California coast in the springtime. I hiked through the

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When I got home from that hike, I did what I do when I see a cool plant, fungi, or creature for the first time, I go online and download every available piece of information about it to my brain, kicking out a couple of childhood memories and college friends' names to free up storage space.

Ospreys are cool as shit. Their diet is exclusively made up of fish. And I don't just mean little minnows, they can pull fish up to 4 pounds. They are engineered to be fish-grabbing machines: their outer toes are "reversible" (??) to form terrifying grappling hooks, and the bottoms of their feet have specialized scales to make them extra grippy.

Oh, and when they're diving for fish (from 30-130' in the air!), they can adjust their angle to account for the effect of refraction from the water, which causes the fish to appear in a slightly different location.

I finally left the osprey zone, and decided to stop and rest at a beach. This is Laird's Landing, one of about a dozen or so along the western edge of the bay. Most days you can pull up to one of the smaller beaches and have it all to yourself.

I really could've just sat in the sand and stared at the water all day, but I had to get home to start getting ready for my birthday party the next day. By the time I got back to Chicken Ranch Beach, the whole world was enveloped in fog again.

I was lucky enough to get to see my ospreys one more time, circling overhead as I walked to the bus.