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Fingers of the Sea By Jules Evens
Dawn. Spring tide. Fog shrouds the estuary. A shore-cast tree trunk — contorted, branching skyward — rests in the shallows. On its twisted branches roost a half-dozen cormorants, some with wings outstretched or akimbo, others standing upright, necks coiled into graceful question marks. That congregation, silhouetted by the morning light, suspended on the rising tide between the pewter sky and the mercurial bay, conjures a prehistoric diorama, a world awaiting sunlight parables. Estuaries — wetlands where seawater mixes with freshwater and the nutrients of each commingle — are crucial ecological engines, nurseries of the sea and arteries to the land. Nature’s rhythms are amplified here, not only through the recurrent seasons, but through the daily pulse of the tide’s ebb and flow, vast respiratory systems breathing in lunar time, remaking the world on each tidal cycle. The largest estuary complex encompassed by the Point Reyes peninsula, Drakes Estero, resembles a huge hand, irregularly outlined by nearly 25 miles of crenulated shoreline. The main lagoon, along with its five fingers—Barries Bay, Creamery Bay, Schooner Bay, Home Bay, and Limantour Estero — comprises 2,270 acres or about 3.6 square miles at high tide. The Drakes complex is not discrete but exists within a network of coastal wetlands — San Francisco Bay, Bolinas Lagoon, Tomales Bay, Abbotts Lagoon, the esteros San Antonio and Americano, Bodega Bay — that supports as diverse an array of estuarine organisms as any habitat on the west coast of North America. Movements of migratory fish, birds, and marine mammals between the constituents of this wetland network add to the value of each, and each to the other. These coastal treasures are connected, in turn, to others distributed up and down the Pacific Coast — from Baja’s Laguna Magdalena to the estuarine systems of the Alaska coast. Because there are no large freshwater streams feeding Drakes Estero, the name is something of a misnomer. In strictly scientific terms, it would be referred to as a “low-inflow marine lagoon” because most of the system is fed and flushed in synchrony with the daily tidal cycle, its salinities and water temperatures mirroring nearby oceanic conditions. The estero’s productivity is not fueled by the upland watershed but rather by the ocean, in the form of nutri-
(above) View from Bull Point ents that arrive on incoming tides that Trail looking south across feed the foundations of the estuary’s food Drakes Estero toward Limantour pyramid — phytoplankton, benthic algae, Spit and Drakes Bay; (left to right) Point Reyes hosts the and salt marsh vegetation. largest concentration of harbor seals Early summer, I sit on a boulder at in California; view south from the Drakes Head overlooking the confluence beach at Bull Point; eelgrass provides the only sustenance for brants of Limantour and Drakes esteros. The on their 5,000-mile migration. pulse of the rising tide floods the estuary with cold seawater. Flocks of waterbirds forage at the water’s edge, their voices amplified in the translucent marine air — wails of whimbrels, insistent tattles of willets, braying brant, mellow whistles of wigeon, and the nervous chirrups of small shorebirds. A squadron of brown pelicans, as silent as they are graceful, skims the breakers just offshore. Bat rays and leopard sharks glide in on the flood tide, their silhouettes visible in the shallow water as they forage across the flats. Eelgrass blades sway on a pulse of the tide. At the base of the chalky cliffs is a narrow cobbled beach where multitudes of invertebrates — brittle stars, anemones, barnacles, and shore crabs the size of silver dollars — are busily provisioning the estuary. All are making the world come into being, each in its own way. Another day. After an early April rain the morning sky, obscured by low cloud cover, is glazed leaden gray. The low-lying fog begins to lift and the soft geometry of the surrounding landscape is slowly unveiled. The sheltering terrain — white shale cliffs, rhythmically
It seems that intrigue and controversy have
entrepreneur, ran his schooner the Ayacucho
Drakes Bay Oyster Company (formerly John-
visited this estuary ever since the earliest
aground on the sandbar that now bears his
son’s Oyster Farm), has become embroiled
Europeans arrived. The questions surround-
name. Limantour promulgated a land scheme
in a fight with the National Park Service over
ing the landing spot of Sir Francis Drake’s
that laid claim to more than 300 square miles
efforts to extend its lease to farm oysters in
Golden Hinde, thought by many to be Drakes
before he was exposed and fled to Mexico.
the estuary beyond 2012, when Drakes Bay,
Bay, are still unresolved. In 1841, Joseph-
In recent years, a private commercial opera-
by law, becomes part of the Phillip Burton
Yves Limantour, a Breton navy captain and
tion that predates the formation of the park,
Wilderness.
b ay n at u r e
j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 2