Probing the magic of mud
The contrast could not have been more stark.
One Sunday morning, we emerged from a copse of trees (mostly
eucalyptus) and stopped at an overlook that marked the end of a
boardwalk. Looking toward Morro Rock from the south shore of the
bay by the same name, there was little left to do but gasp.
Probing the magic of mud
The contrast could not have been more stark.
One Sunday morning, we emerged from a copse of trees (mostly eucalyptus) and stopped at an overlook that marked the end of a boardwalk. Looking toward Morro Rock from the south shore of the bay by the same name, there was little left to do but gasp.
And it was not the rich mix of life and decay rising from the mudflats stretching before us that led us to gasp.
It was what was on top of the mud, an A-to-Z mixture of shorebirds and waterfowl. Out toward the barrier dunes, where verdant green beds of eelgrass offer their favorite food, were hundreds of brant, a small, migratory sea goose. Hundreds of cormorants flew by in skeins. Ducks – northern shoveler, northern pintail, greenwing teal, American widgeon, bufflehead, mallards by the hundreds and more – mingled side-by-side with clouds of sandpipers and dowitchers. Herons and egrets watched from the edges of the crowd. Grebes paddled along industriously.
It would be conservative to estimate the numbers of birds visible at that spot at more than 10,000.
Six days later, a walk around Elkhorn Slough Reserve produced a few grebe, a healthy scattering of ducks – almost all bufflehead and a grand total of one shorebird. Not one species, but one lonely greater yellowlegs to show itself on a half day’s walk.
The difference? Elkhorn slough was brimming over that morning. The mudflats that held so much life a week earlier, just down the coast, were deep under water at Moss Landing.
Call it the magic of mud.
Until relatively recently, it was understood that mudflats were places of little value.
Plans once called for a deepwater port in Elkhorn Slough. Morro Rock, which marks the entrance to the Morro Bay estuary, was mined for fill.
But if you can hold your nose for a bit, and plunge your hands into the black goo that forms the mudflats, you will encounter seething life. A shovelful may hold hundreds of organisms. There are worms as big as your thumb, living at the bottom of U-shaped burrows that are home to crabs especially adapted to inhabit them. There are clams that live 100 years or more. There are worms with hooked jaws on their heads, the better to prey on other worms and the stuff of nightmares.
Everything that settles to the bottom is fair game, and it all becomes mud, sustaining life that in turn sustains the birdlife that awed us. Because they’re calm and protected, offering an abundance of food, they’re lively nurseries for young sport fish.
Whether you like to hunt ducks, watch birds, fish or dig clams, mud is cool.
But it is especially cool for migrating birds. Earlier that day at Morro Bay, we stared as a pair of peregrine falcons circled and called from Morro Rock. They nest there, sustaining their young on the easy pickings to be found among the birds browsing the mudflats.
As birds migrate along the Pacific Flyway, they play out a mute drama. Many of the shorebirds along our winter bays will soon return to the Arctic to breed. Their globe-spanning commute depends on finding places to rest and recover, places like Elkhorn Slough and Morro Bay.
Mark Paxton is publisher of The Pinnacle. His e-mail address is [email protected].
