Natural History Journal

More commonly known as "starfish," sea stars truly are shining stars of the tidepool.  Last week while exploring one of my favorite places, the coast and tidepools around Point Pinos, I was delighted to come across a couple dozen bat stars of all colors and sizes.   Though I still slip up and refer to these beautiful creatures as "starfish" on occasion, sea stars are not fish at all.  Having neither fins, scales, gills, or even blood, sea stars are echinoderms (members of the phylum Echinodermata), related to sand dollars, sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Residents of kelp forests and the rocky intertidal zone, bat stars are found from Sitka Alaska to Baja California, from tidepools to depths of 950 feet. Though sea stars appear quite sessile, or fixed to one spot, they are actually quite mobile, moving along the sea floor and tidepool substrates on hundreds of tiny little suction cup-tipped tube feet.  (Check out the photo below for a look at the underside of a bat s...

Easily the coolest mollusk I have ever seen, the jeweled top snail ( Calliostoma annulatum ) is aptly-named, with its spiraled shell of iridescent orange and purple.  Contrasting with dark sea weeds and black turban snails, it almost doesn't even look real!  I found this guy while exploring the tide pools around Point Pinos the other day, and was blown away by its amazing colors.  Photos don't really do justice to this amazing animal. Jeweled top snails live in kelp forests from southeastern Alaska to Baja California.  Their preferred niche is in the middle of the forest, mid-stipe ("stipe" is marine biology-speak for what basically amounts to a seaweed stem), while related species prefer either higher or lower parts of the forest.  According to Monterey Bay Aquarium, each species knows its niche, and will climb back to its precise level in the forest after being knocked off. Like other marine snails, jeweled top snails graze on algae, hydroids and bryozoans....

There's really never a bad time to visit California's magnificent coastline.  However, if you visit during the fall, winter and spring months, you will be treated to a wide and varied array of avian species, the numbers of which diminish in the early summer as many species return to distant breeding grounds.  (In other words, head to the coast now!)  The species composition of any given area is constantly in flux, due to the migratory nature of many birds.  This is part of what makes birding fun: Are we expecting to see migratory species today?  Breeding species?  Overwintering species?   While some species only make brief appearances at specific times of the year, others are reliably seen in favorable habitat year-round.  One such resident of our coastline is the Black Oystercatcher ( Haematopus bachmani ). The Black Oystercatcher is certainly a distinct-looking bird!  A year-round resident and breeder on rocky shores of th...

Yesterday, Eric and I spent the day in Monterey with some friends, browsing used book stores, taking in the historic sites and, of course, exploring the tide pools and the rocky shoreline around Point Pinos.  The area affectionately known as The Great Tide Pool, made famous by the research, collections and publications of Edward Ricketts, is not only one of my favorite places to peer into tide pools, but also to bird, particularly with an eye for the birds of the rocky shore, like turnstones, oystercatchers and the appropriately-named Surfbird ( Calidris virgata ). Surfbirds are stocky migratory sandpipers, closely related to other familiar shorebirds  such as sanderlings , dunlin, and least and western sandpipers.  Surfbirds are relatively common along California's rocky shores during migration and winter, from late summer through late spring.  They are almost always found within the splash zone, just out of reach of the pounding waves and foaming sea spray....

I am fortunate enough to live within about a two-hour drive of the Pacific Coast (which is far enough away to avoid the traffic and potential earthquake damage, but close enough for day trips!).  Some of my earliest and fondest childhood memories involve days spent on the beach at Carmel, and entire weekends and weeks spent along the rocky shore in Pacific Grove with my dad, building sandcastles and poking around in tide pools.  Until I began birding seriously a few years ago, most of my time along the coast was spent like this: Following in the footsteps of "Doc" Ed Ricketts: tide-pooling in Monterey's Great Tide Pool area ... Looking for things like this: Hermit Crab ... And this: Anemone ... And this: California Sea Hare (found already dead, washed up on the beach) I was aware of "seagulls" and "sandpipers," maybe even vaguely aware of that mystical group known as the "sea birds" which exist somewhere out the...