The day after my 1,000,004th birthday, my friend Lee Smith and I went to Moss Lading to take a boat tour of the Elkhorn Slough (“slough” is pronounced “slew”), a National Estuarine Research Reserve managed by the California Department of Fish and Game.

Like Baylands Park, Elkhorn Slough is a restored wetlands area. The 105 acres of wetlands adjoining Baylands Park are a largely dry marsh. Elkhorn Slough is much bigger and wetter: at 1,400 acres, it’s the largest tract of tidal salt marsh in California outside of San Francisco Bay.

Mammals we’re most likely to see at Baylands are ground squirrels, rabbits and gophers. In Elkhorn Slough, it’s sea otters, sea lions and bay seals. I’m sure there are many small mammals along the shore, but they’re hard to spot from a boat.

After buying tickets from the captain of the Elkhorn Slough Safari, we boarded a 27-foot pontoon boat — a box riding on a pair of floats — along with about 25 other sightseers. Our guide and captain was Yohn Gideon, a local naturalist and birder.

Afraid of a chilly day, I was wearing six layers of clothes (t-short, thermal shirt, sweatshirt, light fleece, fleece jacket and heavy outer jacket: I looked very big!), but the weather was perfect: mid-60s, barely a breeze, the brightest sun you’ll ever see in February.

At the start of the voyage, the crew passed out click counters and assigned different passengers to tally different animals: sea otters, great herons, harbors seals, sea lions, pelicans, various other birds.

We glided by an enormous research ship, one of three Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute vessels. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute was founded in 1987 by David Packard.

As our boat maneuvered into the main channel, we passed a floating dock piled high with sea lions.

The crew was explaining the differences between sea lions (well-developed front flippers, little ears, solid colors, big) and harbor seals (no ears, small front flippers, torpedo shape, spots) as we cruised past our first small group of sea otters. Groups of otters are called “rafts,” we learned.

Meanwhile, we saw birds everywhere. Captain Gideon spotted them and named them, locating them for us using traditional clock positioning (“Blue herons on the shore at 10 o’clock”).

Within a few minutes we encountered a raft of 30-some otters, paddling on their backs, snacking, playing in the water. “You’re looking at 1.5% of the population of California sea otters,” announced the captain.

Someone on the boat asked him about the difference between river otters and sea otters. He couldn’t resist the bait. “River otters,” he said, “live in rivers. Sea otters, on the other hand, live in the sea.”

Lee was in charge of counting harbor seals. At first it was easy — a few animals hauled up on the shore line. But an hour or so into our two-hour excursion we saw a hundred or so seals blanketing the shoreline. The captain asked everyone to count. Tallies ranged around 111 to 119. I heard Lee clicking like mad.

By the end of the trip, Lee had counted more than 300 harbor seals. As I recall, we saw slightly more than 100 sea otters.

The Elkhorn Slough website says that the slough supports 346 species of resident and migratory birds. I’d guess that we saw about 100 species on our short trip.

During much of the 20th century, the Elkhorn Slough was developed in various ways. Oyster culture, salt harvesting, duck hunting, dairy farming and development of Moss Landing Harbor all altered the wetlands.

In 1983, the Department of Fish and Game decided to return several hundred acres of diked marshlands to the tides. They created a system of channels and mounds that have now become islands.

Since then, the Elkhorn Slough Foundation has planted native vegetation and cleaned up streams and ponds filled with eroded soil to return the land to its natural diversity.

Tags: Birds, Boats, Gallery, Life, Water.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Elsewhere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.