| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Life on the Edge New Moons, Blue Moons
The Moon isn't such a barren place after all: we had just been looking in the wrong place. This modest spaceship, made modest in part because of NASA's belt-tightening, and partly because the Moon was considered a little passe, confounded all the skeptics by detecting hydrogen. Given the Moon's surface temperature, the most likely form in which hydrogen could exist there is as water ice. In astronomical circles, water is the biggest bonanza. It is fundamental to the most important needs of space travel: fuel for the spaceship and fuel for its crew. The discovery of water beyond the Earth has breathed new life into the prospect of extraterrestrial colonies and interplanetary travel. Sally Stephens describes the new discoveries and their consequences in "The Little Spacecraft that Could." A hundred and fifty years ago, an enterprising pharmacist-cum-thespian was prospecting on another rocky outcrop, this one surrounded by water. He was in pursuit of something almost as rare as water on the Moon–protein for the fledgling, burgeoning town of San Francisco. For three months of the year, the 120 granite acres that make up the Farallon Islands are home to the largest seabird colony in the United States, outside Alaska. In 1848, when there must have been upwards of a million birds on these islands, San Francisco had few reliable food supplies. If you could stand the lurching 30-mile trip through the rough waters typical of late spring, the precarious landing, and the steep, craggy, slippery slopes, the bounty could be substantial. So rewarding, in fact, that longshoremen and thwarted gold-diggers vied and fought for the right to harvest murre eggs. "Poached Eggs," Aleta Brown's chronicle of the years of plunder, takes us to the end of the century when Leverett Loomis, then Curator of Ornithology at the California Academy of Sciences, and later the Academy's Director, led the fight to end the trade. Today, there are far fewer murres along the northern California coast, and biologists are concerned about each nesting site. One such rookery, whose population was reduced to zero after an oil spill in 1986, is on a small outcrop a few hundred yards off the infamous Devil's Slide just south of Pacifica. With most, if not all, of the murres that once had Devil's Slide Rock in their memory bank gone, any repopulation would need to come from other sites. Although they live solitary lives at sea, when it's nesting time, murres like company and none wants to blaze a trail. Laura Helmuth, in "Mirrors, Magic, and Murres," writes about how imaginative biologists are persuading some birds to venture onto new cliffs. North of San Francisco Bay another successful reintroduction project is underway. To restore Adobe Creek to a state sufficiently natural to appeal to salmon, students from Casa Grande High School have transformed both the habitat and, as you will read in Phyllis Zauner's "Science Track," their lives. Just to the East is a far more ambitious restoration project, which Gordy Slack reports on in "Habitats." Rivers are supposed to overflow their banks once in a blue moon, but after watching their town and river intermingle every year for the last five years, the people of Napa threw in the soaking towel and decided on a compromise. If the river would avoid their streets and basements, it could have its will with much of the floodplain to the north and south. Even the Army Corps of Engineers, reversing decades of efforts to constrain rivers into riprap-ridden channels, doffed their caps to Nature and agreed to the plan. Once the project is complete, we'll have to wait for the next wet season to see if the river approves, too. Meanwhile, look elsewhere for unusual concurrences this winter: there will be Blue Moons in both January and March. Keith K. Howell is Editor of California Wild. |
Winter 1999
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