Sharing The Shoreline With Birds Of A Feather
The Western Snowy Plover is a threatened species, with only a few thousand remaining on the west coast, and with an average of forty who over-winter on Ocean Beach and Crissy Field in San Francisco. It is, of course, quite possible that there are more, and that we just can't see them, because they blend in to the sand so well, like camouflaged golf balls (the link above takes you to an HTML version of a document regarding the Snowy Plover Protection Program through the National Park Service; important stuff, and also controversial in some circles).
This is not actually about the plover qua plover, but more about sharing. If it is true that the best way to learn is to teach, then maybe it is equally true that the best way to see something hard to see like a plover is to show one to someone else.
Last night, Marina went with me to the beach as I roved the protected area, trying to talk to people about why it isn't so awesome to let dogs run free among threatened shorebirds; measure just how much fun teenagers have these days in terms of the percentage of signs destroyed by reckless use of markers; and hopefully glimpse a couple of the little plovers around and about. I've never been 100% confident in my ability to distinguish a plover from a sanderling, say, which would put a bit of a crimp in my ability to protect them, one would think.
But hey, if your girlfriend wants to see a plover, you get motivated to see a plover. And so, after discounting thirty sanderlings as not being the genuine article, I looked carefully through the binoculars at a small creature barely visible in a small indentation in the sand that Marina pointed out, and I said with authority that there indeed was a plover. The difference from the sanderling was now crystal clear to me, which would have been reward enough, but it was even better to see Marina's excitement as she looked at the plover through the binoculars. From there, we quickly spotted another five plovers huddled nearby.
I've always thought protecting the plovers was a great idea; now I don't need to worry about actually seeing them in the first place.
This is not actually about the plover qua plover, but more about sharing. If it is true that the best way to learn is to teach, then maybe it is equally true that the best way to see something hard to see like a plover is to show one to someone else.
Last night, Marina went with me to the beach as I roved the protected area, trying to talk to people about why it isn't so awesome to let dogs run free among threatened shorebirds; measure just how much fun teenagers have these days in terms of the percentage of signs destroyed by reckless use of markers; and hopefully glimpse a couple of the little plovers around and about. I've never been 100% confident in my ability to distinguish a plover from a sanderling, say, which would put a bit of a crimp in my ability to protect them, one would think.
But hey, if your girlfriend wants to see a plover, you get motivated to see a plover. And so, after discounting thirty sanderlings as not being the genuine article, I looked carefully through the binoculars at a small creature barely visible in a small indentation in the sand that Marina pointed out, and I said with authority that there indeed was a plover. The difference from the sanderling was now crystal clear to me, which would have been reward enough, but it was even better to see Marina's excitement as she looked at the plover through the binoculars. From there, we quickly spotted another five plovers huddled nearby.
I've always thought protecting the plovers was a great idea; now I don't need to worry about actually seeing them in the first place.
Labels: environment, sharing, snowy plover, threatened species
posted by Devin at 9:46 PM
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