Bringing the ocean inland for Earth Day

At the Earth Day celebration at Bolsa Chica a month ago, Laura Bandy and I decided to bring the ocean inland to the teens at the Orange County Conservation Corps who are working toward their high school diplomas. Laura, the education director at the Bolsa Chica Conservancy, offered to do this as a form of payback for all of the free labor that our corps orientation crews have donated to the restoration at Bolsa Chica.

Our plan was to bring an introduction to marine biology to them, complete with water-quality sampling, live plankton and microscopes, and a saltwater touch tank with live stingrays and marine invertebrates. We were pretty excited about this because corps members tend to be underprivileged kids who don’t get to go to the ocean or marine aquariums often, if at all.

We scheduled the event for last Friday. With that much lead time, you would think that we would have been better prepared. Unfortunately, it turns out that both Laura and I wait until the last minute to do things. That’s how Vic and I found ourselves down in the wetlands and once again on the wrong side of the law in the wee hours of the morning last Friday. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Laura and I planned to have four stations at our “introduction to marine biology” day. Brian Tufts of the Southern California Marine Institute volunteered to bring a saltwater touch tank with coolers, aerators and filters that would keep the fish and invertebrates alive and happy. Brian is a mountain of a man, with a shaved head and two earrings halfway up his left ear. I figured my corps members would be more afraid of him than vice versa.

We were counting on Vic to do the water-quality station, but unfortunately our event fell on the first day of his new summer natural history class for seniors. Dave Carlberg gamely stepped in to take Vic’s place. Laura staffed the marine fish, birds and mammals station, and I did plankton and marine invertebrates. We wanted something alive at my station other than the plankton, so Laura said she would bring a couple of horn snails. We thought that if we put them under a dissecting microscope, the students would enjoy seeing them move around.

Laura was going to collect a few horn snails from Bolsa Chica on Thursday afternoon, but an injured brown pelican threw off her schedule. By the time she had finished transporting the pelican to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center, the tide had come in. Laura sent me a desperate e-mail that she couldn’t get the snails because the tide was too high. Low tide, when the snails would be exposed again, wasn’t due until after midnight. I knew I would be up late anyway given my slow start on the written materials for my station.

That’s why Vic and I found ourselves at Bolsa Chica at 1 in the morning, preparing to engage in a little snail poaching. We had planned on collecting the snails from Percy Park across the street, but the city has closed the park. It has a “For Sale” sign on it. So we parked at the ecological reserve lot at Warner and PCH.

I swear, the only reason the Huntington Beach cops put up a helicopter at night is to see whether our car is in the driveway. It wasn’t, so they must have gone looking for us. A friendly officer found Vic with flashlight in hand, searching the mudflats. I was on the other side of the wetlands with some Vietnamese fishermen. Since all I was carrying was a large plastic beaker, a net and a flashlight, the nervous Vietnamese asked where my fishing gear was. It was too hard to explain. Short version is that Vic distracted the officer while I successfully poached the snails. I wasn’t stealing them, officer, I was only borrowing them. They went back to the wetlands after the event.

I was up until 4:30 a.m. preparing my materials. Laura got up at 5 to go to San Pedro to help Brian with the tank and critters, and to load the preserved specimens. We were both running on sheer adrenaline. Somehow we got the tables set up, got all the specimens laid out and put on a fabulous event for the 60 corps members who are enrolled in the John Muir Charter School at the Conservation Corps.

The corps members went from station to station, filling out their worksheets and learning marine biology. Naturally, the touch tank was the biggest hit, but they also enjoyed many little things, like using forceps to manipulate the snails under the microscope.

One rather large corps member challenged Laura, saying that he didn’t believe that gray whales ate only tiny amphipods. How could something that big eat only tiny shrimp?, he asked. Laura responded by observing that he was a big boy and asking if he ever ate shrimp at a buffet. He got the connection. It’s not the size of what you eat, it’s how much of it you eat.

Laura overheard a couple of the corps teachers remark about how well organized the event was. We’re still laughing about that. If only they knew.