Photo Essay: The Island That Prisoners Pioneered

Santa Cruz Island has a similar history to Santa Rosa Island in terms of ranching, habitat devastation thanks to feral pigs and sheep, and endangered and nearly extinct species of both flora and fauna (including the island fox).

But, like Santa Rosa, it's on the road to recovery—and it's been free of pigs since 2006.

It's considered one of those great "day trip destinations" of the Channel Islands; but for me, it's so frustrating to take a 25-mile boat ride out (which, in our case, took four hours with all of the birding we did)...



...come up ashore at Prisoner's Harbor for an hour and a half just to see what we can see, and then turn around and take another long boat ride back. I don't even like doing Catalina in one day.



But if this was how I was going to get onto Santa Cruz—the largest and most rugged of the Channel Islands, named by the Spanish after a "sacred cross"—so be it.



And it turns out, there's a lot to see, although it's only the eastern 24 percent of the island that you can visit without a permit. (Access to the remaining 76 percent is tightly controlled by the Nature Conservancy.)



Fortunately, there are some historic ranch buildings that are close to the Prisoner's Harbor pier...



...including a red brick double barn that dates back to 1887.



Beyond that, most of the hiking trails would take longer than an hour and a half to tackle as an out-and-back...



...but then again, most of the people on our boat trip to Santa Cruz were there for birds, not trails.



After all, we'd docked at the island to look for the Island Scrub Jay, endemic to this particular island.



They're not too hard to find as long as you can recognize its call, which isn't exactly musical.



After spotting our one scrub jay, we climbed up one of the old dirt ranch roads that, if we had continued on it, would eventually lead to Del Norte Camp.



Given the sun and the heat and the time constraints, we were happy to take it at a leisurely pace, taking in the ocean view...



...and marveling at the Giant Coreopsis plants...



...whose stalks are so sturdy, they really are like little trees.



While we stuck to the National Parks Service side of the island, being sure not to trespass onto Nature Conservancy property...



...we spotted a lone island fox, hunting for somebody's hiking pack to root through.



Although our time on the island was all too brief...



...we did have enough time to climb the Pelican Bay Trail (which technically is maintained by Nature Conservancy, but was on this side of the No Trespassing sign)...



...up to Harvey's Lookout, where 19th and early 20th century island watchmen would look for ships in the channel through a telescope.



It's just one indication of the historical commercial use of Santa Cruz Island, which more or less started when a bunch of Mexican prisoners were dropped off here as part of the plan to increase California's Mexican presence after gaining independence from Spain.



Those convicted criminals were the pioneers of the modern settlement of Santa Cruz Island, and they quickly went to work.



At the end of the day—unlike the birds that flew here and never left, or the foxes that hitchhiked or rafted their way over—we had a boat to take us back to the mainland.



But it wasn't until that late afternoon trip through the swells that we saw the most amazing sight of our trip: an unbelievably dense and active pod of dolphins that swam right behind us...



...breaching and diving us if to usher us to safety with a grand send-off of splashing dorsal and tail fins.

Of course, one visit to Santa Cruz Island won't be enough, since there's apparently lots more to see at Scorpion Bay, Potato Harbor, and Smuggler's Cove.

Which of the Channel Islands will I hit next?

I can't wait to find out.

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Photo Essay: Birding the Channel Islands

It had taken me so long to get to any of the Channel Islands (other than Catalina), that once I did, I couldn't wait to get back.

Sure, I'd love another overnight volunteer trip like the one to Santa Rosa back in October, but those opportunities can be few and far between.



So I paid my way to get back, by buying a ticket on a daylong birding trip with Island Packers.



I'd never been on a boat for that long—four hours before docking, and another three hours on the way back—or with so many serious birders, their long lenses swinging and the pages of their field guides flipping against the downwind.



As for myself, although I love birds, I was there for the entire experience—which, to my delight, included spouting gray whales and lots of dolphins.



Of course, there were plenty of gulls and brown pelicans this time of year, in this pelagic zone of the Pacific Ocean.



But, land ho! The islands! The arch of Anacapa!



The ancient volcanic eruptions and land forms birthed out of the San Andreas Fault!



At the eastern end of Anacapa Island, there's a light that was the last built by the Coast Guard's United States Lighthouse Service on the West Coast, in 1932.



It still acts as an active beacon, though it wasn't able to prevent a small plane crash near the island in 2000.



The birds seem to like it there at Cathedral Cove. As our boat passed by, a whole bunch of brown boobies were perched there.



Perhaps the highlight of the trip—well, at least for the birders—was the spotting of a single blue-footed booby, perhaps astray from an influx of them that came up from warmer waters farther south back in 2013.



In truth, there were tons of birds sighted on our trip, their species and common names being called out...



...from loons to grebes to shearwaters, terns, jaegers, rhinoceros auklets, and cormorants.



We even saw a couple of peregrine falcons and nesting golden eagles.



At high ocean levels, with the melting polar ice caps, Anacapa is actually three islets that, true to its name, appear almost as a mirage. But it's shallow down there, and underneath the water, there's a land bridge. You just can't see it now.



The recent rains and the abundant fog has got the islands fertile with greenery...




...which makes good nesting for the brown pelicans this time of year.



On Anacapa, there's a nice outcropping of giant coreopsis, a bright yellow "tree sunflower" that peaks on a couple of the Channel Islands between January and March, which you can see even from the sea.



There are so many birds out there, they don't even have time—or room—to scatter with our oncoming vessel...



...though a few get spooked by all the shouting and the announcements over the PA system, so they would dive down and stay underwater until we passed.



If it's at all difficult to spot the birds with binoculars, as the sea swells and little crests of waves distract the eye, imagine how hard it is to photograph them without the aid of magnification, and with a surging seasickness.



But sometimes, nature gives you these little gifts. Birds like this snowy egret have grown accustomed to the presence of humans and their boats and sometimes come for a visit in hopes of a snack.

Stay tuned for photos from our stop ashore at Santa Cruz Island, including a sighting of the island scrub-jay (a close relative of the mainland western scrub-jay)—which is only found on this one island, which makes it the smallest range of any bird species in North America.

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Photo Essay: The Shape-Shifting Island of Seagulls

About a year ago, I was on a boat cruise that was encircling one of the Channel Islands, looking for brown pelicans, seagulls, and blue-footed boobies.



But although our boat did land, it was on a different Channel Island, Santa Cruz—not this island, Anacapa.



By then I'd already been to Santa Rosa Island, and I was trying to hit as many of them as I could. But my opportunity to fully explore this one would have to wait.



I'd booked this year's trip to Anacapa to ideally coincide with wildflower and bird-breeding season, but that sort of thing is tough to plan ahead.



You never really know what you're going to find until right before you get there—and if you don't have the trip already planned, you're likely to miss whatever it is that you were looking for.



So when I finally got to climb the 150+ steps up the "cliff island" from Landing Cove to the ranger office and visitors' center, I hadn't banked on the fog layer. Anacapa looked completely different from what I'd seen on a sunny day a year before. It's no wonder its Native American name loosely translates as "ever-changing."



The islands sometimes create their own weather patterns, but this was the same fog that had stretched all the way from Beverly Hills into the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County and across the Santa Barbara Channel that morning.



To be honest, the low-hanging mist was rather romantic. At least, the seagulls must've thought so, because they'd already started pairing off for mating season on this island, the largest breeding ground for the Western Gull in the Western U.S.



"Just don't walk too quickly on the trail," our volunteer park ranger, Tara, told us. "The birds probably won't dive-bomb you, but if you've got a hat, you'd better wear it just in case."



The trail is one of great transition. When the Coast Guard inhabited Anacapa, they'd brought in some red flowering iceplant as ground cover to prevent erosion—but a little of that stuff goes a long way. Eventually, it takes over the whole habitat.



Volunteers are still pulling up the remaining iceplant; but now, crystalline iceplant (Mesembryanthemum crystallinum), with its bright pink flowers, is taking over.



Nevertheless, the gulls have plenty of vegetation—native, endemic, or not—to lay their eggs in and use for shelter. And fog to create some misty, watercolored memories.



The main botanical attraction this time of year is the coreopsis (or "tree sunflower").



The flowers look a lot like yellow daisies, but they grow in what looks like clumps dispersed throughout the hillside—but what are actually hardy little shrubs with thick stalks.



They attract butterflies and lots of pollinating insects, but they only last a couple of months in full bloom. And the higher you go—the closer you get to Inspiration Point—the less spectacular the display.



The gulls on the island are your common seagull—you know, the kind that will steal a sandwich out of your hand.



If nothing goes wrong, they could live to be 25 years old. (You can kind of age them by their eye color: The older the birds are, the lighter their eyes.)



But this is a special time of year for them.



If they're older than four years old (or so), they're ready to find a mate, make some babies, and take turns incubating the resulting clutch of eggs.



Of course, pairing off isn't always so easy—especially when you've got pesky humans ruining the mood. When you approach—even slowly, even quietly—one of them is likely to give a holler.



And once one starts to vocalize, it triggers a domino effect—much like gibbons—with the entire flock erupting in calls of alarm. Some of them sound like cows mooing, and others like dogs barking.



They're not very used to humans, given the remoteness of this island (and its lack of services). And so, they don't really like them. "They think the island belongs to them, and it does," Ranger Tara said. "Please don't disturb them."



Anacapa is the closest of the Channel Islands to the mainland (less than 15 miles from Oxnard), but it's got no fresh water source (and, hence, no endemic foxes). But that didn't keep intrepid explorers (and loners) from trying to make a go of it (including the namesake of Frenchy's Cove, Raymond "Frenchy" LeDreau, a hermit fisherman who lived on Middle Anacapa for nearly 30 years).



The only way the ranchers' grazing sheep survived was by licking the condensation that formed from the fog; but, later, the Coast Guard built a system to collect rainwater and store it in tanks made of redwood that were stored in the ecclesiastical-looking water tank house.



Unfortunately, Anacapa's rocky shore (including a jagged area known as "Cathedral Cove") caused its share of shipwrecks—until the Bureau of Lighthouses intervened. A primitive, unmanned beacon had already been erected in 1912, but it just wasn't enough. Anacapa needed a real lighthouse.



So came to be the Anacapa Island Light Station and many of the surrounding Spanish Revival-style buildings (including quarters for the lighthouse keeper), which were taken over by the Coast Guard in 1939. Of course, like all other light sources (including neon) during World War II, the Anacapa Light was extinguished for a while. The Navy took over the Coast Guard, and the isolated island was transformed into a Coastal Lookout Station.



And what better day to visit the island than a foggy one that really necessitated the light—and the deafening foghorn?



The 40-foot lighthouse was automated in the 1960s, putting the lighthouse keeper (and the Coast Guardsmen) out of a job. In 1980, five of the islands in the channel were designated a national park. In 1989, an acrylic, solar-powered lens replaced the original Third Order Fresnel lens from 1932, which is on view now at the visitors' center.



In 2008, the National Park Service took over the light station...



...and it still uses many of those white stuccoed, red terra-cotta roofed structures...



...though now it's the gulls that stand watch like soldiers, waiting to sound the alarm.



They swoop along the cliffside, defending their coast.



They stand watch on the old foundations of the former Coast Guard residences, waiting for a lover to breed and brood with.



And if there aren't enough males to father a clutch of eggs for every female, the ladies who are left behind might hook up and brood together.



Just as it seemed like I was starting to get to know Anacapa Island—and finally see it in the light—it was time to return to our boat at Landing Cove.



The gulls swarmed one last time in celebration.



The fog swirled low, blowing across the bluffs and blurring the scenery.



A couple of sentinels saw us off, making sure none of us were left behind.



The wind was picking up—as it tends to do, both early and late in the day on the islands of the Santa Barbara Channel...



...and the birds went about their preening, no time for modesty when you're still single and have got to make a good impression with your plumage.



The foghorn moaned from its perch, though the low visibility kept the light station out of sight.



We descended the cliff on those stairs down to the dock at Landing Cove, setting sail for the mainland.

I can't wait to see some hatchlings and fledglings on a return visit.

Related Post:
Photo Essay: Birding the Channel Islands