Abe Borker

After waiting all year for the cormorants to fledge their young, on my final trip to Ano Nuevo Island for the year we headed into the abandoned Lighthouse Keeper’s house built in the late 1800’s. It’s a place of juxtapositions, sea lions chilling in the bathtub, guillemots and cormorants nesting in the eves.

From what I’ve gathered the house was inhabited from about 1880 to 1948 when the island’s light tower was disabled in favor of a whistle buoy offshore. Throughout the years researchers have made short stays in the other building on the island, and I’m sure it didn’t take long for the animals to takeover the main house. They have brought the outside in, as the floors are so covered in scat and filth look no different than bare ground. Brandt’s cormorants have been nesting in the rooms, adding topography as the build their nest mounds.

Sea Lions used to get up into the top floor, as a skull up there proved to us, but recently, the stairs have become so slick and muddy that the top floor seems to be reserved for the Pelagic Cormorants and other birds. This is a rare opportunity to get to the nest of usually cliff nesting Pelagic Cormorants and collect regurgitant for diet analysis.

Our little visit was of course not un-noticed. It seemed that the building’s residents assembled out front eager to see us leave so they could take back their home.

We obliged and started the long crawl home (quite literally, moving slowly on one’s knees is the only way to move around on an island packed with thousands of wary sea lions). Recently, a non-profit Oikinos constructed a sea lion exclusion fence to restore some of the seabird breeding habitat on the island. As we were getting ready to pack up, we found a weak spot in the fence, where sea lions or the wind had nearly collapsed it. A fence seems like a simple idea, but not many fences are meant to keep out thousands of very large sea lions! While the repair was frantic, the setting sun cast golden light on the culprits, and it was hard to be mad.

A moonlit cruise back to the mainland and everyone was able to relax. I don’t expect to be back until next spring, I can’t wait to see how the island changes. The gallery below has all my photos from this season at Ano Nuevo Island.

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• Alan Grinberg May 1, 2010

  Wow! So cool you got to visit the island!
  Thanks for sharing.