Excerpt:
The first thing you notice after stepping foot on Southeast Farallon Island is that the animals are in charge. And they are loud.
Western gulls hurl piercing shrieks from their nests along the island’s main path. Sea lions grunt from the rocky shore in such numbers that the sound reverberates from another island more than half a mile away. Hundreds of thousands of common murres trill a kazoo-like sound…
The animals of this wildlife refuge 27 miles from San Francisco have thrived under the protection of the nonprofit Point Blue Conservation Science, which has stationed a small crew on the island continuously since 1968 with the blessing of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But starting in 2025, federal funding will be lost and Point Blue’s budget will be slashed by more than a third. It will probably mean having to leave the island without a human presence for half the year, and cuts to research on endangered whales, great white sharks, elephant seals and some seabirds.
“By us being there, it precludes anyone from landing and walking around and disturbing the wildlife,” said Point Blue’s Jaime Jahncke, while guiding visitors last week on the first media tour of the island in more than a decade.
With just a few stunted trees, the island presents a strange mixture of beauty and desolation. The land is paved in uneven sharp granite with patches of vegetation, dropping into narrow inlets with sparkling aquamarine water and rising into pointed, craggy hills. Buildings and infrastructure from earlier eras, including its time as a U.S. Navy base, are still around.
The island is part of an archipelago 5 miles from the edge of the continental shelf, home to the largest seabird colony in the lower 48 states, with 450,000 breeding birds. The islands are passed by other migrating birds — more than 430 species in all — as well as blue whales, orcas and humpbacks. Research done on the animals informs decisions about their protection and provides long-term insights on the impacts of climate change.
“We are studying huge ecosystems on a large scale that have really long cycles,” said Amanda Spears, a program biologist for Point Blue who during bird season manages a team of four research assistants who live in an old home for lighthouse keepers. She perched near a nest with a just-hatched spotted gull chick and tried to speak over its loud hovering parent. “We need a lot of time and a lot of data” to learn how animals will be affected by changes in those cycles, she said.
The team also keeps an eye on short-term issues such as avian flu or El Niño, when warmer ocean temperatures lead to fewer nutrients at the base of the food chain and less food overall. Spears said some possible effects of this year’s El Niño are already appearing: Only a fraction of the usual number of Brandt’s cormorants are nesting on the islands this year, and most gulls are laying two eggs rather than their usual three. ..
