Spent the day in Santa Cruz showing a good friend around some of the sites. Natural Bridge State Park was a fine place to spend the afternoon. I never get tired of the sounds of gulls mixed with the surf breaking against the rocks.
These are brown pelicans, one of the success stories of the Endangered Species Act. Beginning in the 1940s DDT had a catastrophic effect on the population. The chemical, which was sprayed as an insecticide on crops in California and absorbed by aquatic wildlife from resulting water runoff, weakened the shells of these birds’ eggs after they ate contaminated fish.
The brown pelicans’ numbers plummeted along the coast as a result until they were put on the Endangered Species list in 1970 and DDT was banned in 1972. Today the species has completely recovered and is now listed as “least concern.”