Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge
Pete Pyle – Ornithologist, Author, and Researcher
Just north of San Francisco lies a small cluster of unassuming institutions, which in the last 40 years have changed the world view of bird populations, avian ecology, and the interconnectedness and fragility of international coastal ecosystems, as demonstrated by the travels and needs of migratory bird species. Riding this wave of conservation biology from the institutions’ humble beginnings are a corps group of biologists – many of whom are still local and active in avian research and conservation – Among them is Pete Pyle, a well respected ornithologist and author, who has broken ground in the study of aging and sexing birds in the hand through his pioneering research into the molt patterns of hundreds of species of birds.
Peter is the author of many scientific publications, including the definitive series of technical guides to ageing and sexing all North American birds: Identification Guide to North American Birds – parts 1 and 2: Known in ornithological circles simply as “The Pyle Guide”. This massive research project includes identification keys for all of North America’s species of land birds, water birds, game birds and raptors. Peter also soon will be completing The Birds of the Hawaiian Islands: Occurrence, History, Distribution, and Status – which includes records of all the birds of Hawaii: native, introduced, and vagrant. This monograph was started over 20 years ago by his late father, ornithologist Robert L. Pyle, and is now set-up online as a guide and database through The Bishop Museum: http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/birds/rlp-monograph/
Peter cut his teeth as a researcher in many exciting field studies over the years, including: his years on the rugged Hawaii/Micronesia/Samoa Forest Bird Surveys for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; lengthy at-sea ship surveys of pelagic birds and marine life; seabird monitoring projects in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands including Midway Atoll, Kure Atoll, Tern, and Laysan islands; and 24 years as lead biologist for the fall season on the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge – a rocky offshore outcropping 27 miles west of the Golden Gate.
Peter is also known for his participation in the pioneering team studies of the white shark populations at the Farallon Islands – for which he and the other researchers on this project received a deluge of media attention – often unwanted. Such attention created unforeseen problems for the project, ultimately leading to its demise... But only after many years of important scientific study had been accomplished by the team, and a foundation laid for all future white shark research in California. The Farallon Islands white shark project shed light on the natural history and undisturbed behaviors of this vulnerable predator, directly contributing to the newfound popular respect and conservation of the white shark in California and world wide.
This was a fun conversation with Peter. I have known him well for 15
plus years, and we wanted to tailor an interview which was more personal and
behind-the-scenes than other interviews he has done in the past.
CZ: When you “landed” on the north-central coast a couple of decades
ago as a young, enthusiastic ornithologist and naturalist, you were offered
a unique living arrangement. Please tell me about that:
PP: I first arrived in Bolinas on the afternoon of December 31st, 1979, so
I can say I've been there since the '70s. I was to start an internship at
PRBO's Palomarin Field Station near the end of Mesa Road but when I got there
nobody was home and the building was locked. I knew nobody in the area so
I stayed by myself in my old Datsun pick-up camper in the parking lot that
night. I distinctly recall getting up the next morning, looking over the coastal
scrub to the tranquil and blue Pacific Ocean, and thinking that a new decade
and era was dawning for me. Almost 30 years later I'm still around and own
a house in Bolinas. When I return to that parking lot I'm saddened by the
fact that Douglas Firs have completely consumed the coastal scrub and you
can no-longer see the ocean from the place I arose that first morning of the
1980s. I became part of the PRBO family during the 1980s, back when the organization
still had a family feel. I got involved in various projects and began to lead
trips for them to Mexico and Central America. It was on one of these trips
in the early 1980s, to Palenque and Veracruz that I met Corinne Ryan and Judge
Dick Simms, who had come on my tour along with 8-10 other PRBO affiliates.
We had a great time, and toward the end of the trip Corinne asked me if I
would like to care-take her summer home on Wharf Road along Bolinas Lagoon.
Known as "The Barge" it was an old coal transporter that was parked
along the road in the early 1900s and was put up on pillars and converted
into a house during the 1950s. I stayed in a small room at the back of the
garage and was responsible for looking over the place and making sure that
occasional renters were accommodated and cleaned up after. Outside my bedroom
window stood the entire lagoon, and I immediately started keeping track of
everything I could see, including the number of bird species seen from the
property. I was where I was supposed to be.
CZ: You must have had a lot of fun years there. The Barge is also situated
perfectly for excellent wildlife viewing. Please describe that, and your favorite
wildlife observations or events when you lived there:
PP: My work was still taking me into the field for extended periods, and
in 1987 I was to be gone for a four-month stretch on a scientific cruise to
the equatorial Pacific and on to the Farallon Islands after. So I asked my
friend Keith Hansen – an avid birder, seasonal volunteer for PRBO, and
exceptionally creative and talented wildlife artist – if he would come
up from Fresno to care-take the Barge for me in my absence. By the time I'd
returned Corinne had invited Keith to stay as well, and he has since established
his well-known wildlife gallery in Bolinas, and is still care-taking the Barge
with his wife Patricia. We overlapped there for another 7 years or so, during
which time we had built an outstanding “yard-list” of all the
birds and other animals we observed from home at the Barge. The list grew
to over 270 bird species, at the time one of the largest totals for a yard-list
in the country. We had a lot of fun and many memorable moments during those
years there together.
One year a young and scraggly male Western Gull landed on the deck. He was
so pathetic that we named him "Stud", and started giving him leftovers
to help him survive. For two to three years he was a regular fixture on the
deck of the Barge, and several times we needed to rescue him from various
predicaments. At least three times we had to catch him and pull fish-hooks
or lodged starfish out of his mouth. Typical of gulls, Stud began to push
the boundaries in search of food, and one day we caught him in the kitchen
scrounging around and making a mess. Attempts to reprimand Stud for such actions
were to no avail, and he continued to enter the house. One day we left the
door open all day by mistake and Stud found his way to the upstairs living
room and could not figure out how to get back out. He freaked out and through
the course of the day had bashed against the windows and covered the expensive
furniture and carpets with blood and excrement. Poor Keith was the one to
discover Stud, and after booting him out, spent 2-3 days getting the house
back in shape before the next renters arrived. It was not long after this
that I saw Stud over on the tip of Seadrift, wet, bedraggled, and with a drooping
wing, apparently broken. A large winter surge entered the lagoon, flooding
the spit and took poor struggling Stud up into the lagoon on the rising surge.
This was the last we saw of Stud, but we were able to at least give him a
few years of borrowed time, for better or for worse.
CZ: It’s hard to know where to start with the mammoth subject of the Farallon Islands. It’s a location that has received a ton of attention over the last 140 years! The topics of Farallon natural history and human history are vast and many-layered. We will focus on your particular expertise, and a handful of remembrances from your 24 years there. Please start by comparing the three seasons on the island for me, and why you loved the Fall on the Farallones:
PP: The Farallon Islands are a magical place for a biologist. There are three
distinct seasons on the Farallones, defined primarily by ecological events.
The longest and most intense season occurs in March-August and is characterized
by the seabird nesting season and heavy northwest winds. Over 300,000 seabirds
of 12 or 13 species converge on the island each year, and their success varies
tremendously, depending on oceanographic factors - El Niño, coastal
upwelling, etc. A focus now will be seeing how things evolve there as ocean
warming and global climate change take place over the next decades. The studies
on the seabirds out there often focus on their diet, which helps us manage
our fisheries and other ocean resources. The fall season, September-November,
was my favorite due to the generally calmer and more variable weather, and
the emphasis on observing and recording details on everything that occurs
around the island. Over 415 species of birds, including many far-flung vagrants,
have been documented over the years, primarily in the fall, incredible for
a tiny rock with three trees. We also closely monitored the comings and goings
of seals and sea lions, cetaceans, bats, butterflies, insects, plants, and
of course the white sharks in fall. Winter season, December-February, is when
the Elephant Seals come in to breed. In 24 years working there I spent most
of my time in fall but also covered five or six breeding seasons in spring,
and have been there at all times of year to cover for other biologists.
CZ: There’s been much written about life on the island for humans:
the Russian sealers, Gold Rush era “eggers”, lighthouse keepers,
Coast Guard occupation. Please give me a fly-on-the-wall view of life in the
Farallon House:
PP: Every day I would get up before 6 am to sniff the weather and call in
our observations to the Coast Guard, and whether rain, wind, or shine, I and
the other biologists would be completely focused on the tasks at hand until
bed time. When not out looking around, there were generators and boat motors
to service, data to analyze, and reports and papers to write. It was impossible
to plan out a day - you just had a big list and would chip away at things
between constant interruptions for biological events or mechanical breakdowns.
The Fish and Wildlife Service worked hard to upgrade the electrical and water-catchment
systems during my time out there, so it got easier for us biologists, but
I sort of began to miss the old days when challenges would keep us on our
toes. I liked to foster a team approach while there, where everyone chipped
in evenly to get things done. We all rotated kitchen duty days, in which one
person would wash all dishes and cook dinner. Some of us got fishing licenses
and would go out on our cooking days to pick up dinner. Each night after eating
we convened and summarized the day's events in the Farallon Journal, an amazing
chronology of every day out there since PRBO established the station in April
1968. We did have a TV but it was exiled to the neighboring vacant “Coast
Guard House” and few out there had time or interest to watch it regularly.
My daily TV dose was limited to five minutes at 6:23 every evening when the
weather-satellite photo would come on during the evening news. Evening activities,
when time and energy allowed, consisted of battling the mice, which over-ran
the island each fall, and re-telling the many convincing ghost encounters,
especially during dark foggy nights. After a long foggy, house-bound day at
the computer we'd sometimes have mouse-trap wars in the night, where we’d
turn off all the lights, sneak around as silently as possible, and randomly
throw loaded mousetraps, hoping to hit another participant. Sometimes the
traps would just go off in mid air; we knew we'd hit the ghost and we were
in for a restless night.
CZ: Up until recently forms of communication from the Farallones were
primitive, which was nice. No cell phones, internet, landline. Please describe
communications with the mainland from the island as you knew it:
PP: When I first started out there in the early 1980s, besides our thrice-daily
weather report radio calls to the Coast Guard, we would call in a grocery
list to PRBO and set up the weekend boat run once a week on Thursday, and
that was it as far as communication with the mainland went. There was trust
in those days that we would take care of ourselves and get the job done at
hand. Save for mail call once per week or two, everyone on the island could
focus on our well-defined world without distractions from outside sources.
I liked that. Gradually, however, communication was sort of forced upon us
by an outside world, eager to find out what was going on and, in some cases,
to exert more control over what we did. A radio-phone was installed, then
a primitive email system, then a direct, open-line radio patch to the PRBO
office in Bolinas, then a satellite cel phone, and now full internet service.
I suppose these additions reflect the times and the wants of a younger generation
of biologists used to being connected at all times. It wasn't for me, though.
On the other hand, I had no problem talking to the captains of the fishing,
whale-watching, and other boats around the island on the marine radio, as
they shared that corner of the world with us, along with all of its elements.
Most mornings when I was there I chatted with a salty old fisherman named
San Bruno in the morning after my 6-am call to the Coast Guard, and gave him
a more detailed analysis on the immediate weather and what I thought might
happen that day and that week. San Bruno was blind and lived up on the slopes
of San Bruno Mountain where he could communicate via radio to fisherman from
Monterey to Fort Bragg and beyond. The fishing community so enjoyed (and at
times relied on) our morning chat with San Bruno that they would stop by and
drop off a sack of Dungeness Crabs for us each Thanksgiving. Those were some
of the best meals I've ever had, in many cases with a violent ocean as a backdrop,
accompanying the first winter storm of the season.
CZ: Let’s hear some boat stories:
PP: I enjoyed monitoring the boating community and providing a safety valve
for them at times. A sailboat came in once and radioed a request for some
diesel fuel to negotiate the Golden Gate. I was happy to go give them a few
gallons and it turned out I was the first person the crew had seen in something
like six weeks. They had limped in off the ocean from some far-flung place
in the Pacific. Another time there was a knock at the door when I got up to
take the 6-am weather. Two Vietnamese fishermen in their pajamas! I followed
them around to Fisherman's Cove on the north side of the island where their
boat was upside-down and smashing up against the rocks. The weather had turned
unexpectedly that night and their boat had come untied from the mooring in
the cove. Huddled behind an outcropping near the boat was an old man in an
orange bathrobe. We call it Pajama Point now. They wanted us to save their
boat but there was nothing we could do as the storm was rapidly gaining intensity.
So we brought them in the house (where the old man curled up and fell asleep
atop our kitchen table), and called the Coast Guard to come out and take them
home. Then there was the guy in the water, in the middle of shark season!
He'd come out fishing all the way from Sacramento and his boat had been caught
by a sneaker wave off Great Arch, the absolute gnarliest and sharkiest place
around the island, and had sunk. We had seen a shark attack on a seal right
at that spot the day before and I was certain I'd have a mess on my hand by
the time I got there in our whaler but his karma must have been good that
day, as we were able to get him ashore, warm him up, and call the rescue helicopter
to come fetch him. (CZ: Peter was awarded an Honor and official recognition
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for this rescue).
There are other success stories: towing stray boats to moorings, in some cases
preventing them from drifting into the surf and rocks, or providing first
aid, water, and battery recharges. And others not so successful, like the
family of five who disappeared in 1982 (we found their boat on the rocks)
and the various distress calls and at-sea tragedies that were impossible to
respond to which occurred during the round-the-Farallones regattas (sailboat
races), e.g., in March 1999, and (especially) April 1982.
CZ: The field studies and biological monitoring that occur on the Farallon
Islands are noteworthy, and generally exciting. Some monitoring projects have
been running continuously since PRBO started their studies on the island in
1968, and some have begun more recently as questions about the ecosystem arise.
Some Farallon studies have grabbed an overload of media attention. Please
tell me about one of the “quieter” ornithological projects you
enjoyed and participated in on the island:
PP: I like taking an ecosystem approach, so all studies are relevant to each
other. You can't understand the birds without studying what they eat, you
can't study what they eat without knowing about oceanographic processes, these
oceanographic processes in turn affect how the marine mammals are doing, which
indirectly affect the birds, etc. I tried to view all of these interactions
through the eyes of the subjects themselves, and perhaps this was easiest
with the Western Gull, since they are such intelligent birds. Based on the
work of Larry Spear we had a very intense study where we followed about 500
banded birds through the breeding season each year - where they nested and
who they nested with, how many eggs they laid, and how many chicks they hatched
and fledged. We got to know each of these gulls, and to recognize each one's
distinct personality. The shrewd ones, the silly ones, the successful ones,
the evil ones. We followed divorces, remarriages, many a territorial dispute,
older males with younger females, and vice versa. The 3 and 4 year-olds that
had not yet bred (the equivalent to human teenagers) would hang out together
in clubs, acting dumb and inexperienced, the males sometimes practicing copulation
but standing backwards on the backs of females, eyes wide open with fear.
Working with gulls, you really understood how they and humans are all of the
same cloth, and how studying animals can help us understand ourselves.
CZ: Now to the white shark project.. Please give a brief history of the
project, and tell me about the early days. It must have been exciting, and
a bit rogue in the beginning:
PP: With such an undertaking we had to take a patient approach. Early-on in the study we consistently took a few steps forward each year in better understanding the natural history of the white shark. In the early 1980s we documented attacks on seals from the island, and noted how the killing of four white sharks by a fisherman in the fall of 1982 impacted the number of attacks on seals that we observed. In those days everyone was still gripped by the movie Jaws, which gave us a very unrealistic sense about what white sharks are all about. Thus, when a 13-foot shark came up to our 11-foot whaler as I was doing a boat landing one day in 1985 I was terrified and, despite racing into 3' of water next to the island, I still did not feel safe. But we gradually worked up the gumption to study attacks up close, and we were able to document a lot of little known and interesting behaviors. It was the only study of its kind: on un-baited sharks in their natural environment - and we used this opportunity to instigate their protection in California (a protection bill was passed in 1994) and publish about 20 papers in the scientific literature. We pioneered study methods and camera equipment for observing and recording white shark attacks and behaviors. Among other things, we documented with the use of archival pop-up transmitters, that some of our sharks migrate all the way to Hawaii when not at the Farallones, something that struck home with me since I have been doing the same thing for so many years. Since I have departed the project in 2003 they have learned a great deal more with pop-up transmitters.
Filming natural white shark feeding event, P. Pyle,
Scot Anderson
CZ: What and when do you think the peak of the project was?
PP: In 1993 a film team that was sponsored by the BBC and National Geographic
Society came out to do a special on the sharks and our project. Up until that
point we had been careful to keep a low profile about our research, knowing
that attention would only spell eventual doom to the project, if not the sharks.
The documentary came out in 1995 and was very popular, winning an Emmy or
two. It focused on the natural history and was accompanied by triumphant music,
as opposed to the stale old heart-beat mantra of Jaws, to better give the
audience a heraldic sense about the sharks. But as we predicted, it riveted
attention on the sharks and our studies on the Farallones, and began a parade
of thrill-seekers, countless other film and media parties looking for an edge
(and out-take footage that they could sell), cage divers, administrators,
fund-raisers, writers, etc... It became a feeding frenzy. I look back at the
decade between 1986 and 1995 as the best part of the shark project, as our
time was relatively undisturbed and filled with discovery about the sharks.
CZ: What are you most proud of from the years of the white shark study
on the Farallones?
PP: I'm proud of the shark protection bill, regulations we got passed on the shark-diving industry, and what we contributed to science, but I'm most proud about our role in helping shape peoples’ attitudes about sharks, away from the fear and loathing promoted by Jaws and toward one of respect and understanding. Without the white sharks our waters would be over-run by seals and sea lions, which would deplete our fishery resources and instigate a cascade of effects of ill benefit to both our marine ecosystems and ourselves. Through our studies I think a lot of folks, including kids, now think white sharks are cool, and belong out there off our coasts.
