by Leath Tonino
Outside a hardware store, we stopped to consider what to my eye resembled nothing but traffic and more phone-fiddling pedestrians. “This used to be all dunes,” Pomerantz said with a sweep of the hand. He reminisced about first coming across a black-and-white photo, taken in the nineteenth century, that shows a pool of water backed up against sand and grass. “It was a dynamic feature called Laguna Seca. That means Dry Lake. It came and went, depending on conditions.” I mentioned that his reality seemed doubled, the past no less vivid than the present, and he agreed: “I hallucinate dunes when I ride my bike through town. I see the gullies, the drainages, and I notice the infrastructure on top and how it all connects.”
Though we never consulted it, Pomerantz carried a rolled-up topographic map, sometimes swinging it like a baton, sometimes tucking it into his armpit. It was his most recent project: Seep City, a survey of paved-over creeks, backfilled wetlands, tidal sloughs, municipal reservoirs, half-hidden brooks, and dozens of secret springs. In addition to data gleaned from photos in library archives, the map is derived from government surveys conducted in the Gold Rush era. More than anything though, it’s a product of boots-on-the-ground “landscape sleuthing.” Pomerantz has found a number of damp basements and soggy backyards by knocking on doors and introducing himself to strangers. He estimates that he’s initiated five thousand—or perhaps ten thousand—random conversations on the street over the years, searching for clues.
Forty-five minutes into our stroll, having worked our way through crooked neighborhoods and discussed everything from bike activism to desert wilderness travel to an outfit called the Awesome Foundation (somehow it came as no surprise that Pomerantz was on the board of the San Francisco chapter), we reached our destination: an empty parking lot fronting a three-story apartment building. By the appearance of it, five or six reasonably hydrated guys had recently gone pee nearby, their trickles gathering into a snake that slithered twenty-five feet and culminated in a millimeter-deep puddle. “It’s always flowing,” Pomerantz said, crouching to touch the wet blacktop with his fingertip.
What we’d found was a freshwater spring: both entirely unimpressive and, because of what it represented—namely, a kind of primeval lifeblood that will not die no matter how much civilization we heap atop it—totally inspiring. For a moment, I sensed thousands of liquid threads coursing beneath my feet, vibrating in drainpipes and dark tunnels of rock.
“The world we live in is a real place, and it’s worth real effort, real exploration,” Pomerantz said, his finger still against the pavement. “You’ve got to go far beyond the edge of the computer screen, far beyond the armchair.”
Watching Goggles
It’s a typical late-summer afternoon in San Francisco, chilly and damp, the sky a low ceiling of cloud. I’m sitting at the edge of a golf course fairway with Janet Kessler—waiting, watching, listening. The soft thowck of a well-struck ball sounds from behind a screen of Monterey cypress at our back. A red-tailed hawk alights on a nearby branch. “It’s funny,” Kessler says, scanning the expanse of cropped grass before us. “People are always asking me how to see a coyote in the city. I tell them the coyotes are right here, right in front of you. You just have to look.”
And so we look.
Thowck.
A naturalist, self-taught urban wildlife photographer, and longtime resident of San Francisco, Kessler, age sixty-five, has spent much of the past decade tracking, studying, documenting, and generally enjoying the heck out of her favorite neighbor, Canis latrans. She spends a minimum of three hours a day, usually at dawn or dusk, checking up on individual animals and family packs. By her estimate, several dozen coyotes live in the metropolis: “McLaren, Lake Merced, Golden Gate—they’re in all the parks.” This golf course, sandwiched between a neighborhood flush with Chinese restaurants and a cliff band that drops steeply to the Pacific, is one of her go-to sites.
She points to a tee box on a slight rise to our left, indicating that I should hold my gaze there. “Goggles usually comes out around six or seven p.m., though I’ve seen him as early as four p.m. He’s the coyote I’ve known the longest, almost eight years. He looks a little like he’s hanging on his bones now—he walks stiff—but hey, we all get old.”
Thowck.
Two border collies approach with a young guy in tow. “Have you seen the coyote?” Kessler asks.
“All the time,” the guy says. “It yells at us.” He plays a video on his phone of a coyote standing beside a log, framed by shrubs, barking. The border collies turn, intrigued.
“Oh, yeah, that’s Goggles all right,” Kessler says. “I recognize my coyotes by facial structure and expressions, not by their fur. It’s the same with humans. We hardly ever forget a face.”
Some people take on their dog’s appearance and mannerisms after enough years together—a beefy, truculent man jogging his pit bull, a poodle in the lap of a prim, curly-haired lady. Kessler is thin, quick, and hyperattentive, her descriptions of coyotes often more pantomime than speech. She dresses in various shades of muted green to blend with her surroundings: mossy jeans, fern-colored fleece, olive ball cap with a coyote standing above the brim. A brown-gray ponytail hangs to her lumbar spine, resembling—as the name suggests—a tail.
There is a surefire way to identify Kessler as human, though, and that’s the massive camera in its case, slung across her chest like a camo-patterned infant. “I don’t have an encounter every time I come out, but if I do, I’ll easily get six hundred photos,” she says. “My camera is my notebook. It records time, place, weather, behavior.” Her images have been featured in Bay Area magazines and shown at local museums and galleries, but they are first and foremost personal research tools. Recently, she’s been using them in conjunction with Google Maps to better comprehend how coyotes navigate the city—what she calls “trekking patterns.”
Kessler’s obsession can be traced back to a random accident. In 2006 she cut her finger on a can of black beans and had to quit practicing the pedal harp for two hours each day, her habit at the time. During the recovery, while walking her dog on Twin Peaks, a semi-wild ridge at the center of the city, she happened upon a hunting coyote. Entranced by its behavior, she returned the next morning with her camera—and the next morning, and the next. Shortly, she had self-published an album, Myca of Twin Peaks, and was feeling an entwined sense of wonder and responsibility, an obligation to share her newfound appreciation of San Francisco’s lesser-known denizens.
Occasionally, coyotes in urban and suburban settings have attacked dogs and even people, but Kessler argues that such antagonistic interactions are avoidable. She’s adamantly opposed to trapping and killing programs, and helped found a volunteer group—Coyote Coexistence—to educate the public about how to live alongside the species. (Rule number one: Keep your dog leashed.) “In every community, there’s one group that wants to kill them, one that wants to save them,” she says. Coyotes as Neighbors—the title of the thirty-minute slideshow she produced for coyotecoexistence.com—is an apt summary of her hopeful vision.
Thowck.
And now here comes one of those neighbors: Goggles.
Kessler is on her feet in an instant, camera out, shutter snapping. Goggles, so named because the coat rimming his eyes is “a little puffy,” strikes me as more robust and handsome than previously described. Trotting the far side of the fairway, he stops and ponders the ground. His head tilts. “Pay close attention,” Kessler whispers. “You might witness a pounce any second. Gophers and voles, that’s what he wants.” But the pounce never comes, and for fifteen minutes we trail Goggles at a respectful distance of fifty feet. Then he turns, glances at us—snap-snap-snap, goes the camera—and disappears into heavy brush.
The afternoon dimming into evening, we wander the back nine, poking about in thickets, enjoying the exploration, Kessler recounting stories as we stroll. Once she observed snoozing siblings for thirteen hours. (They stirred occasionally to harmonize with howling ambulance sirens.) Another time, determi
ned to travel through the night with a particularly welcoming coyote, she told her husband not to worry if she wasn’t home by sunrise. (The coyote ditched her earlier than expected.) She’s seen about everything in the field, from coyotes that have been hit by cars to one that understood traffic signals and would wait patiently for the light to change before dashing across the street.
Eventually, inevitably, I raise the obvious question: Why? Why would a woman with no formal biological training pursue an animal that many folks consider a pest, a damn varmint, and that others say has no business living in a city?
“You get to know them,” Kessler offers. “Their world opens up, the details of their days. It’s a soap opera: Wow, am I going to see that youngster again? Is his sister going to be around? Is Dad going to be aggressive with him? There’s always a cliffhanger.” Though she’s collected scat samples for a University of California professor studying coyote DNA, has consulted with groups in Texas and Georgia that are trying to establish coexistence management plans, and is writing a book based on her coyote observations, it’s this multigenerational family saga that keeps her passionate, this backyard melodrama playing out across the years. “Like with the pedal harp,” she says. “You get lost in the music. It absorbs you. You become part of it and nothing else exists.”
Revisiting the fairway, we’re surprised by the sight of Goggles hunting exactly where we initially spotted him. This time he treats us to a number of acrobatic pounces, all unsuccessful. Kessler says that she usually departs when she can’t see to shoot—snap-snap-snap—and both of us chuckle. If that were true, we’d have been out of here a half-hour ago.
Soon it’s full-on night, and Goggles is all but gone; I can barely make him out curled up in a ball, five feet from a paved cart path. Kessler and I sit in silence, squinting into the dark, not quite ready to leave. “We could call it quits,” she says. “Or, if you’d like, we could play with my night-vision goggles.”
I must have misheard. Was that night-vision goggles?
“They’re really just a toy.”
She pulls what looks like a regular pair of binoculars from her backpack and hands them to me. In a flash, it’s daylight again—a key-lime sort of daylight, the fairway a pale wash, Goggles a coyote-shaped splotch of ink. The perspective is magical, like I’ve been sucked through a portal and granted access to a secret San Francisco.
“Here come some people,” Kessler says, excited and tense. “Keep your eye on him. See what he does.” I pan, and five teenage girls stroll into view. They follow the cart path, moving directly toward Goggles, oblivious. He raises his head an inch—and my chest tightens.
Four, three, two steps away: The girls are closing in, chit-chatting, near enough to notice a coyote’s hot breath on their ankles if they were to shed their socks. Goggles flicks his ears and puts his chin down on the ground. He knows they don’t know. He knows this is his turf, his zone. He knows there’s no issue, no problem, no need to react.
The girls pass by, none the wiser, and I lower the night-vision goggles. The scene goes murky; for a moment, I’m blind.
“The only thing we’re missing now is a howl,” says a voice. “Then we’d have the perfect outing.”
Stucco’d All Over
I had a college professor who studied squirrels. In fact, he ate, slept, and breathed squirrels—you know the type. Squirrel, where? Did it have grizzled-gray dorsal fur? Was it digging for ectomycorrhizal fungi? On a scale of one to ten, was it an eleven?
Specifically, this professor adored the tassel-eared—or Abert’s—squirrel, a denizen of the Rocky Mountains’ cool, dry ponderosa pine forests. As the name suggests, the species’s distinguishing morphological characteristic is a tuft of hair extending approximately three centimeters from each ear. “Truly elegant,” wrote naturalist S. W. Woodhouse in 1853.
But here’s the interesting thing—my professor, the Squirrel Man, also had hairy ears. That’s right, the dude was tufted, tasseled, truly elegant. Furthermore, he boasted an impressive beard, a pelage really, and drank coffee in such quantities that during lectures he climbed the classroom walls. I’ve never met a person who so resembled, in both physical form and spirit, a member of the genus Sciurus.
Which raises the question: Do wildlife lovers assume qualities of the beloved? Put another way: Does the very act of sustained observation lead to a transformation of our bodies and minds?
This may sound ridiculous, but it’s not. Consider the devoted marine biologist swimming in endless pursuit of some sleek, streamlined fish. After hundreds of hours in the water, won’t certain of her muscles have developed and others atrophied? Or take the diehard ornithologist roaming inky-dark woodlands, searching for owls. It seems likely that she will eventually develop superior night vision, doesn’t it?
Another professor of mine, a guy who ate, slept, and breathed Plato, summed up the ancient Greek understanding of psychology with the line, “You become like the object you intend.” It’s a fancy way of saying that the things we spend time with, commit our senses to, and reflect on do indeed alter us. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines intentionality as the power of minds to be about something. If your mind is entirely about, say, a prairie dog or a salamander, where does that leave the so-called you?
Walt Whitman touches on this perplexing logic when he describes himself as “stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over.” That’s quite the image—a human plastered with bits and pieces of other creatures, zoologically collaged both inside and out. How does the poet, or for that matter the naturalist, hybridize with his animal neighbors? Whitman provides an answer a few stanzas later: “I stand and look at them long and long.”
Cut to a small park in San Francisco ringed with Monterey pines where, more often than not, yours truly can be found looking long and long at a family of red-tailed hawks. I located their nest a month ago—airborne feces and my stucco’d baseball cap facilitated the discovery—and have been visiting regularly ever since. To stare. To study. To jot notes.
Actually, that last part is a lie. Halfway through my third marathon session with the hawks, I dropped my pencil and didn’t bend to pick it up. Somehow, paying close attention to these birds turns off the intellectual, analytical region of my brain. Just being nearby, splitting the difference between meditation and mesmerization, constitutes my method of inquiry.
A couple centuries before Whitman, the haiku master Bashō, a Zen Buddhist, entreated his disciples, “Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn.” I’m a few notches shy of enlightenment, but this does jibe with my daily practice in the park.
I stand long and long. I look longer and longer. The tunnel of my binoculars, by focusing consciousness, makes me about that nest of awkward, tottering, almost-fledged juveniles. They turn their heads, scanning for mother and father, and I do the same, my eyes in a squint. A chilly gust ruffles their feathers, sneaks under my collar, and we all shy away, hunching into ourselves for warmth. Everybody spaces out. Borders blur. I slide toward the edge of me and the beginning of them.
And then, so fast, the raptors are dancing a jig and I’m dancing a jig and the air is full of cries because Mom’s coming in hot with a mouse. Dinner is served!
Perhaps this is getting too wacky. Let’s grab hold of something solid, something tangible—for instance, Squirrel Man’s ears. Are they the result of his decades-long fascination with Sciurus aberti? No, probably not. I’ll be the first to admit that those magnificent tufts of his are beyond my ken. Honestly, this entire subject, though exciting, leaves me a tad dizzy.
But just in case there is some truth here—just in case the lover of wildlife does assume qualities of the beloved—why not offer a quick word of encouragement to the passionate folks who research blobfishes, monkfishes, walruses, matamata turtles, vampire bats, and
naked mole rats? I say be not deterred. I say follow your heart’s idiosyncratic path. On a scale of one to ten, you freaks are an eleven. Pay no attention to the haters, the superficial haters, when they call you ugly.
Birdnap
The story begins in Arizona, when I was working as a biological science technician on a northern goshawk demography study. My job involved identifying banded birds, and that meant rising at dawn, hanging around nest areas, waiting for a prey delivery. Often I’d scope an elusive male’s anklet by eight a.m., then recline in the duff at the foot of a ponderosa pine for a couple minutes of shut-eye. Once or twice, maybe three times, I woke with a start to the surreal vision of a raptor perched on a nearby branch, its crimson eyes lasering me.
Whoa. Is this a dream?
It wasn’t long before I realized that napping with birds could be its own pastime, an enriching practice to deliberately pursue with different species in different habitats.
Since leaving Arizona, I’ve conked off with golden eagles on Colorado’s fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, trumpeter swans at Montana’s Red Rock Lakes, Costa’s hummingbirds in the Mojave, and ravens gossiping above the Hoh Rainforest’s dense green canopy—not to mention owls, from the great horned to the flammulated. The bulk of my avian dozing, however, has taken place in the Bay Area: Goat Rock to Point Reyes, Pescadero to the Golden Gate. San Francisco’s overgrown corners make for fantastic urban birdnapping (nuthatches weave blankets of twittering all through the summer afternoons!), and even riding the Amtrak east from Richmond there are avocets and egrets on mudflats beyond the pillow-window.
Normally we conceive of birding as a senses-on-high-alert activity: Only she who is vigilant, fully awake, will catch the flash of scapulars there in the tangled woods. Well, sure, I’ve been known to gulp a pot of black coffee and eagerly apply myself to scanning, scanning, scanning, David Allen Sibley and Roger Tory Peterson spurring me on. But there’s also something to be said for attention’s opposite, isn’t there? For relaxing? For easing ourselves into a different relationship with warblers and thrushes, pelicans and grebes?
