A Heads-Up Boat Tour : Gaggles of Geese, Thousands of Ducks, a Multitude of Shore and Land Birds--and, Finally, a Soaring Eagle

Way out on Lake Cachuma, somewhere between the call of the loon and the honk of the Canadian goose, there is the amazing spiel of naturalist Neal Taylor.

“At Lake Cachuma we have seeds that walk, spiders that fly, plants that catch fish and trees that predict rain,” Taylor says to his Eagle Tour passengers aboard the Cachuma Queen, “and there are 276 varieties of birds, including three dozen species of waterfowl on the lake.”

But only one Neal Taylor.

Taylor’s tour-boat passengers are surprised when, in the middle of the lake, he cuts the outboard. Soon they will be even more surprised when Taylor begins discourses on such topics as capitalism and conservation, differences between goldeneyes and common mergansers, the natural history of Spanish moss and how to cook a coot.

For a few moments, passengers on the bobbing boat savor the quiet of the lake and the reflection of the Santa Ynez Mountains on the water’s surface.

Taylor smiles. To say he had a captive audience is supreme understatement. With an actor’s instinct, the naturalist stretches out his Harold Pinter-like dramatic pause until his passengers begin to fidget. He then begins his first discourse of the day about Lake Cachuma, which is just northwest of Santa Barbara:

“Who’s the best fisherman on the lake?” Taylor asks.

“The cormorant,” answers a young woman, who, judging from the way she clutches her high-powered binoculars, bird checklist and Peterson “Field Guide to Western Birds,” is a serious bird watcher indeed.

“Good guess,” Taylor declares. “The cormorant is a big eater, excellent at diving for fish. And extremely smart. I swear that bird knows when the trout truck arrives and where we’ll stock the lake. But actually, the cormorant is the third-best fisherman around here.”

“The eagle,” answers a safari-suited fellow who looks as if he had stepped from the pages of the Banana Republic catalogue.

“Another good guess,” Taylor says. “The bald eagle’s feet are adapted for fishing. The eagle has little bumps on its toes so that when it swoops down to get a fish swimming close to the lake’s surface, the bird can hold onto its dinner. The eagle is the second-best fisherman on the lake.”

The sly grin working at the corners of Taylor’s mouth and the twinkle in his eyes lets the passengers know they’ve been had. “Yeah,” he says with mock bravado. “You’re looking at him.”

Groans and laughter are overpowered by the roar of the outboard as Taylor throttles the Cachuma Queen toward the north shore.

With all due respect to the eagle and the cormorant, and with all kidding aside, Taylor may very well be the best fisherman on the lake. As a teen-ager, he won several national casting titles. These days, he teaches “The Art and Science of Fly-Fishing,” both “academically” at UCLA and “hands-on” in the wilds of Wyoming.

Taylor, a mountain of a man with a winning grin, may be entertaining to tour passengers, but he’s anything but to the lake’s rule-breakers when he finds them fishing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Taylor came to be a park ranger rather late in life because, he says, “I was spending too much time in the corporate world and not enough time in the natural world.”

He spent the better part of two decades as a salesman for a sporting goods distributor before becoming Lake Cachuma Recreation Area’s park naturalist seven years ago. Early attempts to market his tours as water nature trails and wildlife cruises were not very successful. Then the eagles discovered Lake Cachuma and Taylor and county park officials had a product to market.

Taylor stops the boat again. “This is a free-enterprise lake,” he declares. “Fees collected for day use, camping and tours completely pay for this park, and no local tax dollars have to be collected.”

Passengers, expecting to learn about fish, not free enterprise, are a bit baffled.

“Thank you for your support,” he adds.

Taylor thinks capitalism, in the manner that it’s practiced at Lake Cachuma, can promote conservation. Fees collected from wildlife-watching tours could go to help preserve animals and their habitat. Whale watchers helped save the whale, elephant-seal watchers helped save the elephant seal, and perhaps eagle watchers can help save the eagle, Taylor reasons.

Alas, on this overcast Friday morning, the eagles are elusive. True, the passengers already have sighted gaggles of geese, thousands of ducks and a multitude of shore and land birds, but Taylor feels compelled to provide at least one glimpse of an eagle on any Eagle Tour.

“Where are they?” Taylor mutters under his breath as he pilots the boat into isolated inlets and scans the high crags and snags where the eagles roost.

America’s national bird migrates south from the Pacific Northwest and western Canada to the warmer climate and more abundant food sources of Central and Southern California. Eagles often winter in the same spots preferred by migrating waterfowl--the state’s inland lakes such as Cachuma--where food is plentiful and human intrusion is minimal.

Cachuma’s eagles arrive in November or December and stay until mid-March. Wildlife experts believe that birds wintering at Lake Cachuma come from the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington.

Declining Population

At the turn of the century, there were nesting pairs of bald eagles in 24 California counties. By 1950, only eight counties could count reproducing pairs, the decrease partially attributable to the use of DDT from the 1940s to the ‘60s.

“Look!” Taylor cries with a mixture of triumph and relief. “An immature, high in that oak tree.”

Binoculars are trained on a brownish-black bird, all but camouflaged in the branches of the distant tree. The largest raptor in North America (with the exception of the captured condors in the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos) is not all that majestic from such a distance.

Every Eagle Tour is different, Taylor says. Sometimes passengers get an eyeball-to-eyeball look at an eagle perched on a snag near shore. At close range, when the observer can see the white head and tail, the large, yellow hooked bill and talons, America’s national symbol is truly an impressive sight.

“Look!” Taylor exclaims. “High in the sky!”

Eagles in flight are beautiful to behold. Unlike some other large birds, eagles soar with their wings almost flat. With a 6- to 8-foot wingspan, they create a dramatic and distinctive silhouette against the clear winter sky.

And the flight of this eagle on this day has made Taylor a happy man and delights the tour-boat passengers. Now he can talk of other things.

“I really didn’t want the lake at first,” Taylor confesses. “It (building a dam to impound the Santa Ynez River) half-drowned a beautiful valley and it wrecked one of the best steelhead fishing rivers in the state.”

Chumash Artifacts

A lot of other people disliked the proposal to form the lake, but when water-short Santa Barbara resorted to rationing during 1948, the dam and lake were approved by local voters. Congress appropriated funds and the project was completed in 1953.

The lake also covered up a lot of human history, Taylor says. “My brother and I picked up four truckloads of Chumash artifacts and took them over to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.”

It was the abundance of steelhead trout in the river that brought the Chumash to the area and later attracted several generations of anglers. Dedicated fishermen say the Santa Ynez River once compared favorably with the Klamath as one of the state’s best steelhead-fishing rivers.

Concerned with the demise of the trout stream, the California Sport Fishing Protection Alliance recently filed a complaint with the State Water Board. The alliance wants a study done on how the fishery might be restored. Taylor, too, would like to see the wild river of his youth restored, but for now, his priority is protecting the lake’s 42 miles of shoreline.

“Now I regard the lake as a wonderful resource--as a way to enhance wildlife habitat. This is a remarkable place for birds,” he says.

For beginning bird watchers who’ve traveled long distances for the chance to sight a bald eagle, it’s almost bird-watching blasphemy to opine that eagles often are not the most intriguing part of the Eagle Tour.

Visitors are sometimes more delighted by the great multitude of birds--the flocks of geese taking flight or the clouds of canvasbacks traveling in long, V-shaped formations.

Sometimes it’s the antics of the diving ducks that are most remembered. The canvasback, a diving duck with a white back, rusty-red head and long black bill, is almost always sighted on the lake. And visitors are all but certain to see the bufflehead, one of the smallest diving ducks, a chubby white fellow with a black back that buzzes more like a fly than a bird.

Great Blue Heron

Other divers include the small, brown, pie-billed grebe and its cousin, the eared grebe. Because grebes ride stern up in the water, they always seem to be in danger of sinking.

The lake’s longest-legged resident is the great blue heron. Its long neck, regal bearing and great size make it one of the most photogenic of birds, and its habit of standing motionless for long periods on one leg make it an easy target for amateur photographers.

“Cachuma is a great place for the beginning bird watcher,” says Joan Lentz, co-author with Judith Young of “Birdwatching: A Guide for Beginners” (Capra Press). “There are more than a dozen species of ducks, four species of grebes and a couple of loons--a real wealth of wintering bird life.

“The lake’s low water level means you can get fairly close to a lot of water birds,” Lentz explains, “and don’t forget the perching birds in the park’s oak woodland--acorn woodpeckers, Western bluebirds, goldfinches, juncos and lots of sparrows.”

Taylor has a breezy approach to bird watching, which may be just what the beginner needs to get off to a good start, says author Young, “but, uh, he didn’t tell his coot story to a boatload of Auduboners, did he?”

Well . . . yes.

“The coot is the Rodney Dangerfield of the bird world,” Taylor declares. “It doesn’t get any respect.”

He and the passengers watch one of the gregarious gray, white-billed birds skitter over the lake’s surface on its huge feet and lunge awkwardly into the air. Not only is it a graceless flyer, but it has a grating kakakakaka call.

Still, the ugly duckling-like bird is kind of cute and one serious birder nearly drops her binoculars when Taylor blithely asks: “Know how to cook a coot?”

None of the cooks on board dares hazard a guess.

“First you pluck it, then leave it in a stream overnight. Then you put an apple inside the bird and wire it to a split green log. Smoke the coot over a campfire 3 1/2 hours or until golden brown.”

Everyone on board but the Auduboner realizes Taylor is pulling their legs.

“Then throw away the coot and eat the apple.”

Bobcat, fox and coyote prowl Cachuma’s shoreline. About 70 beaver families live by the lake. Unlike their river-dwelling cousins, Cachuma’s beavers don’t build dams. Instead, they occupy burrows in the mud banks.

While much wildlife inhabits the lake’s shores, a few visitors expect a thrill at every turn. “Some visitors expect the Disneyland jungle boat ride,” Taylor complains. “There aren’t any pop-up rhinos and recorded bird calls out here. It’s all real.”

‘That’s Nature’s Way’

Sometimes too real.

On some occasions, the natural history lesson comes from Charles Darwin rather than Walt Disney. During one cruise, Taylor maneuvered the tour boat into an isolated inlet and he and his passengers watched, enthralled, as not 30 feet away a doe and two fawns nibbled at the lakeside brush. It was an idyllic scene, pretty as a post card . . . until a mountain lion, with the big cat’s legendary quickness, burst out of the bushes and killed the doe.

“It’s one thing to read about survival of the fittest in a textbook; it’s another thing to see it acted out before your eyes,” Taylor comments.

“I have to say it was a little like watching the murder of Bambi,” admits Taylor, “but that’s nature’s way and it’s not my job to interrupt it.”

The Eagle Tours, through mid-March, run Wednesdays through Sundays. For a free Eagle Tour brochure or reservations, call or write to Santa Barbara County Parks Department, Attn: Eagle Tours, 610 Mission Canyon Road, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93105; telephone (805) 568-2460 weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon or 1-4 p.m. Tickets: adults, $8; children 11 and younger, $5; plus $3 parking. Eagle Tours stay at least 200 feet from eagles, so photographers should bring fast film, long lenses and perhaps a small tripod. Dress warmly and bring binoculars.