Notes about your surroundings.

Aftermath--Crystal Cove State Park may provide the best chance to accurately measure the effect on sea life of the recent oil spill off Huntington Beach. The park, which covers 3.2 miles of rocky coastline between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, has some of the richest intertidal areas in the county, and it also has a 1,000-acre undersea reserve that includes kelp forests.

The park was spared the heaviest concentrations of oil, but a light brown foam and oily sheen did wash up in its tide pools and sandy coves.

For seven years now, the park has conducted a twice-yearly survey of marine life at five test points--two in the tide pools at Reef Point and Treasure Cove and three offshore. Those surveys provide a base line against which to measure any changes in the months and years ahead.

John O’Rourke, a park ranger and head of resource management at Crystal Cove, said that monitoring at the sites will become more frequent beginning in March, with surveys being taken monthly or every other month.

As for the spill’s effect on wildlife, O’Rourke said: “What is this all going to mean? We don’t know right now.” But thanks to the survey, park officials may develop a pretty good Birds--The dead birds that washed ashore in the aftermath of the spill were the focus of intense scrutiny. But some biologists were equally worried about the birds that didn’t wash up--the pelagic birds that stay farther offshore and whose bodies would probably sink before they could reach land.

Loren Hays, a Huntington Beach biologist, went up in a helicopter soon after the tanker accident and saw several pelagic species in the spill area, among them black-vented shearwaters and a flock of what he guessed were rhinoceros auklets. The auklets are part of a bird family called alcids, which Hays described as “our version of the penguin, except they’re able to fly.” The waters off Orange County are at the southern end of the bird’s range. “They’re pretty scarce,” Hays said. There would be no way to tell if any of them were killed or injured by the spill.