Up Close and Personal With the Sea Gulls

“Don’t run. Shuffle your feet,” the naturalist tells the fifth-graders. That’s a tall order for 10- and 11-year-olds who have been cooped up on a boat and are ready to scamper up the trails on this wind-swept island.

When they round the first bend, all of the rules make sense.

Baby sea gulls are everywhere. Nests pop up every 20 feet. Clueless chicks, camouflaged by downy, mottled black and tan feathers, wander in every direction.

It sometimes takes the squawking, swooping protests of a parent gull to ward off disaster between wayward chick and oncoming foot.

“Look at the babies!” squeals one fifth-grader in a pink sweatshirt. She points to her discovery: a pair of fuzzy chicks rising on unsteady legs. One stumbles and plops on its side in a cartoonish pratfall.

“Look how cute they are,” another girl says, clutching her hands to her heart. “I want to take one home.”

Every spring, thousands of schoolchildren stumble on to one of Southern California’s best-kept secrets: the western gulls that nest in the little-visited Channel Islands National Park.

It’s the ultimate field trip, or so these students and their teachers say. School groups make up about 25% of the park’s 37,000 visitors, brought by boats run by Island Packers, the park’s principle concessionaire.

On the 45-minute boat ride to Anacapa, students saw dolphins frolicking in the waves off the bow. Often, these groups see whales.

On the island, they took a virtual walk through the kelp forest with Ranger Bill Faulkner. While Faulkner slipped into the chilly, emerald water, the students stayed on land huddled around television monitors. They watched him through underwater video cameras and peppered him with questions, using a transceiver built into his dive mask.

When Faulkner climbed up the ladder to the landing, he was mobbed by the fifth-graders. He held out his black swim fins for the students to touch. Some of the braver ones felt his wetsuit. Yes, it was wet. Their touch made it real. It was the same suit they had just seen on TV.

“Most of these students have no experience with the ocean,” said Andrea Moe, coordinator of the yearlong Los Marineros marine education program. This year, it enrolled all of Santa Barbara’s fifth-graders.

“Some of these schools are two blocks from the beach and yet these kids never set foot on the sand,” Moe said. “They’d never seen a tide pool or ridden in a boat until we take them out.”

This time of year, students get a special treat. They get very close--sometimes too close--to the nests of western gulls.

“If the birds are squawking, keep on walking,” naturalist Monica Baker tells the 73 students on this trip from Franklin Elementary School in Santa Barbara.

Ranger Dave Begun lays down some national park rules: Don’t take anything home with you. Be careful where you step. Don’t chase the fuzzy chicks, no matter how much you want to pet them.

“The mother and father will see us as a threat and start divebombing you,” he warns.

“Cool!” says an 11-year-old boy.

“It may sound cool, but what comes out of sea gulls?” the ranger asks the circle of children.

“Poopie!” several of them shout in unison.

“Right. If the sea gull divebombs you, they will try to get a little poopie right on you.”

Message delivered.

Anacapa Island, one of three spots on the Channel Islands used by western gulls for nesting, offers unusual access to chicks born in the wild.

Unlike many birds, gulls are fairly bold with humans. Just ask anyone who has fed gulls at the beach, or watched these airborne scavengers--sometimes nicknamed sky rats--squabble over scraps from fishing boats or municipal dumps.

On Anacapa Island, people see a different side of gulls. Western gulls pair up and share parental tasks.

While one guards the nest, the other goes fishing, returning to regurgitate the catch.

“By mid-July, all of the chicks will be the same size as their parents,” said Ranger Tom Dore. That’s when they try to fly, with spectacular and comical crash-landings.

“By the end of August, there is not a bird left on the island,”

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The National Park Service will run its underwater video program Tuesdays and Thursdays through Labor Day. For park information, call (805) 658-5730 or go to www.nps.gov/chis. For Island Packers’ boat trips, call (805) 642-1393 or go to www.islandpackers. com.