It looks to be a third day of heavy fog laying over the coast. I took a walk along the cliffs of Pleasure Point in the later morning yesterday and could hardly believe how many gulls and pelicans were busy fishing in the kelp beds a couple of hundred yards offshore. We have had a swarm of anchovies come close to the beaches, which has excited not only the seabirds into a feeding frenzy, but the dolphins have packed together and skimmed the surface of the water as though training for the circus.

The other day the anchovies swam in a large clump too close to the shore and got tossed up on the sand by the waves. They were scattered up and down the wet sand for a couple of miles--mostly dead, but some still gasping--so that in the late afternoon their shiny bodies reflected a million bright images of the sun. The last great anchovy die-off that I recall was in the late 1960s, when they swam en masse into the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor. There was no easy way to get them out of the harbor in a timely fashion, so the rotting carcasses, piled deep in the still water, created a putrefaction that would turn people green up to twenty miles away. Since then the harbor has had an aeration system installed to prevent future occurrences, but nearly fifty years later I hear people on occasion talking of the great die-off.

Alfred Hitchcock's movie The Birds was also based on a true-to-life event that occurred here in 1961, when a massive flock of sooty shearwaters became poisoned from shellfish and flew into buildings and roof tops in Capitola village. This year the shearwaters, which come visit us in an annual migration from New Zealand, have returned home without incident. I'm always curious as to what might visit us next.

Around home, though, we have been visited by trails of ants. They seem to have been disturbed by recent changes in the weather. I find them marching in different paths around the perimeter of the house and cottage next door, and when I go sit out in the afternoon sun to read I find ant scouts running up the legs of the lawn chair and crawling on my legs and arms. I put out traps for them and that seems to have deterred their progress.

Nature is busy at work with all sorts of things I would not expect, unless I stop what I'm doing and give her my attention.