Marin Arts & Culture MAC_Oct_Nov_2017_final | Page 34

Point Reyes:
To See a Piece of Land
Cole Hersey
I
have been hiking Point Reyes since
before I was conscious. My family
goes on walks there. My friends live
and work in Point Reyes Station where
I visit them. It is the place where I first
swam in open ocean, where I first went
backpacking, where I first began to
wonder how landscapes were made,
where I first saw kinglets and yellow
warblers, where I first began to bird.
Point Reyes is the birthplace of my
affinity for things that are not human.
Much of Point Reyes that is not private
ranchland is protected wilderness. Two
and a half million people visit Point Reyes
to enjoy the waters and the wildlife, to
admire a world that is not their own.
It’s almost as if, in some sense, these
protected areas have become like
landscape paintings we can walk into,
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enjoy them for their physical beauty, and
leave. And largely I am this way as well.
There are many who make their living
in and around the peninsula farming
oysters, or herding cattle, but for the
most part I only view this landscape as a
visitor. My most recent form of viewing
Point Reyes has come in the form of the
Christmas Bird Count.
I love the Christmas Bird Count. It’s a
day where my friends and I hike around
until the sun starts to fade, tallying up
the birds we see in this peninsula by
our home, getting distracted by the
mushrooms and the trees, pausing to
look at the landscape, so beautiful, so
pristine in an idealized way that you
quickly realize why the Spanish named it
Point Reyes. Everything in the landscape
is angelic, from the turkey tails to the
amanitas, the grey squirrels to the grey
foxes, the bishop pines to the live oaks,
the coyote bush to the marshes full of
cattails, koots and black phoebes. It is
a landscape that I have easily wrapped
myself into, a landscape I readily identify
myself with and call home. And a
landscape I would like to know better.
For this Bird Count we were surveying
a stretch of land that is bisected by
Highway 1. It’s a large area mostly
comprised of marshes on the eastern
edge of Tomales Bay, eucalyptus
groves, grasslands, and chaparral. It’s
private rangeland for the most part,
so getting onto a site can be difficult.
But once arriving into those areas you
can see a myriad of beautiful things:
Ruby-crowned kinglets, scrub jays,
great and snowy egrets, vultures by