I was in the parking lot this morning at Linda Mar, waxing my board and eager for my first surf session in more than a week, when a cop in a black dune buggy drove up and yelled, “Beach’s closed!”
Last week’s oil spill in San Francisco Bay had finally reached my bread-and-butter break. Dead, oily birds had turned up at the beach that morning, the cop explained, shortly after a similar bodycount emerged at Rockaway Beach, one headland north.
After the spill last Wednesday it seemed that the coast south of the Golden Gate might be spared from the goo goblin. Slicks and distressed birds were reported on the north coast as far as Point Reyes. But now the blobs are drifting everywhere. There’s no harbor from our fossil-fuel catastrophe.
I walked down the beach with my camera but was only able to find one bird (pictured). No way to know for sure if it was a victim of oil or natural causes.
As if the Bay Area’s plight isn’t bad enough, there’s a sister disaster emerging in the Black Sea, where a tanker broke up in a huge storm on Sunday and dumped more than six times the volume of fuel that we’re suffering here. Thousands of birds are struggling on the beach, too coated with oil to fly.
2007 is a lousy year for the birds.
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