Cattle Point
We went to Cattle Point in the early morning of October 9; it was a grey, windy, and the sky was painted with a pallet scraped down in rough strokes. Cattle point a completely different experience than this side of the Island- it's wave-exposed and windy, rough and intertidal. There's some of that here, but not anywhere like it is here on these shores. We descended down the steep path to the water, and once we got there were overwhelmed by the variety of species, both plant and animal, that we saw there. There was a ton of fucus and other kelps, the ubiquitous Nereocystis, and tons and tons of ulva. Dr. Emily Carrington told us all about how the 'emerald carpet' forms when the seagulls proliferate their guano on the rocks. The huge amount of nitrogen that comes from their feces fertilizes the seaweeds and they grow in abundance on the rocks that the seagulls live on. And there WERE a lot of birds there. I even saw a bald eagle, whose scientific name I PRAY is Aquila americana but it turns out is not, it's Haliaeetus leucocephalus. Some students who are from the east coast had never even seen a bald eagle before that day. It's kind of remarkable when you consider that some of them are kind of outdoorsy. It was at this field trip that I first became interested in seaweeds because there are so many of them and because they're just so cool! The intertidal nature of this environment was also especially neat to experience. The water comes in and out makes and engulfs little islands in almost the same instant. The cattle point ecosystem is really an amazing one.
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