UNDER A SOMBER WESTERN SKY whitecapped waves crowd together, peak, and tumble with a roar upon the bouldery shore. Sea palms toss and swirl, double over - and hold fast, defying the waves on a stormy outpost of jagged rock. . . . In a tidepool teeming with a strange assortment of life, a sea star locks its rays on a mussel and slowly pulls apart the shell. And all about the chatter and squeal of birds rises above the sea foam.
Birds everywhere: Gulls wheeling, watchful, pick-ing off stray chicks on the Farallon rocks . . . humming-birds flickering amid the orchid-draped mangroves of Yucatan ... herons stalking the Sapelo marshes... au-tumn hawks funneling into Cape May ... yellowlegs fishing the bayside of Cape Cod ... sandpipers running with the surf, pecking, piping - everywhere.
From Vancouver Island’s storm-wracked cliffs to the gray whale lagoons of Baja California, around the Gulf of Mexico with its sandy barrier islands and swampy deltas and blazing coral gardens, from the hot sands of Florida to the cold granite of Maine, America’s Seashore Wonderlands explores what the late Rachel Carson called “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.”
With scientists and conservationists as their guides, skilled writers and photographers examine the diverse worlds of the shore: Killer whales play on the “rubbing beaches” of British Columbia. Jellyfish glisten like “crystal dinner bells”; along the California coast giant kelp glows “like old gold” as sunlight strikes the can¬opy of a submarine forest, where 800 kinds of plants and animals reside. Even a blade of eelgrass, plucked from quiet shallows, may reveal a trove of life. Snails and slugs lay eggs on it, anemones grow on it, crabs crawl on it, sea stars adorn it, and clams burrow among its roots. Around Yucatan’s Rio Lagartos 12,000 flamingos filter food from the salt ponds; huddled in midday siesta they look like “overgrown pink mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms” also adorn the Bay of Fundy - mushrooms of rock, four stories high, shaped by weather and the world’s highest tides, where a human visitor feels like “a pixie wandering a springtime wood.”
Amid such wonderlands are other worlds, where resort developments sprout on islands of migrating sand, with costly, and sometimes tragic, consequences; where worried beach communities await the dark blot of spilled oil; where scientists and government officials seek to succor ailing estuaries and marshes, so long abused, so vital to the life of the shore.
While elders take to icing, young royal terns remain grounded, awaiting the growth of flight feathers on an island in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River estuary.