Ocean rescue

As I walked along the beach in northern Washington, scouting for garbage to put in the heavy-duty trash bag they had given me at the Olympic Coast clean-up orientation session a few hours earlier, I came upon a sad sight. A sea otter had somehow lost its way and ended up dead on Shi Shi Beach. With its life drained away, the otter's matted fur seemed to have lost its luxuriant richness, appearing more a drab gray than the chestnut brown I would have expected from the world's most prized fur.

Lacking a Ph.D. in marine biology, it was hard to tell what exactly killed the wayward sea otter. It might have been a predator, but I didn't see any visible wounds. Maybe it succumbed to leptospirosis or one of any dozen other bacterial outbreaks slowly making their way up the coast from California's marine mammal populations. Or perhaps one of the hundreds of tanker ships that pass through the area every week had discharged some oil into the waters contaminating an abalone or crab that the otter had enjoyed as an unwitting last meal. Or maybe it has starved while foraging far and wide for dwindling amounts of shellfish. I noted the dead otter's location to report to the National Marine Sanctuary group that was overseeing the beach clean-up.

Then I got back to work. I had volunteered to help cleanup Shi Shi Beach, a pristine sea-stacked affair on the northwest corner of the continental United States, just a four-hour drive from downtown Seattle. While other beach clean-ups happening around the country on this Earth Day might have focused on empty beer cans and abandoned beach toys, my work at Shi Shi, three miles from the nearest road and only accessible via a muddy tromp through verdant old-growth forest, focused more on debris washed up onto the beach from the turbulent Pacific. A large piece of broken fishing net. A weathered shipping palette. An oil can. A melange of odd-shaped plastic pieces. Each item in my assemblage represented one or another major threat to the world's oceans. The otter was just the coup de grace.

by Roddy Scheer