Threads from the Web of Life: Stories in Natural History

Sighting in the Desert

11 Sighting in the Desert AREA 51 is an alien landscape of black volcanic craters and mountain ranges riding above dust devil flats and sand dunes. The area, north of Las Vegas, is a military reserve. It is sparsely patrolled by the U.S. Air Force, but if you wander far enough to get lost, they will never find you in time. Even as you keep to the mid-morning shade north of the rocks, you can feel your vitality beginning to evaporate through your skin into the powder-dry air. Years pass here without a trace of rain. Spreading skirts of jumbled rock stand at the feet of the mountains. These are alluvial fans, washed from box canyons out onto the floors of the valleys by the flash floods of the last ice age and preserved in perfect detail. All the rain that has fallen ever since has not moved them at all from where they came to rest ten thousand years ago. As you hang back in the shade of a cliff that still retains the previous night’s chill, you can lose yourself in the unlimited visibility and the profound silence of the place. Suddenly, however, your eyes fix in the distance and you witness an apparition you’ll never forget. Luminous objects materialize above the ridgeline and hover against the hard blue sky. Two or three of them emerge at first—pure white lights, their distance impossible to judge, gliding slowly west. Seconds later, more of them appear— half a dozen now, then more—all flying in a loose diamond formation. They linger long enough to erase any suspicion that they might be illusory; then finally, one by one, the leading lights wink out, soon followed by the others, and just as they came into view, they vanish. You stare at the spot where they were until your eyes tire, the deep field of view now corrupted with the shimmering hal- 120 Threads from the Web of Life lucinations of visual fatigue. Glancing back once more to recall the paranormal event, you are rewarded with a repeat glimpse. They are back for an encore appearance, flying the same open formation farther up the dome of the sky. Smaller now, they are rising to depart the area, ascending without a sound toward outer space. What are they? An atmospheric anomaly? Early signs of heat stroke? No, nor are they some new, classified air force project. They are a long-established natural phenomenon as old as these skies are high, frequenting this area since days long gone when the ridgetops dividing the wastelands here were chains of islands divided from each other by an inland ocean that stretched all the way to Utah. FAR to the west, a modern of archipelago of flooded ridgetops floats off the coast of Southern California in much the same way the ridge crests of Nevada once floated on long-vanished Lake Lahontan. With the exception of the few mammalian species that were stranded there when sea levels rose, the isolated channel islands are home now mainly to those seals and sea birds able to cross miles of open water. The most striking of the sea birds to inhabit these stranded shores are the pelicans. Their low reptilian croak perpetuates the legacy of their saurian ancestors. Their thin heads extend into a broad weather-vane bill much like that of the pterodactyls that plied this same niche long ago. There are two species of this modern pterodactyl—the Brown and the White Pelicans. The Brown is a marine diving bird; the White is not a diver—its greater volume of flight feathers renders it too buoyant to dive— it is a forager for surface fish. Both are accomplished soarers. The Browns can often be seen air surfing, gliding beside the breakers, riding the waves of air deflected upward where the sea breeze crests over the swells of the shore break. These pelicans are intimately attuned to this ethereal topology, seeking out the air waves along the edge of the bluff above the beach in the afternoon, and later, along the rooftops of the high-rise beachfront hotels on the mainland; they know every advantage the wind has to offer. 122 Threads from the Web of Life What the Brown Pelicans know about the air flowing above the surf, the White Pelicans know on a much grander scale. The Whites soar on...