Hundreds of deep-diving seabirds are nesting along the Central Coast. Here’s why

Brandt’s cormorants are nesting by the hundreds along the rugged cliffs and broad coastal terraces of the Pecho Coast — the coastline that stretches from Point San Luis, where the lighthouse is located, northwestward to Islay Creek in Montaña de Oro State Park near Point Buchon.

This point of land takes its name for the Spanish word for goiter. At the time of the Spanish arrival, the Chumash chief had an enormous goiter on his neck and was nicknamed “El Buchon.”

It is located a few miles north of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant.

Brandt’s cormorants fly above, float upon and swim in the Pacific Ocean. In fact, after watching them below the surface while scuba diving, I think they fly better in the ocean than above it.

Like the kelp beds, the cormorants thrive on the boundary between the land and the ocean and are never found inland or rarely more than 10 miles out the sea.

If you ever have the chance to hold one, cormorants have cobalt blue eyes and manage to keep their heads on a flat plane even as their bodies move up and down.

They typically fish in large flocks that act as one rapidly trekking team that dives below or on the flank of relatively small schooling fish such as silver smelt, Pacific herring, hake and sardines or Northern anchovies.

These birds can dive deeper than 200 feet below the surface of the water. As they head toward the ocean’s surface, they heard these fish into densely packed bait balls for easier capture.

Along with the cormorants, a remarkable aggregation of marine life often gathers during these feeding frenzies. You can see humpback whales, dolphins, California sea lions and gulls — plus dive-bombing pelicans attacking from above with their necks stretched straight, and their wings tucked in like arrows to penetrate the water.

Brandt’s cormorants’ largest breeding populations occur in locations along the coastline with the highest amount of upwelling, primarily north of Point Conception northward into Oregon.

Along the Pecho Coast, the northwesterly can be fierce and relentlessly blow for days on end during spring.

Last week, northwesterly wind gusts reached 61 mph at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant’s meteorological tower.

These winds are vital to the abundance of marine life along the Central Coast, and here is why.

As the northwesterly winds blow parallel to our coastline, the friction of the wind causes ocean surface water to move.

Because of the Coriolis Effect, the surface water flows to the right, or offshore. This, in turn, causes upwelling along the coast as cold, and nutrient-rich water rises from the ocean’s depths to the surface along the immediate shoreline to replace the warmer and shallow water that is pushed out to sea.

On days with plenty of sunshine and lots of upwelling, California giant kelp (Macrocystis) can grow up to 24 inches in just one day. At that rate, you could almost see this type of algae grow in front of your eyes.

These nutrient-rich waters provide the fertilizer for the phytoplankton, which is the foundation of the aquatic food web.

In turn, the phytoplankton provides the primary food source for zooplankton, fish, marine birds and mammals.

In other words, the force of the wind creates some of the most productive areas of the coastal waters found anywhere in the world, which provides the fish that support hundreds of nesting cormorants and other marine species.

Unfortunately, the global population of Brandt’s cormorants seems to be in decline. But along the Central Coast they appear to be holding their own due to the northwesterly gales of spring.

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