Welcome to Senior Perspectives.
I'm Michael Potts, your stand-in host for the regular host, Charles Bush.
This program is sponsored by Redwood Coast Seniors and MCTV.
Our guest today is Ron LaValle, a well-known local photographer and biologist.
Ron, welcome.
Thank you for being here.
You're welcome.
Tell us a little bit about how you got here.
In Fort Bragg, you mean?
Well, I guess it started when I was a little kid and my dad used to bring me over here
to go fishing from Sacramento.
I grew up in Sacramento and I spent a lot of time here.
I think I got the ocean in my blood when I was a kid.
Then after I graduated from college at Sacramento State, I ended up being the Coast Guard for
four years up and down the coast, going to all the little Coast Guard lighthouses and
lifeboat stations once a year for three years.
I spent time out at Point Cabrillo and Point Arena.
I kind of like the area.
Ended up in Humboldt County for about 30 years as a biologist up there.
I still have a company up there doing biological consulting.
One of the guys that works for me introduced me to his mom and I get to live with her down
here now.
That's what brought me down here.
Excellent.
So many, many years going clear back to the beginning of your life, you've been attracted
to this part of the world.
I understand that.
I first felt like I needed to be here when I was about seven.
There's something magnetic about this place.
I know your work because of your wonderful photographs that I get on a daily basis.
Do you have a website?
Yeah, there's a website.
There's a link on all the daily photos.
I've been doing this daily photo.
I call it Outside My Window.
The background about me is I'm a biologist, but I use photography to tell people about
the outside world because I love the outside world.
I like other people to enjoy it too.
The reason I do this daily picture, which I call Outside My Window, is to get people
to look outside their window, to look beyond all the insulation that their daily lives
puts around them so that they can really appreciate nature.
I've been doing that.
I'm coming up on seven years now and the picture goes out to well over 2,000 people all over
the world now.
Wow.
A lot of fun.
I get a lot of feedback and a lot of fun things from it.
I've noticed that your window moves around quite a lot.
That's true.
Yeah, my window is mobile.
Yes.
You've recently gotten back from a trip across the bottom of the United States.
We went to Texas.
I went to the North American Nature Photography Association annual meeting.
We did a little bird watching and photography on the way there and on the way back.
There were some wonderful images of birds that I was not familiar with.
The Northern Mexican birds and Texas birds and Florida birds, those were really nice.
The amazing thing was that they were all taken on March 8th, practically.
I had one day that we spent the morning at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge where a
lot of the local land birds that just barely made it into the United States along the Rio
Grande were there.
In the afternoon, we went to the South Padre Island Birding Center, which was just fantastic
for water birds.
Almost all the pictures you've seen in the last month and a half have been from that
one day.
One of the things that I find really most remarkable about your photography is the closeups.
It seems like you're just right on the animal's front door.
I'm assuming that you have really a long lens and like that, but I'm also guessing that
you have a lot of patience.
Has that been something that you've consciously developed over time?
No one's ever accused me of having patience.
My style is to be ready all the time.
So I don't use a really big long lens.
I use like a 300, which is a long lens, but not a big long lens.
But I'm always ready.
I'm always ready to take a picture so if something shows up in front of me, then I can take the
picture.
I'm better at that than I am at patience.
You've been doing photography, obviously, over that interesting divide between film
photography and electronic photography.
How did you experience that?
Was that an interesting change?
Yeah, it definitely was.
I mean, yeah, I was in film photography.
I have 30,000, 40,000 slides in my catalogs at home still.
But I embraced digital photography when it first came out and there even was a gap between
the time I quit taking film pictures and the time that the digital world evolved to where
I could get pictures that I was really satisfied with.
So there was about a year and a half to two years where I took very few pictures.
And then once I got the single lens reflex that would fit on my old lenses and everything,
then I really did it.
And yeah, I definitely like the digital world a lot better than the film world, because
film always had a little color cast that was different, depending on what kind of film
you took.
And now with digital, I have complete control over the color.
And so I can make that cardinal look the red that it looked like when I saw it in Texas.
So one of the questions that I have about that is that I noticed that you play with
your photography.
I remember a picture that we probably don't want to show, the Easter bunny with a little
basket in it and like that.
So you obviously have fun in the light room.
Yeah, I do play with that a little bit.
It's not very often that I, it's usually on holidays that I do something like that.
Yeah, I like to do.
I have an annual Christmas morning card that's pretty fun.
But most of the time I don't do that, but it is every once in a while fun.
Now is that the scientist in you that feels like you really shouldn't play with the imagery
once it's clicked?
Oh, no.
No, I think it's the interpretive person in me that's trying to make things look as real
as possible.
So that I'm actually sharing what's out there really.
So others will recognize it.
Yeah, and they can appreciate it for being what it is.
But every once in a while I like to play around.
Going back to the film Electronic Divide, did you feel liberated when you were able
to take as many pictures as you wanted to without thinking at all about the price?
That's a funny thing because you don't save money by taking lots of pictures.
For example, I really like wave pictures.
I live where I can see this one particular wave breaking, and I have a lot of pictures
of it.
And one night the wave was just doing its thing.
And I had both two cameras and two different lenses going, and in an hour and a half I
took 1,100 pictures.
And the time I have spent going through those pictures has cost me way more than if I'd
had had film and just took a few pictures of it.
So you don't save money if you take a lot of pictures, because you end up having to
go and look through them all and figure out what you're going to do with them all.
You save money in terms of the film and the developing, but then you lose a lot of time.
Yeah.
So it's a trade-off.
I wanted to mention that Ron has generously given the rights to reproduce his photos,
through the window photos, at the Redwood Coast Center.
And they're very much appreciated in the lunchroom.
One of the things that they do is they attract a lot of attention, because it is a window
into the outside world.
And then we slip in a slide about how we're trying to get people to pay a little bit more,
because our federal funding only accounts for $2.50 worth of lunch.
And the actual cost of lunch is something more like $6 apiece.
So I wanted to give you some thanks for that, and the props that you deserve for so generously
giving us those rights.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah, that's a fun thing for me, is I like to see my pictures used in good ways.
I enjoy sharing them with people, and it's really nice to know that they're online, and
I can refer to them.
I'm curious about your work as a biologist.
I think that this, as an interpretive biologist, I really understand that work.
But I understand that you've also been working on local endangered species, and associated
with the local national monument.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I've been involved with biological consulting, usually with endangered species.
I mean, for over 30 years now, I think I started actually walking in front of the bulldozer
to see if there were any spotted owls in the trees that were going to push down, back in
the days when there wasn't any kind of review.
And then in the recent years, I've been involved a lot with a marbled murrelet, which is an
endangered seabird that nests in the redwood forest here in California, and with snowy
plovers, which is a small sandpiper, a small shorebird that lives on our beaches.
And recently, I've been real involved with the California Coastal National Monument.
It's a BLM, Bureau of Land Management, holding, that are all the offshore rocks, kind of.
And in fact, the next Audubon meeting is called On the Rocks, and I'll be talking about all
the birds and mammals that live out there.
But it's been a lot of fun to be involved with that sort of thing, and be involved with,
first, kind of helping to prepare the management plan, and figuring out issues and priorities
for management.
And the most fun has been coordinating some citizen science projects for monitoring some
of the birds out there, especially cormorants.
It's a lot of fun to get people from different Audubon societies going out and looking at
birds and turning in, you know, they spend a little time, they turn in their data, and
we compile it all, and it becomes really, really valuable information that doesn't cost
very much to gather.
So it's been a pretty fun project.
It also involves just regular people, just civilians.
Absolutely.
And a serious scientific effort.
Yeah.
What we do is we choose some way to take data that is pretty simple and easy to do, and
almost anybody can do it, as long as, you know, they can count black birds, you know.
I mean, that's probably about it.
And so once we get that information, the way we gather it, even if you make a mistake one
day, the total amount of information will wash out your mistake, and we get really good
information at the end of the season.
And we're learning a lot about our ocean here, just based on the fact that we are watching
to see how many cormorants hatch chicks each year.
And that's pretty interesting.
A bunch of your territory in Humboldt County and northern Mendocino County is out off the
Cinqueon.
Is that a hard place to get to?
Is that an area that doesn't get gotten too much?
Yeah, that's true.
My company has done some work on the Cinqueon with the tribes and with the state parks,
and but, you know, that whole Lost Coast area with the BLM, we've worked on out there.
One of the projects we're just starting now will be monitoring a bird called a black oyster
catcher, which is a shorebird that lives along the rocky shoreline.
And we're going to be monitoring it, doing a survey from kind of Crescent City down to
here in a couple of weekends in June.
And we're going to be looking at a lot of those places that are hard to get to.
So that's, I'll be looking the next couple of weeks trying to figure out how we're going
to get to some of those places.
I think one of the questions that lots of people who don't spend a lot of time thinking
about species preservation would like to ask is, why does an oyster catcher matter?
Why does a black bird matter?
Why are we concerned enough about that to send a man like you out counting them?
I used to answer that question in a kind of an obnoxious way by saying, why do you matter?
You know?
And the bottom line is, we all matter.
And it is.
I mean, it was John Muir.
Everything's linked to everything.
And we take out a piece of the puzzle, and the puzzle no longer works.
The puzzle no longer is visible.
The more pieces you take out, the less that you see what the picture's supposed to be.
And as a parent with kids, I look forward to having my kids have enjoyment of seeing
the wonders of the natural world like I did when I grew up.
Part of that's, I think that's an important part of it.
How do you feel that's going?
We're making progress.
Give us some of the good news.
Well, there's a lot of good management going on now.
There's a lot of awareness of the problems.
And we're working on some of them.
There's a lot of bad news, too.
I won't dwell on that.
The bottom line is, there's way too many people on Earth right now.
And the more people there are, the more resources we use, and the greater the impact we have
on things.
But we are working on that.
And we're working on figuring out ways to reduce our impact and restore some of the
things that are valuable to us.
Do you have some personal stories about how you work to reduce your impact?
Or is that an area where it's hard to think about?
Oh, well, we always try to do that.
I guess we have a Prius.
And I drive a Subaru that's got a PZEV, partial zero emissions.
You do what you can.
We put solar panels on our house.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
And we try to.
Do you suppose that is this something that you're doing because of your awareness that
this is something that needs to be done, that culturally that we need to reduce that footprint?
Yeah, I think so.
I think that's the reason we did it.
We could have chosen to go to Africa and Australia that year, but we decided to put solar panels
on the house instead.
And I think that I've noticed that you mostly stay on the surface when you do your travel.
You don't seem to fly.
When you went down to Texas, you were on the road.
Well, we were on the road there, but I fly.
And the last time we flew was over to Japan for a conference.
I'm real involved in a group called the Pacific Seabird Group, the treasurer and on the executive
council.
So I go to all their meetings and their meetings are in a lot of different places.
So when we flew over to Japan, we did a little donation to try to offset the carbon that we
were using and that sort of thing.
Try to do that when we can.
It's hard when you...
We have a little RV that gets bad gas mileage and I've always wanted to put a bumper sticker
saying my other car is a Prius.
And Charlene says if we do that, then I have to put the bumper sticker on the Prius saying
that the other car is an RV.
Truth in advertising.
That is truth.
We try to do our best.
So I think that one of the things that I heard, I want to circle back a little bit.
I think one of the things that I heard is that on some very important matters, it's
your perception that government and that little G government is doing a pretty good job of
moving forward on some of the grounds here.
I think the current meme on television is that government's terrible and that the only
good government's one that you can drown in the bathtub.
But here we're talking about the idea that government actually is paying attention to
the welfare of fairly unknown species in a very wilderness off the beaten track area
like the Cinqueon.
In your general, do you agree that government, at least in this area, is doing good work?
Well, they're definitely playing an important role.
There's no doubt about that.
And I think that we all have a role to play in it, though the government is doing what
it can, but it does it partly because the government is us.
We're the ones to tell it what to do.
We're the ones to vote and do things like that and decide how to spend money.
So it takes people out there always looking and reporting and discussing things to get
things going in the right direction.
I have good feelings about a lot of government and I have feelings about government like
everybody else does, too.
I'm worrying about our state parks and how California government has been a real problem.
I don't know what the future of our state parks is and that's important to me.
It's important to our community because state parks brings a lot of money into our community
and people come to go ab diving and stay there in the parks and so on.
There's definitely good things being done in and out of government and it is a team
effort, I think.
I really do believe that every part of it is important.
I think that your point that it's us, the government is us, and furthermore that the
decisions mostly get made by us that steer the directions.
I think there's a general misunderstanding of the importance of natural infrastructure.
I like hearing you talk about state parks.
I think most Californians don't really get how important the state parks are to us.
I think here in our area we have a much clearer idea because we are so richly endowed with
beautiful state parks.
We get a lot of visitors because of it.
Absolutely, it's absolutely at the root of our economy.
Let's talk a little bit more about biology.
I presume something also that you've done since you were very young, that it was an
interest of yours.
What drew you to it as a study?
I guess I've always been interested in the outdoors.
One of my next door neighbors when I was a really young kid was a biology teacher at
a local junior college and taught me how to dissect frogs and actually look at things.
He would be a naturalist for state parks every summer.
Our family vacation often was to go to wherever park he was.
He and his son and I and my brother, we'd tag along and help do the interpretive stuff.
I always got into that way.
In junior college, a friend of mine introduced me to a group called Point Raised Bird Observatory
where I learned how to ban birds and be a part of research activities.
That was a really big part of my background.
That's when I got to go out onto the Farallon Islands in 1968 and help start that research
station out there.
I like to say I helped start it, but I was a 21-year-old kid doing what people told me
to do.
I was there and it was really exciting to be a part of that.
One of the exciting times in my life was to go back 40 years later in 2008 and be a part
of that research station for a couple of weeks.
That is interesting to see that continuity.
I think something that jumps out at me is the idea that there was an important teacher
in your life, maybe even a charismatic teacher who set you in a direction that you followed
ever since.
Shall we mention his name?
Yeah, there were a few of them.
Bruce Swinehart was a junior college biology teacher who I'll never forget.
When I took natural history for him, he held up this little bird, a brown toey, and said,
now it's called a California toey, but the story's better with the old name.
He said, this is a brown bird.
It has no field marks.
It's brown on the top, it's brown on the bottom, it's brown everywhere, and it's called the
brown toey.
I'll never forget him saying that.
Then I guess when I got to undergraduate and did, I worked with a professor called Nicholas
Udvarti who was a Hungarian refugee who was world renowned in biogeography and the distribution
of plants and animals.
He inspired me a lot in the Quintinry's Bird Observatory and the people there were a lot
to do that.
I could go on and on with that.
There were a lot of people that inspired me.
I hope I'm giving some of it back.
Thank you for that.
I think that one of the things that the current meme's doing is dishonoring teachers.
It's really important to give honor where honor should be given.
It's really hard.
I think you could ask anybody about how some person in their life almost always would come
up as a teacher.
I think that's true.
I just thought of three others in that sentence.
I think that especially those of us who are doing exceptional work, not the ones who just
I-O-I-O to so off to work I go, but the people who are doing work from the heart as obviously
you are doing, have that experience of a charismatic teacher or two or three or five or ten and
that's the credit is due there.
As a biologist, one of the things that you can't help but notice is that you are getting
older as so many of us are, possibly all of us.
Are there any lessons that you might be able to share with us from that standpoint?
I hear you saying I'm always ready and I really like that.
That's something to aspire to.
Is there anything else that you can help us with from a biological perspective about aging
gracefully?
Well, I try to ignore the part that I'm aging.
I'm not very good at paying attention to that, but it is reality.
That's for sure.
One of your guests two weeks ago just did my knee, so now I'm actually back on the road
running a little bit now than I wasn't for a while.
It's a part of that.
I don't know.
I think from a biology point of view, just try to stay healthy and be good to yourself.
I don't know that I have any more.
Do you find yourself slowing down at all or do you feel like you're as productive now
as you've ever been?
Oh, I'm productive in different ways now.
I've definitely slowed down physically, but I think I've sped up mentally.
How about the quality of the work?
Do you feel like the photography that you're doing now is as good or better than what you've
done before?
Photography, yeah.
I think it's always getting better because I'm still learning.
There's always new things to learn.
That's one of the things that keeps me excited about life is learning new things.
As for some of my other stuff, my writing and things like that, you'd have to ask the
people that edit it, my coworkers, to ask me if I'm still good.
Your career has bridged another interesting divide, which I'd love to have you talk about
a little bit.
You mentioned that the brown tohi is no longer the brown tohi.
I noticed in the recent years that we went from having the white-tailed kite to the black-shouldered
kite and then back to the white-tailed kite again.
I know that in a lot of disciplines, DNA has become a major issue.
Talk a little bit about the way science has changed in the period of your career.
That's an interesting way.
My thesis was actually renaming a bird that was once thought to be one species and turned
out to be another species.
That was back in the days we didn't have DNA to work with, so I did an analysis of the
plumage sequence and its voice and things like that.
Things have changed dramatically.
I could tell you some DNA stories.
The fact that I'm not probably a laballi, I found out, but I don't know that.
How interesting.
There's a lot of interesting things that are coming out of the new science.
It is definitely changing things.
The best part about it is that by using these new techniques, we're getting a lot better
appreciation of how our impact is, I think, on different species or subspecies or forms
or whatever you want to call it.
There's technical names for them, but we understand more about the fact, just recently they were
discovered at the gray whales.
There's a small number of gray whales that spend their summer down here off California
and Oregon.
They don't go all the way up to Alaska, like most of them do.
Just recently we found out that those are different.
They're different than the ones that go to Alaska.
They're genetically different.
That means that they're maybe a little bit more important to us now because they're not
just all the rest.
Those are special whales.
We could say that about the godwits that spend the winter in Humboldt Bay.
Those are the ones that nest in Alaska where all the rest of the godwits nest in the interior
part of the United States.
The ones that spend the winter in Humboldt Bay, if it's true, and we think it is, they
depend upon Humboldt Bay.
They don't have any place else to go.
That means we should be taking better care of Humboldt Bay.
The more we understand about this, the better we understand what our actions should be to
preserve some of this stuff or to restore it.
Do you see any particular effects of global weirding or ocean warming in the work that
you're doing?
Do you have anything to share about that?
Every day.
That's one of the biggest issues.
It's a difficult issue to incorporate into management.
Obviously, the sea level is rising.
I recall working out at Lake Cleon about 10 years ago when a geology friend of mine, when
we were working on a project together out there for state parks, and he pointed and
says, I give it five years, the ocean is going to wash through that spot.
It was almost to the day when the ocean washed through the old hall road out there.
Lake Cleon will be an estuary in our lifetime.
It's the ocean rising.
We'll change that dynamic right there.
A big, big dynamic, big change.
State parks are going to have to figure out a way to get across that part.
They're going to have to build a bridge.
They don't have any money yet for that.
There are always things like that.
We're concerned about, as a seabird biologist, a lot of the islands in the Pacific Ocean
are going to be underwater in the next 50 to 100 years.
A lot of those islands are the main breeding grounds for birds that we like to look at
when we go offshore here.
We have about a minute left.
Is there anything that you'd like to say that I haven't touched on, or are you feeling okay
about this?
I'm feeling pretty good about this.
You've done a good job.
I think that we could keep on talking like a couple of science geeks for a long time
here.
I very much have appreciated that.
I want to thank you again for your photographs.
I hope that we'll be able to get your URL up so that people will be able to come and
sign up and be a part of the through the window thing.
I want to thank you very much for listening and watching us.
This is Michael Potts standing in for Charles Bush.
We're at the end of Senior Perspectives with Ron LaValle.
Thank you very much.