Salt Sage Rice and Beans: the Birth of an Ecologist

This essay, written by John G. T. Anderson, appears in the 2025 Mono Lake Calendar.

“frost and fire working together in the making of beauty” —John Muir

“All that is holding us together is stories and compassion” —Barry Lopez

“For the sake of an illusion, this crystal world shatter” —Gray Brechin

How do I tell you of a place that utterly altered a life? I guess I just tell you.

Magical lake, inland sea, place of pilgrimage, brief diversion on the road from Reno to Las Vegas. Mono Lake has been many things to many people since the first Indigenous Americans arrived at its shores and realized that they had found home. For those of us who have spent time there, the lake has become intensely personal, we each have stories to tell, and we are drawn back, time and time again, either literally, or in our dreams.

For me, because of my story, Mono will always be a cradle for young ecologists. I was too young to be part of the original team that in 1976 began the serious ongoing study of the lake, its inhabitants, and the surrounding landscape. I first came to the lake in the spring of 1979 as part of the California Gull team lead by David Winkler. I was in my last year at Berkeley, finishing a degree in Zoology that seemed to only qualify me for a stint in grad school, and it seemed like I lacked the grades and the experience to get into grad school. I saw a flyer on the wall of the Life Sciences Building advertising for a couple of volunteer field assistants to work on a bird project at some place that I had never heard of, and I applied on a whim. Ready or not I was in for my first field season.

I still remember the long drive from Berkeley up over Donner Summit, because all the southern passes were blocked with snow. The equally long dogleg south along the east side of the Sierra, ending at Conway Summit and the first sight of the lake, a feeling of falling or flying into a vast space where literally anything could happen and probably would. Science at Mono was enormously different from what we had called science on campus. There were still some of the original team working on expanding projects they had started three years earlier. Gayle Dana seemed to know more about brine shrimp than was possible, Wink was full of ideas for different ways to study gulls, Dave Herbst was obsessed with brine flies. John Harris was the hirsute mammal guy who would come to town after wandering the stark emptiness of the Eastside in search of his beloved desert rats. Then there was Dave Gaines, our leader, our guide, a whirlwind of energy surrounding a deep calm. A person of seriousness with a gnomish sense of humor. When I was with Gaines I had a sense of possibility greater than anything I had felt before or since.

Field work was hard. A land bridge had formed between the main gull nesting colony on Negit Island and the shore the previous year, and coyote got out to the island, driving the gulls to smaller islets nearby. The gull team lived in an abandoned movie set on a small islet called Krakatoa, coming ashore for supplies and rest at a cabin near County Park. We ate beans and rice, and sometimes rice and beans. We read Herman Hesse and John Muir and Ed Abbey.

We went out to the gull islands at night to band and weigh and measure birds because if we landed in the day it was too disruptive to the gulls. The gulls had ticks, so we got ticks. I remember waking up in the morning with my sleeping bag bloody from crushing the ticks that had found me during banding operations. The chicks vomited on us, mixtures of brine shrimp, brine flies, and Lee Vining garbage. They smelled, we smelled, the islands smelled. We were surrounded by water too salty to wash in, much too salty to drink. But. But I remember the sun going down behind Mt. Dana, stars that most people never get to see sweeping their circles above Krakatoa. The Great Horned Owl that shared the movie set with us, that every evening would come out, stretch its wings, and fly off to the neighboring gull colony for dinner.

Then, back to town. Maybe a treat at the Mono Cone. Off to Gaines’ and his partner Sally’s house for an update on court cases and impromptu seminars on ecology, public policy, the uses of art in activism, wine… It was science with guitars, science with poetry, science for a purpose, for a mission greater than any of us. It was just a spring and summer, but I learned so much. I learned science, but I also learned that science is a deeply human thing, a science devoid of art and literature, purpose and joy, is not worth doing. I came to Mono at best a potential, I left on the road to become a naturalist. A previous occupant of the cabin had left a graffito behind: “Ecologists can learn much from simply observing animals before breaking them down into fluxes of organic carbon. —Deevey.” It would be thirty years before one of my own students tracked down the quotation. I quote it whenever I can.

A spring and summer, and then I left to find my own salty sea. I spent parts of seven years at Pyramid Lake before coming east, to very different islands, very different birds.

Aldo Leopold told us that to be an ecologist was to “live in a world of wounds.” Mono Lake, Dave Gaines, and the ragged band of Mono ecologists taught me to try to be a teacher, to help students address ecological wounds with clear eyes and a sense of hope. Eventually we scattered to our destinies. John wrote The Book on mammals of the Tioga region, but the rest of us went away. Wink studied swallows in Ithaca, I studied gulls in Maine, Suzanne studied agriculture in Norway and Mexico, I last saw Gayle on a boat in the Gulf of Maine, but somehow the lake has stayed with us. I am old now, I have my own students. I bring them to the lake when I can. For some it is just a stopover on the way to somewhere else, for others I watch a strange light grow in their eyes as they fall in love with the possibility of the lake, the sheer improbability of its survival, their own role in mending an endangered planet. Gaines is gone. My teachers have retired. The birds and I return. We hold seminars under the whispering aspen in Lundy Canyon, we marvel at the tufa, we laugh as gulls chase brine flies, we eat rice and beans (and beans and rice) and sometimes I treat them to a Mono Burger. Somehow, through the work of a strange band of people, Gray Brechin’s crystal world has held together to teach another generation.

John G. T. Anderson is the W. H. Drury Professor of Ecology/Natural History at College of the Atlantic. He is the author of Deep Things Out of Darkness: A History of Natural History. He studies colonial nesting seabirds, history, island ecology, and the intersection between natural history and human history in relation to long-term ecological processes. At present his field research centers around Great Duck Island in eastern Maine.

Top photo by Santiago M. Escruceria.