Point Vicente

From December 1 to late May, seven days a week, volunteers stand on the patio here with binoculars and count gray whales. The bluff is a hundred and twenty-five feet above the water and the bottom drops away close to shore, which brings the migration within sight of land. The Los Angeles chapter of the American Cetacean Society has run its Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project from this spot since the mid-1980s, after a pilot count in 1979, making it one of the longest continuous shore-based whale counts anywhere.

They record more than numbers. Breaching, spyhopping, courtship, nursing, feeding, interactions with kelp and with sea lions, and human impacts too: boat harassment, entanglement. Four decades of it, from one place, by one method. Humpbacks, blues, fins, orcas, several kinds of dolphin, elephant seals and sea otters go into the same log.

There is a reason these whales are worth counting. Two miles up the coast at Portuguese Bend, shore whalers worked the same herds from open boats through the 1860s and 1870s, and the work ended when there were no longer enough whales passing to make it pay.

The interpretive center behind the patio is free, and it holds the Point Vicente Lighthouse's Fresnel lens, retired after more than ninety years of use.