Volunteer Spotlight: Keary and Sally Sorenson

MFN: Where did this dedication to Beach Watch and the Sanctuary come from?

Sally: It was seeing our first seagull with half a beak and a fishing line down its beak. You know it's a wild critter and it was caught and it was going to die within hours.
Keary: It had its upper part of its beak completely ripped off and you could look down the deep mauve of its throat. In 1968, I was at Pescadero. We show up at the beach and instead of the roar of the ocean, all you heard was slop, slop, slop. Um, we now call chocolate mousse. There wasn't a name for it back then. It was just oil in the ocean and we spent all day gathering up what I now know (thanks to the sanctuary) as oiled cormorants and murres. From that point on I worked on debris. (Points to Sally.) She's worked on debris her whole life. There's one other thing that brings our dedication to the sanctuary, Mara.

MFN: What's that?

Keary: You, Dru, Joanne, Shannon, it's the people here.

MFN: So what happened? How did you get drawn into the Beach Watch program?

Keary: About 14 years ago up at Marshall Gulch beach in Sonoma, Sally and I sat down for a picnic and barbeque. We sat down and there was debris around. About an hour and half later....
Sally: There weren't no more debris. (Laughs.)
Keary: There weren't no more debris. We went back two weeks later and there was just as much debris as before. So we spend about an hour and a half and there was no more debris. And we called it our beach, and it really wasn't our beach.
Sally: Yes, it was.

MFN: Well, you take ownership of something when you take care of it.

Keary: Exactly, well when you are a steward of a beach, pretty soon you consider it yours whether it is or isn't. And we considered it our beach, and those other people who pick up debris there now think of it as their beach.
Sally: And it's like, that's okay, you're trained now!

MFN: How did you become a Beach Watch volunteer?

Keary: We heard an advertisement on KCBS that said "How would you like to have your own beach given to you by the federal government?" So I went home, and I said, "Hey baby, you know how we call the beach ours and it's not really ours?" That's how it started.

MFN: Tell me an interesting story about what you've found on your beach.

Keary: For me, it's gotta be the minke. Because we reduced it down to nothing but bone, and we got to see exactly what's inside. So now when I look into a baleen beak, I know exactly what's there. Working with Ray (Ray "Bones" Bandar - Field Associate Department of Ornithology and Mammology with California Academy of Sciences)....
Sally: What a blast!
Keary: You get an intricate look at the animals that we're supposed to study. When we find small bits and pieces on our beach survey, we know what they are. One of the things that we're supposed to strive for is accuracy. Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. That's one of the things that I set out to do with this. Is learn every single solitary animal in the ocean that we're gonna come across [and be able to identify it] by just tiny little bits and pieces. With the introduction of birds she and I received, it opened up a whole new world to us.
Sally: Last March, the 8th something happened.

MFN: What happened?

Keary: It started off with boredom overtaking us while doing SEAL watch because there was only one seal. All of a sudden, there's this bird struggling in the water. I saved it from a flock of Western Gulls. I ran back and handed it to her, and said "Figure it out, I'm going to get the ranger!" I ran a mile away and came back with the ranger. Just as we came out, there was a BBBBSSSTTTT grating sound. And off the cliff, 200 feet away from us and a hundred feet above us this PT cruiser comes flying off the cliff; it came down, hit a rock, flipped over, hit another rock, flipped over and hit a third rock, went up and spun like a football and came down and stuck itself between two rocks. (Keary motions wildly to illustrate the car accident.)

Keary: Both people died inside of it. Everyone else took off and left her and I on the beach.
Sally: With all these tourists, and the injured grebe....
Keary: And the harbor seals are starting to haul out because the sun's going down. And now all of a sudden we've got seals on the beach that we have to keep the tourists away from, and they're there because the helicopters down there, and they're using our telescopes to look inside the car to see the dead people.

MFN: No! That's awful!

Sally: I just finally got fed up, so I gathered them all up and damn near plopped them down.
Keary: She had about 30 people in a circle and started showing them this bird. She’s never seen this bird before in her life and pulls the bird book out and starts explaining what the bird does.

MFN: You just became a naturalist on the spot about an animal you knew nothing about it.

Sally: Yup, I just had it under my arm like a small chicken and it was pecking at me. (She motions holding an animal in the crook of her arm.)

MFN: Let’s talk about your trash monsters, because I know that you clean up the beach and make sculptures from the plastic you find.

Keary: The process of making them started at an OceanFest. I was inspired by the trash vehicle.  I started doing the debris sculptures so that I can gain children’s interest. People look at me and say “Wow, what’s that?” and then they realize “Oh my god, that’s a tampon applicator!” And I can tell them where it came from. I carry the article that was in NOAA’s BARK [about albatrosses consuming plastic and passing it onto their young] and I give it out to teach people. I want to bring every single solitary beach in America underneath a regular debris monitoring once a month. That’s my goal in life. When I’m 85, 90 years old, in my wheelchair and can’t walk, I gotta have somebody to able to push me down to the beach so I can teach people about debris. And I’ll have all day long to just sit there and teach people about the ocean and why plastics don’t belong out there.
Sally: So if we die when we’re sitting out there on the beach, why don’t you just pour some cement over us and put a little plaque on it that says Sally and Keary, Committed Beach Watch volunteers! It wasn’t always like that. Years ago, when I first talked to people about doing this [type of volunteering], everyone told me to buy these binoculars and buy this and buy that because you need it, and I thought, I’m a poor kid, that’s not possible.

MFN: That reality was not your reality.

Sally: Yes! So instead I became a working girl.
Keary: But once Rich showed us what birds are and what they do and how beautiful they are though.... The bird books, the telescopes, all the implements...
Sally: It just all fell into place.

MFN: Then all of a sudden it was your reality.

Sally: (Laughter.) Yeah. It was. We were hooked.
Keary: I don't know who choose us as Beachwatch volunteers but I can never thank them enough, ever.

Read more about marine debris.