Results tagged “migration” from Daily Link

My daughter and I staked out the seascape near the Point Vicente Interpretive Center after a field trip with her preschool class on Wednesday. The volunteers who track the whale migration for the American Cetacean Society were abuzz with tales of what they saw the day before: A group of orcas heading for Redondo Beach. So we waited. And watched. And waited. But my disappointed 4-year-old pouted the whole way home because we didn't see a thing.

Turns out we should have stuck around a little longer. According to the ACS Daily Log, Wednesday was the first big day for spotting the whales' northbound return trip

Log notes for March 12:

Our first big northbound count day featured pulses of gray whales throughout the day. One whale milled nearshore for over thirty minutes. One whale BREACHED two times within 1/4 mile offshore. The three whales in our final sighting milled nearshore, and one lunged. We also saw common and bottlenose dolphin.

The log also tracks the totals for the season and has charts comparing this year to last year. Check here foroverview of the project.

A Know section article today explored the huge impact of Dust Bowl-era immigrants on California.

By 1937, officials from counties all over the state met in Sacramento to try to figure out what to do about the flood of needy immigrants. “Los Angeles is the most seriously hit of all the counties of the state,” declared a July 11, 1937, San Francisco Chronicle article on the upcoming summit. Officials said nearly 20 percent of Los Angeles County’s estimated 2.3 million population was on relief, a forerunner of welfare. Between April 1936 and April 1937, more than 2.9 million people had entered California by auto; of those, 74 percent said they planned to settle in Southern California.

If you want to learn more about the era, check out these links:

See Dorothea Lange’s haunting photos of Dust Bowl refugees

More tales of Dust Bowl immigrants

PBS coverage

Learn more about the blues music that chronicled the era