In the year 1990 an oil tanker named the American Trader had an unrelated misfortune, running over its anchor off the coast of Huntington Beach. Separated by more than a hundred years and nearly as many miles, the two events would eventually converge to trigger a landmark battle in U.S. conservation history. The American Trader’s punctured tanks disgorged four hundred thousand gallons of Alaska crude, which would very publicly kill some thirty-four hundred seabirds. Of the thirteen-million-dollar settlement the court imposed on the tanker’s owners, one and a half million was to go toward undoing some of the damages. The most worrisome mortalities from the spill had been borne by the Xantus’s murrelet, a robin-size seabird numbering just a few thousand breeding pairs short of extinction. One obvious way for the offenders to make amends was to make someplace safe again for the murrelets to breed. And one obvious place to do so was Anacapa. Anacapa is three slips of jagged rock in the archipelago comprising Channel Islands National Park.
