Early Music and Carpinteria Salt Marsh Surprises

By Robert Bernstein

Our Santa Barbara Early Music Ensemble had been practicing music all during COVID. Music taken from the time of the Plague of the 1300s. Our music director Katie Saxon has a delightful sense of humor, making the best of the pandemic and connecting to pandemics past!

A mix ranging from the very sad and tragic to the joyful, as people tried to forget their woes. We finally got to perform at five public events, including for over 300 school students and ending at the Carpinteria Community Church.

Here we posed before our first performance:

After our Carpinteria performance, my wife and I strolled around the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Nature Park. I had been there before, but we had some surprises this time. Here are my photos.

Here was a panoramic view as we entered the area:

We followed the path around.

We came to some colorful vegetation.

At the mountain end of the park we came to a residential area that included some pleasant decorations.

We paused at the far end of the park from where we entered.

This is where things started to get interesting. This crab was “foaming at the mouth” apparently to keeps its gills moist as it sat out of the water glaring at us.

Here you can see him “fiddling”

No surprise to find a duck in the water.

But then the water began roiling and we wondered what was going on. Leopard sharks!

How cool is that? Here is a video that shows them in action:

We continued all the way to the end of the path and crossed onto this bridge where we stopped for the view.

Now things got interesting again. Did we really see a fish fly out of the water?!

Yes! Over and over we saw fish flying up into the air and flopping back into the water. It was totally random, making it very difficult to get a good shot. But here I did the best I could to catch a few of these events on video.

We asked a few people passing by if this is common. Everyone said it happens every day all year round. Maybe we are the only ones who didn’t know about this? I did some searching online and it seems the fish are mullets. And they live all over the US and do this jumping behavior. And no one knows for sure why they do it. As we headed out we enjoyed the use of the restrooms and the art on them!

I will come full circle and end with the full video of our Early Music Ensemble Plague performance! We hope to start a new round of Early Music and we welcome new singers and instrumentalists!