NAVAL WEAPONS SUPPORT FACILITY, SEAL BEACH — It's not the kind of early-bird weekend crowd you'd expect to see crashing the gates of the Naval Weapons Support Facility in Seal Beach. But here we are, about 40 latte-sipping civilians and me chatting beside a barbed wire fence with binoculars slung around our necks.
We're gathered in a parking lot on the most uninviting-looking block of Seal Beach Boulevard, between the ocean and Interstate 405. Up the road is a Boeing plant. Across the street, a pair of oil derricks nods monotonously. Twenty feet away hangs a sign: "Keep Out -- Authorized Personnel Only." That's no idle threat beside this manned military gate.
An anomalous blue-and-white van airbrushed with flying pelicans on the hood and doors exits the base and stops in front of the crowd, ready for another load of people. Folks in shorts and running shoes board the van, which turns around and scoots past security and back onto the base without a hitch.
On any other morning, this quirky civilian invasion at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station would simply not fly. But on the last Saturday of each month, the gates briefly open to the public for a two-hour tour of the property's alter-ego: the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most reclusive wildlife sanctuaries and endangered bird habitats in the country.
It occupies about a fifth of the 5,000-acre weapons station, which has been here since World War II. The refuge was established nearly 40 years ago to protect the California least tern and the light-footed clapper rail, two of the state's most-threatened avian subspecies.
Peregrine falcons, brown pelicans and the Belding's savannah sparrow -- also threatened -- call this tidal salt marsh in the Anaheim Bay estuary home. So do coyotes, striped shore crabs, hundreds of thousands of migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway and the odd visiting leopard shark and sea turtle cutting in for a bite from the ocean.
The pelican van deposits the final load of passengers in front of the refuge's Nature Center, a small, un-Navy-ish building muralized with birds and butterflies, overlooking a giant marsh with an empty road and a line of electrical poles running through the center of it.
"How many folks here have been to a National Wildlife Refuge before?" asks Chantel Jimenez, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife employee who is co-hosting today's tour with khaki-vested volunteers from the Friends of Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge.
