Rico says Verlyn Klinkenborg has an article in The New York Times about a place Rico's been, when he lived in California as a young man:

Something about a sea otter looks so insouciant. Drifting on its back, bobbing up and down in the waves, it looks over at the humans standing on the rocks as if to exaggerate its ease in the water, its complacent, buoyant virtuosity. There is not merely one sea otter here on the north side of the point at Año Nuevo State Park, a couple of dozen miles north of Santa Cruz, California. There are perhaps twenty in sight, parents and young.
Where we stand, the sand is mottled with dark brown scraps of fur, as if the sky had been raining swatches. This is the accumulated debris left behind by the catastrophic molting of several thousand elephant seals, which begin coming ashore in December to give birth, to mate, to bask and to shed all of their fur and a layer of their skin before slipping into the sea again. The main contingent of elephant seals has not yet arrived, only a lone female, so much handsomer than her suitors. She lies well up the beach, under a scrub of shade, soft and gray. She turns her head to look at us a few yards away, her moist black eyes almost beseeching.
Both the sea otter and the northern elephant seal came through severe bottlenecks in the past century. These are the survivors of tiny, relict populations after being hunted nearly to extinction for their blubber and their fur. And, in a sense, Año Nuevo has come through several bottlenecks, too. Like so many of California’s state parks, it narrowly averted being closed during the ongoing state budget crisis.
But the real bottleneck in the first half of the 20th century was simply lack of protection. Before California created this refuge for elephant seals in 1958, Año Nuevo was a deeply puzzling place. The low, rocky point was a place of unbelievably rich intertidal life, yet it was overburdened by development plans and surrounded by farms growing row-crops heavy on pesticide — brussels sprouts mostly.
Setting aside the park’s 4,000 acres was a start. But it has taken another 50 years to begin to protect the landscape in which Año Nuevo Point is set. What you see there now is a steadily developing patchwork of protections, the remarkable result of private efforts, state and municipal programs, reclamation trade-offs, and the gradual substitution of small organic farms for the old toxic monocultures. The protections are by no means complete. But it’s hard to imagine a more vivid demonstration of the value of coastal protection and the ways in which it can be done.