 Good morning, everybody. Happy Sunday Sunday. Yes, happy Sunday. Thank you for being here today and joining us on our nature boost. Today's nature boost is part of women's history month. And we are going to be learning all about the women of the Marin Headlands. We want to thank you for joining us here today and I'm going to give some brief announcements. My name is Anissa. I am one of the librarians at San Francisco Public Library. And we want to, again, just thank you for being here on this beautiful sunny Sunday. We are going to celebrate our 16th one city one book campaign. This is San Francisco Public Library's largest literary campaign, and we are celebrating the author Chanel Miller, and her book know my name. Chanel will be in conversation with Robin talk to Yama on March 16 at 6pm. This will be a one time only viewing so you must attend no recording. We also want to welcome you to the Eloni Ram Yutush Eloni tribal lands and acknowledge the many Ram Yutush Eloni tribal groups as the rightful stewards of the lands in which we live and work here in the Bay Area. The library is committed to upholding the names of these lands and community members from these nations. We encourage you to learn more about first person's culture. Land rights, and we do this by providing lots of resources. I'm going to put a, there'll be a link into the chat box of YouTube, which will link back to all sorts of amazing resources about the library as well as today's presentation. I also want to acknowledge that the library is not a neutral institution and that we stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter movement and support collective action to instructural systemic and institutional racism in our own institution and within our communities. We do want to remind you there is, we still are in this pandemic and with our libraries starting to open with more curbside pickups. Please wear your masks, protect my library family and everybody's family out there working in serving us in the city. Part of One City One Book, we get to bring in amazing events. So I'm just going to breeze through a couple of events related to One City One Book, the amazing gorilla girls who've been fighting the patriarchy of art systems for a very long time. So please join us on the 24th when they will be doing a presentation and talking about their new book. Every Monday in March and April we'll be doing a series called Know Your Name. And this will be amazing humans talking about transforming and surviving sexual assault. So please come check that out. And I'm just going to breeze through these. These are all associated to One City One Book, lots of events. If you just Googled One City One Book SFPL, you'll find all of the information about the campaign. We will have a panel about homelessness and sexual violence and I know this is really heavy topics. So we'll also be befriending a lot of resources and a lot of partners will be working with that can help. So, while it's triggering, it's also very important. So please come out, support this. Lots of healthy ways to survive and get through this. And we're here to help you. So just going to breeze through this. I definitely want to highlight this person, Aisha Shahida Simmons. She did a documentary over a decade ago but it is still revolutionary work about rape culture. So please come check that out Monday, April 12. And then without further ado, we would like to introduce you to Ranger Lara, who is going to tell us about the Moran headlands and the women who stewarded all of this amazing work. This is part of our women's her story month. We have lots of events and I'll share again with you in YouTube land those links. And I'm going to now pass it over to Ranger Lara. Thank you, Laura. Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. All right, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Let me press that. Oops, wrong button. Cool. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here today as part of her story and helping out with the SFPL I've admired the SFPL work for quite some time so super it's a privilege to be here. My name is Ranger Lara, and I am a national park ranger in the Moran headlands. So if you have never visited the Moran headlands, if you're standing in San Francisco, and you're looking across the bay to those blustery foggy rolling areas, those are the Moran headlands. And it's part of the larger park, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And this also includes sites such as Muir Woods, Alcatraz, Fort Point, the Presidio, a lot of park sites down in San Mateo County as well, 80,000 acres of open green space right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. My job as a ranger is that I am a storyteller. And being a storyteller means acknowledging the entire history of the land that you stand in. So before we begin, I would also like to give a land acknowledgement for the women coast Miwok people. They are the original people of the Moran headlands, and I would like to thank their role in stewarding this land, both historically and today. Our first story month is women of the Moran headlands. This is actually this program's first grand debut so I thank you very much for being its first audience. And without further ado, let's take a look at where we're going. So we're going to do a bit of a virtual tour of the Moran headlands here is the map right down there that's the Golden Gate Bridge here is the headlands. We're going to first stop in Fort Baker, which used to be a coast Miwok village, and we're going to discuss the role that women were able to play in coast Miwok societies in the late 1700s, early 1800s. From there we're going to hop on over to the point beneath the lighthouse and talk about the role that one woman was able to play in the lighthouse's story in the early 1900s. From there, we'll go to Battery Townsley and the Nike missile site, and talk about the role of women in these coastal military defense sites in World War two and in the Cold War. And last but not least, we'll hop on over to Tennessee Valley and talk about the creation of the GG NRA, what Moran cello was, and how one particular woman really champion the effort to get us a national park right here in the Bay Area. And one last thing before we begin, anytime you see this question mark pop up on screen, that means that I have a question for you. So I'll give you about 30 seconds to pop your answer to that question into the chat, so we can have a dialogue about all the things that we're learning. All right, let's get started. Yeah, we're going to start with the role of women in Coast Miwok communities, and to kind of orient you to Coast Miwok territory. Right here this is all Moran County and this was all Coast Miwok territory. And you can see that it's subdivided into smaller groups. So down here in Southern Moran County I've circled the Moran Helens that was the women Coast Miwok group. And then as we just learned south of the bridge that's a very Matesha Lone Land and then also an East Bay that was a Lone Land as well. So the world of pre-modern indigenous people I imagine was quite different than our world today. They lived very transient lives, and they also were in a world that was very biodiverse. So they shared this land with giants, we're talking towering redwoods, we're talking wolves and grizzlies, and the shadows of condors sweeping over those coastal prairies. And these are all organisms that have either been severely reduced or extirpated sense, extirpated sense. So the world of women in Coast Miwok communities, I was really excited to learn what a prominent leadership role they were able to play. So right here we're looking at an image depicting an alone village by Amy Hosa and Linda Yamane. But I think we can also apply it to Coast Miwok villages or just San Franciscan indigenous communities in general. I think it's a beautiful image it's so colorful so fun to look at. The role of women as leaders in Coast Miwok societies is essentially the way the structure worked is there would be two female leaders and one male leader. And the more prominent of those two female leaders would be known as the Mayan. And it was her job to kind of guide a decision making for the village and give nightly speeches on how her people should behave and what decisions they should make next. It was also the role of women to select the male leader who was called the huipu and they would select him at a very young age and train him to become a leader and train him in those speech making skills and those leadership skills and etc. But of course, being a leader wasn't the only role available for Coast Miwok women they were able to conduct a lot of other roles within their villages as well. And one of the most commonly highlighted ones is basket weaving Coast Miwok women are remembered as being these fantastic artisans, they could weave these really intricate designs into baskets, without even drawing it out beforehand, truly remembered for their craftsmanship. Otherwise chores were often divided by gender. So women could also construct duck decoys they could prepare acorns for flower may close or beads construction of pipes making a rabbit skin blankets, and those acorns and that seed gathering really important because that provided the majority of the calories for the village. They could also lead certain dances. So generally dances were either led depending on the dance by a man or a woman, and one such dance that women can lead was the condor dance. And for the duration of that whole dance she would be known as the huipu kulele, and she would be the leader of that aspect of ceremonial life. I would also like to acknowledge that not all women in Coast Miwok societies were cisgendered. So what that means is not all women were assigned that gender at birth. Coast Miwok societies recognized transgendered women. And these women would behave like any other women they would dress in women's clothing they would adopt women's chores, and in some societies they could also marry men and have a household. In this picture we're looking at a few Coast Miwok individuals. Notice that the two people on the right hand side have face tattoos, and only women generally would have those face tattoos. And a cool fact that I learned is that the dye they used for these tattoos was often extracted from poison oak, and I'm super allergic to poison oak so I found that pretty, pretty interesting and pretty cool. The role of women in Coast Miwok societies changed drastically when Spanish missionaries arrived to California. These colonizers did not recognize women as having a position of power they would really only want to negotiate with men. So because of that the traditional leadership role that women were used to playing in Coast Miwok societies that it was kind of stripped of them because they just weren't recognized as leaders by Spanish missionaries anymore. And instead at mission systems women were forced to live in dormitories, and the only time they would see sunlight is when they were transported to and from churchly services, and generally their path to freedom out of those dormitories would be to get married. Nevertheless, I do want to highlight one indigenous Coast Miwok woman who kind of rose above her situation, and was still able to hold a position of power and prominence within the mission system. Her baptized name was Wana, and she is remembered as having this larger than life personality, and some days she would be the godparent for every single person that was baptized that day, and they could baptize up to maybe 40 people in a single day. And when historians kind of look at this mission history, they generally look at the number of baptisms that you helped with was a sign of how prominent you were in the leadership hierarchy so she definitely was able to do that. And also the wife of chief Marin after whom Marin County is named. All right, my friends, it is time for our first question I'll give you about 30 seconds to pop into the chat. Who is a woman that has a special place in your history. Awesome, I'm going to move us on ahead but after the program I would definitely love to take a look at that a little more. I see someone said my grandma. That is wonderful I would definitely agree that my grandma is a woman that has a special place in my history. I'm seeing a lot of mothers I'm seeing ants as well. That's really wonderful. Awesome thanks for sharing. All right, we're going to hop on over to our next stop in the tour we're going to go to the point beneath a lighthouse. It's right here this kind of extended arm of the Marin headlands. This is in this picture just beautiful. The lighthouse is gorgeous. So, women of the point beneath the lighthouse. The first thing I want you to notice in this picture is how difficult to navigate this landscape looks. Remember that lighthouses are placed in places that are difficult to navigate so it's a very hard and strenuous life to be a lighthouse keeper. And the really cool thing about lighthouse keeping history is that a lot of women were able to serve in this role. Lighthouse keeping was the first non clerical US government job one of the first to ever be made available to women. So super neat to kind of see throughout lighthouse history, how women were able to rise into that role. The woman we're going to highlight today. She was not a lighthouse keeper, but she nevertheless lived at the point beneath a lighthouse. Well, she didn't live at the lighthouse. She lived in a house that was kind of way further up on this trail. And then here's the lighthouse so at the top of the trailhead is where she lived her family. And that woman is Frida Engle. So here she is pictured with her husband Herman Engle and her two children, and her daughter Norma Engle sitting in her lap. And her story really exemplifies the tenacity and resilience it would take to live at a place like Point Benita. And she's remembered as saying those years at Point Benita were the happiest in my life so she definitely made it work for her. So let's see how one of the first ways is she found a way to feed her family. Remember it's really hard to navigate around Point Benita and the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist at this time so it's difficult to get to San Francisco it's difficult to get food. She decided to bring food to herself and her family, and the soil at Point Benita it is crumbly, it is hard to tell everyone said she couldn't do it but she said I'm going to plant a vegetable garden, and she also did this while five months pregnant and wearing a back brace so pretty impressive. And if you've ever been to the lighthouse, you may recognize that there are little cabbages growing along the trail on your way down there, and that is Frida's legacy on the landscape. She also exemplified a lot of resilience. When she saved her family during the 1906 earthquake. So you may be familiar with the fact that the 1906 earthquake was an absolute terrible earthquake in San Francisco. It really decimated the city a lot of people said after the earthquake that they didn't think San Francisco would recover. They thought the city would never be built again. This time Herman Engel her husband he was down at the Point Benita lighthouse, and he could not abandon his post to go check on his family, which really speaks to the level of duty that light housekeepers had to their jobs, and Frida was in in her house with her family. Their house was destroyed, absolutely crumbled. So she grabbed her children in her arms, and she climbed out of the window to save their lives. And they did have to find new housing after that they kind of had to rebuild. But the way that she was able to bounce back from this is told in a book called three beams of light, which you may recognize the author's name, Norma Engel, that was that little girl that was sitting on her lap in that earlier photo. And Norma Engel grew up to write a book about her childhood at the Point Benita lighthouse, and the way that her mother really just made their family feel like a family despite how hard it was to live there. And maybe we love, when I think about this, the fact that Norma was just writing about her life. That's all she was doing. But because she did this, we now are able to tell the story of Point Benita so much better. We even have a main character we have Frida Engel, and it kind of just goes to show that your life and the story you have to tell is incredibly valuable to people today but also to historians to the future. So I always like to kind of use that call to action when I talk about this book, but it is time for our next question in light of Frida Engel succeeding even when odds were against her. My question for you is when is a time you have succeeded, even when odds were against you. So you can go ahead and pop that into the chat. I see going to college as an older adult that is that's wonderful. I would be curious to learn what you studied. I see continuing my choice and career. That is wonderful. It sounds like maybe you had some things working against you but you decided to pursue your passion anyway. See emotionally making it through quarantine. I can relate to that a lot. Awesome, cool. I see promotion at work. That is exciting. Wonderful. Cool. All right, I'll then move us ahead to our next subject today. We're going to hop on over to Battery Townsley. So Battery Townsley, if you go to Bordeaux Beach and you walk less than a mile up the coastal trail, you'll hit Battery Townsley. You can't miss it. There's a giant 40 foot gun at the entrance. So you'll know that you're there. And this is a picture of Battery Townsley. You can see right up there 1938. That's when it was constructed. This is a World War II battery. And after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1939, it was operated 24-7 around the clock because there was this perceived notion, this perceived threat that after Hawaii, California would be next. So I imagine it was a pretty tense place to work at. And the soldiers at Battery Townsley, they operated, as I mentioned, those super big, I think it's like 400 ton guns that could fire these 1000 pound shells 25 miles out to sea. And apparently the sound from these guns could be heard all the way from San Mateo County. So this is some heavy duty equipment here. And women at this time were not able to serve in this role in the military. But there is, nevertheless, one woman who not only helped make herself part of the story, but she helped to tell the story as well. And that is National Geographic Reporter Laverne Bradley. So Laverne Bradley, she was assigned to get the scoop on World War II operations in San Francisco. I want to say 1943 is when she was assigned to do this. And she wasn't allowed to know where she was going. They didn't want her to know geographically where Battery Townsley was. But after reading her article, it's pretty clear we can pick up from complex clues that she was describing Battery Townsley. And something I really admire about Laverne Bradley is she is just an excellent writer. She's really mastered being able to describe places with her words. So we're going to take a moment to read this excerpt to kind of see how good of a writer she is. At a given point, the driver snapped off the headlights, and we began to wind over miles of dark, silent hills. It was like a spy film, or like spiraling slowly down the black insides of a gun barrel, not a movement, not a sound and all those vast reaches of gloom. The light would flicker for a second away off then go out. Suddenly, from out of the blackness, a voice would ring out, Holt, who's there, advance and be recognized. I think that just really characterizes what it would have been like to visit Battery Townsley. Also in her article that she wrote, she described the various ways that soldiers at the site kind of reacted to her presence there. This is a picture of some of the soldiers loading up that gun, and this is what she had to say. I was handed a phone and told to report that all was secure. Way off, I heard an amused, very good sir, ma'am. Back in the underground city, we explored more channels and more quarters. Soldiers would look up and smile as we walked over the concrete floors. An officer glanced at my heels and said, that's a sound we don't often hear around here. And something I really love that she's done here is when we look at all of these documents we have about Battery Townsley, they're often very logistical. They're talking about the construction of the battery, they're talking about the operation of the guns, but they don't really give a face and a human narrative to the people who work there. And Laverne Bradley, with her excellent skills as a writer, was able to bring this site to life and make it more relatable and accessible for us today. And I think that's a key to historic preservation. Part of the reason that Battery Townsley is restored is because people care about its story and they think it's interesting. And it takes storytellers like Laverne Bradley to get people, even now, you know, decades into the future to care and preserve this piece of history. So super cool. I definitely try to emulate her when I'm giving tours at Battery Townsley and if you ever visit, I recommend you do the same. All right, we're going to hop on over about 20 years into the future. That was World War Two. Now we're looking at the Cold War, and we're looking at the Nike Missile Site. It's right up the road from the Marin Hedlunds Visitor Center. And if you have never visited the Nike Missile Site, I definitely recommend that you do. This is a very interesting piece of history. It's a Cold War Museum, and it is the only fully restored Nike Missile Site in the country. There are about 300 across the U.S. And you may be wondering, Nike, like the shoe, what's Nike? So it's named after the Greek goddess of victory, Nike. And this was our last line of defense during the Cold War. So if there was an aircraft coming and it was carrying a nuclear bomb, and the Air Force failed and the Navy failed to intercept this aircraft, then it would be up to the Nike Missiles to stop that aircraft. And these Nike Missiles did have nuclear capacity as well. It's a super interesting subject to dive into kind of the intentions that went into this program and the consequences coming out of it. It's definitely something that I think we still feel the echoes of in our society today. It's an interesting site. That being said, there is a woman that was able to play a very prominent role at Nike and we're going to highlight her. This is Lieutenant Susan P. Cheney, Colonel Lieutenant. It's Colonel Susan P. Cheney now, but Lieutenant at the time. Here she is. She's down in the Nike magazine. This is her on the right. And she's speaking with Ranger John Martini on the left. And so Lieutenant Susan P. Cheney, she was the last battery executive officer at the Nike site. And she was the first woman ever in the Army to be assigned to a combat ready installation. She was there. She saw Nike through its clothes in 1974. And to kind of show how much of a pioneer she was, it wouldn't be until 1976 that service academies like West Point even admitted women for the first time. So she definitely kind of steerheaded, you know, her career in that way. And it's kind of interesting. I was looking into the career she held after Nike. And she went through these various phases of being able to hold leadership positions or not, based on whether or not the military allowed women to serve in that capacity, which I imagine was probably frustrating for her. But she was still able to navigate through that and have a very successful career afterwards. So in light of Susan P. Cheney being the first to do something. My question for you now is, have you or anyone in your life ever been the first to accomplish something. So maybe your mother was the first to go to college in her family, or maybe you, you wrote a book for the first time, whatever that maybe I would be curious to learn in the chat. You produced a movie that is really exciting. I would love to learn the name of the movie you produced. That is super cool. My dad earned his PhD first in his family. That again is really exciting. I would also love to be the first person in my family to earn their PhD that is such an accomplishment. Maybe someone says ballet. They were maybe the first to do ballet in their family or maybe the for the first time ever they tried ballet. That's really cool ballet is a difficult sport so you have my respect. Wonderful. Awesome. I'm going to move us ahead but please continue to populate the chat and we may have time to discuss it more afterwards. But last but not least, we're going to head up to Tennessee Valley. And I say this story takes place in Tennessee Valley but really the story I'm about to tell encompasses the entirety of the Marin Headlands and not just that but the entirety of the G-Gina Ray, but I've highlighted Tennessee Valley because you can still see some evidence of the story I'm about to tell in Tennessee Valley. So we're going to talk about Mar and Cello. Mar and Cello. What is Mar and Cello? It sounds like a fancy gelato. Mar and Cello is what the Marin Headlands was going to be. So we just talked about those coastal defense sites. We talked about Battery Townsley. We talked about the Nike missile site. And as those kind of phased out into obsolescence, there became a lot of talk of what to do with the Marin Headlands. And some developers thought they had the perfect idea. They thought the Marin Headlands could be the place for the most beautiful planned community in the world. That was their vision. And you can see right here, this is an image depicting what their vision was. So they wanted Mar and Cello to have golf courses and pools and they wanted to have an art community center, which a lot of artists were really excited about to kind of have that opportunity to work together and produce more awesome examples of art. And you can see back here, they also wanted to have these high rise apartments with multiple stories all to house 30,000 people right here in the Marin Headlands. So there were a lot of proponents for it. A lot of people were really excited to see this change. We do have a housing crisis in San Francisco. So housing is needed. But at the same time, there were a lot of people that were not too happy about the idea of Mar and Cello. And that's this photo right here. It says fight Mar and Cello and you can see a snake constricting a mountain. That's probably Mount Tamil Pai. And there were multiple reasons that people were upset with this idea. One could be they wanted to preserve the historic and cultural resources of the Headlands. There are so many, as we've just seen, so many historic stories we can tell here. Another could be they wanted to preserve the natural history of the Headlands. We're kind of in the Headlands and in the DGNRA, we're situated within this floristic frontier. We have more biodiversity that can kind of, it's on par with the biodiversity you see in equatorial rainforests. I think we have something like over 45 species of endangered plants. And we have so many animals that rely upon that food web. A really intricate ecosystem working within here. And that's a really special thing to have as well. The third reason that people were upset with Mar and Cello is they were upset that they didn't have the ability to vote on it. They thought development this large should be put up to the people to decide, and not just a select few developers. So one of the people that helped spearhead this movement against Mar and Cello was Amy Meyer. So we're going to go into her story. But before we do, I want to highlight this photo right here. This is a model of what Mar and Cello would have looked like. So there you see the Golden Gate Bridge, there you see Hawk Hill, there you see Rodeo Lagoon, and this is all the Marin Headlands and that's what that bustling city of Mar and Cello would have been. So remember that this is right in the 60s and 70s. It's the dawn of the environmental movement. People are starting to make their voices heard for what they want to see change in their society and Amy Meyer was one of them. At the time she was a housewife living in San Francisco, and she was looking for a project. And boy did she choose a big one she chose the creation of a national park. So let's see what she has to say about her intentions going into this. So this is in her words. The people out here since the gold rush have said this is a gorgeous place and we've got to save it. San Francisco began protecting its beaches in the 1870s. Muir Woods became a national monument in 1907. Mount Tam was protected beginning in the 1920s. There's a tradition and attitude about this beautiful place that we've got to keep it whole. But there's also a saying that goes, all of our gains are temporary, all of our losses are permanent. So we have to keep watching out and working all the time to protect these natural and cultural treasures. I really love that sentiment. My favorite part of that is all of our gains are temporary, all of our losses are permanent, because she makes a really good point that once we move forward with a decision like this, there's no going back, there's no taking back our actions. So Amy Meyer, here she is pictured walking on Baker Beach. She worked with a ton of other people the Sierra Club, people in her community all over to get their voices heard, and they did grassroots activism to do this. So there's stories I there's a story of two elderly sisters, they would camp out at the Golden Gate Bridge and run back and forth to vehicles to get their petition on signatures. There were also three lawyers who went pro bono to kind of sue the development project to say, hey, we want to be able to vote to this. Can you put this to a vote? And everyone worked together. And it's really a great example. What I love about the story is that it worked. People, individual people had an idea and they made it happen. So Amy Meyer, she went on, she's the founder, one of the founders of the GGNRA. She is the co-chair for the people for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area, or Puf Gunra, as I've heard her say. And she was appointed by President Clinton as a founding board member of the Presidio Trust. So there's probably something in society today that you think could be better. There's something that you think could be improved. And it can be a little intimidating to think, wow, do I have the ability to do that? I'm just one person. But this goes to show that it can and does work. This is a success story because she had this vision and she joined up with others who have this vision. We now have 80,000 acres that we all share within the San Francisco Bay Area, this close to a major metropolitan city. That's pretty rare to have wilderness right in our back doors. So really, really wonderful that she was able to do that. In light of Amy Meyer champion for what she believes in, our last question of the day before we wrap up our program is when is the time you stood up for what you believe in? You can go ahead and pop that into the chat. See at the ballot box, that's where you stood up for what you believe in. That's awesome. You exercised your right to vote. I see bad website design that needs to be fixed for her clients. See it? All right, so you were able to fix up a website and make it more accessible. That's wonderful. I see Women's March, BML March, that's wonderful that you were able to participate in that. That's awesome. Women's March 2017 against a school bully. Those individual actions, they really do add up. And then also, again, standing up for kids to get picked on by bullies, I work in childcare. That is wonderful. That's definitely going to make a difference in their lives. How exciting. That's so cool to see. Thank you for sharing. All right, so I want to thank you again for coming to this program today. And I also want to remind you that the story of National Parks is still being told. This is a picture of me with some of my fellow Rangers at the Marin Headlands. And this story is going into the future. I just looked at the historic role of women in the Marin Headlands, but we want to make sure that the story we tell in the future is as inclusive as possible for people from all walks of life. And we can all work together to make sure that this is the case. I also want to remind you that you are its storyteller. National Parks are your parks. So the kinds of stories that you want to see told in these parks. If you begin to tell them, if you begin to reach out to us and share them, we can make sure that these stories are preserved for future generations. I want to encourage you to think back on all of the answers that you wrote in the chat in response to my questions. Those two are stories and think back to Norma Engel as well and how her life is so valuable to future historians. So my challenge for you is one of the answers you shared in the box, maybe in Q&A you can talk more about it, or maybe today tell someone else about that experience you had, whether it was the way that you stood up for what you believe in, whether you want to tell someone else about a woman that's important to your history, whatever it may be, share it. Words matter, stories matter, is what's going to get us together to care about the causes that we want to champion. My name is Laura Volsky. If you have any questions about this program, of course ask it in the Q&A, but you can also shoot me an email, my email is right there. Or maybe you have more information about the stories I've told, whatever it is, we are here for you. The Moran Hedlins is your park and we want to learn from you. Yeah, so this is a review of all of the questions. But so if I think we're going to move into Q&A now. But if you also want to share any of your answers more in depth to the questions, these are the questions right there. Great. I'm not sure if I should stop screen share for Q&A or should I keep it as it is? Let's leave those questions up for a while. All right. And YouTube now is your chance to ask those questions of Laura. And the YouTube video will be available to watch again and share with other people in your family. We'll also plug our next. Well, I don't know if it's our next we probably have one coming up, but in May we'll have a API version of our partnership with the parks nature boost. So don't miss that one. Get those questions rolling there. We know there is a little bit of a lag time between YouTube and the zoom format. So we're here waiting for your questions. I have a question pop up. How did you become a ranger? I can answer that. The way I became a ranger is I started while I was a student at UC Berkeley through something called the pathways program, and it's a program available for either current students or recent graduates. You can actually work at a park if you're a current student you work at a park maybe in the summers between your semesters, and then after you finish up your time at the park, you have a position in the park to become a permanent ranger. So for any young students that are interested in being either a storyteller or maybe you want to be historian or you want to be a scientist, or you just want to protect natural resources, whatever it is, look into the pathways program because that was absolutely wonderful for me. What's your favorite bird you have ever seen in the park? I love that question. So the Marin Headlands is a stop in the Pacific flyway. So that means there's a lot of raptors, which are eagles, hawks or falcons that navigate on their migration routes through the park. So in autumn, kind of August, October to October time, we get a lot of really cool raptors and we have a park partner here and they just researched those raptors at Hawk Hill. But we get peregrine falcons and I think peregrine falcons are so cool they're the fastest animal in the world. And there were two that liked to roost by the point we need a lighthouse. So sometimes on my tour is we would see them, and they weren't always happy to see us and so they would be squawking at us but it was really cool they're such cool birds. I see also, did Norma continue to live and work in the lighthouse after her mother and into adulthood? That's a great question. I actually don't know the full answer. Three beams of light was based on three different lighthouses. So it was first a lighthouse in Oakland, then they went over to the Point Bonita lighthouse and then they moved down to a lighthouse in San Diego. So the book ends with Norma still living in San Diego with her family as they were taking care of that lighthouse. I don't know what she did after but I guess she became an author and a writer because she did publish that book about her life. I see another question about birds. The most unusual bird, like a rare bird, because there was the peregrine falcon but I guess I see them not like they're not super rare in the park. A rare bird. I think I need to think on that some more. There's really cool birds. For example, behind me there's the rodeo lagoon and brown pelicans. They come generally in the winter like flocks by the hundreds of them all are bathing in the lagoon and it's cool to see them because they were once endangered. And their population has recovered since ever since Rachel Carson, another wonderful female scientist. She published her book and where her book really talked about DDT and how that was affecting a lot of bird life. And because she was able to publish that book pelicans were really affected by DDT and that that's a type of pesticide. They were able to recover after that. There's even a story of kind of her and her old age. She flies out the first time she ever saw the Pacific Ocean, and she stopped by the rodeo lagoon and she just kind of reminisced on how these pelicans are here now, largely because of the difference she was able to make with her book. So I guess they're not that uncommon of a bird didn't really answer your question, but it is a story about a bird. I say who is a woman special to you. Thank you for asking. Oh man, I, there's so many like I think like many people in the chat the first woman that pops into my head is my mom, because she definitely was just so wonderful and in throughout my entire life of guiding me through it. But I, there's also a lot of women in the GG and RA that I really admire. For example, we have a park partner in the GG and RA the Marine Mammal Center, they are a seal hospital. And a lot of the veterinarians at the Marine Mammal Center are women. They have their PhDs and animal science and they're out there saving the lives of seals and sea lions, not just to save their lives but also because seals and sea lions. And they kind of let us know their sentinels of climate change. So we can see the health of the ocean through the health of these animals. And I just think the work they're doing over there is really cool. They're, they're saving animal lives but they're also doing this broader research on how our entire planet is being affected by these changes to our ocean. So I think I want to say that my mother and then a lot of the vets at the Marine Mammal Center I think are really neat. I see, oh wow so lighthouse families could be relocated to other lighthouses like a military family, yes, yes lighthouse families could be relocated. And it was actually, so we at the lighthouse we talk about navigation a lot we talk about literal navigation, but then also kind of metaphorical navigation and advancing through your lighthouse career as one of them. It was pretty difficult to do this. And the way you would do it is they would have these random un unprompted kind of examinations, where someone would just show up and they would look around the lighthouse, and they would think like, oh let's see if you've been doing a good job. And you wanted to make sure the lighthouse was spick and span at all times in case you got that random, that random person coming to like a pop quiz to check up on you. And if you did that well, then you could advance slowly through the ranks and be transferred to other lighthouses. And we have a volunteer at the Marine Headlands and his grandmother was the wife of a lighthouse keeper. And apparently she hated the ocean. She never learned how to swim, which was really funny considering that she basically lived at a lighthouse. And he asked her what was the worst thing about ever working at a lighthouse. And she didn't say the ocean. She didn't say that she couldn't swim. She said it was keeping the oven and the grill clean, because apparently when that inspector would come, they would lick their finger and drag it along appliances like a grill and if any like smudge came up, you would get docked points. So it sounds like they had to be pretty spick and span and on top of it as a lighthouse keeper. So what percent of GG NRI Rangers are women. I don't know the answer to that question. I would guess a good amount of them for sure. Maybe more than half. Definitely there's a lot of female Rangers out there, which is very cool to see. I also see when did military activity cease in the Marine Headlands. Was it with the creation of the National Park. That is a great question. The last time we ever really saw military activity was with that Nike missile site. And that was it closed in 1974. And the reason it closed as it was deemed obsolescent. So ICBMs kind of became the new defense against a potential nuclear attack and Nike missiles that their range is only about 100 miles. They were just truly defensive. And as ICBMs, they can just go so much farther and faster and there's better technology. So it phased out of use then they closed down the Nike site and that was pretty much the end of military activity in the Marine Headlands. There's a crazy story of someone. So around this time, of course, they were talking about what to do with the Marine Headlands. A lot of people wanted to make it a park. And there's this story of this person kind of surveying the Marine Headlands trying to think, oh, can we make it a park? And they were camped out over the Nike site looking around. And it was still active at that time in 74. And apparently they thought this person was a spy, because they like, they came up and they stopped him and they questioned him and they're like, what are you doing? Are you a drill? Are they trying to see if we're on top of our security? And this person was like, no, no, I was just trying to see if we're going to make this a park. So yeah, I don't know. It's a story that really kind of shows how serious the Nike operations were. Do we give tours? Yes, we do give tours, not really right now during COVID-19. We are not doing that at the moment, but later afterwards when things are open again and it's safe to come back to the park and it's safe to have people together, we will be offering tours again. We'll be offering tours generally. We do it at the Nike missile site. We do it at the point beneath the lighthouse and we do it at Battery Townsley, but we also do guided hikes all throughout the headlands as well. And we'll start to advertise that when we do that again, but generally it's on our website. Oh, I see the question, do you personally give tours? Yes, yes I do. And this will hopefully be one of them. It's about all the questions I see. Laura, thank you so much for answering all those amazing questions and there was some great ones in there. I love all of those questions and I have met some amazing female rangers through our partnership and our continued partnership. We are soulmates, I've heard it called. So the natural world versus with the House of Knowledge together. So we love that. And we thank all of our YouTube friends for being here and again this is available on our YouTube channel, along with all of our other nature boosts. So you can check those out. Laura, thank you so much. And everyone have a wonderful day. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Bye. Find us again.