Elkhorn Slough*, a 7-mile long estuary near Moss Landing, is the closest place from home to view Southern sea otters. Usually we drive there and view from the shore, but Monday my husband and I joined a pontoon boat “safari” to explore the interior. On a small boat run by a small operation catering to tourists in a small town we had a transformative experience.

This saltwater slough surrounded by marshland and dotted with islands of eelgrass is home to many animals, and on this sleepy, sunny afternoon during low tide, floating through felt like being in the middle of a nature documentary. Harbor seals hauled out on the sand, while otters dozed in the eelgrass or foraged midstream, several carrying pups of varying sizes. We saw flocks of both white and brown pelicans in flight as well as fishing, together with cormorants, great blue herons, great egrets, godwits, and one of those orange-beaked terns–Caspian or Lesser I think. The boat’s throttle was held to a gentle purr, the patter was sparse, and into the contemplative space opened by the silence of humans flowed the exultation of the natural world, which lifted our spirits.

We also learned a few things. The 100 or so otters who live in the slough spend 40-60% of their time resting and hanging out, and dip down for a meal from the bottom–they eat invertebrates–when they feel like it. They don’t even have a mating season, so perhaps the females get pregnant when they feel like it as well?

Harbor seals are not particularly social. Other than an occasional loner, most of them were hauled out in groups, carefully spaced at least a fin-width apart, and peacefully silent. Their movement on shore, sort of a wiggle along the ground, is officially called galumphing, a term purloined from Jabberwocky by naturalists, among others. In the water, they are sleek and acrobatic.

White pelicans are the second largest birds in California after the California condor; those two birds have maximum wingspans of 9 and 12 feet respectively. White pelicans feed in groups, herding fish together by walking in shallow water, then standing around and eating them. The day we went, there were so many fish that those birds were just walking and eating in small social groups, not having to do much herding.

Brown pelicans, with wingspans of 6 feet, fly over the water looking for a fish, then dive directly in to nab it, with 100% success as far as we could determine. Their oblong eyes compensate for light refraction, so they perceive things underwater at their real locations, unlike us. The diving behavior is learned, and more experience equates to diving from higher altitudes, as we observed watching a group of about 200 wheel and feed.

Blue herons and egrets stand still or step very slowly in the water, waiting for a fish to swim toward them, then suddenly stretch their long necks down and snap it up. When they fly, they coil their necks. All that they do, they do gracefully. Both also have wing spans around 6 feet.

In the bay between the mooring and the entrance to the slough we saw many sea lions, which are rambunctious this time of year, play-fighting in preparation for the start of the mating season in July. They were both vocal and physical, with lots of barking, splashing, falling off of piers, rolling around on the deck and in the water, and crawling over each other.

Atop pilings in the harbor Brandt’s cormorants were nesting; individuals return to same spot every year. Several of the nests contained fluffy grey hatchlings.

All of these animals seem to be doing whatever they want, with no worries at all, and this is my observation of coastal animals near our house as well. But how differently in might have turned out. The guide told us that there had been plans to make Elkhorn Slough into a yacht club, and the nearby hills into a condo community. A combination of the Nature Conservancy, a slough preservation society that still manages the area today, local billionaire David Packard, and the state of California combined to buy most of the land, and some of these continue to monitor sales of the private patches remaining. One is an operating dairy farm, owned by a great citizen of the planet who installed a long berm at his own expense to prevent farm runoff from entering the slough.

I am grateful to everyone who made this happen. However, now I look at developed waterways, for example Santa Cruz harbor, differently, thinking that in a world of fewer humans, they would also be instead a mini-Serengeti of the sea.

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• Californians pronounce this word “slew.”