We are excited to announce our 2023 cohort of volunteer docents at Duxbury Reef! A fantastic and curious group who are enthusiastic and looking forward taking shifts on the Reef. 

Our docent program started in January 2022 and has now grown to a team of 21 people. Our volunteers generoulsy donate their time to provide outreach and education to visitors to the reef during low tides and days we estimate will have high visitation. We were thrilled to learn that some of our new docents joined the program this year because they engaged with our docents on the Reef in 2022! 

The foundation of our program is to provide positive outreach and engagement with the visiting public on the Reef and inspire curiousity and stewardship. To meet these goals, our docents go through a 5-week training course to learn about the ecology and species on the Reef and the regulatory and management framework of the area. 

Our new team of eleven volunteers completed their 5-day training session to become a Duxbury Docent. They are now taking shifts on the reef at low tide to help educate visitors about the marine life on the reef and how they can help protect the sensitive habitat at Duxbury Reef through their actions and understanding.

We launched the training for the first team of Duxbury Docents on the day the tsunami washed into Marin County shores. To keep everyone safe, we decided to cancel the field trip for the day, but pivoted our program introduction to remote format. Though we didn’t cover as much as we planned, it was great to get to know our docent team a little bit and share some background on tidepool stewardship and MPAs.

In early 2020, EAC met with Marin County Parks and Open Space with local Bolinas resident and Marin Marine Protected Area (MPA) Watch volunteer, Kent Khitkian, to present a report on the increased visitation at Duxbury Reef that examined the data collected by our MPA Watch volunteers. The report focused on the ecological significance of Duxbury Reef’s intertidal area and concerns that visitation could be irreparably harming the reef species and habitats. We proposed a partnership between EAC and Marin County Parks and Open Space to create an on-site volunteer docent program to provide the visiting public with information and resources about the rocky intertidal habitat at Duxbury Reef.