Bay Nature Oct-Dec 2014 by Bay Nature Institute

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A N E X P L O R AT I O N O F N AT U R E I N T H E S A N F R A N C I S CO B AY A R E A

Eyeball to Eyeball with Turkey Vultures

Hunters Take Aim for Conservation Drought and Climate Change

Ridge Trail Opens Up Sonoma Mountain East Bay Parks: The Next Generation

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Features 24

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october–december 2014

MEET THE FUTURE

VIEW FROM THE BLIND

HUNG OUT TO DRY

A N ew G e n e r at i o n R i s i n g at E a st Bay Re g i o na l Pa r k s The Bay Area 25 years from now will look very different from the Bay Area of today. For up-and-coming employees of the East Bay Regional Park District, that prospect presents a challenge: to keep the largest regional park district in the nation relevant in a time of technological, cultural, and environmental change. As many of the district’s longtime staffers retire, these new staff members explain their approach to outreach, diversity, climate change … and the rise of the “selfie”! by Lexi Pandell

H u n t e r s Ta ke A i m f o r C o n s e rvat i o n It seems contradictory: shooting animals to save them, saving animals to shoot them. But the history of conservation is closely linked to the history of hunting. In the Bay Area, hunters have saved thousands of acres from development and funded restoration projects even in areas where there’s no hunting. We venture out to the duck blinds and hunting grounds of the Bay Area in the company of several conservationist hunters, who explain how hunting has informed their view of conservation and vice versa. by Aleta George

I s Th i s D ro u g h t t h e “ N ew Nor mal”? California remains gripped by the worst drought in recorded history, and many animal and plant species are feeling the effects of three exceptionally dry years. But the question scientists are now racing to answer looks to the future: Is this drought a symptom of our climate-changed world? We know warmer temperatures exacerbate drought, but there’s an even scarier prospect: What if climate change helped turn off California’s water? by Alison Hawkes

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12 On the Trail

Bay View Letter from the publisher

Letters from Our Readers

Ear to the Ground

News from the conservation community and the natural world.

Conservation in Action

Using mushrooms to reduce toxins and save the world by Sarah Bernard

Signs of the Season

The mysterious, regal, underappreciated turkey vulture by Joe Eaton

Lofty Ambitions The Ridge Trail Opens Up Sonoma Mountain Sonoma Mountain looms over the North Bay towns of Petaluma and Santa Rosa, but until now, most of it has remained off-limits to the public. That will change with the opening this fall of a new segment of the Bay Area Ridge Trail. by Glen Martin

16 Elsewhere . . .

Moore Creek, Batteries to Bluffs, UC Botanic Garden

35 First Person

Open space planner David Hansen has left his mark on parks, preserves, and trails from Sonoma to Saratoga. Interview by Eric Simons

45 Ask the Naturalist

Which local wintering birds are long-distance champions? by Michael Ellis

46 Naturalist’s Notebook

A moth that makes its home in coyote scat by John Muir Law

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october–december 2014

bay v iew letter from the publisher

contr ibuto rs Becca Andrews (p. 38) is a graduate student reporter at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a Bay Nature editorial intern. Sara Bernard (p. 10) is an editorial fellow at Grist. Elizabeth Devitt (p. 7) is a freelance writer and large animal veterinarian based in Santa Cruz. Rachel Diaz-Bastin (p. 16) is a scientific illustrator and a Bay Nature editorial intern. Find her work at http:// racheldiazbastin.com/

Diane Poslosky

t’s been said that in California “water runs downhill toward money.” Of course, there isn’t a whole lot of water running anywhere in California these days. Which makes it all the more likely that what there is will indeed follow that old dictum. We are, as you know, in the third year of a severe drought, with 58 percent of the state experiencing “exceptional drought” conditions. What does that mean on the ground? According to researchers at UC Berkeley, it means record low soil moisture, putting severe stress on perennial plants. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, it means a dramatic reduction in the number and size of seasonal wetlands and flooded fields available to the 10 to 12 million ducks, geese, cranes, and other birds that travel the Pacific Flyway to the Sacramento and Central valleys each fall. And according to officials from local resource conservation districts, it means that some ranchers have had to cull their herds due to shortages of water and forage. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the situation could improve significantly with a few good early winter storms. But we have neither the power to make that happen nor the prescience to know if it will. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. We can certainly institute meaningful conservation measures,

particularly in the sectors that use the most water. Yes, we can all take shorter showers and stop watering lawns if we still have them; every little bit helps. But many of us have had low-flow shower heads since the 1970s and have already said good-bye (and good riddance) to our lawns. Moreover, with more than 80 percent of the state’s water going to agriculture, changing personal hygiene habits will only result in a few more drops in the proverbial bucket. So at least monitoring agricultural use of groundwater, as mandated by legislations recently passed in Sacramento, would be a good start. The other thing we can do is reduce our carbon footprint, on the unproven but not unreasonable assumption that there’s a nexus between drought and climate change. As we discuss in our article on the drought (“Hung Out to Dry,” page 30), we can say with certainty that climate change exacerbates the effects of a drought through higher temperatures (the past year has been the state’s warmest on record) and the resulting increase in evapotranspiration (the loss of moisture into the atmosphere): When it’s hot, moisture evaporates at a faster rate, and water is therefore less available for us to drink (think of the evaporation from the surface of reservoirs) and for plants to retain. But what we don’t know yet is if climate change is itself a cause of this drought. That’s a complex question— involving atmospheric wind patterns and global ocean currents—but not an academic one. Because if climate change is a cause, then the current crisis is a harbinger of (continued on next page) Joe Eaton (p. 8) lives in Berkeley and has written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Estuary News Michael Ellis (p. 45) is a Santa Rosa–based naturalist who leads nature-based tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com). Berkeley-based writer Joan Hamilton (p. 39) has produced downloadable audio guides to Mount Diablo (audiblemountdiablo.com).

BayNature

le tte r s

Exploring, celebrating, and understanding the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area

Dear Editor: I wanted to thank you and your staff for the recent articles on East Bay Regional Parks. Some years ago I lived in Los Angeles and Connecticut. Neither place had much open space available to the public, and I longed to get back to Northern California. Now I live very close to Briones Regional Park and hike there a couple of times a week. Many times I have thought to myself how grateful I am to whomever it was that had the foresight to see that so much open space got set aside and protected from development. Your editorial staff must have picked up my brain waves because the April-June issue of Bay Nature made it clear all the various people I should thank. And then the July-September issue highlighted several Regional Parks

Volume 14, Issue 4 october-december 2014 Publisher David Loeb Editorial Director Eric Simons Development Director Judith Katz Online Editor Alison Hawkes Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Tech & Data Manager Laura Schatzkin Advertising Director Ellen Weis Design & Production Susan Scandrett Contributing Editor Sue Rosenthal Copy Editors Cynthia Rubin, Kathleen Wong Board of Directors Carol Baird, Christopher Dann, Catherine Fox (president), Tracy Grubbs, Bruce Hartsough, David Loeb, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott, Malcolm Margolin (emeritus) Volunteers/Interns Becca Andrews, Sabine Bergmann, Rachel Diaz-Bastin, Elizabeth Devitt, Paul Epstein, Eleanor Gilchrist, Asbery Rainey, Carmen Taylor, Kimberley Teruya Bay Nature is published quarterly by the Bay Nature Institute, 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 Subscriptions: $53.95/three years; $39.95/two years; $21.95/one year; (888)422-9628, baynature.org/subscribe P.O. Box 92408, Long Beach, CA 90809 Advertising: (510)813-1903/advertising@baynature.org Editorial & Business Office: 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510)528-8550; (510)528-8117 (fax) baynature@baynature.org baynature.org issn 1531-5193 No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from Bay Nature and its contributors. © 2014 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

staff who had spent their entire careers making the parks the significant successes they are today. That was especially nice because it’s easy to take such work for granted and forget that it takes talented, dedicated people to keep open space beautiful and accessible. You all do a terrific job at Bay Nature. Keep up the exceptional work! Sincerely, Richard Morrison, Lafayette Send your letters to letters@baynature.org ( bay

view: continued from page 4) worse to

come rather than just part of our state’s typical drought/flood pendulum. And that raises the stakes considerably for Proposition One, the $7.25 billion water bond appearing on the November ballot. With its combination of funding for watershed restoration, water conservation and recycling, and major storage and delivery infrastructure, the measure has

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Front Cover: A turkey vulture resting on a log at Pescadero State Beach keeps an eye out for carrion but relies primarily on a keen sense of smell to find its food. [Hank Christensen, www.hankchristensen.com]

Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 46) is the author of the Laws Guide to Drawing Birds and teaches nature observation and illustration. Info at johnmuirlaws.com. Ann Sieck (p. 16) is dedicated to helping people with disabilities find parks and trails they can enjoy. See her reviews at baynature.org/asiecker.

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Test Drives

by david loeb

support from both sides of the aisle. Most environmental groups support the proposed investments in restoration, conservation, and recycling as responsible ways to stretch the state’s limited water supply. But they’re less happy about the $2.7 billion for storage and delivery projects. If this simply means more dams, it won’t increase the state’s water supply by a single drop. And it may just encourage large agricultural users to continue their less-than-efficient practices. However, that might be the necessary political trade-off to get the conservation and restoration funding. I haven’t yet seen a clear environmental consensus in support for or opposition to the bond, so I hope we’ll all take a closer look, consider the pros and cons, and then get out and vote accordingly. Keep in mind that none of the proposed measures would have any impact for several years. So whatever the outcome of the vote, it will take a few good storms and stepped-up conservation to get us out of this drought.

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october–december 2014

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e ar to the gro und

Elizabeth Devitt

n e w s f r o m t h e c o m m u n i t y a n d t h e n at u r a l w o r l d

Kestrel Population Drops Dramatically, and Quietly

Two volunteer researchers with the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group at UC Santa Cruz are investigating the local status of American kestrels (Falco sparverius) in response to reports that the small falcon’s numbers have been declining nationwide. “No one has specifically studied the birds in the Santa Cruz area. We want to lay the groundwork for repeatable surveys with our research,” says researcher Zach Michelson. “It’s only by following these kestrels year after year that we can find out if there are population changes and what, if anything, can be done to help.” Records from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a massive annual data collection on more than 400 bird species that’s overseen by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Canadian Wildlife Service, show that the U.S. population of American kestrels declined by an estimated 1.5 percent each year between 1966 and 2010. That’s a long-term loss of almost 50 percent of the population, a significant drop even for a bird considered abundant in North America. Almost one-third of the world’s estimated four million kestrels live in

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the United States, according to Partners in Flight, a nonprofit organization for land-bird conservation. Some migrate seasonally, while others stay all year in areas with more hospitable climates,

such as Santa Cruz. In coastal California there’s been a 68 percent decrease in kestrels across 106 migration routes monitored by the Breeding Bird Survey from 1966 to 2008. But the kestrel’s decline isn’t uniformly distributed across the country. For reasons that aren’t clear, the bird’s numbers are increasing around the central states and parts of Mexico, according to the same survey. A handful of factors could be causing the nationwide decline, bird biologists say, including increased predation by Cooper’s hawks, exposure to pesticides, and competition at nesting sites by European starlings. The landclearing practices of “clean farming” may also get rid of trees and brush that are good places for the birds to nest and hunt. Another factor could be invasive plant species taking over the short ground cover of the grassland habitats kestrels rely on to locate their prey as they hover in the air. Michelson and his colleague Teague (continued on page 38) Scott mapped out 12

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Photo: John Morgan

october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

Oyster mushrooms emerge from a fallen log

con ser vati on i n ac tion

Mycology to lower fire risk.

sean parnell

article title

Mushrooms to the Rescue!

the glare of the bright sunshine flooding Duffel Meadow, a pale swath of cattle-trodden grassland near Orinda, several dozen lumpy burlap sacks lie gray and ragged, no more conspicuous than a pile of compost, in two natural swales. But each bag’s straw and wood chip stuffing is threaded with a rich web of mushroom mycelium that is doing some heroic work: quickly consuming any E. coli that pass through it. These bags contain two types of fungi, King Stropharia and oyster, that can digest E. coli in a very short period of time—“we’re talking, like, an hour”—says Mino de Angelis, a Berkeley resident who’s leading this experimental project at Duffel Meadow. De Angelis prods at the parts of the damp bags that are shredding open, revealing a handful of harmless fruiting bodies—what we call “mushrooms.” The oyster and Stropharia are 8

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absorbing harmful fecal bacteria—like E. coli and Giardia, from the cattle that regularly graze here—which can seep into the local watershed. That watershed, including Duffel Meadow, belongs to the East Bay Municipal Utility District (ebmud) and drains into the utility’s San Pablo Reservoir. De Angelis is a volunteer, one of several dozen members of Bay Area Radical Mycology (barm), a dedicated crew of mushroom enthusiasts who see promise in the fungus kingdom beyond taste and beauty. Their claim—one that’s becoming increasingly less radical, at least in the scientific community—is that fungi can not only recycle natural “waste” products in the forest, but can also recycle highly toxic humangenerated waste, including petroleum, heavy metals, plastics, and pesticides. Recent studies have found, for instance, that certain fungi can remediate oil spills, decompose the cellulose in disposable baby diapers, and siphon

october–december 2014

there are some private stables near ebmud land, for instance, that can generate “mountains of manure” that shed to creeks and then to reservoirs; an inexpensive biofiltering method like mycoremediation could easily be applied to some of those areas to reduce the burden on treatment facilities. Another barm–ebmud project, one that tests mushrooms’ ability to speed up the process of wood decomposition, has had more immediate results. Near San Pablo Reservoir, ebmud workers have been gradually logging a forest of Monterey pines that are reaching the end of their normal life span and pose a potential fire risk. But the logging requires either hauling out the felled logs using diesel engines or letting them sit, increasing the chance of wildfire. Starting in November 2012, barm volunteers began “inoculating” the logs with various kinds of locally foraged fungi, including oyster, lion’s mane, false turkey tail, and artist’s conk. Once the

“inoculated” by members of Bay Area Radical

the gold from ground-up cell phones. “All this stuff is really new,” says de Angelis, who’s been a mushroom buff for some time and has seen interest in so-called “mycoremediation” take off in the last few years. “We know a heck of a lot more this year than we did the year before, but there’s still a lot more to find out.” Maya Elson and Peter McCoy, two local mycophiles who wanted to do more than exchange morel-hunting secrets, formed Bay Area Radical Mycology about three years ago. So far, the group has been involved in a dozen workshops, remediation projects, and fungus fairs. Members meet monthly to brainstorm activity ideas (a “petridish party” to help build members’ lab skills, a “guerrilla gardening” excursion to toss “spore bombs” into neglected urban lots). “We’re not really interested in just talking about it,” says de Angelis, who, like most members, is self-taught and got involved largely out of concern for the environment. “We want to get out there and do something.” They’ve found an eager partner in ebmud. The barm E. coli filtration project, among several they’re working on with the agency, is more about practice and potential than it is about results; ebmud’s drinking water is treated downstream from Duffel, so any E. coli presence is not a health issue, and anyway, de Angelis says, “it’s such a vast watershed; what we’re doing right now is a drop in the bucket.” Instead, barm volunteers are using the partnership they’ve formed with ebmud as a sort of teaching lab for themselves, other volunteer groups, and ebmud staff. They’re basing the experiment on studies by renowned mycologist and fungus advocate Paul Stamets, and what they learn could provide a simple, eco-friendly tool for ebmud and local landholders to tackle small-scale bacterial contamination. ebmud senior ranger and volunteer coordinator Virginia Northrop says

fungi take hold, the logs are less likely to burn and more likely to decompose quickly, since mycelium retains moisture and breaks down the wood’s lignin, making a log spongier and less brittle. It’s a simple, commonsense project with potential to expand; the usda’s Natural Resource Conservation Service recently contacted barm to see if they could do similar work on a eucalyptus site in Pescadero. “They’re doing really cutting-edge stuff,” says ebmud’s Northrop, adding that barm has been “our best volunteer group ever” thanks to its fount of enthusiasm. Paul Stamets has done fantastic work with mycoremediation, she says, “but we hadn’t seen much of it done in the East Bay — until these guys.” And she wouldn’t mind seeing a lot more of it. Since a big part of Northrop’s job is managing the health of local ecosystems, from creeks to forests to hillsides, the more economical and ecological the methods, the better. “I’ve been in

sean parnell

by sara bernard

Bay Area Radical Mycology member Joe Soeller looks for mushroom growth between bags of “bunker spawn” deployed as stream filters in Duffel Meadow

this field a long time, and to me this is something that should explode,” she says. “It’s so healthy for the forest; it’s so healthy for the land. Mushrooms are just this untapped resource.”

october–december 2014

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si gn s o f th e s eason

The Underappreciated Undertakers When you’re eyeball to eyeball with a turkey vulture, you wonder how he perceives you. (My “he” is Vladimir, a 30-year-old male, permanent resident of WildCare in San Rafael.) You may think of William Leon Dawson, an early celebrant of California birds: “…when the buzzard sweeps low to bend upon you an inquiring eye, you shudder…[I]t is really the grave which appraises you in that deferential, hopeful gaze.” Or the poet Robinson Jeffers on a bare hillside near Big Sur, “under inspection,” telling the bird: “These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” You might even remember, as Jeffers apparently did, the ancient custom of exposing the dead to be consumed by vultures, still practiced in parts of Asia: “What a

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for sure where he was born. If he was born in Marin, he and a single sibling probably hatched in a cave or a rock pile. It’s hard to be more precise; breeding-bird atlas compilers report that turkey vulture nests are hard to locate. Farther north, turkey vultures nest in the burned-out redwood stumps that loggers call goose pens. UC Cooperative Extension biologist Greg Giusti says

october–december 2014

since 1989, has seen turkey vulture numbers increase from about 2,000 to a peak of 11,000 in 2003, leveling off to a current 7,000 to 8,000. “From midAugust to mid-December, there are always turkey vultures in the sky,” he says. Late September is the high point. They travel in small groups, sometimes up to 25. Some must be southbound, others are locals just hanging around a nearby Caltrans roadkill disposal site: “It’s hard to judge,” he says. A much larger contingent, 33,000 strong in some years, moves down the west side of the Sierra Nevada into the Kern River Valley, where they’re honored with an annual September festival. Fish believes the interior and coastal streams are separate: No one has observed migrants crossing the Central Valley. Maybe they merge farther south, in Mexico, joining the immense flocks that funnel through Veracruz, Costa Rica, and Panama. No one knows. Also unknown: whether adults and juveniles travel together. Bildstein tells of five vultures that were equipped with radio transmitters in Southern California in 2005 and 2006. One never left California; the others traveled as far north as Washington State, as far south as Central America. One made a detour down the Baja California peninsula, then crossed the border back into California, made a U-turn, and proceeded south across mainland Mexico to Guatemala. Two others wintered in western Mexico. Vultures that nested in southern Canada went farther, all the way to Venezuela. Meanwhile, winter visitors from the north move into the Bay Area. Bildstein suspects they’re coming from British Columbia, although none have been tracked yet. Audubon Christmas Bird Count data show dramatic increases in the winter population locally since the 1960s and ’70s, from single digits to 1,001 Denise Cadman

Vlad, who is being hand-fed mealworms by wildlife rehabber Alex Godbe, probably doesn’t see me as unripe carrion. He’s imprinted on humans, though most of us make him nervous. Godbe, a raptor whisperer if there is such a thing, got Vlad used to leaving his cage, being handled, and traveling to schools and such in a dog carrier. He’ll tolerate WildCare volunteer Maggie Rufo. But he flinches if anyone else gets close, and a whitening patch on his head’s red skin signals anxiety. That skin, not quite bare, is flecked with short hairlike black feathers. Loss of head plumage is an adaptation for feeding on messy carcasses that New World vultures and condors share with the superficially similar but not closely related Old World vultures and a few stork species. Conventional plumage would become matted with gore. A blood test a few years ago determined Vlad’s gender—the only way to tell the sexes apart. That’s not the only thing that’s difficult to determine with vultures. They might be common, but where they nest and where they go remain mysteries. Vlad, for instance, was found in Marin, but it’s not known

breezy, and reel drunkenly in strong winds.” Teetering, counterintuitively, helps stabilize flight while allowing the vulture to cruise low enough to pick up scents. Flying vultures expend minimal energy. “When we had heartrate monitors on turkey vultures, we found that flight costs them next to nil above perching,” recalls Keith Bildstein, conservation director of Pennsylvania’s famous Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. For long-distance flights, they catch thermals—elevators of heated air—and ride them as high as four miles. “Turkey vultures are more flightefficient in thermals than other soaring raptors,” says Allen Fish, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory. Red-tailed hawks and other species keep an eye on them, following them up. In the fall, thousands of Vlad’s relatives are moving south. Over the species’ huge range, from Saskatchewan to Tierra del Fuego, some—not all— populations migrate seasonally. We know surprisingly little of the details; they’re less intensively studied than rarer species like California condors or peregrine falcons. Only 50 or so have been equipped with transmitters that allow satellite tracking. Traditional leg bands can’t be used on New World vultures: like storks, they defecate on their legs and feet, rendering band codes unreadable. Wing tags are more feasible, but not widely used. Fish, watching the fall passage of raptors through the Marin Headlands

Steve Zamek

sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death,” he wrote.

that in the Mendocino woods, near Hopland, where he is studying the big birds, they use hollowed-out valley and Oregon white oaks: “They’re essentially tree caves, some only two feet wide with entrances 10 to 12 feet up the trunk. The vultures can’t fly in and out; they shinny down to the ground-level nest using feet and elbows.” That’s also how they exit, like chimneying rock climbers. His handlers call Vladimir curious and social—adaptive traits for a scavenger reliant on shared meals. Outside the nesting season, vultures congregate in roosts that function as information centers: Vultures that failed to find a carcass the day before might follow their luckier neighbors when they return for second helpings. Turkey vultures rarely make their own kills, and their few documented victims (grouse chicks, minnows) are small and defenseless. They scour the landscape for the dead, alert to whiffs of decay. In the 1950s, amateur ornithologist Betsy Bang showed that the smell-processing part of a turkey vulture’s brain is proportionately larger than in birds of comparable size, such as the turkey. Experiments dating back to Audubon’s day established that turkey vultures, unlike even other vultures, can locate concealed food. A Connecticut turkey vulture exhumed a dead woodchuck that had been buried half a foot deep. They can be picky, rejecting food that’s too far gone, and will dissect and discard a skunk’s scent gland before consuming the skunk. Resistant to most pathogens (including botulism, salmonella, and anthrax), they are nonetheless susceptible to commercial rodenticides. Turkey vultures are built for lowaltitude, steadily patrolling flight. With six-foot-long, narrow wings tilted above the horizontal to form a shallow V, vultures rock in the air currents— one of their best field marks. As Pete Dunne and Clay Sutton say in Hawks in Flight, they “teeter unsteadily even in windless conditions, wobble when it’s

(bottom left) Turkey vulture nests are hard to locate, but researchers were lucky to find these vulture chicks in an oak tree cavity in the Laguna de Santa Rosa.

Michael Baird

by joe eaton

on the 2006 Point Reyes count. Eight other local counts recorded record highs within the last six years. Climate change? More food available? It’s anyone’s guess. Whatever draws them, they’re the region’s most abundant wintering bird of prey (running second to red-tailed hawks in the nesting season and fall migration). The Golden Gate also hosts a northbound raptor migration in spring, serendipitously discovered nine years ago by a falcon watcher. “Numbers are lower than in fall, but turkey vultures are the stars,” Fish says. In the low thousands, they can outnumber red-tailed hawks, the next most common species, by three to one. It’s odd that we know so little about such a common, conspicuous, and ecologically indispensable bird. Giusti’s project is only the third study of nesting turkey vultures in California. The more biologists learn about them, the more impressive vultures’ behavioral flexibility appears. Along with now-rare condors and extinct teratorns, these consummate survivors jostled for scraps of mammoth and ground sloth at the site of today’s La Brea Tar Pits—and they’re still prospering, five million or more of them in the world. International Vulture Awareness Day is the first Saturday in September; mark your calendar for next year. Or, the next time you’re in San Rafael, pay Vladimir a visit.

october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

lo f ty am bi ti o n s

The view north from the lower portion of the new

the ridge trail opens up sonoma mountain

by Glen Martin This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Bay Area Ridge Trail, an ambitious project to knit together the Bay Area’s diverse ridgeline parks and open spaces. So far, over 340 out of a projected 550 miles of the trail are complete and open to the public. In recognition of this milestone, we invite you to explore one of the newest segments of the trail. If you’re driving north on Highway 101 from San Francisco, you first see Sonoma Mountain as you approach Petaluma: an abrupt and massive upswelling of the terrain, more like the prow of a great ship than a peak. It dominates the eastern horizon all the way to Santa Rosa, changing constantly with the light and the season. This part of the North Bay is heavily populated, the lowlands a vast tessellation of exurbs, vineyards, and

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pastures. But from the freeway, the flanks of the mountain look almost untouched. Dark woodlands are interspersed with rolling uplands, golden in the summer and fall, green as emeralds and jade during winter and spring. The mountain looks wild, and it looks close. It seems that a short hike could take you from the congestion of the 101 corridor to a different time and place. This is not mere illusion. Sonoma

october–december 2014

Ridge Trail on Sonoma Mountain looks across to Bennett Mountain and beyond to Santa Rosa.

Mountain is wild, and its wildness is all the more precious for its proximity to Petaluma and Santa Rosa. I speak here from experience. I lived on the mountain’s heavily forested north slope for more than 10 years, in a small cabin on a 35-acre vineyard – or “grape ranch,” as the local parlance had it. We heated with eucalyptus and oak from the property; we raised most of our food. I could look down to Santa Rosa, seven miles away, with its traffic, noise, commerce, and congestion. But from my vantage, it was just a static diorama; I heard nothing but the soughing of the wind through the black oaks. I was reluctant to leave the mountain, even for necessary shopping or business. Everything I wanted, and most of what I needed, was there. I tracked the mountain’s … not cycles so much, but fluctuations. Some years, the deer, or the gray squirrels,

An aerial view of Sonoma Mountain shows the northwest face of the mountain now traversed by the new Ridge Trail segment. Mount Diablo is visible in the distance in the upper left corner.

the northeast side of the mountain. The trail, the end product of a collaboration of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (scaposd), Sonoma County Regional Parks, the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, LandPaths, and the state Department of Parks and Recreation, is largely completed and is a linchpin component of the regional Bay Area Ridge Trail. I recently hiked the new Ridge Trail segment on the mountain’s north slope with John Aranson, trail steward for the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council. Aranson, as his title implies, knows trails: He was the field inspector during construction, monitoring everything from the route surveys to the construction of the elaborate rock drains that divert water from the trail to minimize erosion. We met at the Jacobs Ranch, the trail’s staging area, not far from the hamlet of Penngrove. This property, formerly owned by the late Sonoma Mountain cattleman Bill Jacobs, was acquired by scaposd in 2003. I had known Bill. He was a massive man, with a chest like a keg, hands that could grip a basketball like a grapefruit, a booming foghorn voice and an omnipresent 10-gallon hat jammed down on his head. It was strange to visit the ranch in his absence. I half expected to see him striding from the ranch house where

Courtesy SCAPOSD/Stephen Joseph Photography

Bill Helsel

Kim Batchelder, SCAPOSD

jackrabbits chasing each other through the vineyards once winter had broken—literally mad as March hares. I must admit I found the mountain’s enforced isolation attractive. In other words, I enjoyed the fact that people were largely excluded. Virtually all the mountain was privately owned; there was no public access. In 2010, a Conservation Corps North Bay crew worked on erosion control for I could roam at will, the new Ridge Trail segment on Sonoma Mountain. because the grape rancher or raccoons, or valley quail, were up. was friends with all the neighboring Others, they were down. One year, feral property owners. But I also felt, deep pigs rampaged through the vineyards down, there was something inequitable and gardens. During some winters, about this arrangement. Sonoma mallards, widgeon, and scaup were Mountain was and is too great of a thick on the pond the owner used for treasure to be hoarded. Somehow, there irrigation. Others, they were almost had to be a means of allowing access absent. One duck-related incident while protecting its incomparable beauty remains particularly vivid. The pond and largely intact natural systems. teemed with small bluegills, the That was—yikes—more than two decades ago. For all those intervening descendants of a few fish dumped there years, most of Sonoma Mountain has long ago by the kid of a neighboring remained off-limits to the public. But rancher. One cold winter morning, I that’s about to change. Soon, you’ll strolled down to the pond and found be able to hike more than eight miles it carpeted with common mergansers. across the mountain, from a trailhead They were conducting a mighty at Jacobs Ranch on the northwest slope slaughter, consuming the bluegills as fast to Jack London State Historic Park on as they could cram the fish down their gullets. They fed for three days, then abruptly decamped, leaving nothing but a few floating, finned carcasses. Other memories intrude whenever I look at the mountain—which is often, given that I now live in Santa Rosa. I remember the varied thrushes flitting through the California laurel and redwood groves in late winter and the Bullock’s orioles trilling in the eucalyptus lining our driveway in the spring. I remember the lust-crazed black-tailed

on th e tr ai l

on the trail

october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

Sonom a

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a park ranger now lives, bellowing a greeting, one hand raised, the other grasping some horse tack or a hay hook. “To a real degree, ranchers kept this area undeveloped,” Aranson says. “It was their early stewardship that ultimately made the establishment of the trail possible.” The trail was engineered with moderate gradient and minimal environmental disturbance in mind, and it traverses virtually all the mountain’s diverse and lovely biomes. Rather than attempting to dominate the natural topography of the mountain, the trail accommodates it. In the rare instances where switchbacks are necessary, they are long and gentle. As noted, expertly constructed rock drains divert water away from the route. Walls of pressuretreated lumber reinforced with h beams maintain the trail’s gradient across steep and unstable ground. In cases where significant excavation was necessary, the overburden was moved to stable locations near the trail, contoured with the existing slope, and seeded with native annuals and perennials. “We had a licensed contractor handle most of the construction, but we also used Conservation Corps North Bay crew members and local youth volunteers wherever possible,” Aranson says. “Sonoma County has a huge trail and open space constituency, and a project this ambitious generates a lot of support and excitement.”

Our hike took place in mid-spring, and the mountain was at the peak of its vernal glory. Despite the drought, the slopes burned with a dazzling palette of greens. A few last puffballs yielded their spores at the margins of the track, and wood satyr butterflies flitted among lush stands of yarrow, lupine, blue-eyed grass, California poppies, and buttercups. We followed the trail across broad meadows, past several vernal pools, and through groves of bay laurels and black oaks. Redwoods grew along the Matanzas Creek gorge, and as we gained elevation, we passed into a mixed woodland of Douglas fir and madrone. At one point, we saw a large flock of turkeys ghosting through the trees, and later we heard the crazed yammering of a pileated woodpecker. We walked through an expanse of small, twisted oaks and native bunchgrasses growing between piles and windrows of volcanic stone covered with moss and lichen. The scene almost looked cultivated, like a meticulously tended Kyoto rock garden. One of the oaks supported an active honeybee colony. The air around the tree was perfumed by honeycomb and pollen and resonated with the low susurrus of

Courtesy SCAPOSD

Ridge Trail on the north slope of Sonoma Mountain.

deer, coyotes, mountain lions, and bobcats,” Batchelder says. “The cameras are motion-activated, and they’re providing excellent data on animal distribution that will really help managers protect the mountain’s wildlife.” Completing the trail required that scaposd acquire 783 acres on five separate properties. While the district is now in the process of transferring ownership of the land to Sonoma County Regional Parks, scaposd will retain the conservation easement for the property. “We’ll do regular site visits to ensure that the terms of the conservation easement are met,” says Sheri Emerson, the stewardship program manager for scaposd, “but long-term land ownership and day-to-day management fall more within the portfolio of Regional Parks.” A Sonoma County Regional Parks ranger is permanently stationed at the former Jacobs Ranch and the department is eager to open the new property to the public. “This park will be amazing,” says Caryl Hart, director of the regional parks department. “It’s adjacent to densely populated areas, but has a real wild feeling, and it gets people close to the top of Sonoma Mountain, where the views are phenomenal.” From the beginning, says Emerson, the trail “has been a collaboration. The Open Space District, Regional Parks, the Ridge Trail Council, State Parks, LandPaths, and the State Coastal Conservancy, all contributed. So did the Jacobs family and other landowners who wanted to see the essential character of Sonoma Mountain preserved. It took about 18 years to put all the pieces together, and it wasn’t always easy. Without everyone working together, public agencies and private citizens, this never would have happened.” Bill Keene, scaposd’s general manager, observes that such partnerships made it possible for his agency to do what it does best: punch above its fiscal weight. “We employ a variety of funding mechanisms,” Keene says, including “the district’s unique local sales tax revenues—which we also use

to obtain matching funds from other sources. Basically, it’s about leveraging funding to that point where large, important projects like the north slope Ridge Trail can move forward. We couldn’t do it alone. Our partners are essential at every juncture.” For Aranson, this new trail closes a critical gap in the larger Bay Area Ridge Trail route. But he’s hardly resting on his laurels. “Now we need to close the four to five miles that will connect us from Jack London State Park to Annadel State Park, where there are about eight miles of dedicated Ridge Trail,” Aranson says. “When the project is completed, we’ll have some 550 miles of trail circling the Bay Area. So far, we have nearly 350 miles. We aren’t going

thing to be able to hike the circumference of the entire Bay Area, from Morgan Hill to Calistoga. But there’s no need to wait; the benefits of the work of the Ridge Trail Council and its partners can be—should be—enjoyed now. Each leg accessible to the public offers respite from the travails and stresses of urban life. And if the entire Bay Area Ridge Trail can be viewed as a crown that is slowly being fitted to the region’s brow, the Sonoma Mountain Ridge Trail will shine as one of its loveliest gems. During my hike, we stopped for lunch in a narrow declivity shaded by Douglas firs and hardwoods, next to one of Aranson’s delta-shaped rock drains. It was a masterpiece of stone masonry,

Bill Helsel

out the route of the planned but not-yet-constructed

on th e tr ai l

returning bees. And at every open vista, we were treated to spectacular views of the Santa Rosa plain, nearby Taylor Mountain, and the Mayacamas range to the east. Far to the west, the coastal mountains lined the horizon, and turkey vultures and red-tailed hawks wheeled on thermals across the bowl of the sky. In short, the trail is spectacular, and it seems inevitable that it will become a priority destination for hiking and equestrian enthusiasts regionally and beyond. But again, such a remarkable recreational resource begs a couple of questions: How do we preserve it? As its reputation grows, could we end up loving it to death? “This is a fairly long trail in a sensitive environment,” says Kim Batchelder, the natural resources planner for scaposd. “This isn’t a build-it-andforget-it situation. Monitoring impacts on an ongoing basis is an essential part of trail management. We’re committed to ongoing evaluations of everything from erosion to wildlife movement.” I had noticed several small cameras discreetly placed along the trail. Batchelder confirmed they were integral to research on the mountain’s wildlife. “Sonoma Mountain supports both a rich diversity and large numbers of wild animals, including black-tailed

Long time coming: In spring 2005, hikers checked

The new trail on Sonoma Mountain traverses many of the mountain’s diverse habitats, including this shady oak woodland.

to finish this in my working lifetime, but I know we’ll get there eventually.” Part of getting there will be the dedication in Spring 2015, of the milelong east slope Ridge Trail segment, which will adjoin Jack London on the mountain’s southeastern flank and bring the total length of the Ridge Trail on the mountain to over nine miles. It also moves the Ridge Trail one mile closer to connecting Sonoma Mountain with Petaluma Valley, but that’s a future story. Certainly, it will be a remarkable

and it was a pleasure to eat my sandwich and contemplate its meticulous joinery. Some bushtits squabbled in a thicket of laurel behind us. The air was sweet with the tender vegetation of late spring. It tasted green and pure. I was flooded with memories: of Bill Jacobs and other mountain residents. Of the faint soundings of a gong at daybreak, calling acolytes to meditation at Genjo-ji, the Zen monastery up the road. Of black (continued on page 34) phoebes and western

v48

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

elsewhere . . .

Moore Creek Preserve It’s hard to beat Moore Creek Preserve for a quick nature fix within the Santa Cruz city limits. Once slated to become an enclave of townhomes, the preserve’s 246 acres overlook the ocean on the west end of town. An easy ramble of about 2.5 miles on the Prairie View Trail offers a mix of coastal prairie and riparian forest that draws a variety of birds. From the entrance on Highway 1, the dirt trail gently climbs through coastal grassland toward a stand of trees on the ridge. A short side loop, aptly named Coast Vista, offers panoramic views of Monterey Bay. The path follows a fence line toward the Vernal Ridge Trail, another short forested loop where you’ll see—or hear—brown creepers, band-tailed pigeons, chestnut-backed chickadees, and purple finches. Wildflowers—and poison oak—find enough moisture under the tree canopy to make a living here. Heading back toward the coast, the Terrace Loop Trail swings through more grassland where sparrows, swallows, and meadowlarks flit over the cows at pasture. Kestrels and other raptors favor hunting the well-grazed area. Rejoining the Prairie Creek Trail, you can either take a hard left on Moore Creek Trail and exit on Meder Street or continue down to return to Highway 1. g e t t i n g t h e r e : One entrance is on the north side of Hwy 1, across from Shaffer Road. The other is at the end of Meder St. No parking on site. No dogs or bicycles allowed. No amenities. For trail maps, contact the Parks and Recreation Department at (831) 420-5270. [Elizabeth Devitt]

san francisco

east bay

Batteries to Bluffs Trail/Presidio Before you even begin your descent past hauntingly weathered historic gun batteries and into a sea of blue-jade serpentinite and bright green thickets, the Presidio’s Batteries to Bluffs Trail impresses. Entering from Lincoln Street, in spring and summer you’ll be greeted with purple bush lupine, San Francisco wallflower, and buckwheat. From the parking lot at the Golden Gate Overlook you can follow the paved path to the north to take in stunningly close views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands, a perfect start to a hike full of human-made and natural beauty. Continuing back south past Battery Godfrey, the wide dirt trail snakes through a thin forest of Monterey cypress and pine. A sign at the top of the wood steps marks the start of the Batteries to Bluffs Trail. As you descend, the trail shows off fantastic views from Point Bonita south to Lands End and dramatic bluffs edging the sea. Poison oak and invasive ivy blanket the understory in parts, but many patches of native plants—such as coyote bush, sage, and sticky monkeyflower— have been restored. 2 Even on an overcast San Francisco day this place is magical, with the ocean stretching to the horizon, pelicans flying in formation overhead, and ships slowly gliding under the bridge. g e t t i n g t h e r e : From Lincoln Drive in the Presidio, just under the toll plaza, turn right into the parking lot for the Golden Gate Overlook, or continue to the side of the road and park on Lincoln near Kobe. No amenities; dogs must be on leash. [Rachel Diaz-Bastin]

Become a Member or donate today.

Dan Hill

Rachel Diaz-Bastin

south bay

Heather Grimes

UC Berkeley Botanical Garden This is the place to go if you love the diversity of plant life as you explore natural places—or if, while on the trail, you lament an inability to tell huckleberry from salal. Visiting the garden in the offseason (August to February), you miss the best display of wildflowers, but also the crowds. And if you are familiar with local plants, shrubs and trees, you’ll find many an old acquaintance, looking right at home in the California Native area, with little signs providing common and Latin names and telling where the plants were collected. Of the fine native plant collections in three local botanical gardens, uc’s is the largest. Plants here are grouped by geographic affinities, and the beds feel natural, since each embodies an ecosystem. But you also can travel botanically from here to Australia to the Mediterranean or Asia or South America. Every part of the garden attracts birds and wildlife, especially where it provides an oasis from our long drought: We were delighted to see black phoebes hawking insects over a small marshy pond in the five-acre Redwood Grove, where healthy ferns and redwood sorrel grow 1 on the shaded hillside. g e t t i n g t h e r e : UC Berkeley shuttles are available on weekdays from Downtown Berkeley bart. The garden is 1.5 miles east of the UC Berkeley Stadium on Centennial Drive. Entrance fee is $10, parking $1 per hour. [Ann Sieck]

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Redwoods

The other San Francisco giants

The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District is a champion of nature. We offer 26 preserves, over 225 miles of trails, and everything from towering redwood groves to rolling grasslands to stunning panoramic views. All free, all the time. Discover your own adventure today.

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d i s c o v e r m a n y m o r e t r a i l s at b ay n at u r e . o r g /t r a i l f i n d e r 16

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

by lexi pandell

ecause this story is about parks, and parks are, in part, about the people who visit them and treasure them, this story begins with our society, the way it is changing, and the direction it is going in. » Start 26 years in the future: the Bay Area in 2040, a reasonable target for the retirement party of a current earlycareer park supervisor. What do you plan for? Silicon Valley churning out brain-implant devices and 3d-printed clothes; a foodie landscape of engineered nutritional drinks; a solarpowered transit utopia? Or trends easier to predict: 2.1 million additional residents facing environmental challenges like rising sea level and threats to shoreline infrastructure, increasingly dense urban areas, and intensifying development in the suburbs? That’s the challenge for the modern generation of East Bay Regional Park District staffers, such as Francis Mendoza, Sergio Huerta, Akin Lee, Jose Cabrera, Kate Collins, and Ashley Elliott. Their employer, one of the largest landowners

b ay n at u r e

Future

october–december 2014

r e s o u rc e s o f t h e e ast bay r e g i o n a l pa r ks resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). The series is sponsored by EBRPD, which manages 65 parks, reserves, and trails covering more than 100,000 acres in Alameda and Contra Costa counties (ebparks.org). This year the district is celebrating its 80th anniversary.

in the Bay Area and recreation destination for millions of Bay Area residents each year, sits at the nexus of societal and environmental change. It acquires and manages land next to cities like Oakland, Fremont, and Richmond and in suburbs like Clayton and Sunol. It restores and manages parks along the shores of San Francisco Bay, where sea-level rise looms. It needs to convey the value of parks to a more diverse and more tech-savvy audience than ever before. It has to engage citizens who hold the future of park funding and land protection in their hands. That engagement falls not just to the park’s current leadership, but to those who are today working in the field and will be the leadership when 2040 rolls around.

oday, though, Francis Mendoza is

thinking about the past. Mendoza, 38, an ebrpd interpretive naturalist, is at Mission Peak Regional Preserve in Fremont, leading a group of four women and one sixth-grade boy on a twilight hike up the 2,517-foot peak. From the lookout point where they’re taking a break you can see “where the South Bay meets the East Bay,” Mendoza says: Coyote Hills Regional Park, the Dumbarton Bridge, the salt ponds and the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Oakland skyline peeking out from the fog. “I like looking at the expanse of the Bay and thinking about what it looked like in the olden days,” he says. A Fremont native working primarily at Coyote Hills, Mendoza draws on a background as a social worker for troubled youth and combines it with a love of nature, making him an ideal interpreter of cultural and technological trends for a district celebrating its 80th year. The ebrpd has become known for fostering long-term employees, but the baby boomers who were hired during the

This story is part of a series exploring significant natural habitats and cultural

Lexi Pandell (2)

Meet the

a new generation Rising at East Bay Regional parks

(above left) East Bay Parks interpretive naturalist Francis Mendoza looks to the future from the top of Mission Peak in Fremont. (above) East Bay Parks supervising naturalist Philip Coffin embraces his two young recreation leaders Akin Lee (left) and Jose Cabrera (right), at Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline in Oakland.

district’s major expansion years of the 1970s are retiring. Robert Doyle, the ebrpd general manager and a product of that generation of hires himself, says about 75 percent of those at the senior management level have retired in the last five years. “As much as there’s huge change going on here with a vast amount of knowledge going out the door,” he says, “I think the new energy, new ideas, and diversity slowly coming into the district is very exciting.” The parks remain full of traditional users: nature lovers, joggers, horseback riders, and dog walkers. But now they’re joined by those documenting their finds with naturalist apps and meeting up for events through social media, as well by those Mendoza calls “the selfie groups.” At the top of Mission Peak, the selfie groups are out in full force. They do victory october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

nce upon a time, going into nature

Scott Braley, scottbraley.com

meant leaving gadgets at home, and it’s still that way in some of the open spaces. Up in the hills at Tilden Regional Park, cell reception can be so poor that using a smartphone isn’t an option. That’s just fine by park supervisor Sergio Huerta. “It’s not that we’re opposed to technology,” he says. “Just that, being off the grid, we enjoy the fact that we’re not linked in. When you come to the park, it’s time to turn off devices and just experience the natural features of the park.” Huerta came on with the park district as a temporary employee at Tilden in 1990 and “immediately fell in love with the East Bay hills,” he says. He was formally hired in 1991 and went from the roads and trails crew to becoming a supervisor, spending time all over the district, from Tilden to Point Pinole to the campgrounds at Anthony Chabot to the East Contra Costa trails, while also serving on the district’s firefighting team.

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2014

Inside a reconstructed traditional Ohlone dwelling, naturalist Francis Mendoza talks

Two years ago, Huerta was brought back to Tilden. “Back to where I want to be,” he says. Tilden is a haven for those who want to detox from the wired world: Even gps is unreliable there. “We definitely get great feedback from people who come here and say it’s a refuge for them,” Huerta says. “It’s a spiritual place, a place where people have so many fond memories, and being entrusted to take care of it is really an honor.” But those tech refuges are becoming increasingly rare, as Mission Peak and many other locations demonstrate. “The reality is, more than likely, soon everyone will have their smartphone,” says Anne Kassebaum, ebrpd’s chief of interpretive and recreation services. “So the question becomes, how can we use that as a complement to what’s going on outdoors?” The ebrpd has naturalists and staff from public affairs, recreation, planning, and public safety generating posts for their various social media accounts. Visitors can scan qr codes on info panels at Lake Chabot in the Oakland hills and along an interpretive walk at Crab Cove in Alameda. The district supports a number of web and mobile apps, too, including ones to help people find activities at different parks and information about trail safety. There’s an app for an annual Trails Challenge that helps users track hikes they’ve completed, and a Trailsafe app that provides safety tips, phone numbers, and a way for users to “check in” with friends and family. Mendoza is one of the district’s most active employees online, snapping photos of wildlife and program attendees for his personal accounts and for the district. The district has more than 8,600 Twitter followers, 841 Instagram followers, and 29,000 photos from 1,400 followers in its “ebrpd Official Fans” Flickr group. Mendoza’s personal account on his social media platform of choice, Instagram, has more than 400 followers. (He’s @roving_ranger.) Social media has enticed new visitors into the parks. But increased use means increased wear: fences and rocks tagged with Instagram handles, “bootleg” trails, trash, graffiti, and noise pollution. It’s great to see so many people in the parks, Mendoza says, especially young people, but there’s a downside. “We want them to love the parks, but not love them to death,” he says. Mission Peak, which has seen exponential increases in park visitors (it’s been tagged on Instagram 83,000 times and counting) over the past several years, is one such example, and the district has started outreach efforts and ramped up enforcement of the existing nighttime curfew to try and minimize damage to the park’s resources and preserve its natural beauty. With rosy cheeks and a youthful grin, Mendoza has the approachable look of a camp counselor, but he can certainly get serious when it comes to protecting open spaces. When two girls start jogging up a hill off-trail, he calls out, “Down! You can’t go that way.” The girls pause, confused, and he has to call

with students from Union City Hillview Crest Elementary School about the people who once inhabited the area that is now Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont.

out to them once more before they head back down to the path. Certainly, some of the visitors have a contradictory relationship with nature, Mendoza says, but he also sees people use their phones to post beautiful nature photos, consult bird-tracking apps like eBird, and gather info about plant and wildlife species during bioblitzes. He counts the River Otter Ecology Project, with its Facebook page for posting otter sightings, as a huge tech success. “It’s not feasible to have scientists who work with river otters going all over looking for river otters,” he points out. “Instead, we can teach citizen scientists about the apps so they can contribute.” The digital world is omnipresent in the activity on Mission Peak, but fundamentally the visitors are all just people in nature. A woman in the group comments, “Could this be more exemplary of the Bay Area? Young, old, every race and grouping, couples and singles.” A guy with tattoos and a 49ers backpack charges up the hill with speakers blasting hip-hop, Spanish-speaking friends stop to say hello as they pass each other on the trail, preteens hike alongside their parents, and a group of young men in matching white T-shirts make their way slowly up the trail toward the peak.

Scott Braley, scottbraley.com

dances to music playing from their iPhones and huddle together for group photos. Others clamber up the iconic old directional monument to take pictures and videos. One young man walking down the hill talks to a friend with FaceTime. “I come here every day,” he shouts at the screen, the wind carrying his voice away.

it’s expected that Latinos will make up the largest demographic segment, at 35 percent. “If we don’t start engaging kids when they’re young, they’re not going to preserve, protect, and support the district—or the state parks, or the national parks—because they’re just not going to have a relationship with it,” Kassebaum says. The district’s outreach efforts have led to a new generation of park staff, people like Jose Cabrera and Akin Lee, seasonal employees at the Martin Luther King Regional Shoreline, who reflect the increasing diversity of the East Bay. On a clear summer afternoon, Cabrera and Lee are at the ngaging youth goes beyond the Tidewater Boating Center, where they’ve just finished up a full screen. Mendoza, who has worked with youth in day of work as recreation leaders. Lee and Cabrera met three Oakland, Hayward, Hunters Point, and Richmond, years ago through Teen Eco Action Week, a program that gives spends a great deal of time working to break down barriers to youth ages 13 to 17 the chance to participate in restoration visiting the parks. Some young people in those neighborhoods projects and other activities throughout the parks. For both, don’t know about the parks because their parents don’t have that brush with the district turned into interest in the parks the knowledge or time to introduce them, he says. Others and, eventually, a job. fear parks as places where bodies are dumped by gangs, Lee was introduced to the outdoors by his family, where people commit who took him on regular suicide, and where they’ll camping and fishing trips. encounter wild animals. He spent some time in Some of [Lee’s] favorite moments come Many don’t have cars and East Bay parks, but didn’t when he uses nature to help people aren’t familiar with how to know anything about the come out of their shells—teaching them take public transportation district until Teen Eco how to fish, for example, and seeing to the parks (if it’s available Action Week. “Growing their faces light up with their first catch. at all). For Mendoza and up in East Oakland, I’m others, the impact of so blessed to have this job,” educating such kids about he says. “Without it, I’d be all the positive aspects of the parks is twofold: People from all working at kfc or somewhere else breathing in the smell of fast food all day. And if that were the case…I don’t know walks of life can reap the benefits of free outdoor spaces, and where I’d be.” nature can benefit from more engaged visitors. As part of the Teen Eco Action and the Teen Afterschool It is especially important to engage the communities Outdoor Leadership teams, Lee leads canoeing, kayaking, that have been less active in open space issues but make up biking, and fishing programs for day campers, teens, and the increasingly large shares of the population. About 86 percent general public. “Basically I help out with all the programs here,” of people in the Bay Area identified themselves as “white” in he says with a smile. the 1970 census; by 2010, that number was down to 45 percent, Some of his favorite moments come when he uses nature while 23 percent identified as Latino, 21 percent identified as to help people come out of their shells—teaching them how Asian, and 6 percent identified as African-American. By 2040,

Sergio Huerta, a park employee since 1990, is now the supervisor at Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley.

october–december 2014

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to fish, for example, and seeing their faces light up with their first catch. “Usually the first day everyone is quiet,” he says of the Teen Eco Action Weeks he helps lead. “They mumble a word here and there. But by the end of the week everybody is laughing and enjoying each other. Nobody wants to leave.” “He’s Mr. Reliable,” Philip Coffin, his supervisor, chimes in. Lee is currently a student at Merritt College and he’ll be juggling work and classes during the academic year. But Coffin says he thinks Lee will be with the district for a long while. Ask Lee if he sees a future in the ebrpd and he responds quickly, and with a big grin: “I hope so.” Cabrera hails from East Oakland, too, though he lived in Michoacán, Mexico, before moving to the u.s. at age 8. Growing up here, he explored the city and went to parks on his own. Like many immigrant families just trying to get by, his didn’t have the time to spend with him outdoors. “When my dad gets home from work, I don’t think he has the energy to get out to the parks and pitch a tent,” Cabrera says. “My uncles and aunties are in the same position.” But he was encouraged to attend Teen Eco Action Week by a teacher who knew he liked the outdoors, and later he took part in an after-school program at the Tidewater Boating Center. He learned to kayak, tried archery, participated in trash cleanups, did trail maintenance, and learned how to get to the parks using public transportation. “I got hooked,” he says. Though he currently attends Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a computer science major and hopes to get a job related to his major upon graduating, Cabrera returned to the ebrpd to work during the summer. Though his major “doesn’t have a lot to do with nature,” he says, “I do like the idea of working with something park-related in the future.” Cabrera, as part of the ebrpd’s Community Outreach Outdoor Programs team, leads overnight camping trips, among other things: “We’re really there to just make sure [all the campers] have a great time.” Both Cabrera and Lee encounter people who aren’t accustomed to seeing

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october–december 2014

Park by offering to let them touch Tyler, the gopher snake.

rising waters of San Francisco Bay. Hoping to teach visitors about changes going on in their parks and how they can be environmental stewards, she helped lead a training for interpretive staffers on incorporating climate change into their materials and programs. For example, some staff at Ardenwood Historic Farm in Fremont have begun talking to visitors and school kids about the environmental impacts of food production, which fits in seamlessly with the park’s educational programs. “If you’re not familiar with how to talk to people about [climate change], it can seem daunting because it’s controversial,” she says. “But once you learn how to communicate about it, it becomes second nature.” “It’s hard to find good, inspiring, useful information to talk about the impacts of climate change,” Collins says, adding, “[Ashley is] on the cutting edge of this and is helping bring us forward.”

shley Elliott reaches into a glass

Scott Braley, scottbraley.com

Philip Coffin, ebrpd

credit tk

Ashley Elliott draws visitors to her outreach table at Black Diamond Mines Regional

people of color working as recreation leaders in the parks. Cabrera says, “People sometimes turn and look a little too long. Like, ‘When did they get here?’” “I think people get used to seeing a white ranger dressed like Smokey the Bear and they have this idea of what a park staff person looks like,” Coffin says. “But the regional parks belong to everybody and it’s our legacy. The parks belong to Jose and Akin just as much as they belong to me.”

Lexi Pandell

tank. “Let me pull out our friend Tyler,” she says. “Ooh, he’s big,” a mother says, clearly wary. The group of kids in front of her is clamoring for a better view of Tyler, a gopher snake. The mother’s eyes grow enormous as Elliott brings Tyler closer to the crowd. The kids don’t seem to mind, though, and take turns reaching out to touch him. Others peer at a second terrarium, which houses Sydney, a female gopher snake currently taking a dip in her water dish. Elliott and interpretive student aide Courtney Whiteside have set up a table under a blue e-z up in a parking lot at Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve in Antioch, to educate parkgoers about local snakes. They have informational books and brochures, a dried-out skin that Sydney shed recently, fact cards, and laminated photos, including one of a snake extending its jaws around a rabbit, the back legs and fluffy tail dangling from its mouth. “Want to touch my snake?” Whiteside calls out. By the end of the day, Elliott and Whiteside have talked to 107 visitors about snakes, the park, and the district’s programs. Black Diamond employees have been at the forefront of the district’s engagement challenge. “We work with youth more than any other [demographic] group,” says supervising naturalist Kate Collins. “Students and all kinds of youth groups come on field trips for mine tours. We also go to schools and libraries, anywhere there are people who might want to learn more.” (above) Akin Lee and Collins spent 12 years working in national Jose Cabrera prepare parks before coming to the ebrpd, including to lead a group time in Alaska’s Denali National Park as an of teens on their first backpacking interpretive ranger and guide. Growing up trip, starting out at in Southern California, Collins lived with Joaquin Miller Park “an urban canopy,” and today she hopes in the Oakland Hills. primarily to connect people with nature near (left) Supervising where they live. She’s gone on long group naturalist Kate Collins trips in remote areas and “inevitably, when at the entrance to you’re about to turn around, people say, ‘It’s the historic Hazeltoo bad I have to go back to the real world,’ Atlas Mine at Black meaning their homes in urban and suburban Diamond Mines areas. It makes me sad that people feel they Regional Preserve have to be so far from home to have an near Antioch.

uplifting natural experience.” Ashley Elliott grew up in Castro Valley and always loved nature, although as a kid she didn’t spend much time in the nearby East Bay Parks. “We were a beach family,” she says. An environmental studies major at UC Santa Cruz, she earned a master’s in environmental education, then worked at the Aquarium of the Bay and the California Coastal Commission. Her love for the ocean became a gateway to parks, which she became interested in during grad school in Seattle. Elliott has been with the ebrpd as an interpretive naturalist for just over a year, focusing mostly on outreach at Black Diamond. She’s a natural teacher, the kind of person that both kids and adults can easily relate to, and she’s tech savvy, too. She posts “Throwback Thursday” historical photos, along with information about upcoming park programs and images of wildlife, to the ebrpd and Black Diamond Instagram pages. “We don’t have a social media department here at the park—though, I guess at Black Diamond, I’m it,” she says with a laugh. For the upcoming Teen Eco Action Week in Bay Point, she won’t allow the participants to use phones during the day, but she created a hashtag for them to use when posting photos at home after the program. “There is a dichotomy between naturalists who like technology and naturalists who are wary of it,” Elliott says. “All of us understand the importance of it, but we get scared. You hear about kids spending eight hours a day staring at a screen, and we don’t want to encourage that. We want them to be out here. But at the same time, if that’s what they’re paying attention to… For me, it’s a teaching tool. Just like you use a microscope to look closely at something, you can use social media to connect with people.” Recently Elliott has been thinking about how to educate people about climate change. She’s especially concerned about the shoreline parks, which could become inundated by the

hen we first talked, Robert Doyle

asked me a question: “Do you have a crystal ball?” No, I replied, though I wish I did. “I wish you did, too,” he laughed. “I would rent it.” Doyle recognizes it won’t be his district in 2040, and that it’s the new staff members—college kids or recent graduates, parttimers like Doyle was in 1973—who will be the ones to see those changes take hold and guide the district through them. The ebrpd will need more staff to facilitate the growth in visitors, Huerta says, as well as funding to address aging infrastructure and for opening new parks. Elliott expects there will be more houses bordering the parks, which may be tougher on wildlife but will further acquaint and involve people with their neighboring open spaces. Cabrera hopes the parks will help ground our tech-fueled culture, and Lee sees future visitors from a variety of cultures coming together to enjoy what the parks have to offer. Employees such as Mendoza and Huerta are bringing their kids up in the district (“they get dirty and muddy like me,” Mendoza says of his two daughters, ages 8 and 9) and are thinking about how technology might promote better connection with the parks. “I think [the younger generation of staffers] look at things differently,” Doyle says. “They’re more willing to say, ‘What is my mark going to be and what am I going to do? I want to make my own mark.’ I think that’s a good thing.” Lexi Pandell is an Oakland-based writer and researcher whose previous piece for Bay Nature chronicled spartina restoration in Bay Area wetlands. She’s written for Wired, the Atlantic, and the Bold Italic. explore coyote hills regional parks

Sunday, November 2, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Join Bay Nature and East Bay Parks naturalist Francis Mendoza for an afternoon walk through the diverse habitats of Coyote Hills Regional Park at a peak time for migratory birds. Space is limited. Sign up at baynature.org/field

october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

Hunters Take Aim for Conservation

Dennis Anderson, bluewaterpictures.com

view from the blind

by aleta george

here’s nothing like seeing dawn from a duck blind,”

Christopher Reiger, 2013

the noted Bay Area conservationist Huey Johnson told me. “There’s a real rhythm to it.” » Two months later, I was sitting next to him on a wooden bench in a flooded Marysville rice field. As the predawn light emerged, I watched Bear, Johnson’s black Lab, snap his big puppy head in the direction of every sound. The rising sun seemed to cue the 18 tundra swans that flew overhead, followed by a cackling vee of white-fronted geese. Distant gunshots punctured the peace, and suddenly the cattail fluff in the tules looked like bird feathers.

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Johnson talked in hushed tones with his Benelli 12-gauge at the ready. It’s disconcerting to interview someone with a loaded shotgun in his hands, even if that someone was the first western regional director of the Nature Conservancy and the founder of Trust for Public Land, Grand Canyon Trust, and Resource Renewal Institute. When a pintail flew across our field of vision he took a shot and missed. It wasn’t his fault. He was busy telling me how he had saved the Seven Sacred Pools in Maui’s Haleakala National Park. The field trip with Johnson was part of an extended series of lessons about the intimate and indelible connection between hunting and conservation. My first lesson came when I moved to Solano County and learned that the Suisun Marsh, the largest brackish wetland on the West Coast, was saved from development by private duck clubs. Before I moved to a rural-turnedsuburban community that included hunters, I had lived in cities and didn’t (left) Duck decoys on a flooded rice field at dawn in Sutter County set the stage for the day’s hunt. (top) A young hunter uses a low-impact form of transportation to get around Grizzly Island Wildlife Area in Solano County.

october–december 2014

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know anything about hunters beyond the stereotypes I’d seen in The Deer Hunter and Deliverance. Part of the divide between hunters and nonhunters is urban vs. rural (hunting is part of the history and fabric of rural areas), but the division also stems from a belief on the part of some ecologists that killing an animal is inimical to the objective of conservation: the preservation of natural landscapes and the wildlife that inhabit them. But I have learned that many well-known conservationists honed their appreciation for the natural world with a gun in their hands, including John James Audubon, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. After that day in the field with Johnson, I decided to take a closer look Renowned Bay Area conservationist Huey Johnson poses with his dog Bear, after a at the connection between hunters and conservation. First of successful hunt in the Sacramento Valley. all, I was surprised to learn how much money hunters and a boy he built a terrarium for the snakes, lizards, and frogs he fishers contribute to conservation through the purchase of collected; learned the names of trees; and joined the Sierra licenses, stamps, and equipment. In 2014, the U.S. Fish and Club. He read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s Wildlife Service distributed $25.3 million to California through Sand County Almanac. McCormick remembers his first hunt at the Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program. The funds age 5 when he and his father climbed the grassy hill behind were funneled to agencies such as the California Department their house and, with the 12-gauge Ithaca pump rifle that his of Fish and Wildlife (cdfw) and the Coastal Conservancy for operations at places like father had given him, he Grizzly Island Wildlife Area shot at ducks flying from I have learned that many and the Napa-Sonoma Marshes Richardson Bay to San well-known conservationists honed Wildlife Area and restoration Pablo Bay. He remembers their appreciation for the natural that the recoil “hurt like projects like those at Sears world with a gun in their hands. Point, Giacomini Wetlands, hell” and that he missed. and Bair Island. “Hunting is a tradition, “It’s not just the license fees, but their invaluable political not a sport,” said instructor Tom Henderson during my cdfw hunter education class, a course that is required if you support for preserving habitat, especially wetlands for migratory want to get a hunting license. “It’s not about shooting up the waterfowl,” says Richard Walker, professor emeritus of countryside; it’s about spending time with family.” geography at UC Berkeley. “The same applies to fishermen and their associations, who support wild rivers, habitat restoration on rivers, and water flows for fish, as in the Delta. Hunters get Not every hunter grew up in a family that hunted. more bad press among environmentalists than fishermen, but Craig Anderson, the executive director of the environmental they are quite equivalent, though it’s easier to practice catchnonprofit organization LandPaths and Bay Nature’s 2014 and-release with fish than with deer or boar!” Conservation Action award winner, was raised in a household For some hunters the connection goes deeper than without guns. In college he studied environmental science and pockets and further than politics. “People find it hard to restoration ecology and was a “Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-eating understand that being a hunter is not only consistent with vegetarian.” His interest in hunting began years later when being a conservationist, but in some ways is part of being a LandPaths acquired Riddell Preserve above Dry Creek Valley conservationist,” says Steven McCormick, who recently stepped in Sonoma County, a property then overrun with wild pigs. down as president and ceo of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and who before that worked for the Nature Volunteer Dave Barry suggested a low-impact hunting program. Conservancy for 30 years, including seven as president of the Anderson agreed to try it and asked Barry to teach him to hunt. large national environmental group. “I am a conservationist and Anderson was alone when he shot his first pig. “All of a a hunter as one thing, not as two separate interests or passions.” sudden college boy was on a dirt road with a dead pig in a McCormick has walked the fields as conservationist and rainstorm,” says Anderson, who had field-dressed a turkey but hunter for most of his life. He grew up in Tiburon, where as not a pig. “I got under a madrone and with two bars on my 26

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october–december 2014

Courtesy Heather DeQuincy

Aleta George

Yancy Forest-Knowles

Blackberry Googled ‘YouTube field dress pig.’ I pressed pause and play with my pinkie because it was the only finger that wasn’t bloody.” Anderson says hunting gives him entree to social groups that he couldn’t reach as a conservationist; reduces the population of animals that don’t belong here; and provides local, organic, free-range meat for his family. “The final reason I hunt relates back to Leopold,” he says. “Hunting gives me an opportunity to be part of the ecosystem in a way that I’m not when I’m walking along with a clipboard and my agency colleagues and a landowner. It’s an enormous stress reducer to be out before dawn, huddled against a giant redwood tree calling in a turkey that might be dinner; to hear the owls hooting; and to watch the planets burning bright in the sky. We might have a better understanding of what it (top) Habitat restoration is to be humans on land, specialist and hunting to be managers of both instructor Mark Heath in the marsh at Ringstrom Bay. wild land and working landscapes, if we’re more (right) Park employee and part of that ecosystem.” native landscaper Heather DeQuincy with her first buck Another conservation on Catalina Island. hunter who wasn’t raised in a family of hunters is Heather DeQuincy. She grew up on the Peninsula in a milieu where she was expected to attend the debutante ball after she graduated high school. She donned a ball gown and elbow-high gloves and went, even though she had already started to move toward an “earth-based ethic.” In college she majored in environmental studies and sustainable agriculture, worked on organic farms, and became a vegetarian. Today, in addition to her job as a senior office assistant at the East Bay Regional Park District, she runs a landscape business that focuses on native and edible plants. Food, and where it comes from, plays an important role in her life. DeQuincy shot her first deer on Catalina Island in 2009. She later learned that the buck had the widest rack of any animal taken that year. “I felt overwhelmed with excitement and sadness, almost a devastation,” she said. “He was a lovely animal and it was a solemn experience.” I asked DeQuincy if she had trouble pulling the trigger for the first time (I didn’t know if I could). She said she didn’t because she’d done her homework. “I wanted to feel purposedriven enough that my emotions weren’t going to get in the way of my plan to hunt and shoot a deer and bring home meat for my family and friends to eat and sustain ourselves,” she said.

After giving it some thought, I concluded that I already pull the trigger every time I eat meat, even though I pay someone else to do it. So I asked Mark Heath to take me on a duck hunt. Heath is a habitat restoration specialist who leaves his San Francisco home at 4:30 a.m. during duck season to hunt pintail, mallard, and canvasback in the North Bay marshes and is back in the city for work by 9 a.m. Heath leads hunting workshops for the Wildlife Society, California Waterfowl, and Society for Conservation Biology and co-teaches the only hunter education class in the County of San Francisco. He has seen a spike in the popularity of his classes and a change in demographics, with more women, urban professionals, and ethnic diversity than before. I met up with Heath on a January afternoon at Ringstrom Bay on the northern edge of the Napa-Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area northwest of Vallejo. Ringstrom Bay is a freshwater seasonal wetland that is owned and managed by cdfw and was restored by Ducks Unlimited, a member-based national nonprofit that specializes in wetlands conservation from design to construction. Locally, Ducks Unlimited has played a major role in numerous projects, including Sears Point and Eden Landing. Heath showed up in a hatchback with the necessary gear, and we waded through the knee-deep water until we reached a small island of bulrush at the far end of the bay, where we loaded our guns and watched and waited. A few wigeons flew by and landed out of range. At one point I took out my phone to take pictures and it was just then that a small flock of canvasback chose to fly overhead. The sun set early in the winter sky and as we packed up to leave a pintail flew above. My gun was still loaded. “Shoot it,” encouraged Heath. But habit prevailed and instead I admired the duck’s white belly. We crunched through the pickleweed as the lights of San Francisco blinked on and a steady parade of ducks landed in the inky water, as if aware that it was against regulation to shoot after sunset.

The conservation hunters that I interviewed for

this story not only agree with the rules and regulations imposed october–december 2014

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After my unsuccessful duck hunt, Heath suggested

I try turkeys. So a few months later, I went for a hunt with Bradford Smith, professor emeritus of veterinary medicine at UC Davis and author of Large Animal Internal Medicine. We pitched Smith’s pop-up camouflage tent in the middle of a walnut orchard in Winters, where in the dark we could hear turkeys gobbling in the taller trees to the left and right of the orchard. The orchard was next to John Anderson’s seed farm in Yolo County. Anderson is a California native grassland specialist and founder of Hedgerow Farms, a seed producer of California native grasses, forbs, sedges and rushes. Anderson bought his 500-acre farm when he was a primate vet at UC Davis and began to “reconstruct” (his term) the land in the 1970s after being inspired by the prairie grassland restorations he saw at the Aldo Leopold Center in Wisconsin. Though much of Anderson’s land now functions as a seed farm, its borders and riparian edges are alive with wild rose, redbud, blue elderberry, deer grass, and coast live oak, and his property teems with beneficial insects, birds, and wildlife. Anderson has served on the boards of Audubon California, California Native Grasslands Association, and the Yolo County Resource Conservation District. He also hunts rock dove, quail, deer, wild pigs, and turkeys on his property. I had asked Anderson to take me out for a hunt, but he was busy and asked Smith, a hunting buddy, to guide me. Smith and I sat quietly on stools inside the tent with nets over our faces and the mesh windows open. A borrowed overunder shotgun with one shell sat on my lap. Smith explained in a whisper that we would only shoot the males, which were recognizable with their red heads and beards. Once the sun

introduced to California in 1877 as game for the state’s hunters.

species of bears, with the “grizzly everywhere to be met with.” By 1874 the same paper reported that the antelopes were gone, as were the elk that roamed San Francisco, Stockton, and Solano and Yolo Counties. “They have all been destroyed by the vandal pothunters, who regard neither season nor age, nor sex or condition of the game they slaughter,” the Daily Union lamented. An old-time market hunter interviewed by Anthony Arnold for Suisun Marsh History said that he and his partner killed 100 to 200 ducks a day in 1879, and that their take was only limited by transportation. “Refrigerated railroad cars were critical to the expansion of market hunting,” says Stanford historian Richard White, “and played into why the passenger pigeon went extinct and why waterfowl populations plummeted.” In b ay n at u r e

october–december 2014

Dennis Anderson, bluewaterpictures.com

Rick Lewis

(left) Northern pintail, a favorite target of duck hunters. (right) Wild turkeys were first

1910, 500,000 ducks were sold in San Francisco, and four years later that number had dropped to 28,425 birds. “Past practices of mass slaughter, here and elsewhere, were so offensive than a foul odor still hangs over all hunting,” says Walker. “Recreational hunting gets confused with market hunting, so it’s good to make that distinction.” Newspapers and national outdoor sports magazines called for restrictions, and George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest and Stream, became the voice of conservation. Grinnell also founded the Audubon Society in response to the slaughter of millions of herons, egrets, and other birds for the use of their plumage on hats. Grinnell helped to establish the “code of the sportsman,” which advocated for the noncommercial use of all game killed, writes John F. Reiger in American Sportsman and the Origins of Conservation. Sportsmen taxed themselves, pushed for state regulations, and formed game reserves, such as the duck clubs in the Suisun Marsh. The code is alive for some hunters, while for others it is enforced only through regulation.

Barry Grivett, San Jose, CA

upon them, but exceed them. Anderson and DeQuincy have only hunted nonnative species; DeQuincy is adamant that if she were to shoot waterfowl, she would be well-educated about the health of their populations first; and others belong to clubs with self-imposed rules such as only shooting in the morning and taking less than the bag limit. Most of these hypervigilant hunters are trained in biology or ecology and believe in the science and the reasoning behind the limits. Not all hunters do. I talked to one hunter who is frustrated because he can’t feed his family of four by hunting due to the bag limits. Other hunters doubt the science behind the species counts and the resulting limits. The divisiveness cuts both ways, especially in communities with changing demographics such as Point Reyes, where hunters have bagged ducks at the Tomales Bay Ecological Reserve for four generations, and where a contingent of residents is now circulating petitions to stop them. While it may seem logical to assume that scientists or naturalists were the first to advocate hunting regulations in America, it was actually the hunters—or, to put a finer point on it, the “sportsmen”—who did. By the end of the 19th century, sportsmen took care to separate themselves from the market hunters who supplied meat to California’s growing population after the Gold Rush. Hunters and nonhunters alike witnessed the disappearance of large game animals during the second half of the 19th century. In 1856 the Sacramento Daily Union boasted of the limitless opportunities to hunt deer, elk, and antelope and both

came up, the turkeys came down from their roosts. Smith called them with a reed, but they were not lured. We waited, whispered, and didn’t make any fast movements. After two hours we gave up on the orchard and drove to a hedgerow where we watched a flock of turkeys on the other side of the field. Smith tried his reed, but the turkeys continued their leisurely gait. “I think the turkeys are safe for today,” I whispered. “It’s not over yet,” said Smith. We followed them in the truck, stalked them on foot through more hedgerows, and saw that they were headed for Anderson’s guesthouse. We followed and ran into John Anderson, who gave us permission to shoot close to his house. With a woodpile for cover, Smith, who is not a young man but is fit, crawled on his belly to stake a female decoy in the ground six feet beyond the woodpile. He crawled back to where I was crouched, said something in a whisper that I couldn’t hear through my earplugs, and disappeared behind the guesthouse. All was quiet. I was more aware of my surroundings as a hunter than I would have been as a spectator with binoculars. Gobble. A jake turkey, a young male, came out from behind a pine and headed for the decoy. Smith was nowhere to be seen. The bird came closer to the decoy and I clicked my safety off. Wait; was that a male for sure? The beard didn’t look like the one on the decoy. Safety on. Should I shoot the bird without my guide here? Yes, he would want me to shoot this bird. Safety off. I knelt for better stability, but first, safety on.

A father and son pose with their dog at the end of the annual Grizzly Island youth hunt, an event sponsored by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The bird reached the decoy. I was on my knees and had it in my sights. “Shoot it,” I could hear Heath say. Safety off. My gun sight was on the turkey’s head. He looked at me but didn’t move right away. Smith said that jacks were young and tender and delicious when roasted, and I liked the idea of bringing one home for dinner. And yet, I didn’t squeeze the trigger. The turkey sauntered off, as if he knew I wasn’t going to kill him. I lowered my gun, clicked on the safety, and took out my earplugs. “Did you see the turkey?” Smith said as he came around the corner of the guesthouse. “I shooed it towards you.” “I had the shot but didn’t take it,” I said, with a mixture of remorse and relief. On the way home I considered why I hadn’t pulled the trigger. I knew it wasn’t an ethical or moral decision; I had already worked that out. For me it was an emotional decision. I just couldn’t pull the trigger, not on that day. Though I have to admit, I’m more than a little tempted to try again. “Everyone has done something similar,” said Smith when I told him I had mixed feelings about the one that got away. “You had all the excitement, but didn’t have to clean the bird.” Aleta George writes about nature and culture in California. october–december 2014

b ay n at u r e

climate change: Dispatches from the Home Front

down to a beleaguered few, a severe drought such as this year’s has the potential to push the population over the edge.

hung out to dry

The 100-Year Drought

Is this Drought the “New Normal”?

The last three years have seen the least precipitation in a three-year stretch in recorded California history. To make matters worse, this year the deepening drought was coupled with the warmest winter and spring on record, creating a “perfect storm” for the region’s ecosystems—unfortunately, only in the metaphorical sense. And the coho are not alone in their suffering. California has always had unpredictable rainfall, and the salmon, like the plants, animals, and people who also live here, have a history of making it through to the other side. But in this era of climate change, any severe or unusual climate pattern becomes not just a survival challenge but a source of anxiety: What if the drought is not an aberration but the “new normal”? How much of what’s happening in the skies can scientists ascribe to climate change? As the records continue to fall, superlatives are becoming commonplace among climate The Ridge and the Vortex scientists. “We have a concept The drought has set off a flurry developed for disaster planning —the 100-year flood or the 100of research as scientists seize the year drought,” says David Ackerly, opportunity to better understand a biologist at the University of what it says about the changing California, Berkeley. “But now I climate and how the state’s hear people discussing what we’re ecosystems will fare in a climategoing to replace that term with changed future. While scientists when a 100-year drought starts are notoriously reluctant to tie any coming every five years.” single year’s weather to climate California has the highest yearchange, many are willing to say that to-year precipitation variability the degree of warming associated of all the western states. Because with this drought—which rainfall is determined by the limited The drought has hit California nature in a variety of ways: Salmon lingering in exacerbates the impacts of the lack of rainfall—bears all the hallmarks number of storms—on average warm water have developed fungal growths (top), streams like Mill Creek have around five or six—that blow in of climate change. What water dried up (middle), and (bottom) blue oak leaves gathered this year in a Central from the Pacific between late fall has fallen has evaporated quickly, California woodland are tiny compared to the normal-size leaves below. and early spring, a shortfall of just instead of staying in the soil and a couple of those winter storms can set the stage for drought. vegetation; what was supposed to fall as snow fell as rain; and Conversely, an additional storm or two can produce severe what snow did drop melted quickly, leaving waterways that flooding. depend on the Sierra snowmelt parched. California’s flora and fauna have evolved to deal with long It’s one thing to say that climate change is making the periods of dry weather—the coho, for example, can survive in drought worse because of higher temperatures, but something even half a cubic foot per second of stream water if it’s spring else entirely to say that climate change itself is a cause of

Davor Desancic

Courtesy California Sea Grant

Courtesy Sonoma County Water Agency

by alison hawkes

“Dispatches from the Home Front” is a series of articles highlighting groundbreaking work being done by Bay Area institutions, agencies, and nonprofit groups to comprehend, mitigate, and adapt to the impact of climate change on Bay Area ecosystems. The series is a partnership with the Bay Area Ecosystem Climate Change Consortium (baeccc.org). More at baynature.org/climate-change.

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2014

The sun rises over a dried-out pond at Coyote Hills Regional Park in May 2014.

named them “zombie fish.” “It’s not a technical name, but it kind of fits,” Obedzinski says. “Adult salmon migrating upstream do get beat up, but this is extreme.” In February, the season’s first major storm finally arrived, but Obedzinski thinks few of the exhausted fish made it up the high gradients to prime spawning habitat in the upper reaches of Mill Creek. When the rains faltered later in the spring, the mouth of Mill Creek dried up yet again. Many of the juveniles from the previous year’s spawn, who had started their migration downstream toward the ocean, were trapped in small pools, only to disappear a few days later. The only clue to their fate was the heron tracks around the pools. For a species so sensitive to rainfall patterns, the ongoing drought hits hard. It may be that in the past coho were able to survive periodic droughts by sheer force of numbers, but given that other stressors have whittled Northern California coho

Andrew Weitz

he coho salmon of Mill Creek have had an especially rough go of it this year. During last fall’s spawning season, they swam up the main stem of the Russian River, only to find the corridor back to their spawning grounds cut off before they could reach their destination. There had been too little rain to reconnect Mill Creek to the main stem of the river, and the coho spent the better part of two months treading water and waiting, and waiting … and waiting for the rains to come. While they waited, many developed a fungus on their skin, and they became sluggish, recalls Mariska Obedzinski, a fish biologist who monitors the Russian River watershed’s coho population for UC Cooperative Extension and noaa’s California Sea Grant program. One of the field crew leaders

fed, Obedzinski say—but there’s dry and then there’s dry. UC Berkeley biologist Todd Dawson, who along with Ackerly has measured the effects of the drought on various native plant species, says that at one of their research sites near San Luis Obispo on the Central Coast, blue oaks, one of the state’s most widely distributed oak species, are in the worst shape he has ever seen them. “They’ve got these dinky little leaves, not even the size of your pinkie fingernail,” Dawson says. By early June, the leaves were already falling off because of water stress, sending the trees into dormancy during the height of their normal growing season. The trees were trying to hang on in soil with a measured moisture content of between 2 and 5 percent (normally it would be between 12 and 18 percent). “That’s almost dust,” Dawson says. “These trees are quite drought tolerant, but we’re seeing levels of drought response in June in them that we normally see at the very end of the summer-fall period. Who knows what that means. Is the water in the soil going to get so low that mortality results, even in bigger trees?”

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By June 2014, blue oak woodlands in Central California

reduced precipitation. Because if that’s true, then human activity is not just exacerbating an existing pattern, but influencing the pattern itself—and what we’re seeing this year could be an unpleasant dress rehearsal for what’s to come. “It’s going to be warmer in the future so a drought of any intensity is going to be worse,” says Daniel Swain, a Stanford University doctoral candidate who writes about the drought in his blog The California Weather Blog (WeatherWest.com). “Whether they become more frequent [due to climate change] is a question we don’t have an answer to yet.” Swain, an earth scientist who studies extreme weather events in the context of climate change, has made a name for himself by publicizing the peculiarities around the failure of the past year’s rains. Meteorologists attributed it to a high-pressure atmospheric system anchored over the Gulf of Alaska that deflected storm after storm to the north (and eventually directed them to the Midwest and East Coast, which got slammed with

studied by UC Berkeley researcher Todd Dawson had a very low soil moisture content of between 2 and 5 percent, and the trees were losing their leaves in the

Mary Sheft (2)

Andrew Weitz

middle of their normal growing season.

like this one, they’re not particularly stable features in the atmosphere. But this one had a self-reinforcing setup, a positive feedback loop, and at some point it started to maintain itself.” The ridge first appeared in the 2012-2013 winter season, so it’s been around for two winters now. Swain says such a two-year pattern has never appeared in the meteorological record before and has led scientists, including himself, to look for a climate change connection. “What are the physical causes in the ocean or atmosphere that allowed this to happen in the first place?” he asks. Simon Wang, a climatologist at Utah State University, identified a potential answer in a paper published earlier this year in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Atmospheric ridges over the eastern Pacific and accompanying lowNicasio Reservoir in Marin shows the effects of a year of drought in photos taken in March 2013 (left) and January 2014 (right). pressure zones in the eastern United cold, snowy weather by the so-called polar vortex). States, a condition the paper labels a “dipole,” often form over High-pressure ridges like this are a regular pattern in the West Coast one year before an El Niño event because of a California’s winters and are usually responsible for temporary particular pattern of wind and sea-surface temperatures in the lulls in rain around January, Swain says. But this particular one western north Pacific. But Wang and his colleagues found that wouldn’t go away. He dubbed it the “Ridiculously Resilient since the 1970s this El Niño “precursor” has gotten stronger and Ridge”—a name that has stuck. “There is no precedent for more persistent and tracks the rise in greenhouse gas emissions. something that was this persistent in the winter,” Swain says. “Fifty years ago either the precursors of El Niño were “These ridges, when they get this big and have an amplitude different or the impact was not as much as today,” Wang says. dry and drier

This series of maps by David Simeral of the Western Regional Climate Center shows drought extending progressively across the state over the last three years, with darker red representing more severe drought. As of September 2014, nearly 60 percent of the state and most of the Bay Area was in “exceptional” drought, the highest level.

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June 21, 2011

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December 6, 2011

March 6, 2012

June 5, 2012

September 4, 2012

“We think that greenhouse gases are acting upon the atmospheric conditions that create these forcings, or in effect strengthen this more than before.” The dipole will only strengthen, the paper concludes, “which implies that the periodic and inevitable droughts California will experience will exhibit more severity.” Wang says his paper suggests a future that oscillates between climate extremes: a stretch of dry years, a burst of rainfall if the El Niño is strong, then back to dry. While that might sound like the solution to drought is thereby built into the problem, it isn’t, at least not for plants and animals that depend on reliable water. Rain that falls following prolonged drought races off the parched ground, causing flash flooding and leaving vegetation little time to soak up the slow and steady water diet it needs. Vegetation that does grow back becomes fuel for massive wildfires in drought years. Les Rowntree, a retired professor of environmental studies and geography at San Jose State University, says that water managers tend to look at the drought from a natural resource perspective—how many inches fell in a year. Rowntree and his colleagues worry about ecological drought, in which the rains come but not at the time that the flora and fauna need it. “Drought has many different flavors and many different faces to it and many different effects,” Rowntree says.

Looking to the Past for Climate Predictions

Even if it’s hard to say how the wet years and the dry years will balance out, scientists are pretty sure that even wet years are going to feel a whole lot drier because of the effects

December 4, 2012

March 5, 2013

June 4, 2013

September 3, 2013

of warming. “Warmer and more extreme” happens to also be one of the stories of California’s past climate, so while the warming then wasn’t human-caused, some scientists look back in time to gain a glimpse of tomorrow. Lynn Ingram, a UC Berkeley geographer, chronicled the West’s climatic extremes in her book The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow (2013). She points out that evidence from paleoclimate research suggests that the 20th century was a relatively wet period during the past thousand years, and notwithstanding the influence of climate change, the state could quite naturally be shifting into a dry spell of unknown duration and magnitude. “We may be heading into an on-average dry period and superimposed on that is more drying related to more co2 input,” she says. “We’re just making it worse; we’re exacerbating the system.” Droughts and floods, though devastating in many ways for humans with fixed infrastructure, are not always or altogether a bad thing for natural habitats. Wildfires, the inevitable result of droughts, can open up new habitat for species and cycle nutrients into the soil if the fires are not too hot; floodwaters spread nutrients and other organic material around as well. Warmer weather may exacerbate the drought for many species, but some natives have actually fared better in a milder winter. For instance, the resident population of wrentits at Point Reyes National Seashore has exploded this year, according to biologist Geoff Geupel, director of emerging programs at Point Blue Conservation Science. Wrentits are small grayish-brown songbirds that thrive in Pacific Coast chaparral and coastal scrub. Geupel says on one study plot, 95 percent of the adults surveyed survived, as did a similar percentage of the previous year’s hatchlings. That’s resulted in the highest density of wrentits ever observed in the 35-year-long research program. The milder winter, in turns out, has been advantageous to (continued on next page) this species, which can apparently still forage

December 3, 2013

March 4, 2014

June 3, 2014

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(ON THE TRAIL continued from page 15)

David Loeb

bluebirds perched on the grape stakes of the vineyard. Of dozing in front of a woodstove charged with blazing eucalyptus while a freezing rain pounded the tin roof of my cabin.

enough food. However, Geupel says it’s unclear what the bird’s fate would be under longerterm drought. Fire would nip away at encroaching Douglas fir, which threatens to turn the wrentit’s scrubland into forest at Point Reyes, but too much fire could leave only grasslands. Todd Dawson wonders if Northern California could end up losing much of its forests and begin to look a lot more like a Southern California landscape with chaparral and grasslands predominating. “Is that the future? That is a question we don’t have an answer for yet, but these kinds of years might give us an insight into where the vegetation is going,” Dawson says.

(DROUGHT continued from page 33)

First Person

to be certain, so keeping a lot of diversity in the landscape as we go into periods of uncertainty is the best we can do.” The coho, too, are not necessarily doomed. Mariska Obedzinski says water temperatures in the spring-fed tributaries are still cold and to the coho’s liking, and efforts are already under way to facilitate the fishes’ primal upstream journey. The federal noaa Restoration Center and the nonprofit Trout Unlimited are seeking to improve fish passage across the last significant barrier on the six-milelong creek, and the Sonoma Resource Conservation District is starting a rainwater catchment program to help streamside property owners cut down on water withdrawals from the creek and

Open Space Pioneer David Hansen Interview by Eric Simons Twelve-year-old Dave Hansen sailed through the Golden Gate for the first time in 1956, as a young immigrant from New Zealand. The Bay Area stuck with him: After living in Kansas and Seattle and serving a three-year Peace Corps stint in Brazil, he returned in the late 1960s to pursue a landscape architecture degree at UC Berkeley. He wrote his thesis on the redesign of the Oakland Zoo and planned to become a zoo designer … but then one day his landlady saw an advertisement for this new kind of job, as an “open space and park planner” in Marin. Hansen applied, got the job, became Marin’s first full-time open space planner, and never looked back. Hansen’s influence on Bay Area open space now is hard to overstate: He’s variously worked as a planner, land-acquisition manager, and trail designer for the Marin County Open Space District, land manager at the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, and the first general manager of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District. He also has served or serves on the boards of the Bay Area Open Space Council, Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, Friends of the Petaluma River, Marin Open Space Trust, and LandPaths. Among his North Bay accomplishments are public open space parks and preserves like Olompali, China Camp, Mount Burdell, Lucas Valley, and Roy’s Redwoods—where hikers can now hike the David Hansen Trail.

Ridge Trail steward John Aranson on the north slope of Sonoma Mountain.

I realized I would never live on the mountain again, and the thought was deeply melancholic, like remembering a great amour, or the passage of youth. But very soon, this trail will be open to the public. I can come back whenever I want. I can visit. And maybe that will be enough. ✤

es: What was it like coming over to be an open

space planner in Marin in the 1970s? dh: My boss Pierre Joske was my inspiration. He said, “David, I want you to spend at least 50 percent of your time outdoors looking at the landscape.” So I did! I’d run out there and look at every piece of property: ridge and upland greenbelts, streams and creeks, bayfront lowlands. The county was

sonoma mountain ridge trail adventure

Sun., Nov. 23, 10 am – 2:30 pm Join Bay Nature and the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council as we explore Sonoma Mountain on the newly-opened north slope Ridge Trail with guides John Aranson and David Hansen. Space is limited. Sign up at baynature.org/field.

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Cracked earth is all that’s left of parts of the lake bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino in this photo from June 2014.

David Ackerly says he thinks the work of conservation in preserving biodiversity is the key to resource management in an age of fast-paced change. After all, more diverse ecosystems increase the chances that at least some species will thrive under future climates. We may not have the same species in the future, but we can pursue approaches to promote as many native species as possible. The Bay Area, with its enormous diversity of habitat types, may be better positioned than other areas to offer refuge from a changing climate, he says. “It’s one of the ways biodiversity is so important,” Ackerly says. “Our models are never going

october–december 2014

on pumping from their shallow wells. “There are a lot of options to enhance the habitat so the fish can survive,” she says, “but it’s not going to be easy.” Meanwhile, meteorologists, water supply managers, fishery biologists, firefighters, and just about everyone else in the state maintains an anxious watch over the host of mixed signals from the ocean and the jet stream, hoping to finally see a steady parade of moisture-laden storms blow in from the Pacific.

Courtesy David Hansen

✤ Glen Martin, a frequent contributor to Bay Nature, is a freelance environmental reporter based in Santa Rosa. His latest book, Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife, was published by the University of California Press (2012).

mPinlacPerez

A formal dedication of the Sonoma Mountain Ridge Trail is being planned for late fall, 2014. Check ridgetrail.org for updates and news about other new and existing trail segments.

Alison Hawkes, is the online editor for Bay Nature.

still very middle-class. But there was a strong ethic [aiming] to protect the hills around the communities, and to create community separators. People really wanted to protect what they could see outside their back door. es: You’ve got the entire geography of the Bay Area on your resume. Were there common challenges for conservation across these regions? dh: Each place was unique. There was

a uniqueness to how the open space districts were formed, starting with the East Bay back in the 1930s. Down on the Peninsula, there was the feeling that we’ve lost just about everything in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight; it’s all paved over. What have we got left to protect? It was the hills and the bayfront. In Marin it was protecting what’s around and between the cities, and the quality of life. Always focused on the community’s quality of life in each special natural setting. In Sonoma County, it was vast. That’s why it’s an agricultural preservation and open space district. dh: The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District has just passed a bond measure that includes shifting focus from acquisition to stewardship. How has that balance fluctuated over your years in open space work? es: I think in the early days of all these districts, the focus was always primarily on acquisition. There was huge demand down at Midpen for the public to get out on their property. As there was in Sonoma County. Despite the marching orders I had up in Sonoma to preserve open space mainly through conservation easements but not add trails or fee lands for public access, there was tremendous pressure to allow the public on lands they had paid to protect. There’s never enough open space anywhere. When you get overuse, like on Mount Burdell, the only thing we can say is, “You gotta buy more land! There’s gotta be more accessible land!” It’s the key. But at a point you run out of it. es: What kind of stories do you remember from the early days? dh: The classic is Cascade Canyon in 1974-5. That was the first purchase I was really involved in. One of the women on our commission at the time, named Karin Urquhart, as a kid she’d been raised in Fairfax, and had always gone up onto this property, the Elliott Property. [Floyd Elliott, then-mayor of Fairfax] stopped her one day and said, “This is (continued on page 36) private property; you David Hansen gives a thumbs-up at a marker for the trail named after him in Roy’s Redwoods Open Space Preserve.

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There’s so much still to be done; that’s the big thing. I know people look at places like the summit of Bald Hill, and other hills around East Marin, and say, “That’s all open space.” Well it’s not! Up in Sonoma, there was always an informal relationship between Novato and Petaluma about keeping that corridor between them open, either as agriculture or open space. There’s no formal arrangement and the pressure’s on that all the time now, particularly with the highway widening that’s going on. It’s a constant. At the Bay Area Open Space Council we say, “We’ve protected a million acres.” Well, we’ve got a million to go! es: What do you remember about the early days of the Ridge Trail Council? dh: I worked on the first dedication down at Midpeninsula. We had a double dedication that day, at Purisima Creek and one of the San Mateo County parks, working with Brian O’Neill, superintendent at the Golden

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Courtesy David Hansen

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David Hansen at his desk working for the Marin County Open Space District in 1975.

I talked to Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead drummer, about when he lived there with other members of the Dead, and he used to ride his horse around everywhere with his dogs and ride the freeway frontage all the way to San Rafael. But he said, “We never got stoned out there. The only time I got high was when we were playing cards up in one of the valleys. The king started coming off the card.” I said, “Oh yeah, Mickey, OK.”Anyway, I’ve got a million stories about each property down here. And up in Sonoma County, too. es: Do you ever see people out in the parks or open spaces and think, I helped make it happen!? dh: Like every old guy, you like to reminisce about the days when. I think back on these stories when the place was overrun with off-road vehicles. You don’t imagine that in Marin. But in those days it was. It’s a nice feeling, because I get to use all these parks now. I have a backpacking group and we do a monthly local day hike as well. We did Rush Creek last month, and were at Olompali last week. These are my buddies; some of them I’ve hiked with for 40 years; we love going back to these places. It’s such a rewarding feeling. I envision my grandchildren hiking these properties in the decades to come. But you can’t really dwell on it.

David Hansen at the mouth of Estero Americano, on the Sonoma coast.

Time to get off your perch?

Marin, on San Pedro Ridge. Which was steep. Just four of us building it in a day, that was all we did. I was going ahead—I was the alignment planner—whacking stakes in the ground. We had two high school kids behind us, clearing the duff; Ron Paolini, the ranger, was in the back, cutting tread. Very rough tread. I hit a wasp nest, wasps went over my head and hit these kids, and of course everybody’s sweaty. That trail is still there! But they’ve adjusted it now so it’s got a little better grade. The nicest one, I think, is the one up the hill out of Lucas Valley from Big Rock. That trail is spectacular. I did the preliminary design and [Ridge Trail steward] John Aranson changed my alignment a little bit, because he’s the real trail builder. I love that trail. People think it’s going to be tough to go up to 2,000 feet at the top of Big Rock Ridge. But if you take that trail it’s easy! Just a steady climb at 7 to 9 percent, which is an ideal grade. So Big Rock is my favorite. But I should say the David Hansen Trail!

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we knew we couldn’t manage all of those properties. Ring Mountain had these endangered species, so the Nature Conservancy was the ideal entity. But they eventually turned it back over to Marin County Open Space, after we got a bigger land management staff. Olompali has become a state historic area, but field staff and I had to manage that property for two years after we jointly acquired it with State Parks. es: Describe the China Camp acquisition and cleanup. dh: China Camp was a mess. It had been the first site of the Renaissance Faire. It was full of 10,000 tires, and there was a ghastly murder: A Terra Linda girl had killed her parents and burned them out there. A lot of bad things, like drugs, happening out there. But off-road vehicles was the biggest issue. In those days, controlling off-road vehicles was a tough, tough thing for the county. I designed a whole system that’s still in use today—all these entry gates and fences you see around the Marin open spaces, that was my original design. The plaques, the signs, the stepovers. So we pushed the state [on China Camp] and they eventually picked it up. At Olompali, we had to kick out some stable operators who were running horses over everything. We had Dutch elm disease we had to deal with. The adobe was wide-open and deteriorating rapidly. So we fenced off the garden, fixed the Dutch elm.

Gate National Recreation Area, who was also chair of the Ridge Trail group. We did a huge flurry of dedications early on, mostly on public lands that were already protected. But now the tougher part has come, where you’re negotiating for whatever you can get, on private lands. Or looking for new alignments, like up to Mount Saint Helena. It’s a bit like when you’re riding a bike and you shift into a higher gear where it’s harder to push, you can feel the push, you’re trying to get every little piece you can. es: What’s the best trail you’ve ever designed? dh: I’ve actually built a lot of trail -the first trail I ever did was out here in

Courtesy David Hansen

shouldn’t be here.” And she, a young girl, said, “Well, you don’t own this property. This land should belong to everybody.” And in fact it ended up that way. It was a great purchase, because the funding was assisted by an area family whose daughter had just been killed, so the family called me to see if they could help out the district in some way and dedicate something to their daughter. So they gave money for the purchase, and I got usgs to name the ridge Pam’s Blue Ridge. And I designed a plaque that’s still up on Blue Ridge. es: What other trails or acquisitions do you remember putting together? dh: One success was working with George Lucas on the lands he was buying out west of Lucas Valley. I worked hard with them on a pedestrian and biking tunnel under Lucas Valley Road that connects the Big Rock Trail to the Loma Alta Fire Road, and on the 11 miles of trail he had to dedicate [as mitigation] and 800 acres of open space as well. We got a lot of trail and open space out of that development. I was very involved with Roy’s Redwoods near San Geronimo. That’s why they were nice enough to name a trail there after me. Roy’s Redwoods was owned by a family that had a bunch of cattle and horses in there tearing up the landscape. We were trying to get the area around the big trees, some of which we think are 2,000 years old. Some of them were taller—I actually had the county surveyor go out and measure—than the Muir Woods trees. So I remember calling Jean Berensmeier—she’s kind of the duchess of the San Geronimo Valley, she’s fought for open space in the valley—and saying, “Jean, I’m sorry to say, we weren’t able to do what we planned in terms of protecting the redwoods. We wanted to get the crucial 30 acres. But we’ve actually got an additional 300 acres to add to it.” She was just ecstatic. We also worked a lot down in Tiburon. At the time Ring Mountain was owned by the Nature Conservancy. We’d pushed them to own it for the same reason we pushed the state to pick up China Camp and Olompali, because (continued from page 37)

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Ron Horii

renamed California clapper rail), which makes its home in the reserve next door. The 300-acre ecological reserve includes a segment of historic marsh that has never been diked and hence is prime rail habitat. Marin Audubon says restoration efforts would give the birds an additional refuge from potential predators and a space to hunt for food during high tide in the land that slopes slightly above the marsh by the bayshore. “[Ridgway’s rails] are especially vulnerable in the high tide, particularly in the winter when it floods,” Jarocki says. Salzman says efforts to protect the parcel date back all the way to the 1950s, when locals rallied against the first of several attempts to purchase the space for a 66,000-square-foot office development. The development was blocked, but increased unsanctioned use, including trampling of vegetation by off-leash dogs and off-trail cyclists, has since degraded the habitat and spread the seeds of invasive grasses. The group’s plans for restoration include cleaning up debris from former homeless encampments and rerouting trails so that visitors can still come and enjoy the ecological reserve without causing disturbance to the species that make their home there. Reducing those impacts will let the area heal itself, Salzman says, allowing natural processes like endangered species reproductions and seed dispersal to take over. “[The best way] for the marsh to be restored is for it to naturally restore itself,” she adds. Following restoration, mas plans to turn the site over to the California

Who’s Coming Back to Mount Diablo?

One April afternoon, some friends are relaxing in an oak-shrouded campground in Mount Diablo State Park. While most munch on guacamole and chips, one squishes together peanut butter and dry oatmeal in a plastic bag. That’s the first clue that these are no ordinary campers—they are mostly scientists following the aftermath of Mount Diablo’s 2013 Morgan Fire. The gooey pb&o is bait for small mammals, which they hope to lure into shoe-boxsize aluminum traps. Backpacks bulging, the team strides off for a three-hour evening hike, just as they did the night before. They’ll place 40 baited traps in burned grassland, chaparral, woodland, and streamside areas. Early tomorrow morning, before the sun gets too hot, they’ll return to rescue any captives. With thickly gloved hands, they’ll note the (continued on page 40)

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The state water bond Proposition One may well be the big-ticket item on the November ballot this year, but local conservation issues are also appearing before Bay Area voters. In Santa Clara County, a measure to fund $7.9 million annually in open space improvements will be put to the test. Measure Q would double the amount of dedicated public funding for the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority by raising the $12 annual parcel tax to $24 for 15 years. Among the priority projects identified in a series of public meetings: regional trail connections between parks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a new open space preserve in the Diablo Range foothills, interpretive learning centers in several

would allow the turf and lighting plans to move forward. [Alison Hawkes]

th e

be how the birds are making up for lack of interconnectivity of their habitat,” Michelson says. But that adaptability may come at a cost. Studies show that fitting into human-dominated habitats leads to higher stress levels in kestrels.

The Marin Audubon Society (mas) has announced its intention to purchase and restore a tidal wetland on the 5.2-acre Madera Bay Park, next to the Corte Madera Ecological Reserve in eastern Marin. Surrounded on three sides by a mix of restored and historic tidal marsh, the parcel runs along the bayshore at the end of Industrial Way in Corte Madera and will cost a little more than $1 million to purchase. Marin Audubon has until January 31, 2015, to raise the money to complete the deal. The land is currently owned by local developer Frank Greene and eah Housing and is zoned for office space. In a late-summer walkthrough on the parcel, mas President Barbara Salzman pointed out shorebirds that zigzagged in formation overhead, and nearer to the tidal marsh next door, she leaned over to examine a thin line of water that ran through a deep slash in the earth. “Look at that channel; isn’t that a wonderful channel?” she asked. mas hopes that restoration will mean more such channels in a parcel that is now mostly dirt covered with nonnative plants such as Harding grass and fennel, along with the occasional block of leftover concrete. The area receives a fair amount of traffic from locals seeking a quiet spot overlooking the Bay to exercise. Martha Jarocki, a member of mas, comes out here to walk two or three times a week. But Jarocki and Salzman say that currently, too many people are walking off the trail through the marsh, disturbing its fragile ecosystem. They expressed particular concern for the endangered Ridgway’s rail (the recently

Open Space Measures on Local Ballots

parks, preservation of agricultural lands, and restoration of salt ponds into tidal marsh in the South Bay baylands. To the east, voters in Dublin will decide the fate of Doolan Canyon, a biological hot spot with mostly open grasslands north of i-580. The developer-backed Measure t would effectively nullify the urban growth boundary that the city adopted in June for its eastern edge and annex the 1,650acre area into city limits for potential development. In Union City, Measure kk would open 63 acres of protected land to a senior home development in the Hillside area. And San Francisco voters will decide how “natural” to leave the western end of Golden Gate Park, where environmental groups have battled the city for years over plans to install stadium lighting and artificial grass on playing fields to allow for year-round and nighttime use. Measure h would keep the natural grass and ban the lighting, while the competing Measure i

Push to Expand Corte Madera Marsh

Department of Fish and Wildlife, which also manages the reserve. To find out more or to support the purchase effort, go to marinbaylands. com/cmer.html. [Becca Andrews]

ear

Under more stress, more females abandon their nests earlier, resulting in young that don’t survive. “We can’t yet say if the Santa Cruz kestrel population is in trouble,” says Scott. “There could be lots of other breeding pairs that we aren’t surveying. That kind of analysis requires longterm data—maybe five or ten years’ worth.” [Elizabeth Devitt]

study sites scattered throughout Santa Cruz County, based on historical sightings of birds in the area, using information gathered by the Santa Cruz Bird Club and the virtual database of the Monterey Bird Board. In January and February 2014 the researchers surveyed their selected spots for the presence of kestrels. By April, they had four breeding pairs in their sights. Then, in June and July, they returned to the same locations to follow the nesting and fledging process. “We’ve been chasing birds all over the county,” Michelson says. They’ve followed a pair nesting in an abandoned building near Schwan Lake, another pair at the Moore Creek Preserve on the western end of town, and another along the San Lorenzo River. The kestrels need about one square mile to have enough hunting territory to support a nest full of hatchlings. As they followed the birds, the biologists noticed these kestrels adapting their foraging activity to the habitat at their disposal. The Moore Creek Preserve birds nested in an ideal location, with acres of open grassland close by. But at the San Lorenzo site, close to the downtown area, the male kestrel has had to head off in several different directions each day to find insects, rodents, or the occasional snake to feed his mate. “Making huge flights to get prey may (continued from page 7)

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monitor regeneration after a fire,” says McElroy. “It fulfills a passion for inquiry.” With Mount Diablo State Park’s blessing, team members have set up four 20-by-20-meter plots within the 3,000-acre fire zone and plan to survey them regularly. They received a grant from Save Mount Diablo to purchase remote cameras for monitoring large-mammal activity. They’ve also set up cell-phone camera stations on the mountain to enable visitors to contribute to the visual record of the mountain’s recovery. Among the team’s questions: How will the fire affect the 11 plant species that grow on Mount Diablo and almost nowhere else? How will it change the list of animals that live here? Will sensitive species with limited ranges (such as Alameda whipsnakes, Bay Area blond tarantulas, and dusky-footed woodrats) be hurt by the fire? Will resilient species

and seep monkey flower are thriving alongside glistening mounds of poison oak. McElroy wonders whether they should send the team up the poison-oak cluttered drainage. “They’re biologists,” says researcher Sue Townsend. “They can handle it.” At 7 a.m. Sunday, the team heads out to check the traps. Following their progress is like watching a well-pitched baseball game. Not much is happening, but excitement could break out at any moment. “It would be really cool to catch something like a Berkeley kangaroo rat,” researcher Greg Pfau says, though he knows the species hasn’t been seen on the mountain since the 1950s. Western harvest mice and deer mice are more realistic possibilities. On the way to the chaparral plot, researchers sneak by a lethargic rattlesnake. The traps, however, are all empty. In the woodland plot, one of the traps has sprung shut. But alas, no captive. In the streamside and grassland plots, same story: no kangaroo rats, no mice, no nothing. “Sorry!” McElroy says. The team’s hidden cameras have recorded larger mammals using these plots, including black-tailed deer, wild pigs, coyotes, gray foxes, raccoons, and skunks. Before drawing conclusions about small mammals, the team will spend a lot more time in the field, setting out traps in different seasons and for four instead of two nights in a row, to allow fauna to get used to having the boxes around. They also plan to trap in unburned areas, and to compare the results there to those in burned plots. “That’s what science is like,” Larsen says, sighing, as she and other researchers head home. It was an inconclusive couple of days, but they’ll be back. They have lots of questions to answer.

Joan Hamilton

ear

creatures’ species, weight, age, and sex—and send them on their way. This effort, part of the Morgan Fire Research Project, was born inside urs, a Fortune 500 engineering and construction firm. One day over lunch in the company’s Oakland office, three young biologists were chatting about last September’s epic fire. “Wouldn’t it be fun to work together outside of work,” botanist Anna Larsen recalls thinking, “to see the restart of the cycle?” Larsen and biologists Mandi McElroy and Tammy Lim are well versed in local plants, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. After recruiting friends from smaller consulting firms and a group called Nerds for Nature, they had bird and insect expertise at their disposal. What they didn’t have was funding. So they decided to monitor Mount Diablo’s recovery as volunteers, on days off, which would make getting things done more difficult. But that didn’t douse their enthusiasm. “It’s a rare opportunity to be able to (continued from page 39)

bounce back quickly or take their time? Will some species wink out completely? On this weekend in April, though, the questions are simpler. Where should we put the traps? Which habitats are likely to have the most activity? Hopes are high in the once-blackened grassland plot. The grass is already calf-high, a good place for small mammals to hide. The chaparral is greening up too, but there’s a lot of bare ground between skeletal shrubs—not as safe for a rodent scurrying from predators. At the streamside plot, mugwort

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Pole Mountain—SAVED! June 2014

This article is part of a monthly series of photos and articles on the transformation of Mount Diablo following the 2013 Morgan Fire, funded by special donations from Bay Nature readers. You can find stories, as well as event listings, iNaturalist sightings, and magazine features, at baynature.org/diablo. [Joan Hamilton]

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su pport f or bay natur e The Bay Nature Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes exploration and stewardship of the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Through tax-deductible contributions, the Friends of Bay Nature invest in the growth and development of our capacity to serve as an independent voice for local nature and conservation. The Friends of Bay Nature listed below are individuals whose donations we received between June 3 and August 28, 2014. Donors of $500 or more become members of the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to special events and outings. Friends of Bay Nature $1,000+ Anonymous (1) Sarah Dorrance & David Kardatzke Mia Monroe Gertrude Allen

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ends and the days get shorter these darkplumaged geese fly along the coastline to the Aleutian Island chain. Almost the entire Pacific population (some 130,000 birds) gathers in Alaska’s Izembek Lagoon before taking off on an epic open ocean crossing, eventually making landfall in British Columbia or California. The majority continue south to Baja California, but quite a few of them hang out in San Francisco, Tomales, and Drakes bays, where they feed on eelgrass and other marine plants. Their winter journey could be well over 4,000 miles! Finally, we have the easy-to-find long-billed dowitcher (pictured below). These shorebirds nest in Arctic Russia, and tagging studies show that most of the Siberian ones winter in North America. After a trip of up to 3,500 miles, they show up in very large flocks in San Francisco and Tomales bays, and their constant probing in the mudflats for invertebrates has earned them the moniker “sewing machine birds.” The tips of their bills are full of nerve endings that help them find food buried in the mud. So as you can see, we have some fantastic contenders for long-distance travel champion. And what a great life— long days of summer in the far North followed by relatively temperate snowfree winters in San Francisco Bay. And all it takes is a self-propelled journey of at least 3,000 miles … twice a year!

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q: Which of our overwintering bird species travels the farthest to spend the season with us in the Bay Area?—Patrick, San Francisco a: My first thought was “that’s easy— snow geese.” One hundred thousand of these beautiful birds migrate more than 3,000 miles from Wrangel Island in northern Siberia to the continental United States. However, it’s rare to see them in the Bay Area; the closest they get is the Central Valley. So I posed this question to some of my hard-core birding friends, which engendered quite a discussion. But there were three long-distance travelers that everyone agreed on. Lapland longspurs are midsize sparrows that breed in northern Canada, many on remote Melville Island. One of the most abundant breeding songbirds in the Arctic, they spend summers feeding almost exclusively on arthropods and in winter they subsist on seeds. Flocks of over four million have been counted migrating south to spend the winter in the middle part of North America. Yet a handful of them make it to the Bay Area, a trip of 2,500–3,000 miles. They are difficult to find, but they are regular wintering visitors. The best place to look for them is plowed fields on the Point Reyes peninsula. The brant is a small goose that nests way up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska and in the Russian Arctic. When the breeding season

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es y uidado en un mundo atrapados e, nuestra os a otros dor, usted manda que sted es un ed vive en u relación veedor de familiar, diferente. años y proveedor ar, pero sobre el ador de emas que endientes extraño. UHW, ha ya durante ención de gidos por a Loretta campaña ndado de dico y los dores. En un grupo sido los uecido sus plan para

de marcar un hasta aquí, de nuevo, rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, siempre avanzando acercándonos,

“CUHW está rompiendo todos los mitos al enfocarse en los miembros.” conforme continuamos construyendo el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” Estamos reventando la burbuja cuando nuestro Comité de Constitución sugiere un cambio que combine el espacio de nuestro Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El

a nuestro personal político, y asegure los servicios de los individuos que viven y respiran la política durante este tiempo critico en la historia del cuidado del hogar a nivel Federal y Estatal. CUHW, al salir de la burbuja, emerge con nuevas ideas ahora que estamos en período electoral este agosto. Nuestras elecciones estatales incluirán dos semanas en las que puede votar en línea o llamando a un número sin costo, usando su número de celular o un teléfono fijo. Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa de Voluntariado de Incentivos para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros miembros en los negocios al mostrar sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cual representa un ganar-ganar para todos. Hemos establecido oficinas en más de 9 de nuestros condados. La mayoría de las oficinas tienen bancos de llamadas y capacidad de difusión de web y cuentan con grandes pantallas. Contamos con otra acción que es también otra burbuja que se rompe, y estas son las actualizaciones por email y mensajes de texto que alertan a los miembros de los últimos acontecimientos de IHSS. Yo personalmente quiero salirme de la burbuja en la que se considera la reforma de IHSS en California y sugiero que empecemos con

de que se nos haya dañado o se haya abusado de nosotros mentalmente. •Merecemos el derecho de que se nos pague bajo el esquema del Seguro Social por una vida de trabajo por un miembro de la familia. •Merecemos vacaciones pagadas, merecemos el derecho de que se nos trate con compasión y respeto por las

dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios médicos y oportunidades de educación, al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo. ¡No solamente lo merecemos,