Bay Nature July-September 2013, Year of the Bay issue by Bay Nature Institute

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JU LY–SE P TE M B E R 20 1 3

A N E X P LO 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 C O B AY A R E A

spe c i a l se c ti on

Baylands Reborn The Bay’s Miniature Marvels Fun on the Bay

The Future of Fog Beautiful Butano Poison Oak’s Rash Success

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WITHOUT THE BAY, WEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;RE JUST LA

As the largest regional organization working to protect and restore San Francisco Bay, Save The Bay thanks you for all you to do keep our Bay healthy for people and wildlife. Find out what you can do to Save The Bay every day at savesfbay.org

c o n t e n t s

july–september 2013

Features

Judy Kramer

special section

David Liittschwager

L E AV E S O F TH R EE The Ra s h S u cc e ss of Po i s o n Oa k

BAY LA NDS RE BORN Restor ation and Renewal o n San Fr ancis co Bay

MINIATURE MARVE L S One Cubic Foot of San Fr a ncis co Bay

There’s one native plant most people love to hate: poison oak, purveyor of rashes and general trouble. Turns out, though, that it’s also a bounty for wildlife and awfully nice to look at in the fall. So either way, it pays to keep an eye out for it when you’re on the trail. by Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan

Half a century after activists stopped the filling of San Francisco Bay, the region is in the midst of an ambitious effort to restore some 100,000 acres of former Bay wetlands, the largest such undertaking on the West Coast. What have we learned so far about the art and science of restoration? And what challenges lie ahead, given the dual threats of rising seas and shrinking budgets? by Ariel Rubissow Okamoto

Photographer David Liittschwager traveled the world seeking amazing biodiversity in one-cubic-foot samples. And then he came home and found some of the most remarkable-looking creatures of all among the plankton of San Francisco Bay. photography by David Liittschwager text by August Kleinzahler

Departments 4 Bay View

On the Trail

Letter from the Publisher 5 Letters from our Readers

6 Ear to the Ground News from the conservation community and the natural world

8 Conservation in Action Counting fish after they’ve hatched by Daniel McGlynn

10 Signs of the Season The wrentit’s high fidelity in the scrub by Claire Peaslee

12 Into the Forest Finding Your Way to Butano Come explore Butano’s shady forests and innovative efforts to protect the endangered marbled murrelets that nest here. by Marilyn Fahey 16 Elsewhere . . . Redwood Ridges, Hood Mountain, Brisbane’s Frogs

48 Climate Change: Dispatches from the Home Front Demystifying Mist: Fog and the Future of Redwoods by Joan Hamilton

52 First Person Huey Johnson takes the long road. interview by David Kupfer

59 Ask the Naturalist Is that a he-lizard or a she-lizard? by Michael Ellis

60 Fun on the Bay Winners of our Year of the Bay photo contest

62 Naturalist’s Notebook A sailor’s nature guide by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.BayNature.org

bay v iew letter from the publisher

his summer’s confluence of the Americas Cup races and the presumptive opening of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge (if they can figure out what to do about those pesky bolts) has some people calling 2013 the Year of the Bay. At Bay Nature we say that every day is Earth Day, so we’d also say that every year is the Year of the Bay. But just as folks tend to take the Earth for granted — so a “special” day is probably a good idea — here we tend to take our Bay for granted too. We even complain about having to cross over or under it to get to work or a ballgame, especially if we’re late. But even as I’m griping about the traffic on the Bay Bridge heading into the city, the panoramic view across the Bay to the Golden Gate captures my attention and reminds me why I’m here. So maybe a Year of the Bay is a good idea after all. There’s something special about a large metropolitan area centered around a shared body of water — a massive open space in the midst of seven million people. Many other cities have been built next to great bodies of water — Seattle and Puget Sound, New York and its harbor, Chicago and Lake Michigan. But I can’t think of any other U.S. city that has a large body of water like San Francisco Bay as its core geographic feature. That is, after all, why the region is called the Bay Area and why we named this magazine Bay Nature. It’s not that we cover only San Francisco Bay; it’s that the region is defined by this feature.

contributors Journalist and photographer Alessandra Bergamin (p. 54), originally from Australia, is a Bay Nature intern. Learn more at alessandrabergamin.com. Santa Rosa–based Michael Ellis (p. 59) leads nature trips with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com). Jessica Hahn-Taylor (p. 16) lives in San Francisco, where she writes the blog Hill Babies (hillbabiessf.blogspot.com), about hiking with a child in the Bay Area. Alison Hawkes (p. 54) is Bay Nature Institute’s online editor. Filmmaker and photographer Judy Irving (cover) is the

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Diane Poslosky

by david loeb

But cover it we certainly have and do, because one of the best antidotes for taking the Bay for granted is to learn more about it. In our January 2001 inaugural issue we introduced the topic of wetlands restoration — the ambitious effort to bring back some of the lost 150,000 acres of shoreline marshes that once nurtured so much life in and on the Bay. In this issue we head back to the shoreline to see how we’ve been doing at nursing our taken-for-granted Bay back to health. Turns out this job is going to be harder — and even more critical — than we thought: Restored wetlands might be our best defense against the rising seas brought on by climate change. Of course, the very best antidote for taking the Bay for granted is to get out onto it. I did just that the other day, paddling out to Angel Island from Richardson Bay. I’ve made this trip many times, but each time is different because the Bay itself keeps changing with every shift and combination of wind and current and tide. The tide charts told us we could ride a gentle flood tide over to the island, but when we got out on the Bay, the water itself told us “ebb,” and we had to put our backs into it to keep from getting pushed back out toward the Gate. Now it looks like we’re all going to have to “put our backs into it” to make our bayshore more resilient to the flood tides of climate change. The more we can learn and accomplish now, the better we’ll be a few decades down the road. As the old kayaker says, better to go with the tide than against it, and better to ride the wave than get drowned by it. Let’s not take the tides or our Bay for granted.

creator of the feature documentaries Dark Circle, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and Pelican Dreams (in progress). pelicanmedia.org Daniel McGlynn (p. 8) is an independent journalist who covers science and the environment. Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 62) is the author of The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada and the new Laws Guide to Drawing Birds. Info: johnmuirlaws.com. Claire Peaslee (p. 10) is a naturalist, writer, editor, graphic designer, and improvisational theater artist. She produces

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

Volume 13, Issue 3 july–september 2013 Publisher David Loeb Editorial Director Dan Rademacher Development Director Judith Katz Online Editor Alison Hawkes Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Advertising Director Ellen Weis Design & Production David Bullen Contributing Editor Sue Rosenthal Copy Editors Cynthia Rubin, Marianne Dresser Board of Directors Larry Orman (President), Malcolm Margolin (Emeritus), Carol Baird, Christopher Dann, Catherine Fox, Tracy Grubbs, Bruce Hartsough, David Loeb, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott Volunteers/Interns Alessandra Bergamin, Paul Epstein, Megan Gould, Becky Jaffe, Jackson Karlenzig, Kristen Marz, Jackson Mauze, Asbery Rainey, Ann Sieck, Constance Taylor, Christina Vallianos 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 P.O. Box 92408, Long Beach, CA 90809 Advertising: (510)528-8550 x202/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. © 2013 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

Front cover: The tiny salt marsh harvest mouse is one of several wetland species whose endangered status has spurred efforts to restore thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay wetlands. This mouse was trapped by a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologist to be measured and then released back into its pickleweed habitat. [Judy Irving © Pelican Media] Point Blue Conservation Science’s Point Blue Quarterly, appears on the public radio program West Coast Live with Sedge Thomson, and cultivates nature-laughter. More at clairepeaslee.net. Ann Sieck (p. 16) wants to make sure people with disabilities, including those who use wheelchairs, can find parks and trails they can enjoy. See her reviews at baynature.org/asiecker. Constance Taylor (p. 55) is the founder of Wild Oakland, a group dedicated to providing free environmental education to busy urbanites. More at wildoakland.org.

le tter s To the Editor: Your edited version of my letter about Taricha newts implied that the whopping amounts of ttx in adult newts is transferred to them from eggs and larvae. In fact, the toxin is diluted through the developmental stages, and by the time the larvae metamorphose into juveniles there is very little left. The ttx in adult newts is somehow manufactured anew. How that is done is a mystery, but American scientists believe the newts themselves produce it, rather than bacteria in the newts.

Kate Marianchild, Ukiah

To the Editor: Contrary to the letter from Mr. Miller (October–December 2012) the Point Reyes Wilderness Act contains no reference to the oyster farm, nor to the year 2012. There is, in fact, no conflict between the Wilderness Act and the oyster farm, as made clear by Sonoma State professor Dr. Laura Watt, in her extensive review of this matter, summarized at bit.ly/14jy9g2. Professor Watt points out, for example, that in the 1974 Final eis for Proposed Wilderness (page 56), the National Park Service (nps) stated, “This is the only oyster farm in the seashore. Control of the lease from the California Department of Fish and Game, with presumed renewal indefinitely, is within the rights reserved by the State on these submerged lands . . . and there is no foreseeable termination of this condition.” In response, the Sierra Club wrote a letter of comment, including this statement (page a-51): “The draft Environmental Impact Statement implies that none of the Drakes Estero can be classified as wilderness because of Johnson Oyster Farm. This is misleading. The company’s buildings and the access road must be excluded but the estero need not be. The water area can be put under the Wilderness Act even while the oyster

culture is continued — it will be a prior existing, nonconforming use.” Contrary to Mr. Miller’s claim, there has been no effort on the part of the oyster company to “change the rules.” The current oyster farm permit is explicitly renewable, as are all other Seashore Pastoral Zone permits. The view that eliminating shellfish leases in Drakes Estero is preferable to continued shellfish mariculture denies the present-day reality of ecologically benign food production from the estero in favor of titular wilderness designation of a landscape traversed by some 2.5 million automobile-borne visitors each year and increasingly subject to the global ravages of rising temperatures, rising sea level, and ocean acidification. At a time of unprecedented and accelerating global ecological collapse, arguments in favor of ending nearly a century of clearly sustainable shellfish aquaculture within Drakes Estero are rooted in the dangerous illusion that the ecology of the estero is separate from that of the rapidly degrading global marine environment. The Drakes Bay Oyster Farm is part of the solution to the global ecological crisis we now face, not part of the problem. Neither law, nor environmental protection, nor nps policy requires closure of the oyster farm. If they did, this issue would have been settled long ago.

Jeff Creque, Petaluma

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b ay n at u r e

www.sempervirens.org

by aleta george

e ar to t he g ro u nd 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 Nature Rebooted at Oakland Museum

On May 31, the Oakland Museum of California opened the doors to a completely overhauled natural sciences gallery, the world’s largest museum exhibit exclusively focused on California’s habitats and wildlife. “What I think people will find most interesting about the gallery is just how incredibly diverse it is,” says Douglas Long, the museum’s senior curator of natural sciences. “California ranks among the world’s top 10 biodiversity hot spots.” This is the first complete remodel of the gallery since the museum opened in 1968. Where the old gallery covered a somewhat idealized coast-alpine transect across the state, the new exhibits focus

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on seven actual places — from the deep ocean of the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary to the urban wilds of Oakland to the heights of Mount Shasta and Yosemite. “I don’t want this gallery to be the end point,” says Long. “We want people to see this and say, ‘I want to go see that animal.’ Having the gallery be about California, it’s much easier to just take a bus ride up into the redwoods or down to the mudflats at low tide.” The gallery is not just about wildlife and native plants. People are also a major part of the story, for better and worse. “The history of California is the history of exploitation of our natural resources,” says Long. “From gold to lumber, it’s about exploitation. But also we want to b ay n at u r e

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show that we can be part of the solution. People can plant native plants, they can get involved in citizen science programs, they can do restoration, they can help elect the right politicians.” To help make that case, the gallery includes 10 short videos about a local grassroots group, the Friends of Sausal Creek. The nonprofit’s executive director, Kimra McAfee, hopes this will inspire museum visitors to get involved in habitat restoration. “We wanted to show what we do and also make it translatable,” she says. “You don’t have to go to Sausal Creek to do these amazing things. You live in a watershed and you can do it there.” To fans of the original gallery, Long says, “The vast majority of their old favorites will be there, in a new context.” One of his own favorites is an offbeat diorama called “Leftovers,” showing deep-ocean hagfish and other scavengers. “It’s a world where there’s very little food and this shows an incident where a dead fish falls and all these organisms start moving in.” That display, now in the gallery’s Cordell Bank section, has been turned into a deep-sea exploration simulator: The case itself is hidden, and visitors use controls and a video display to explore it, just like scientists using remotecontrol submersibles. The gallery will also integrate art and history elements from the museum’s California art and history collections. “We have paintings of Oakland when it was an oak woodland,” says Long, “and we have these amazing paintings of Yosemite that show how little it has changed. We have art as both a record of habitat change and as an expression of people’s love of the environment.” Read an interview with Alicia Goode, who did the taxidermy for the gallery, at bit.ly/OMCAtax. [Dan Rademacher]

(continued on page 54)

If an echinoderm loses an arm, it grows a new one.

California.

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photo :

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Gallery of Natural Sciences Now Open!

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by daniel mcglynn

co n s er vat ion in a c t i o n

Daniel McGlynn

Counting Fish After They’ve Hatched

Gordon Becker handling an adult steelhead.

Gordon Becker, a senior scientist with the Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration (cemar), is setting up a field lab in the shallows of a bank on Pescadero Creek, about a mile and a half upstream from where it spills into the Pacific. The creek here, just on the outskirts of the town of Pescadero, is shaded by alders full of chattering songbirds. A net spans the 15-foot width of the creek. The rig is called a fyke net, Becker explains, and it funnels whatever is coming downstream into a single collection point, a live trap. This morning something big is splashing in the trap. Becker is leading a regional monitoring program to see how many young steelhead, called smolts, are swimming downstream. Besides Pescadero Creek, Becker and cemar have traps set up on Corte Madera Creek in Marin, the Napa River, and Sonoma Creek, which drain to San Francisco Bay. “This is the first comprehensive approach to studying steelhead outmigration in Bay Area and coastal San Mateo creeks,” Becker says. cemar’s smolt study will help gauge the effectiveness of the substantial regional b ay n at u r e

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watershed restoration efforts undertaken in these watersheds. “What we are trying to figure out,” Becker says, “is if the smolts leaving the watershed are big enough to come back.” Smolting usually begins when anadromous fish (which spawn in freshwater but mature in the ocean) are two years old. This brief period of their life cycle marks the transition from a predominantly freshwater species to a saltwater species. The optimal size for a young fish heading out to sea for the first time is about 10 inches. Smaller than that and survival rates at sea plummet. In the creek, Becker is cleaning out the live trap. First he removes a cover, an improvised tarp designed to keep out a resident heron he suspects is raiding the trap. Then he reaches in the cold water and pulls out a glimmering adult steelhead almost the length of his arm. Becker guides it gently downstream, then pulls out another adult steelhead. After that there are only small fish left. “Steelhead have two life history strategies,” Becker says. “They can either

become resident freshwater fish (rainbow trout) or they can go to the ocean. We have information about where juveniles can be found and we know the distribution of steelhead in Bay Area streams, but with out-migration studies, we can figure out which streams are producing oceangoing fish. Only the most productive habitats are producing smolts.” Becker’s goal is to document the presence of young migrating steelhead and the size and frequency of fish leaving the creek: “This information is important for assessing the health of the steelhead population and it will give us a better understanding of how to protect critical habit.” The project, in its first year, is funded by the Bay Area Integrated Regional Water Management Plan. Becker and the cemar biologists working at the other sites have learned a lot about trapping in their first smolting season, over about 100 days this spring. They hope to continue the study in other watersheds next season and eventually create a smolt data baseline. The study would likely not have been possible without volunteers who help check traps and measure fish at each site. “Each location has its own network of volunteers,” Becker says, “which cuts the cost of the study by about half.” The volunteers were recruited by conservation organizations and agencies in each area, including the Sonoma Ecology Center, the Napa County Resource Conservation District, and the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District. During this trap check on Pescadero Creek, Becker collects and measures two dozen young steelhead (after sending the two adults and native prickly sculpin on their way downstream). Most of the young fish will spend months feeding and growing in the estuary downstream before leaving for the ocean. Knowing where they’re doing that successfully is key to the species’ longterm survival: “In an ideal world you find out which habitats are producing these fish, you analyze the threats to those habitats, and you take action to reduce those threats,” Becker says. “Then you can expand from there and start thinking about recovering the species.”

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a month, the adults show their offspring how to find food (arachnids, berries) and avoid danger. By their first fall or spring, the chicks must absorb a life lesson: “Get territory! Find mate!” A wrentit needs both to survive from year to year. A solitary bird, or one with no Twigs! Lots and lots of twigs! The denser and more tangly, the better. Also preferred: a canopy landholding — just not seen. Or not for long. of evergreen foliage not far off the ground to shield the inner twiggy zone from the probing The Bay Area is home to most of the eyes of an overhead hawk or nearby scrub-jay. Criss-crossing this humble jungle, narrow world’s wrentit research. The first major study of this species, in the Berkeley hills thoroughfares, open to the small and nimble. Adorn this understory with spider silk, add in the 1930s, probed the lives of 21 pairs a few berries, and voilá: a perfect setting for wrentit life. of birds over four years. More recently, Small and relatively common, the an ongoing project in the Point Reyes wrentit has a distinctive song: one note wrentit is highly unusual among our National Seashore has followed hunrepeated with a cadence like that of a local birds. It does not migrate or dreds of wrentits since 1979, without bouncing ping-pong ball — poot! poot! poot! poo-too-too-too-toot. Unlike most songeven disperse far from its birthplace; pause. Biologists from Point Blue birds, both genders sing. The male’s song it remains in one territory for life and Conservation Science (formerly prbo) find all the nests in a study area, band grows more rapid and may trill at the is likely North America’s most sedentary each chick with a unique combination of end; the female’s just winds down to a bird. How the wrentit came to be here is colored anklets, and a biogeographic mysrecord the ensuing tery: It has no close wealth of wrentit lore. relatives, anywhere, Just some of the and is the sole repreintimate revelations: sentative of its avian Four generations of family (the babblers) relatives holding adjain the New World. Its cent territories. Birds entire range is a narthat lose their spouses row swath of North mating again immediAmerica between the ately. Pairs or families Columbia River and cuddling up to roost northern Baja Calion cold nights (fluffy fornia, from the coast balls-o’-wrentit). inland to the Sierra/ Mates preening one Cascade foothills. another’s wingpits The wrentit inhabor taking showers by its thick chaparral or shaking wet branches coastal scrub, as well You’re a lot more likely to hear than see a wrentit as you walk through its for each other. Nests as some forested areas with dense underfavorite habitats, chaparral and coastal scrub. You can hear one online at built of twigs and story, and thrives in the presence of poibit.ly/BNwrentit. lichen (occasionally son oak. It hops and flits about on short, stop. Listen for a pair singing back and toilet paper, too) on a matrix of spider rounded wings, often cocking its long forth, sometimes interweaving their poots silk. Up to five nest attempts in a season tail upward and softly calling to its matein true duet. Because they hold their if eggs are lost to scrub-jays or garter for-life. Wrentits always occur in twos, home territory all year, wrentits sing snakes. Wrentits living up to 12 years and you can listen for them chatting year-round — also unusual among song(song sparrows live eight years at most). as they roam their particular patch of birds. This spring, field biologists at Point earth. If offended by your presence (or In summer, whole families of wrentits Reyes found the first wrentit egg on that of a nest predator, such as a western flutter-hop through their thicket-homes April 1, one of only a handful so early scrub-jay), this pipsqueak ventures forth together. For their first few days out of in 34 years of study. Just think: If that to frighten you away with a rapid rat-athe nest, the young — three or four to a yolk survived to hatch and fledge, another tat-tat scold note. Watch then for its fiercebrood — are flightless, their plumage still new wrentit may now be singing the looking eye with a pale iris; beware the partly pin-feathery. They follow their praises of its very own home among wrentit glare! parents from twig to twig on foot. For the twigs. More commonly heard than seen, the

s ign s o f t h e se aso n

Wrentit: High Fidelity in the Scrub

Bruce Finnocchio, dreamcatcherimages.net

by claire peaslee

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on the trail

(left) The park is bisected by Little Butano Creek, which eventually flows to the ocean at Pescadero Marsh. (right) In the spring, the Coastside State Parks Association leads walks to

see calypso orchids emerging from the duff on the forest floor.

fi nd ing yo u r way to buta n o

INTO THE FOREST

the forest floor as we walked up the canyon on our way toward the shady Ben Ries campground. I visited the park in March with Portia Halbert, an environmental scientist with the California State Parks. She was here to help a rare seabird that you can see here, if you’re determined and lucky. Birders are drawn to Butano by this unusual inhabitant — a little brown creature called the marbled murrelet. Unfortunately, marbled murrelet numbers are declining rapidly across their range — an estimated 70 percent during the past 25 years. While loss of oldgrowth redwoods has been a major problem, the birds are also threatened by the increased number of jays, crows, and other corvids. Those predators, who eat murrelet eggs, are often attracted here by food crumbs we humans leave behind. Marbled murrelets (Brachyramphus marmoratus) are members of the auk family, and while other auks nest along cliffs and bluffs, the murrelets nest high up in old-growth forests of redwood and Douglas fir, ranging from Alaska to Central California. At Butano, near the southern end of their range, marbled murrelets feed offshore and then follow the course of Little Butano Creek and Gazos Creek, passing over the park’s coastal grassland and alder woodlands, above its oak woodlands and vernal wetland, and into the remaining stands of old-growth redwood and Douglas fir.

by Marilyn Fahey Judging from the quiet all around us in a grove of old-growth redwoods, we could have been in one of the large forest parks in Humboldt County. But we weren’t. Instead, it was another peaceful day in Butano State Park, about three

miles inland from Highway 1, on the western slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains just north of the more famous forests of Big Basin and the elephant seals of Año Nuevo. The spring day was cool, and bright white and purple trillium enlivened Rich MacIntosh, USFWS

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Stephen Henry/Henry Images

distinctive call at bit.ly/murreletCall.

tr ail

A marbled murrelet at rest off the coast. Listen to the bird’s

th e

(left) Kaitlin Burroughs, who works for the park’s Marbled Murrelet Project, places a decoy egg in a tree. (below) The eggs, secured by Velcro and zip ties, are painted chicken eggs injected with a foul-tasting substance that researchers hope will teach jays and crows to avoid real murrelet eggs.

Sally Rae Kimmel

One strategy researchers are trying here to stop the bird’s decline is placing fake marbled murrelet eggs throughout the park. The official name of this practice is “conditioned taste aversion,” but Halbert puts it more plainly: “We’re trying to use the intelligence of jays to [make the birds] averse to eating marbled murrelet eggs.” The imitation murrelet eggs — small chicken eggs painted a pale bluish green, with dark brown speckles — are injected with a 10 percent solution of carbachol, a noxious substance that sickens the predators and, if all goes as planned, convinces them to stay away from real marbled murrelet eggs. In March and April, Halbert and her four helpers hiked the park, ladder in tow, and deployed about 800 eggs. Murrelets nest high in old-growth trees, but luckily the fake eggs can be placed fairly low in second- and third-growth. Less luckily, all those eggs have to be replaced after three weeks, once they’ve started to rot. That’s a lot of work focused on such a little bird (full grown, marbled murrelets are only about the size of a guinea pig, eight to 12 inches long). The marbled murrelet is listed as endangered by the state and threatened

notebook for the egg’s coordinates, took a compass reading, and then attempted to locate it. Halbert and her team tried their best to hide the eggs so that people wouldn’t disturb them and consequently create a gap in the data, which Halbert uses to determine who is eating or disturbing the eggs. Corvids and rodents are the usual suspects, with Steller’s jays being the number-one culprit. One way she can determine the predator is by an egg’s “bite mark.” A jay will most often leave a little hole with jagged edges, while a rodent will leave a hole with smooth edges. And then there are the much stronger crows and ravens, which obliterate the eggshells and leave no hole at all. The egg project wrapped up in June when all the fake eggs were removed, along with the flagging that marked the locations, just in time for the real eggs to be hatched. The marbled murrelet’s nesting season runs from March through September; female marbled murrelets lay only one egg per season — which makes it all the more critical to save as many eggs as possible. Marbled murrelets choose old growth over newer growth because the birds don’t build a full nest, so they need wider branches on which to make a soft mat to lay their eggs and raise their chicks on. The “nest” is more like a depression or

under federal law, and Halbert admits it’s possible that someday the bird will no longer be seen at Butano. Still, she’s hopeful the egg project will protect at least some of the marbled murrelet eggs laid this year. She points to a 2011 Humboldt State University pilot egg project at Redwood National Park (by Pia Gabriel and Richard Golightly) that reduced corvid predation on fake murrelet eggs by up to 72 percent. I accompanied Halbert in March, about the time the marbled murrelet nesting season had begun and a few weeks after Halbert and her team had deployed the first 300 or so eggs. We started off at the picnic ground near the park entrance, hiked along the road beside the clear and gurgling Little Butano Creek, and headed up to the Ben Ries campground, whose 39 campsites are a quieter alternative to the often-crowded campgrounds at Big Basin. Winter had ended, and although we were still able to spot bright orange chanterelle mushrooms in the duff of the oak woodlands, we didn’t see any California newts or rough-skinned newts, which come out on rainy winter days, marching across trails and roads to breed in the park’s creeks. Looking for the fake marbled murrelet eggs was almost like an Easter egg

hunt — a severely limited one, where you couldn’t keep (or even touch) the eggs. Small orange biodegradable flagging tied to trees along the side of the trail told us where to start looking; from there, Halbert consulted her densely filled data Sally Rae Kimmel

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(right) In spring, look for western trillium blooming in the understory as you walk through the shady forest. (below) The Candelabra Tree is one of the park’s most visible base, the tree then splits into five smaller trunks.

arral, where manzanita and scrub oaks thrive on the underlying Santa Margarita sandstone. Each spring, the Coastside State Parks Association leads a popular hike to the tree, which also includes a hunt for calypso

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orchids (Calypso bulbosa). These flowers, which depend on a certain mycorrhizal fungus to survive, can be found in the forests along the Mill Ox, Goat Hill, and Año Nuevo trails. During the C oastside hike in April, we spotted plenty of white trillium and redwood violets, along with nonnative forget-menots, but only 10 calypso orchids. These orchids are very sensitive to disturbance and can’t be transplanted, so if you see them, you know the forest is reasonably intact. As the calypso orchids wind down, marbled murrelets make their appearance, flying to and from their nests. These birds’ nests are so well hidden high in old-growth forests that no one had ever seen a nest anywhere until 1974, when tree surgeon Hoyt Foster accidently found one 150 feet up a Douglas fir in Big Basin, ending decades of debate and

Justin Hofman, Justin-Hofman.com

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remaining old-growth redwoods. About 20 feet around at its

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s Gazo Ben Pease, peasepress.com

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shallow bowl on a tree branch, matted with leaf litter, feathers, dung, and moss, which work together to camouflage the bird’s mottled (or “marbled”) brown feather patterns. Old-growth forests also have more gaps in the canopy — not like in a second-growth forest, where many of the trees are the same height and grow more closely together. Space in the canopy is important because marbled murrelets, as seabirds, aren’t so nimble in the forest and need room to maneuver to land on their nest branch. Forest biologist Steve Singer, one of the first to raise the rallying cry for protecting the murrelets, has used aerial photos to map old growth in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He’s found old growth in Butano along the Ray Linder Trail near the trail camp (about six miles in from the park’s entrance), along the service road near the campground, and along the lower portions of Little Butano Creek Trail. Anywhere else along Butano’s 30 or so miles of trails, you can distinguish old growth by looking for large horizontal branches in the upper half of the tree, cavities, broken limbs or other defects, and burn scars on the trunk — as well as, of course, the multilayered canopy. “At Butano, the farther you get from the fire roads and Cloverdale Road [near the park entrance], the more likely you’ll find old growth redwoods,” says Michael Grant, who was head ranger here for eight years. Much of the park was logged from the 1860s until the state acquired it in 1956 after many years of advocacy by the Sempervirens Fund, Save the Redwoods League, and the Sierra Club. “Anyplace in the Butano area that was accessible in the 1800s and early 1900s was logged, so we tend to find oldgrowth redwoods in canyons and locations that harvesters could not easily transport the timber out of.” Also spared were huge oddities like the park’s Candelabra Tree, which was just too gangly to become lumber. About 20 feet in circumference at the base, the Candelabra tree has five tree-size “stems” jutting out diagonally before resuming their vertical climb. Hiking to see it takes you through several of Butano’s six microclimates, including areas of chap-

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second and third growth. Redwood sorrel grows among the redwood needles

speculation about where murrelets nest and raise their young. Since then, fewer than 20 nests have been discovered in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The nests remain hard to find: No murrelet nest has yet been discovered within Butano. But we know they nest here or nearby because you can see marbled murrelets flying by at dawn in June and July during their “nest exchanges.” Males and females share nesting and chick-rearing, and at dawn and dusk, one leaves to hunt for small fish like anchovies and sardines at sea, while the other stays behind to incubate. Spotting them during these shift changes involves an early morning trek along a service road that starts off near the campground and then runs alongside the canyon carved by Little Butano Creek.

The path will be dark at that early hour, but as the rising sun begins to lighten the sky, you’ll notice a break in the canopy above (if you reach the bridge, you’ve gone too far). At the canopy break, scan the sky for small, acrobatic footballshaped birds, calling out a seagull-like “keer, keer, keer.” When Halbert conducts her murrelet surveys in the park, she records a “detection” when she either sees a murrelet or hears calls in a particular direction. Back in the mid-1990s, researchers reported hearing 200 such detections during a two-hour survey period; now, you’re lucky to hear 10. Key to knowing if the Butano egg project is working will be increased marbled murrelet detections. Detections also help conservation organizations identify new areas for land purchases, which is where California’s oldest land trust, the Sempervirens Fund, comes in. “Every time we purchase redwood forests,” says Executive Director Reed Holderman, “we are essentially protecting marbled murrelet habitat.” Recently, Sempervirens purchased parts of upper Butano Creek and the Gazos A banana slug snacks on a red waxy cap mushroom, among the many mushrooms you

Frank S. Balthis

Mountain Camp property as part of a targeted campaign to help murrelets. But even if Sempervirens is successful on land, marbled murrelets still face problems at sea, where they are susceptible to entanglement in fish nets and exposure to oil spills. Fluctuating ocean conditions also affect the abundance of the fish murrelets eat at sea. A seabird that requires healthy old-growth forests and a healthy ocean faces a “double whammy,” as Halbert puts it, so her efforts to help the marbled murrelet go beyond even the labor-intensive fake egg program. Halbert says annual surveys have shown a decrease in corvid numbers in campgrounds where garbage has been reduced. Visit the Ben Ries campground and you’ll find each of the 39 campsites has a brand-new food storage locker, big enough to fit a jumbo cooler and then some. The lockers are part of Halbert’s “keep it crumb free” project — an attempt to teach visitors to Butano (mostly through signage and educational campfire programs) the importance of properly storing and disposing of food. Because when food is left out, it attracts predators like jays, opportunists that may start with picnic leftovers but then stay for whatever nature has to offer, flying ever deeper into old-growth areas. And we all know who likes to nest there.

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Youssef Ismail, organiclightphoto.com

and branches on the forest floor.

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As in many Bay Area redwood parks,

Marilyn Fahey is a technical editor and freelance writer from the Bay Area. bay nature at butano

Saturday, July 13, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Hike with Bay Nature and the Coastside State Parks Association. RSVP required. (510)528-8550 x205, baynature.org/inthefield

can see here in the rainy winter months.

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elsewhere . . . peninsula

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Dan Hill

Jessica Hahn-Taylor

Luxomedia, Creative Commons

The Frog Habitat of Brisbane

Redwood Regional Park: Ridge Trail

Hood Mountain Regional Park

“Can we save the best Pacific chorus frog habitat in the urban Bay Area?” asks Jim McKissock, a longtime Bay Area conservationist and founder of EarthCare, a group of activists that has restored habitat for the frogs in Brisbane. “These frogs’ calls once epitomized the sound of the Bay Area.” At the base of the eastern side of San Bruno Mountain, hundreds of them live in an aquifer-fed ditch among cattails, willows, tule, native herbaceous plants, gopher and garter snakes, swallowtail butterflies, hummingbirds, and numerous small mammals. The Crocker Park Recreational Trail, a 2.5-mile loop, runs alongside the restored frog habitat. It’s a great place to stop to listen to the frogs and see the work of volunteers who have cleaned out trash, pulled weeds, and generally fixed the place up. You can walk through the abandoned Bayshore railroad tunnel due east of the frog habitat; farther out is an old brick icehouse. There’s a proposal to build a candy factory where an old warehouse sits now. That would probably be the end of the frogs. But for now, the effort to preserve the frogs’ habitat continues with a volunteer work party every Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (info: earthcarenow@sbcglobal.net). Getting there: North on 101, exit Bayshore Boulevard toward Cow Palace. Go left at Valley Drive; right on Cypress to 100 Cypress Lane. South on 101, exit Cow Palace/Third Street and take Bayshore Boulevard 1.8 miles. Right on Valley Drive and right on Cypress Lane.

Redwood Regional Park is fine any time of year, but it’s in summer that cool air off the Bay and the shade of all those trees is most welcome. Ridge Trail, which makes a seven-plus-mile horseshoe around the park’s hills, is not the best place to see redwoods, since they are happiest growing by the creek bed below, but plenty of Monterey pines, Douglas firs, bays, oaks, madrones, buckeyes, and elderberries cloak the canyon slopes and march along the crests traversed by this less popular route. Ambitious hikers can undertake various loops using steep connectors from the Ridge Trail down to the Stream Trail along Redwood Creek. But for a delightful, varied stroll, you can hike just the 1.5 miles between Chabot Space and Science Center and Skyline Gate Staging Area, where sun and shadow flicker through the branches in every hue of green onto foliage fading to dry-season tawny brown. Listen for the insistent ack-ack-ack of a nuthatch, the twittering of juncos, or the drumming of a woodpecker high in a snag. Here the path is cut into a cliff-steep hillside, and exposed crumbling rock strata illustrate the forces that shaped it. Coyote bush may screen the trail, but a few yards on, look out to Moraga’s golden hills, or down on a vulture cruising above 100-foot redwoods. Getting there: From Highway 13 take Redwood Road to Skyline Blvd. Go north two miles to the Chabot Center, which has weekday bus service. No fee; dogs and bikes permitted.

The Mayacamas Mountains between Napa and Sonoma are rugged and exposed, but the flanks of Hood Mountain are shaded by fine tall forests. Trails here are steep and take odd turns to skirt hidden bunchgrass meadows where dragonflies hover and butterflies go about their business. Instead of rattlers, I met ring-necked snakes, perfect models for exotic bracelets. From Pythian Road a maze of trails sets out past private inholdings. The many signs don’t help much: For the first mile, the choice is fire trail or footpaths; all are well-shaded and will relentlessly take you up and up again toward peak and ponds. Eventually, 1.5 miles out and 1,000 feet up, we came via Pond Trail and then Valley View to Merganser Pond, a charming, algae-green, reedy lake, low this dry year, edged by tall firs and a craggy lichen-covered bluff. A lone fisherman told us he’d taken five bass that morning; these ponds are not stocked but reward athletic anglers. (Athletic campers may reserve one of 2 two campsites by the ponds.) It’s at least twice as far and another 1,000 feet to Gunsight Rock, from which you can look east to Napa and south to San Francisco. Or, past the pond on Valley View Trail there’s a fine view of the Valley of the Moon. Getting there: From Highway 12 north of Sonoma, follow North Pythian Road 1.3 miles to staging area. $7 parking fee; bikes, horses, dogs on leash permitted. No smoking.

[Jessica Hahn-Taylor]

[Ann Sieck]

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 b ay n at u r e

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habitats of

the East Bay Regiona l Parks This story is part of a series exploring significant natural habitats and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), many of which are encountered in other parts of the Bay Area as well. 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).

by Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan

eaves of Three The Rash Success of Poison Oak Judy Kramer

When East Bay creek restoration expert Susan Schwartz of Friends of Five Creeks goes to work removing invasive weeds in Tilden Regional Park, she suits up: old knee socks on her arms, gloves, long pants, sometimes even old rain gear. What horrors lurk in our hills? There’s only one plant that inspires that sort of response: poison oak. Schwartz and her crews actually have a pretty mild attitude toward the plant. “We do get small rashes, often in odd places. We just live with it and use the usual creams and lotions.” If you haven’t achieved her level of calm acceptance, one obvious question is, “What is poison oak good for?” Like Pretty Boy Floyd , the bank robber who helped the poor, Toxicodendron diversilobum does provide sustenance. Birds eat its berries: quail, turkeys, woodpeckers, corvids, chickadees, bushtits, waxwings, thrushes, mockingbirds, thrashers, wrentits, warblers, sparrows, towhees, juncos, finches. Black-tailed deer browse the leaves, stems, and twigs, as do wood rats and pocket mice. Domestic goats, including the Goats-R-Us herds that clear brush in the East Bay Regional Parks, eat it enthusiastiWe don’t get a lot of fall color in coastal California, but you can count on seeing poison oak’s spectacular bright-red leaves each autumn in parks all over the region. Liam O’Brien, sfbutterfly.com

Frank S. Balthis

Judy Kramer

(far left) A honeybee feeds on a poison oak blossom. (left) As poison oak turns red in the fall, it’s much easier cally; cattle, less so. Horses? We bear pertions included treating warts, corns, sonal witness: Some love it and will sneak to see as it climbs high into trees like this oak. calluses, and skin cancers with the sap (right) New leaves on poison oak are often red as well, a mouthful along the trail and then slob(Chumash); boiling the roots into a tea and then they mature into a bright green with an oily sheen. ber all over their bits. Yuck. for diarrhea (also Chumash); and using In the lower photo, the buds are about to burst into flower. Some insects are also poison oak conan unspecified part of the plant as an sumers. The larvae of several moth species eat the leaves and antidote for rattlesnake venom (Wappo). shelter in them when they pupate. A survey in the Santa Cruz Those culinary and medicinal uses may strain credulity — Indian groups also had remedies for poison oak rashes, indicatMountains tallied 15 insect orders on poison oak but didn’t ing that they weren’t immune to the toxin. But extreme remedies record whether they were eating or just passing through. Native abound in other medical traditions (bloodletting, anyone? cupbees gather nectar from poison oak, as do introduced honeybees; ping?). It’s possible that some individuals either enjoyed natural the resulting honey is bitter but nontoxic. poison oak immunity or developed a tolerance through expoCalifornia Indians had many uses for the plant, some surprissure; that may also have been true of particular local communiing. Several groups, including the Ohlone, prized its stems for ties. (And, it must be said, some ethnographic references may basketry warp; Wappo weavers dyed baskets with the sap. The have resulted from miscommunication.) Coast Miwok, Kashaya Pomo, and Maidu made tattoo ink from The first European to notice western poison oak appears to its ashes. Poison oak could also be an ingredient or otherwise have been Thaddeus Haenke, a Bohemian naturalist on a Spaninvolved in cooking. In the 1920s, Rumsen Ohlone members told ish expedition to the California coast in 1791, but he confused J. P. Harrington that poison oak was “used with bread,” probably it with the poison ivy of eastern North America. (There’s also acorn bread. Mamie Offield and Georgia Orcutt, two Karok an eastern poison oak, as well as poison sumac and several East women interviewed in 1939, said their people roasted soaproot Asian relatives; diversilobum is the only West Coast native in the bulbs wrapped in its leaves and smoked salmon on poison-oak genus.) The plant, which is not an oak at all though its leaves skewers, which imparted a distinctive taste. Medicinal applica-

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but they’re still full of potent skin irritants. (right) Deer and many other animals, unfazed by the plant’s toxin (urushiol), happily browse the leaves, which have high concentrations of phosphorus, sulfur, and calcium.

can seem oak-leaf-shaped, was recognized as a distinct species only in the 19th century, described from a type specimen collected in Oregon. Two British naturalists, Alexander Collie and George Lay, may have encountered it on the Monterey Peninsula in 1827; one source says their captain, Frederick Beechey of hms Blossom, took specimens back to England. Although the Spanish knew it well enough to call it yiedra maligna (evil ivy), early references to poison oak are sparse. “A possible conclusion is that the plant was less common several centuries ago,” suggests botanist William Gillis, who taught at Michigan State University. “Because Toxicodendron diversilobum is a plant which increases in abundance with disturbance, it is likely that it has become more abundant with the activities of man in clearing the countryside, especially changing fire frequency.” Preeminent California botanist Willis L. Jepson, who seemed grudgingly respectful of diversilobum, noted its adaptability in 1936: “It has a wider geographic range than any California shrub and grows under a greater variety of soil conditions than any other; though usually preferring good soil or rich loams, it grows in blue adobe, in saline soils, in gray clays, in sandy flats, in heavy gravel deposits and in the crevices of outcropping rock piles. It

Steven dosRemedios, wiredEye.net

John W. Wall

(below) In winter, poison oak branches are bare of leaves,

is also adapted to a greater range of rainfall and temperature than any other California shrub and is especially remarkable for its extreme shade tolerance and its tolerance of intense insolation [exposure to sun].” James Roof, the founding director of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden, called T. diversilobum “California’s most beautiful and reliable fall-color shrub. It has only one drawback; it’s deciduous.”

PO’ed by POISON OAK A very unscientific survey revealed assorted experiences and remedies among people who’d got their thumbs into it. “I got bad cases as a young child,” says Regional Parks Botanic Garden director Steve Edwards. “Then I was nonreactive for about 30 years, often bushwhacking through it with no effect. Then I got a case out of the blue.” Others on his staff are more reliably allergic: “Some swear by Tecnu, but they like Dawn dish soap even better. We agree that a thorough wash with soap and water as soon as possible after exposure helps, as well as throwing your clothing in the wash to avoid spreading the affliction.” Friends of Five Creeks

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Poison oak is also celebrated every September in a festival in the quasi-ghost town of Columbia, California, at the historic St. Charles Saloon, with awards for best poison oak arrangement, most potent-looking leaves, best poison oak accessory or jewelry, most original poison oak dish (with recipe), and best rash, documented either photographically or in person.

So it is good for something. But it also causes

lots of pain. The plant’s named Toxicodendron —“poison tree”— for a reason. Sap laden with the toxin urushiol lurks in resin canals in the stems, leaves, flowers, and roots. Dry winter stems remain potent. Poison oak ash is a major hazard for firefighters, especially if inhaled. Oddly, the pollen doesn’t contain urushiol. Neither do the seasonally fallen leaves; the chemical is drawn back into the sap before the plant sheds them. Urushiol is in fact an allergen, like the chemicals that cause reactions to mulberry pollen or cat dander. It binds to specialized white blood cells in the skin, triggering a long-lasting immune-system reaction. t-cells rush to the site, broadcasting enzymes and toxins that attack the compromised cells and everything else in the neighborhood like an overzealous swat team. Collateral damage includes redness, itching, and blisters. Different Toxicodendron species have different urushiol types, but the effects are the same. Urushiol is long-lasting; hundred-year-old herbarium specimens have caused rashes. A poison oak attack is more than just a nuisance. In 1994, William Epstein, a dermatologist at UC San Francisco, wrote that poison oak dermatitis caused “significant disability and time lost from work” in California, with costs accounting for one percent of the state’s workers’ compensation budget. Forestry workers and firefighters had the highest incidence of disability. Only humans and a few fellow primates are naturally susceptible to urushiol dermatitis. An estimated quarter of the U.S. population experiences severe symptoms after contact with the closely related poison oak, ivy, or sumac; another 10 to 15 percent are tolerant. The rest of us react with varying degrees of itching and discomfort. But children under five are less easily sensitized. Landscape architect Chris Grampp wasn’t even out in the wild landscape when he got a rash; he just leaned against a neighbor’s handmade wooden fence. The wood was eucalyptus, salvaged from a poison-oakinfested patch of Claremont Canyon. Grampp wound up in the hospital. On another occasion, he took the advice of a friend who suggested a post-exposure hot bath—which distributed the urushiol uniformly over his entire body. Back to the hospital. Park district botanist Wilde Legard usually manages to avoid rashes by rinsing off soon after exposure (in a creek or with water he’s carrying). He also says a product called Ivy Block is widely used by U.S. Forest Service workers to prevent rashes, and the pricey Zanfel ($40 an ounce) and its less expensive generic cousins do a good job of treating rashes.

Native Americans are no less vulnerable than other ethnic groups. Several Californian treatments for poison oak rash are recorded: pulverized bracken fronds (Yurok, Karok, Tolowa), mashed soaproot (Wintu), mugwort and tule ashes (Chumash), boiled yerba santa and manzanita leaves, mule’s-ear roots. The Esselen of Big Sur are reported to have fed their children poison oak leaves to develop immunity; Euell Gibbons of wild asparagus fame claimed that worked for him and for loggers he knew in the Pacific Northwest. In his book Poison Ivy, Poison Oak, Poison Sumac and Their Relatives, Edward Frankel provides a dizzying list of home remedies for urushiol rash: “ammonia, baking soda, bleach, buttermilk, castor oil, coffee, cornstarch, Epsom salts, gasoline, goat’s milk, gunpowder, hairspray, horse urine, iodine, kerosene, Lysol, marshmallow, meat tenderizer, nail polish, oatmeal, sodium bicarbonate, strychnine, tobacco, toothpaste, whiskey, and last but not least, zirconium.” Such a list, dermatologist Albert Kligman observes, “clearly reveals the profound emotional effects of therapeutic desperation.” And that list doesn’t even cover at least a dozen other folk remedies we’ve heard about, from wet cement to darkroom chemicals. For getting the resin off your skin, some swear by Tecnu — a commercial blend of mineral spirits, water, chemicals, and fatty acid soap invented in the 1960s to remove radioactive fallout from human skin. A study by Adam Stibich and colleagues Western scrub-jay perched in poison oak.

Poison oak is part of the territory for trail builders and habitat restoration workers. “It’s an occupational hazard in stream restoration,” says Ann Riley, a river and watershed adviser for the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. “It got to the point where all I would have to do is touch the plant and it would go through my skin and be carried by my bloodstream throughout my body so that I would have to spend a few days in bed in agony and be out of work for a week.” Injections of a poison ivy extract stopped her systemic reaction. A friend of ours who worked in Redwood Regional Park claims his poison oak rash inspired the park system’s current requirement that employees wash their hands before using the bathroom.

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According to Jepson, “In number of individuals, poison oak exceeds, in our judgment, any other shrub species in California.” We couldn’t find supporting surveys or estimates (and plant individuality is a tricky thing, given all those aspen and creosote bush clones). Maybe it just seemed that way to Jepson. It’s widespread for sure: It is recorded in 50 of the state’s 58 counties. Beyond its tolerance for a range of physical conditions, poison oak owes some of its success to animal accomplices. No one seems to have monitored the insect traffic at a flowering poison oak, but it’s safe to assume there are native pollinators. Common insects like soldier beetles, longhorned beetles, checkered beetles, burrowing bees, and sweat bees are known to pollinate poison ivy; representatives of most of these families have been found on poison oak. Birds that eat the berries may unload them some distance away, where the seeds can germinate in fresh territory. Flickers have a prodigious appetite for poison-ivy fruit (up to a quarter of their diet in some cases) and likely consume a comparable amount of poison-oak berries. Other migratory birds may also be significant seed dispersers. Poison oak is limited by altitude, though, growing no higher than 5,000 feet; Yosemite Valley A Merriam’s chipmunk along Waddell Creek in Santa Cruz County munches on poison oak berries, which are also a popular snack for many is free of it. One of the first bits birds, from turkeys to bushtits. of California biogeographical Leaf shape is what you might expect of a plant called diversilore we picked up decades ago was that you didn’t have to worry lobum: The leaves can be flat or curled, symmetrically lobed, about rattlesnakes or poison oak in the High Sierra. asymmetrically lobed, or lobeless. They have a sheen, but they’re That may not be reliable for much longer. Lewis Ziska of the not smooth; they have texture, but they’re not heavily veined or U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service crinkled. A typical color sequence goes from pale green spring and Jackie Mohan of the University of Georgia have studied the leaves to the scarlets and purples of fall, but red leaves can be response of eastern poison ivy to climate change. In field and lab found in any season. Diversilobum is usually a shrub, but given the settings, their test plants were active for a longer part of the year opportunity, it can climb walls and trees like poison ivy or grow under warmer temperatures and higher carbon dioxide levels. low like a ground cover. It’s tempting to invoke Justice Potter What’s more, their urushiol became more poisonous. “I would Stewart’s pornography test: “I know it when I see it.” If you say it’s legitimate to extend our work to other Toxicodendron species, don’t know it when you see it, likely the best way to learn is to including T. diversilobum,” says Mohan. “In fact, the urushiol stanhave somebody show you, and show you again; a search image dard we used for analysis was from poison oak; it’s the same develops in time. chemical.” Fortunately or not, you’ll have lots of opportunity to test In a warmer world, this botanical opportunist may climb the your knowledge, as poison oak is ubiquitous in our parks and mountains of California. Then there will be no escape! open space, including throughout the East Bay hills. The park district doesn’t try to eradicate it; it is, after all, a native plant. Ron Sullivan and Joe Eaton are nature fiends who live in Berkeley and write “The Maintenance chief Kelly Barrington says his crews just cut it Dirt,” a garden column appearing irregularly in the San Francisco Chronicle. Joe also contributes to Estuary News. back if it impinges on buildings or trails. Frank S. Balthis

reported that Tecnu is 70 percent effective at removing plant oils, better than the industrial hand cleaner Goop (62 percent) and standard Dial soap (56 percent). Avoidance is the best strategy. Unfortunately, the familiar mnemonic rhymes can’t always be trusted. “Red touch yellow, kill a fellow” is helpful for coral snakes but “Leaves of three, let it be” is less reliable with poison oak: Some populations have five leaflets — or more. The apparent record is 17. But most of the time, going by the triplets of lobed leaves is a reasonable rule of thumb.

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Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkleley.edu/hiddenecologies

R e s t o r at i o n a n d R e n e wa l o n S a n F r a n c i s c o Bay

than sky and more salmon than water in the rivers. The abundance of wildlife back then was by all accounts astounding. Paired with the temperate climate, it was practically paradise on earth. I’ve often taken my daughters to the baylands and made them stand still long enough to watch a great blue heron catch a goby. When they were young, they didn’t really get the term “wetland” so they used to call them waterlands. “Mommy’s taking us to waterland today,” they’d say. I’ve since become a science writer and met a lot of people who’ve dedicated their lives to studying the waterlands around the Bay—their ecology, the birds in the bushes, and the clams in the mud. “For my Ph.D., I (continued on page 38)

rs. Semino once had to put on a pair of rubber boots to cook her Thanksgiving turkey. It was a long time ago, in the 1920s, when she and her husband lived by the banks of Sonoma Creek in a place called Wingo. After a storm or high tide, Wingo’s half dozen cabin floors returned to their more natural state in the landscape: wet. Wingo lies about six miles up the creek from the north shore of San Francisco Bay, in a place now far inland but once flooded by tides twice daily. Before these “baylands” were diked and drained, they were part of an estuarine ecosystem so rich that early explorers spoke of seeing more waterfowl

Judy Irving © Pelican Media

John Kesselring

David Cardinal / Cardinal Photo

by Ariel Rubissow Okamoto

(above) Pond A20 near Alviso is one of the former South Bay salt ponds being restored to tidal marsh. The new mud and first signs of vegetation in the pond four years after the levee breach in 2006 signal its progress. (below) At the Palo Alto Baylands (left to right): a salt marsh song sparrow; bird watching; an American avocet with three chicks; a northern shoveler in flight.

Lines in the The Battle Historic Bay wetlands had labyrinthine channels of incredible complexity, as illustrated in this rendering of marsh channels near Alviso developed by the Historical Ecology Program at the San Francisco Estuary Institute using 1860s survey maps.

here’s a line in the mud in the Bay Area. It’s a blue line for hydrologists, a green line for biologists, and a red line for environmentalists. Moving the line, which was painstakingly drawn in the 1990s by those who care about wetland ecology and endangered species protection, is considered beyond the pale. It’s the line where the land ends and the Bay begins, and it’s pretty thick. Once a large area of marshes, it’s now a frontier many people feel strongly about guarding. “In other parts of the nation, you can still build a shopping center on a salt marsh, but that’s not going to happen in the Bay Area. It’s different here,” says Marc Holmes of The Bay Institute. Holmes projects the weary hopefulness one gets from decades spent trying to save the planet. He looks kindly, but underneath he’s steel. He’s fought through lawsuits and permits and policies, worked legislatures and local governments, testified on behalf of defenseless birds and thirsty rivers and the last scraps of nature around the Bay. To a large degree, he and countless other individuals and organizations on the front lines of regional wetland protection have won this particular battle to “save the soft shores

Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkleley.edu/hiddenecologies

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from hardscape” because they all have their eyes on the same prize: SFEI, Historical Ecology Program 100,000 acres. Once upon a time we had 196,000 acres of tidal wetlands ringing San Francisco Bay. The Bay formed when ice caps melted and the seas rose 10,000 years ago, flooding river valleys as far inland as present-day Napa. Those were the days when the baylands were much more than a patch of pickleweed or a meadow of cordgrass: Creeks and rain emptied the soils and runoff of whole watersheds onto the marsh plain. Each marsh had high and low spots, varied vegetation, and branching channels so labyrinthine it wasn’t clear where one ended and another began. Forty percent of the land area of California drained into this vast estuary and through its marshes. Then, in short order, settlers dug ditches and heaped up walls of dirt, and later concrete, around all these wetlands. They drained them and sent in the horse and plow, the cow and oats. Soon thereafter cities and towns grew up on the shore and we piled up more dirt in the water—filling the Bay to get more real estate. Along the way, we lost 90 percent of our tidal wetlands. In the 1960s, three women from Berkeley mobilized a citizen army to stop the filling of the Bay and spawned the Save San Francisco Bay Association (now Save The Bay). Their efforts led to new forms of regional governance restricting shoreline development, while the federal Endangered Species and Clean Water acts gave local activists new tools for protecting wildlife from extinction and stopping sewage and garbage from fouling the Bay. In the late 1990s, as the paradigm shifted from defense to offense, scientists and resource managers drew a blue-green line in the mud along the shoreline and produced the first maps of what needed to be saved or restored to achieve some kind of ecological equilibrium. “We essentially declared that the baylands are for restoring, and not for developing, at all, ever,” says Holmes. Since then more than 19,000 acres of wetlands have Citizen advocacy led to the creation of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s first such urban refuge, which provides great public access to the baylands.

been restored or enhanced, and 42,450 more acquired and put into the pipeline. Populations of the endangered California clapper rail—once reduced to a few hundred individuals—are slowly rebounding. All thanks to the activism and stewardship of myriad nonprofits, public agencies, park districts, legislators, businesses, and concerned residents.

Prime Waterfront Real Estate

Steven dosRemedios, wiredEye.net

for Softer Shores

It wasn’t easy. The realization that wetlands were more than useless swamps was slow to dawn on the Bay Area. In the 1970s, citizens here and there began banding together to save their local waterfronts. In Palo Alto, Florence and Phil LaRiviere, who enjoyed heading down to the marshes with a picnic basket, joined with others to advocate for the creation of the nation’s first urban wildlife refuge, made up almost entirely of wetlands. Groups like the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, Save The Bay, and the Audubon Society battled to keep assorted pieces of shoreline real estate from being developed. At the time, concerned citizens had to take what they could get. In exchange for paving over this corner of the Bay, developers had to promise to restore another one. An eye for an eye, you might say. “In the 1980s, decision making was governed by last week’s real estate opportunity, or our short-term idealized vision of what we wanted a particular bayland to look like,” says ecologist Peter Baye, then a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expert on tidal marshes. “There wasn’t any ecosystem-based approach.” When regulators hired biologist Francesca Demgen in 1986 to evaluate 18 mitigation sites to see if their approach was working, The San Francisco Estuary is a critical refueling and foraging habitat for millions of waterbirds on the Pacific Flyway, including shorebirds that breed in the Arctic and waterfowl that raise their young on America’s northern prairies. During peak migration periods up to a million shorebirds may pass through the region in a single day. Recent winter surveys have counted more than 700,000 ducks and other waterfowl on the Bay and more than a million overwintering sandpipers, plovers, dowitchers, and other shorebirds.

(above) A complex of mature tidal channels at Arrowhead Marsh in Oakland. (left) Marc Holmes of the Bay Institute is one of many Bay Area activists who have worked for decades to restore Bay wetlands, in part to prevent the extinction of the endangered California clapper rail (below).

she quickly concluded there was no way of knowing because there were no established objectives to measure against, nor any historical record of what had existed before. Then in the early 1990s a wiry graduate student with formidable intelligence was tasked with unearthing what habitats the Bay once had, and where. “At first I thought it sounded really boring. I wanted to get on to the more exciting contemporary stuff,” says the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Robin Grossinger, who has since produced historical ecologies of the Napa River, Alameda Creek, and the Delta. “But pretty quickly I realized how intertwined this work was with what I’d always wanted to do, which was restart natural systems on a large scale across whole landscapes.” And his very first project, an “EcoAtlas” for the Bay,

Bob Stronck

Mud

Tidal marsh residents—from rails to song sparrows—have responded positively to restoration in terms of overall trends going back decades. According to Point Blue Conservation Science’s Julian Wood, “After 10 to 15 years, once the marsh starts to vegetate, the birds move right in and there’s a big jump in colonization.” Biologist Laura Valoppi of the U.S. Geological Survey says that since Bay waters have been reintroduced to several former salt ponds by the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, wintering waterbirds have increased 125 percent (2005–2012). Dabbling ducks are also on the rise, thanks to wildlife-friendly pond management. Dabblers like the lower salinities of the managed ponds. Shorebirds, meanwhile, favor the shallow-water transitional habitats created on newly breached restoration sites.

Judy Irving © Pelican Media

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Industry has farmed salt from the Bay, using solar evaporation processes, since the 19th century. Today Cargill continues to harvest about half a million tons of salt each year on 8,000 acres of ponds in Newark (below) and Redwood City. Since 1978, Cargill has transferred 41,000 acres of land to public agencies for wildlife, open space, and other purposes. Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkleley.edu/hiddenecologies

provided the scientific basis for the two decades of restoration work that followed. In the meantime, Holmes and other wetland activists got a big break. Cargill Salt, the largest owner of restorable baylands, decided it could make salt more efficiently on a smaller acreage and reversed its previous refusal to sell some of its ponds to the public for restoration. Overnight, it seemed, a whole new playing field opened up. In 1994, $6.5 million in fines from a Shell Oil spill in Martinez plus $3.5 million from state agencies funded the purchase of 10,000 acres of Cargill salt ponds along the lower Napa River. And regional wetland planning evolved from “an era of litigation to an era of acquisition with the anticipation of restoration,” says Holmes.

A Surge in Restoration With restoration moving into the big time, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Regional Water Quality Control Board invited more than 100 scientists, resource managers, and consultants to collaborate on a regional wetland vision that became known as the Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals. They set to work trying to come to a scientific consensus on what kinds of wetlands, in which amounts, were needed where to restore a sustainable tidal marsh ecosystem in San Francisco Bay. The project’s overriding conclusion was that the region needed to increase its tidal marsh acreage from 45,000 to 100,000. It also recognized that restoration science was in its infancy, and that there was a big difference between land that was wet and a functional wetland. The 350-page Goals report, full of maps and photographs, provided a “big beautiful document that you could put down in front of a Congressperson and say, ‘We have this plan, now fund it.’ It brought a lot of money to the table,” says Peggy Olofson, who coordinated the Goals project for the water board. “All of a sudden we had a legitimate program, endorsed by the state and the feds, which became a road map for the future for everyone,” says Holmes. Today, nearly all the same organizations are still involved in championing implementation of the Goals, including the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, Save The Bay, Audubon, the Coastal Conservancy, and the

Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkleley.edu/hiddenecologies

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A major cause of the loss of Bay wetlands has been fill and construction along the shoreline, such as the Eden Shores housing development in Hayward.

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public wildlife agencies, among others. Bringing them all together to set priorities, get projects done, and monitor and evaluate the results is the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, a consortium of 26 agencies, businesses, and organizations that share a commitment to the preservation and restoration of local wetlands. “We knew that no one organization or agency could do landscape-scale protection and restoration on its own,” explains coordinator Beth Huning. “We’ve evolved into such an effective forum for airing the successes and challenges of restoration that project managers and landowners now come to us, knowing that we can collectively help them protect and restore their wetlands.” The results have been transformative, not just for wildlife, but also for people. “To have been involved in such a catalyzing movement for large-scale restoration has been remarkable,” says Robin Grossinger. “This is one of the places in the world people look to as having really turned the corner, from having the centerpiece ecosystem of our region largely destroyed to having a significant amount of healthy habitat, in just a couple of decades.”

Size Matters . . . The publication of the Goals report in 1999, coupled with the large size of the Napa salt ponds acquisition, changed the scale of restoration work dramatically. Whereas Palo Alto’s Faber Tract—all of 32 acres—was a big project in the 1960s, and Sonoma Baylands in the early 1990s was a giant for its time at 300 acres, the size, scale, and complexity of wetland projects grew exponentially. The plan for the Army’s Hamilton Airfield and adjacent properties near Novato, starting in the mid-1990s, envisioned a mosaic of tidal marsh, seasonal wetlands, and upland refugia across several thousand acres. Biologists began to envision habitats big enough for wildlife to actually breed on, rather than just stopping by for shelter or a bite to eat. “We got to the point where the scale was meaningful for biological populations,” says wetlands biologist Letitia Grenier.

San Franciso Bay Restoration Projects Completed and In Progress

. . . And So Do Rising Seas The region steamed full speed ahead with its grand vision for a revived wetland ecosystem until warnings about melting ice sheets and rising seas became more dire. For San Francisco Bay, scientists projected a 16- to 55-inch rise in sea level by 2100. But what really got the attention of the environmental ninjas and public land managers working to restore the bay shore was the marked acceleration in the rate of rise projected for around 2060; at that point, marshes will no longer be able to keep up with rising waters through natural processes. (continued on page 39)

In progress Completed Historical Wetland Shallow Bay

Deep Channel

Miles

Data source: San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, 2013. California Joint Venture Projects Online System for Tracking, cjvp.ducks.org. Programming by Ducks Unlimited.

In 2000, funding scaled up too, with several state propositions providing real taxpayer support for Bay restoration via two state agencies, the Coastal Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Board. When another 16,500 acres of Cargill’s salt ponds were transferred into the public domain in 2003, everyone’s baseline for projects worth doing changed significantly. “Instead of tens or hundreds of acres we started talking about thousands or tens of thousands. And instead of projects and sites, we started talking about a program and a landscape,” says Jeremy Lowe of the environmental consulting firm ESA-PWA. Along with the opportunity to restore larger landscapes came increasing know-how, from how to plant native cordgrass so it survives to being prepared for invasions of destructive nonnative plants on newly restored sites. Designers experimented with how deep to carve channels and how wide to make levee cuts. And they even learned how and where to add sediment—from smears over the top of the marsh to several feet of material imported from local harbor bottoms. After being diked for more than a century, many restoration sites were too subsided for plants to grow after levees were breached, so bringing in dirt could cut a 50-year timeline for vegetation to flourish down to 10. Taxpayers, meanwhile, chose to embrace what had been learned by firing up the backhoes and restoration crews with federal stimulus funds. “Restoration creates jobs and infrastructure,” says Huning. “Bay Area residents need to know their federal money came right back here to put people to work on these restoration projects.”

Cartography, Louis Jaffe, Data Processing, John Kelly, GreenInfo Network

Sarah Craig

(above) The map shows the extent of San Francisco Bay’s tidal wetlands in the 1850s, as well as the completed and permitted projects that are part of the regional effort to restore the Bay’s functioning wetlands. (left) Rising sea levels caused by climate change already threaten critical infrastructure, as illustrated by flooding at Bothin Marsh near Mill Valley during a “king tide” in December 2012. Such flooding will become more common as sea level rises by up to five feet by 2100.

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Waist Deep Re-creating

Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

here are two things that make the San Pablo Bay shoreline different for wetland planners than any other shore in the region: more space and fewer neighbors. Baylands here butt up against pastures, hills, and river floodplains, rather than against hard walls. It’s more rural. Designers see space for wetlands to spread out and creep inland in advance of rising seas. With so few neighbors, the land trusts and government agencies that manage the landscape usually only have to invite county officials and a few ranchers, vintners, and hunters to any stakeholder meeting. This is a whole different context than the South Bay, with its myriad neighboring cities, dog-walkers, ports, cyclists, park districts, flood management agencies, sanitary districts, and corporate office parks.

Getting Close to Primeval Noodling around in the sloughs with two engineers from Ducks Unlimited in a Boston Whaler on a warm spring morning, we see one fisherman, two northern harriers, a dozen lesser scaups, hundreds of peeps, and thousands of acres of very shallow water and wet mud. The tide is going out, so we have to move quickly. But there is much to see here at the southern end of the Napa River, particularly the seven former salt production ponds, some more than 1,000 acres in size, now open to the tides. At one point, it gets so shallow that Russ Lowgren, the ex-navy engineer in a camo cap at the helm, has to put on waders, climb out of the boat, and push. On one side of the whaler the water is waist high, on the other knee-deep, but Lowgren isn’t surprised. That’s what happens when you open up thousands of acres of diked marshes to tidal flow and connect them to a river—some areas scour out while others begin silting in. Such shifts in the mud may be invisible in a foot of water but are commonplace in any active estuary. Where the South Bay is often called a lagoon-like backwater, the David Loeb

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Coon Island (left), part of the extensive Napa–Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area along the lower Napa River, has never been diked and so represents historic natural marsh. Large wetland areas in the North Bay such as Tubbs Island (far right) are magnets for shorebirds and waterfowl, as well as predators such as northern harriers (below).

North Bay is on the receiving end of every storm and flood of fresh water flowing down the Petaluma River, the Napa River, and the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, as well as emptying out Tolay, Sonoma, and Huichica Creeks. “It’s a giant natural estuary,” says Don Brubaker, manager of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, who’s along for the ride. Standing on the prow of the whaler, Brubaker sweeps his arm around 360 degrees to emphasize the extent of the historic estuary he is talking about. “Restoration here will have long-term benefits for estuarine productivity—we may lose hayfields and salt ponds but we’ll gain fish and crustaceans.” Jerry Ting At this moment, we’re in China Slough, one of the few named sloughs in the state-owned Napa-Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area. Lowgren and fellow Ducks Unlimited engineer Steve Carroll are showing off their work on various ponds. As part of their construction contract with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited scraped the first two feet off some levees to allow overtopping at high tide, strengthened others to protect roads and neighbors, and graded others to give wildlife more transitional habitat. They also strategiDucks Unlimited engineer Russ Lowgren has overseen several restoration projects in the North Bay, including the 2010 breach of the levee at the South Unit of the Green Island Unit (formerly the Napa Plant Site).

Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

a We t l a n d s M o s a i c

cally placed breaches to maximize either sediment build-up or scour, and retooled numerous siphons, gates, and other water control structures left behind from the salt production days. They even built island homes for endangered California least terns on one of the ponds. The biggest bugaboo in restoring this landscape block of old salt ponds was the actual site of the original salt production plant, which included crystallizing beds and pickling ponds right on the edge of the Napa River. Restoration managers couldn’t just breach and run, because the salt levels released into the river would have killed fish. As it turned out, the first step involved reopening the fallowed plant. Cargill pitched in, harvesting 350,000 tons of salt within three years. But the crystallizer beds still had salt concentrations up to 360 parts per thousand (ppt) that had to be reduced through dilution to river background levels of 20 to 30 ppt before discharge. A team from URS Corporation, led by habitat engineer Francesca Demgen, experimented with dilution and discharge methods in the lab; then Cargill took the experiment to the next level by engineering a three-acre field test, which earned the project its discharge permit. Based on what they’d learned, URS and Ducks Unlimited conducted the first breaches of the crystallizer beds in several stages, so the salt could dissolve and flow out out of the ponds into the river gradually over a period of two weeks. They also designed the breach sites carefully. “Instead of cutting the breach down to low tide levels, we cut it only partway down,” says Demgen. “Since salt is heavier than water, only a little went out into the river at a time.” The return of the site—now the Green Island Unit of the NapaSonoma Marshes Wildlife Area—to full tidal action was finally completed in 2010, finished up with the help of federal stimulus dollars. “Salmonids entered it at lightning speed,” recalls Demgen. For someone coming in for the first time, floating along these sloughs with the new marsh forming all around is as satisfying as chocolate. In the distance, mountains—Tam, Cougar, Veeder, Diablo—seem to frame the endeavor with California’s golden glow, all marking the edge of lowlands and valleys flooded by the rising seas 10,000 years ago. It’s a nurturing environment, low and quiet,

Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

in the North Bay

warm and natural in the sunlight. It may be about as close to primeval, out there in the growing San Pablo Bay marshes, as it gets in the Bay Area. “Everything has come out exactly as expected,” says Carroll, half jokingly but also with the confidence of a guy who has tried out a lot of different things on large and small landscapes and knows the best and worst of what can happen from experience. No wonder rolling up his jeans to help Lowgren push the boat didn’t faze him one bit.

History in the Making If you drive along Highway 37 from Novato to Vallejo, you can almost see the entire 30-year history of wetland restoration in 20 minutes. Each property has its own story, but the benchmark may well be the Petaluma Marsh just north of the first bridge. Here the Petaluma River is bordered by lushly vegetated wetlands, never diked or disturbed. Talk to wetland designers about these and an awestruck look comes into their eyes. Every comparison they make, as they struggle to re-create wetlands thousands of years old in mere decades, is to a marsh like this. Also visible is Carl’s Marsh, named after one of the first people with a bigger vision for the Bay’s wetlands, state biologist Carl Wilcox. In 1994, Wilcox knocked two 50-foot holes in the Petaluma River dike, creating a marsh out of a run-down farm field

View northwest over Pond 3 in the Napa–Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area in 2012 shows the emergence of historic marsh channels and vegetated marsh plain six years after its opening to tidal action.

Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

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Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

here in the 1990s that planners conducted one of the first large-scale experiments in how to speed up marsh plant colonization of subsided hayfields opened to the tides. Philip Williams Associates (now part of the environmental consulting firm ESA-PWA) came up with a design that added both sediment and topography to the compacted farm field and also sought to dampen waves across the big fetch of the acreage. To accomplish this, the conservancy arranged to bring 2.5 million cubic yards of dredged material from the Port of Oakland to the site, a first for advocates of beneficial reuse of this material. Though still a work in progress, Sonoma Baylands is a wellregarded benchmark in the region’s restoration learning curve. Useful debates ensued over how best to connect an inland site to the Bay through an outer marsh, how endangered species respond to restoration actions, and whether to keep tinkering or just be patient and let nature finish the job. And it was the first real kick in the pants for a region reluctant to commit to long-term moni-

practically overnight. There was enough sediment circulating in this corner of the Bay that the marsh gained six feet in vertical elevation within four years. According to Point Blue Conservation Science (formerly PRBO) biologist Julian Wood, Carl’s Marsh now hosts five pairs of clapper rails and 60 pairs of song sparrows. “To be able to create habitat for endangered species out of nothing, that quickly, is amazing,” says Wood. No wonder Carl’s Marsh is a rock star on the restoration stage. For nearby Sonoma Baylands, a 300-acre site owned by the Coastal Conservancy, things didn’t go quite so smoothly. It was

San Pablo Baylands Diked Baylands

Protected (public & private)

Managed Marsh

Storage or Treatment Basin Mudflat Shallow Bay, Estuary Deep Channel

Managed Pond Tidal Marsh (historic & restored) N

One Mile

121 12

Bay Trail

Pond 7a

121

Pond 8

Pond 7

Cartography by Louis Jaffe, data processing by John Kelly, GreenInfo Network

Marsh

Green Island Unit (CADFW)

Petaluma La

reek ma C

ke vil

Sono

y Infineon Raceway

Pond 6a Skaggs Island

Pond 5

Na pa -S onom a M a rshes W ild life Area

Pond 6

(C AD F W )

Pond 4

Pond 2

Cougar Mountain

Pond 2a

Carl’s Marsh Bahia

(SLT) Sonoma Baylands Pe t a l u m

Novato 37

Tubbs Island

Cullinan Ranch S a n Pa blo B ay Nationa l W ild life R efuge ( USFW S)

American Canyon

Pond 3

iv er

Sears Point Restoration Project

101

Pond 1a Pond 1

The Sears Point Restoration Project will restore these hayfields to tidal marsh over the next few years and reestablish connections between the marsh and the uplands of Cougar Mountain (behind).

(USFWS) 80

Vallejo aR ive r

S an Pabl o B ay W i l dl i fe Are a

S a n Pa b l o B a y

Mare Island

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Hamilton Restoration Project (USACE & SCC)

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View of the first stage of the setback levee that will protect heavily used Highway 37 from flooding once Cullinan Ranch is open to the tides. The final levee has a more gradual slope and will provide transitional habitat for marsh species in high tides.

toring and adaptive management. With this project, our naïve love affair with the idea of creating “instant wetlands” and walking away finally ended. Farther along, the road approaches Sears Point, a 2,300-acre landscape owned by the private nonprofit Sonoma Land Trust. Here the ambitious restoration plan endeavors to nurture a range of habitats from sea level at the Bay shoreline to the uplands of Cougar Mountain, among them tidal marsh, seasonal wetlands, riparian corridors, and grasslands. The plan also preserves some agricultural uses and develops more miles of Bay Trail for public enjoyment. With final permits pending, the land trust hopes to start moving dirt by the fall of 2013. The next bridge crosses Sonoma Creek, and here Skaggs Island comes up on the left. This ex-military listening post is so big and so centrally located that engineers say opening it to the tides will dramatically change the entire North Bay’s tidal prism—the volume of water exchanged between low and high tides. Right now there’s no funding to test this assertion on Skaggs, but after years of prodding from advocates and the local congressional delegation, the military transferred 3,300 acres of the property to the wildlife refuge in 2011.

Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

Cullinan does, however, illustrate the one major complicating factor in most North Bay restoration projects: the need to protect a subsiding Highway 37 and the adjacent rail tracks from flooding. On Cullinan, Ducks Unlimited has just completed a huge setback levee—sloping gently up from marsh plain to elevations out of reach of extreme high tides, and doing double duty as both habitat and flood protection. “Protecting an old elevated highway over the high marsh, while also trying to improve public access from the highway to these marsh areas, has been really expensive,” says Lowgren, “but it’s a must.” This “must” also applies to Sears Point to the tune of an estimated $9 million in infrastructure protection out of a total restoration budget of $11 million. On Cullinan, Ducks Unlimited is also following in the footLong Time Coming steps of Sonoma Baylands, and using dredged material to make While Skaggs remains in limbo, the next stop on our drive-by subsided substrate more vegetation-friendly. “We’re struggling tour, Cullinan Ranch, is on a roll . . . finally. It’s taken two decades to make beneficial reuse cost-competitive with ocean or in-Bay to assemble the plans, permits, and partners to restore the 1,500disposal of the material,” says Carroll, who is well aware of new acre ranch. Francesca Demgen recalls the fight in the 1980s by science documenting the increasing deficit in natural sediment Vallejo citizens and regional environmental groups to save the supply circulating in Bay waters. Without this supply, restored ranch from becoming a new suburb called Egret Bay. “People in sites can’t build up naturally to tidal elevations. Vallejo recognized that once city services crossed the bridge over Besides a lot of new dirt, Cullinan has a parking area and the Napa River, all the oat fields and open spaces beyond would kayak launch to reward the public for its years of patience and go,” she says. The community not only stopped the development, investment. And the tides will reclaim baylands humans long ago but also lobbied to get money to buy the property for the public. “reclaimed” from “useless swamps,” but which are now recognized “It wasn’t just ‘Don’t do this in my backyard,’ it was also ‘Here’s as the lungs of any estuary. an alternative for the landowner.’ And now, years later, Cullinan “Estuaries like this don’t exist in very many places, especially is being restored to the tides.” not next to seven million people,” says Lowgren. “We can’t recreate an old-growth redwood forest in 50 or 100 years, but This tranquil spot along Dutchman Slough is the site of a future levee breach (early 2014) we can do that with an estuary. It’s amazing to think that in that will hasten the transformation of the former Cullinan Ranch (on the right) into a tidal my lifetime I’ll be able to come back here and see a mature wetland. tidal marsh, much like it was 150 years ago. It’s really rewarding to be part of the solution.” Lowgren and Carroll are part of a younger generation of “doers” in the local environmental field. They share a fierce intelligence and commitment to the task of undoing the damage of generations past, and they seem to like the challenge. “The Napa salt ponds and the South Bay salt ponds capture our imagination because they’re of a landscape scale,” says another doer, ESA-PWA’s Jeremy Lowe. “They’re places where we have a chance to think about how everything fits together. Working on these landscapes shows us the difference between restoring individual sites and restoring an estuary.” Russ Lowgren, Ducks Unlimited

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Into the Restoration on

Aerial view of Inner Bair Island in April 2012 during the marsh construction process. At the top of the image, to the south, are the Cargill salt ponds that are the site of the proposed Saltworks development.

ack in the day, activists came up with some unique ideas for making their point. Save The Bay members sent envelopes of sand to legislators, urging them to stop the wanton filling of the Bay. A coalition spearheaded by the Audubon Society, working to keep Bair Island’s baylands from becoming more Redwood City sprawl, took out a full-page ad in the West Coast edition of the New York Times to shame the property’s Japanese owner into backing out of development plans. Plans to build out Bair Island (which is actually three islands— Inner, Middle, and Outer—separated by sloughs) have been popping up like a bad dream for local environmentalists since the 1970s. If not a golf course, how about a lagoon community? Or 20,000 homes and a shopping mall? It took a citizen referendum in 1982 and $15 million in federal and private open space funds to purchase Bair Island’s 3,000 acres of tidal marsh and sloughs in 1996 and make it part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. One battle after another, never enough money, never the right politics. . . . Each of the last three refuge managers has given the same words of advice to their replacement: “Just finish Bair Island.” Bair’s current manager, Eric Mruz, can’t help smiling a little at the thought that he may be the one to do it. On his watch, there are finally boots and trucks on the ground doing the restoration: Trucks are bringing in clean dirt to raise up the level of subsided baylands, and two engineering marvels called flow constrictors are operating in the sloughs to improve tidal action across the whole site. With these key tools in place, Mruz’s crew recently made half a dozen breaches in the levees between the islands and the sloughs. Bair Island’s facelift also includes a Save The Bay–run restoration project in which volunteers will plant native marsh species such as gumplant, salt grass, and alkali heath this coming winter.

The part of Bair near the San Carlos Airport will also get a makeover to make it less appealing to big birds that might collide with small planes. Aric Crabb Mruz has also overseen the completion of a sleek steel pedestrian bridge to Inner Bair and reorganized public access to the site. Dog owners will have to let go of a beloved loop trail so that endangered species can thrive undisturbed, but visitors will find a couple of new one-way trails. Kayaking from the nearby aquatic center may be the best way to enjoy the middle and outer islands, which are now the Bair Island Ecological Reserve. If appearances count, Mruz looks the part: big truck, big shoulders, big smile, big U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service patch on his pressed khakis. Asked what his favorite part of the job is, Mruz doesn’t even have to think: “The best part is going to breaches, considering all the work it takes to get to that point—planning, designing, permitting, finding funding, which can take two, three, four years. Then you get into construction, and there’s things that go wrong with that. But then you finally get to actually breach it and let the tides back in, let nature take over.” Bair may be safe, but the bad dream still hasn’t gone away, according to Save The Bay’s director David Lewis. In 2009 developers proposed The Saltworks, with up to 12,000 new homes on 1,400 acres of Cargill salt ponds south of Bair across from the Port of Redwood City. “Bair was once approved for massive development itself, then saved by Redwood City residents, and it’s now

Sarah Craig

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(left) USFWS refuge manager Eric Mruz at the opening of the new bridge and trail providing access to Inner Bair Island. (right) Biologists Howard Shellhammer and Ron Duke at Laumeister Marsh. (far right) View north of three contiguous marshes in East Palo Alto: Faber Tract below, Laumeister in the middle, and Cooley Landing on the far side of the small peninsula.

Breach a Landscape Scale in the South Bay

cherished by city officials and the public. We’d like to see Bair’s success repeated at the Saltworks site,” he says. While the proposal was recently shelved due to community opposition it will likely return in another guise in the future.

The T-Zone When Howard Shellhammer, a tall man with a world of marsh knowledge between his ears, stands next to the levee, it comes up to his shoulder. The levee is standard fare. Funky and made of dirt. Neither wide enough, nor tall enough, nor strong enough to fend off the surge of a storm like Sandy. Or even a smaller surge after a really high tide. “It’s about two feet shorter than me, so it doesn’t take a lot of sea level rise to be up here in this ecotone,” says Shellhammer, as he stands in a weedy patch of marsh in East Palo Alto. The retired professor uses this technical term with ease because it’s the one place the tiny mice he’s been trying to save for so many years can flee if the water gets too high. The term refers to the transition zone—or “T-zone”—between tidal marsh and the uplands. Shellhammer lifts his arms like airplane wings over the sloping flank of the levee. “This is it,” he says, comparing his six-foot arm span to what new research suggests was once a mile-wide swath of seasonal and brackish marshes bordering the South Bay’s tidal marshes and the equally wide swath of T-zone bordering that. “It was so shallow down here, the marsh had a lot of room. But because of the levees, the edge on both sides of these marshes is abbreviated,” he says. So even though we’ve restored thousands of acres of tidal marsh in the last ten years, and there are thousands more on the drawing boards, what we have in comparison to the historical diversity of habitats is what Shellhammer calls “incomplete marsh.” The marshes are incomplete not only on the upland side but also on the bay front,

Ariel Rubissow Okamoto

points out biologist Ron Duke of H.T. Harvey & Associates, who is accompanying us on our tour of three neighboring Palo Alto marshes. Looking over this Faber Tract restoration site today, side-by-side with a never-diked historic marsh called Laumeister and a 2001 mitigation site called Cooley Landing, Duke notes several differences. While most historic marshes would have had their entire edge exchanging waters with the Bay, most marshes today only connect to the Bay through a levee break. Of the three here, Laumeister never had a bayside levee; Faber had a levee break that now primarily flushes the old borrow ditch dug to create the levee in the first place. At Cooley, however, wetland designers lowered the entire outboard levee so high tides could overtop it and bring with them sediment and seeds to hasten the development of the marsh. Also at Cooley, for the first time in local restoration efforts, engineers connected levee breaks directly to remnant historic channels. Jeff Haltiner of the environmental consulting firm ESA-PWA even designed “ditch blocks” at the levee breaks to force the tides past the borrow ditch and into the channels. “It was amazing to watch,” says Haltiner. “Within days the tides were back in the old veins of the marsh. It was like we’d unzipped them.” Despite the early signs of success, the project also quickly showed signs of a problem that plagues newly breached sites around the Bay to this day. Invasive Atlantic cordgrass hybrids soon colonized Cooley, choking off channels and taking over the marsh plain. Despite a highly effective publicly-funded campaign

Judy Irving © Pelican Media

The endangered salt marsh harvest mouse is at home in pickleweed.

H.T. Harvey & Associates

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Looking east over Pond A8 toward Mission Peak and Fremont in August 2010, shortly before the pond was opened to tidal action as part of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. The historic marsh channels are visible underneath the layer of highly saline water.

Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkleley.edu/hiddenecologies

Laumeister is loaded with the mice, as well as with clapper rails. Since no one has messed around with this landscape much, the network of tidal channels here is mature. Thickets of Grindelia, a bushy gumplant with yellow flowers, flourish along the channels and provide high tide refuge for the mice and rails. It takes a decade for this much Grindelia to grow in a breached marsh. The tides are sure to get higher with sea level rise. Speeding up marsh formation may be critical in the decades ahead, as the more mature and vegetated the marsh, the better equipped it is to weather storms and sea level rise. Recent modeling by the U.S. Geological Survey and Point Blue Conservation Science suggests that many Bay marshes could survive sea level rise until it starts accelerating around 2060. Of the 12 marshes examined, Laumeister has the highest starting elevation and so will stay above water longest. The T-zone, meanwhile, could play a big role in marshes adapting to climate change. So wetland scientists are now busy coming up with innovative designs for completing the incomplete marsh before the sea returns it all to the Bay.

Remaking Habitat Step by Step

to eradicate existing colonies of this hybrid, the region has had a difficult time staying on top of new outbreaks. Many new restoration projects don’t have the scope or funding to eliminate seed sources on adjacent properties, or even to undertake active control on their own sites. Whatever the lessons offered by these three marshes, Shellhammer is quick to return to the absent T-zone. “What isn’t here is the rest of the marsh,” he says. “Anywhere you go in the Bay, where water has been moved around and all the tricks of the trade deployed on restoration, there is almost no emphasis given to creating high marsh and ‘edge.’ What’s so critical about it, besides escape cover for the mice at high tides, is that it’s also area where marsh can go when sea level gets higher.” For most of his life, Shellhammer has been trying to make sure salt marsh harvest mice have some place to go at high tide, or even a place to live at all. It was his data that helped put these rodents—only about six inches long from the tip of their noses to the tip of their tails—on the federal endangered species list in 1970. And it is Shellhammer and Duke who get called when someone has a shoreline project and needs to find out how it will impact the mice or other sensitive small mammals. USGS biologist Joel Shinn wades across a slough at New Chicago Marsh near Alviso where he was monitoring nesting success of Forster’s terns, black-necked stilts, and avocets.

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It’s one thing to experiment in the lab or model various scenarios of environmental change on a computer. But it is quite another to test it in the field. Yet that’s exactly what the region is doing on 15,100 acres of former salt ponds acquired thanks to a combination of taxpayer dollars, private funding, and donations from Cargill in 2003. Knitted together under the grand vision of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, these 65 ponds amount to the largest wetland restoration endeavor on the West Coast, encompassing more completed or shovel-ready acres than projects in the Everglades or Chesapeake Bay. Planned and managed by the state Coastal Conservancy, the entire vision is one of experimentation and learning, from how to shift managed ponds into tidal marshes and troubleshoot mercury accumulation in the food web to what to do with the biggest holes in the baylands—some ponds around Alviso that have subsided as much as eight feet below sea level. When the South Bay project started ten years ago, no one could have imagined how fast this landscape would be studied,

Judy Irving © Pelican Media

designed, restored, and enhanced, nor how complicated it might be. Nor how to manage it in the first place. So in the early days of the project, collaboration with the people on the ground at Cargill was essential. And there was one guy in particular agency managers and engineers came to rely on: Pat Mapelli. Mapelli, a second-generation Cargill employee, seems intimate with each and every salt pond. He knows their elevations, their quirks, their flow patterns, their size and shape without help from GPS or a smart phone. “Out there you have all the ambient conditions that change, whether it’s wind, or sun, or rain, and then you have endangered species and breeding seasons to think about. All those things became a factor in what, when, and how you do things,” he says. Mapelli and his crew get called out in all kinds of weather to unclog pipes, stanch flooding, or unstick mired equipment. He’s good at such challenges, so it’s no surprise that officials asked him to oversee interim stewardship of the ponds during their transition to public ownership. While Mapelli was keeping an eye on things on the ground, the conservancy’s team was putting its new South Bay vision together,

doing the science research to back it up, and then shepherding everything through an unprecedented process of public review and input. Plan and permit approvals trickled in between 2006 and 2009, and by 2013, the project’s first major phase of pond conversions had been completed—3,700 acres at Hayward’s Eden Landing, Redwood City’s Ravenswood, and around Alviso. “We’ve taken a patchwork of lands with multiple owners and reinvented an area of historic baylands the size of Manhattan,” says project director John Bourgeois. “We did it not only for the ecosystem and endangered species, but also to provide Silicon Valley with recreation, flood management, and good water quality.” Ten years into the 50-year timeline to (continued on page 38)

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Cargill Salt HQ

Cartography by Louis Jaffe, data processing by John Kelly, GreenInfo Network, May 2013. After May, Salomon, and Tseng, SFEI, 2006, and SBSPRP, 2011.

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USGS biologist takes measurements of a Forster’s tern chick at Pond A16 as part of ongoing efforts to track the effectiveness of restoration efforts undertaken by the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.

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Cris Benton, arch.ced.berkleley.edu/hiddenecologies

(South Bay, continued from page 37)

completion, the project managers have experimented a lot with how best to achieve landscape-level health and sustainability. Rather than trying to create instant salt marsh, they set up habitat evolution stages, so that shorebirds utilizing the managed pond habitat wouldn’t be suddenly displaced. The experiment also embraces a shift in perspective since the first goal of securing 100,000 acres of tidal marsh baywide was set. Planners now recognize that the system is so altered it can’t all go back to tidal marsh, and that managed ponds have important flood control and wildlife values. “You can’t restore an area this size in one fell swoop; it will take half a century of adaptive management,” says Bourgeois. “The surprise has been how quickly wildlife responded to changes in the marsh. The other day we saw a sea lion catch a striper not far from downtown San Jose.” The Coastal Conservancy now has to find the money for the next phase of work, which includes creation of large T-zone areas. At the moment, there is no dedicated funding source, but a recent push to beef up flood planning around San Jose has put the spotlight on these new wetlands. They’re pretty much all that stands between the rising seas and San Jose’s water pollution control plant, not to mention the bayshore headquarters of more than a dozen Silicon Valley giants. Bourgeois sees each new challenge as a natural evolution in

(baylands reborn, continued from page 25)

followed individual song sparrows in a tidal marsh, so I knew all their stories—that this one had mated with that one, and then all their kids died, and then she went off with another guy. They have their dramas just like we do,” says Letitia Grenier, a biologist who grew up hiking at her local lagoon near San Diego. I’ve asked people like Grenier how they describe their work at cocktail parties. Grenier says buzzwords like “conservation biology” draw blanks. What works is the basics: “When I say I’m trying to save the Bay and make sure birds are still around for their kids to see, then they hear it.” Birds are definitely a draw, and the Bay is a draw for them too. Shorebirds and waterfowl come by the millions to take advantage of the rich and diverse habitats along its shores, making it a major stopover on the Pacific Flyway. “Some people think wetlands are underwhelming, as compared to big mountains, but there’s an ecological bounty and resilience to wetlands that intrigues us,” says Francesca Demgen, a wetlands engineer for URS Corporation. More recently, as cocktail conversations touch on melting polar ice caps, habitat advocates have started pointing out that wetlands are prettier to look at than 12-foot-high flood control levees. Faced with the surge of water that laid waste to Staten Island during Sandy or the French Quarter during Katrina, which would you choose? “People don’t get it,” says Grenier. “They see ‘Salt Pond Restored’ headlines but don’t realize what a hard fight it is, how we’re working on thin margins without knowing if we’ll win the battle. They don’t realize we’re in the midst of choosing between Blade Runner and the almost-paradise of today’s Bay Area for our

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Restoration of Pond SF2, part of the Ravenswood complex, included the construction of habitat islands that allow shorebirds to nest safe from landbased predators such as foxes and raccoons.

the way we care for the Bay: “First we learned not to put garbage and sewage in it, then how to preserve it, and then various ways to restore a salt pond to tidal marsh or shorebird habitat. Now we’re learning how to look at the landscape as a whole, and to connect up larger chunks. And we’re tackling a new challenge, more flooding and sea level rise. The rules change on you every step of the way, but luckily we’re standing on the shoulders of decades of experience in how to adapt.”

future. They figure this will always be here for them and their kids. But it’s not guaranteed.” With the America’s Cup in town this summer and the new Bay Bridge opening up sooner or later, there’s a potential new audience for this message. Grenier and the three generations of what she calls “environmental ninjas” who came before her want to tell this audience that the Bay wouldn’t be this beautiful, this clean, this wonderful to sail on or live next to if it weren’t for its wetlands. Wetlands filter out the Bay’s pollutants, provide nursery grounds for baby crabs and fish, process harmful nitrogen from our fertilizers and sewage, and slow and soften the waves rolling in and gushes of water running off after a big storm. And we wouldn’t have any of the wetlands we have now if we hadn’t used our tax dollars to buy them back, blast holes in their dikes, and restore their wet look. And the truth is, we really do want to see ducks beating their wings along the Bay shoreline while we’re stuck in traffic and tiny sandpipers probing the mudflats as we ride our bikes along the Bay Trail. Though she’s grown up now, my daughter still calls wetlands “waterlands.” It’s a term that brings back good memories. It’s a piece of her awareness of the environment around her. It conjures textures and sensations and wide open spaces you can’t get in HDTV. “It’s grounding to stand in a flat marsh and see both Mount Diablo and Mount Tam in the distance,” says Demgen. “It’s really cool when the tide goes out and you’re in a channel and the rushes are towering overhead. It’s like being in a maze. You can’t see a thing, but you can hear the birds.”

Jennifer Fraser, jenniferfraser.zenfolio.com

(lines in the mud, continued from page 29)

ESA-PWA, based on graphic by Hargreaves Associates for the City of San Jose

The impact of climate change on the Bay’s natural systems will be profound. Storms will be more intense and more frequent; droughts could be longer and hotter; the timing of snowmelt and runoff into the estuary will change too. “There’s big uncertainty about our end points,” says Grenier, who in the spring of 2013 was coordinating the ambitious effort to update the 1999 Goals, largely to adjust for the rising sea levels. The climate change curveball means the Goals’ focus needs to shift to a dynamic, rather than static, end product. In pressing the “reset” button on the Goals, Grenier and the rest of her update team are concentrating on building adaptability. For example, Goals teams are talking about getting freshwater back into the marsh, to better re-create the natural gradient from land to sea and from fresh to brackish to salty marshes. This more complex marsh not only builds up elevation faster, but also sequesters more carbon. And they’re promoting using wetlands and transitional zones, rather than conventional levees, to buffer developed areas from waves and storm surges. Selling the idea to local planning groups, experts are quick to invoke the memory of New Orleans, and to suggest that wetlands do a much better job of protecting shorelines and regional infrastructure than big levees can. “We switched gears on wetland restoration at a critical time,” says Jeremy Lowe. “The threat of more frequent flooding brought the value of these public lands more to the fore. Instead of throwing up our hands or building big structures to keep the Bay out, we’re in a good place to allow the estuary to evolve naturally and provide protection for our developed areas.”

Schematic drawing of a habitat-friendly “horizontal levee,” designed to incorporate a range of habitats from shallow bay to high marsh to upland on the outboard side, to allow for march transgression with sea level rise. A 2013 report from The Bay Institute estimates that such “soft” levees will cost half as much as traditional “vertical, hard” levees and yet offer greater flood protection from future severe storms, given the ability of marsh vegetation to dampen storm surges.

A great egret stands in the freshwater marsh at Coyote Hills Regional Park at sunset.

Show Me the Money After Sandy, even Manhattan seemed to be reconsidering the sharp edge between skyscrapers and the rivers around the island. A New York Times illustration showed a wetland buffer for the Big Apple that might have prevented flooded subways, streets, and homes. But it’s probably too late for Manhattan to go there. Congress appropriated $60 billion for damage from Sandy. “Sixty billion, for one storm?” says Marc Holmes, shaking his head. He and others at work in San Francisco Bay have better ideas about how to spend money, and they think they have a pretty good investment portfolio. “You spend one billion now, and you save tens of billions in future damages,” Holmes says. “This is not alarmist, sky-is-falling kind of stuff. We’re seeing the impacts of climate change all over the place. We need to accelerate our tidal marsh restoration strategy because it’s a proven sea level rise adaptation strategy.” Holmes points out how expensive it would be to throw up seawalls around shoreline highways, airports, and downtowns. A 2013 report from The Bay Institute finds that soft-shored wetlands, combined with habitat-friendly earthen levees, cost about half as much ($6 million versus $12 million per mile) as a conventional flood control levee hardened with riprap and they provide equal or greater buffers. What’s really needed on the federal level is for the San Francisco Estuary to get funding on par with the East Coast’s biggest estuary, Chesapeake Bay. The latter receives $50 million or more a year (continued on page 40) j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 3

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from the Environmental Protection Agency to do exactly the kinds of things already under way here, while the Bay Area gets only $5 million a year. Holmes has been trying to light a fire under local public officials to lean on Congress to provide more money. Meanwhile, advocates led by Save The Bay succeeded in getting a San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority approved by the state legislature. The authority currently has no bank account, but that could change as plans take shape for a regional ballot measure to secure a reliable source of funding for its A young girl plants Grindelia seedlings along San Francisquito Creek with Save The Bay.

“Baylands Reborn: Restoration and Renewal on San Francisco Bay” is a publication of Bay Nature,

a quarterly magazine dedicated to exploring the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area, and was published in the July–September 2013 issue of the magazine. Bay Nature is a project of the Berkeley-based nonprofit Bay Nature Institute, which also sponsors BayNature.org, an online gateway to Bay Area nature. You can purchase subscriptions to Bay Nature and obtain additional copies of “Baylands Reborn” at baynature.org/store or by calling (888)422-9628. Editor: David Loeb Cartography: Louis Jaffé, GreenInfo Network (Data Processing: John Kelly) Design: David Bullen San Francisco-based freelance writer Ariel Rubissow Okamoto has covered California water issues and ecosystem restoration for over 25 years. She is currently the managing editor of ESTUARY News magazine. She is also a co-author, with Kathleen Wong, of Natural History of San Francisco Bay (University of California Press, 2011), for which they received the 2013 Harold Gilliam Award for excellence in environmental reporting. Thanks: The following people provided invaluable advice and assistance in the production of “Baylands Reborn”: John Bourgeois, Beth Huning, Amy Hutzel, Russell Lowgren, Sue Rosenthal, and Mary Selkirk.

G o S e e t h e B ay f o r Yo u r s e l f ! Thanks to the efforts of agencies and organizations such as the San Francisco Bay Trail, East Bay Regional Park District, Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, and various local jurisdictions, there are many opportunities for public access to the San Francisco Bay shoreline, including places where you can view marshes that have been restored or are in the process of being restored. For a listing of places where you can see our Baylands being reborn, go to baynature.org/baylandsaccess. For more information on Bay Area wetlands, including audio tours of North and South Bay wetlands, visit the website of the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture, yourwetlands.org. Find updated maps and guides for every segment of the San Francisco Bay Trail at baytrail.org.

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(Big Picture, continued from page 39)

mission—restoring wetland habitat in San Francisco Bay. Now that the Bay region has fought so effectively for softer shores and advanced so far along the restoration learning curve, it would be an epic miscalculation to retreat from the front lines, and our red line, because we couldn’t find the money, especially when we consider how much is at stake for our infrastructure, ecological well-being, and beloved Bay Area lifestyle. “It’s a difficult political lift in the current economic climate,” says Holmes. “But it’s inexpensive money at this point, and it’s only going to get more expensive, and pretty soon it’s going to be too expensive. We all need to wake up and smell the salt water.”

Funding for “Baylands Reborn” was provided by the following sponsors: Cargill is an international producer and marketer of food, agricultural, financial, and industrial products and services. Founded in 1865, the privately held company employs 142,000 people in 65 countries and produces solar sea salt in the San Francisco Bay Area. (cargill.com) The Coastal Conservancy is a California state agency that protects and restores the natural environment, invests in communities, and helps people get to and enjoy the coast of California and natural lands around San Francisco Bay. (scc.ca.gov) The Friends of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge are dedicated to protecting and preserving our amazing San Pablo Baylands, which provide habitat for the endangered California Clapper Rail and Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse and serve as a wetland sponge, soaking up sea level rise. (pickleweed.org) The San Francisco Bay Wildlife Society is a notfor-profit cooperating association that supports the education and research activities of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and promotes public awareness and appreciation of the San Francisco Bay and its natural history, helping to conserve and preserve Baylands as essential wildlife habitat. (sfbws.com) The San Francisco Estuary Partnership brings together resource agencies, nonprofits, citizens, and scientists committed to the long-term health and preservation of the San Francisco Bay estuary. The Partnership manages or oversees more than 50 projects that protect, restore, and enhance water quality and habitat in the estuary. (sfestuary.org) The Wildlife Conservation Board was created by the state legislature to authorize and allocate funds for the purchase of lands and waters suitable for public recreation; for the preservation, protection, and restoration of wildlife and aquatic habitats; and for the construction of nature-based recreational facilities. (wcb.ca.gov)

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iniature

O n e

C u b i c

F o o t

he project started with a question: How much life can

Then, in 2011, supported by the David Brower Center

be found in a small piece of the world, in just one cubic

in Berkeley and the For-Site Foundation in San Francisco,

foot, over the course of a day? If you examined and photo-

I decided to add a sixth habitat. I wanted to “localize” my

graphed the complex life it held, what would that life look

experience, to find a habitat that was close to home, was

like? I wanted to photograph, as precisely and faithfully as

part of my neighborhood. Early on in the habitat quest, one

possible, every creature I found in that cube. And I wanted

consultant had suggested an open-water habitat, and since I

very diverse habitats, so I consulted with biologists and bota-

live in San Francisco, the Bay seemed ideal. The cube would

nists and finally decided on five: a coral reef, a freshwater

go under the Golden Gate Bridge, where the confluence of

river, forest leaf litter, a cloud forest canopy, and shrubland.

ocean currents and terrestrial run-off creates a rich marine

The photographic work, generously supported by National

stew. Now, I can’t drive across the bridge without recalling

Geographic magazine, occupied me from Octdober 2007 to

what the cube revealed.

September 2008.

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David Liittschwager, Photographer

marvels

o f

S a n

photography by David Liittschwager text by August Kleinzahler

F r a n c i s c o

B a y

(above) The green cube represents a one-cubic-foot sample from which the organisms featured here were taken. Anand Varma aboard the Argo handles a fine mesh plankton net. (right) A drop of water with a few of the approximately 9,000 creatures that occupy a cubic foot of water below the Golden Gate Bridge at any one moment.

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clockwise from left: skeleton shrimp, Dungeness crab larva, fish larva

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top to bottom: snail larva, hydrozoan jellyfish (Polyorchis penicillin), porcelain crab larva

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couple of turkey vultures, wings unfurled like spinnakers, dry and groom themselves in the late morning sun atop Yellow Bluff. Beyond them the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge vibrates with automobile traffic: sedans, hatchbacks, El Caminos, Priuses, Cabriolets, blue, red, white, gray, black, countless variations thereof—forty million a year, nowadays, around two billion total since the bridge went up in April 1937. On the day before the summer solstice, the weather unseasonably warm and still, the 28-foot ketch Argo makes its way out of Sausalito’s Pelican Harbor and into the channel. It’s quiet out there. That automotive buzz on the bridge is gone here. We’re caught up in other elements, wind and water, and it’s the sails and tiller that preside—and, of course, Captain Windrow, who, though vigilant, seems none too concerned, especially on a sweet morning like this. It’s not always sweet out here, as the writer Jack London knew well. He’d been an oyster pirate on the Bay in his early years, and later chased the same pirates as part of the state’s fish patrol. “San Francisco Bay is so large,” he wrote, “that often its storms are more disastrous to ocean-going craft than is the ocean itself in its violent moments.” The Bay is very large indeed: With a surface area of some 400 square miles and two trillion gallons of volume, it is the biggest estuary in the western Americas, draining over 40 percent of the land area of California. On each day’s tide more than seven times the amount of water flows through the Golden Gate than flows out of the Mississippi watershed. And instead of opening delta-like to the sea like the Chesapeake and other great estuaries, it is funneled through a narrow, mile-wide passage at the Golden Gate, where it meets the ocean. “It really blows on San Francisco Bay,” London wrote in

1912. It starts blowing now as we head out under the bridge on the tail end of a big ebb and throw the nets out just off Kirby Cove, near the north tower of the bridge. The nets are 330-micron mesh for the zooplankton, 80-micron for the phytoplankton. We pull up a sample, brown-colored, dense with life. Here, at the eastern edge of the northern Pacific, is one of the richest, if not the richest, near-shore habitats on the planet: 550,000 creatures in the sample, 2.6 billion creatures passing through one cubic foot over the course of 24 hours . . . just a tad busier than the Golden Gate Bridge over the course of 74 years. Saltwater mites, barnacle and worm larvae, diatoms, porcelain crab larvae, tiny jellyfish, pteropod eggs, possum shrimp, marine gastropods, hydrozoas, snails, amphipods, gyroscope-shaped whatnots. There are some 2,500 stars visible at any given time in the Milky Way, and about 200 to 400 million that we can’t see. A mariner like Captain Windrow might not know the particular numbers, but he’d have a ballpark notion. He could, no doubt, steer by those stars if he chose to, but it’s my guess he likes to just kick back and stare at them for no good reason now and again. And because he’s no stranger to these phyto- and zooplankton junkets, it probably doesn’t elude him that all that blinking and whatnot happening above is happening underneath his hull as well, in its own fashion. I suspect it’s a great comfort to the captain knowing of so much going on around him, above and below, and none of it having anything to do with him. It’s all a bit much to try to digest, the wiggling, living sutra of a drop of the Bay. Just about one drop of water from out there by Kirby Cove would seem enough to give most anyone pause, a rather long pause. August Kleinzahler

Photos and text selections adapted from A World in One Cubic Foot: Portraits of Biodiversity, by David Liittschwager, The University of Chicago Press, 2012. San Francisco-based photographer David Liittschwager explores the intersection of nature, conservation, and fine art in ecosystems around the world. Currently a contributing photographer in National Geographic, David’s work has appeared in numerous galleries and museums, including the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. August Kleinzahler is a poet who has published ten books of poetry, including Sleeping It Off In Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008. He lives in San Francisco.

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Demystifying Mist: Fog and the Future of Redwoods

by Joan Hamilton

climate Change: Dispatches from the Home Front

“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.

og means survival for many Bay Area plants and animals. What will happen to this life-giving airborne moisture in an era of global warming? The Grove of Old Trees sits on a hill in Sonoma County in full view of the ocean. “This is where I come to chase the fog,” says Emily Burns. But on this day in March, her prey is elusive. Buttercups gleam in the sunshine beside a fortress of redwoods scraping an azure sky.

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Burns has been studying this 28-acre remnant old-growth forest for almost a decade — especially the plants’ relationship with the area’s bounteous, bone-chilling fog. She points out a vigorous sword fern — the subject of her current research — and introduces me to some redwoods over 200 feet tall. A young biologist, Burns is a pioneer in the field of fog. She has risen before dawn, climbed to the tops of these trees, and measured the effects of fog on their uppermost shoots. In 2009 she published a landmark paper describing how plants in the Grove of Old Trees use fog — part of a growing body of evidence demonstrating fog’s central role in sustaining California’s coastal ecosystems. These days, Burns is on a broader quest. As head of conservation planning at the San Francisco–based nonprofit Save the Redwoods League, she’s trying to figure out what the climatechanged future may hold for redwood forests. And fog is a major

wild card: Some theories suggest more fog is likely, others less. So Burns and a small group of other biologists are crossing the traditional borders of their field — working with physicists, hydrologists, and meteorologists — to demystify the mists. The job involves everything from measuring fern fronds to teasing out the atomic composition of redwood leaves in a lab. Some of the most important work is centered right here, among the ancient redwoods of the California coast.

Joan Hamilton

Jim Campbell-Spickler

The Bay Area’s climate is like few others in the world, especially in summer: We can be shivering at 50 degrees along the coast and Bay shore, but then drive a few miles inland and be sweating at over 100. If we don’t like the cold and Fog forms when a damp, we can go east — or up. Or stay where we warm air mass comes are and wait until noon. in contact with the Fog provides us with natural air-conditioning, cold waters of the lower energy bills, and more diverse vegetation Pacific Ocean. Here fog pours in from the and wildlife than we should expect in a place that ocean on a summer receives an average of only 20-some inches of rain evening to cover the a year. In summer, coast redwoods can get more San Mateo coast south than half of their moisture from fog. Scientists of Half Moon Bay. once assumed the trees had to soak up fog’s drippings from the soil. But then, in 1998, UC Berkeley biologist Todd Dawson showed that they could also absorb moisture through their leaves. Burns, a student of Dawson’s, built on that knowledge, showing that eight other plants in the forest, including sword ferns, huckleberries, and tanoaks, were capable of “foliar uptake” too. Fog can be surprisingly wet. Three years ago, physicist Daniel Fernandez of California State University, Monterey Bay, began measuring its water content. His record haul from a onesquare-meter fog collector: 39 liters, or nearly 10 gallons, in a single day.

How much fog we have in any given year is determined by factors still poorly understood. The difference between inland temperatures and temperatures along the coast plays a part. But there are other factors, too, including atmospheric shifts of the jet stream and air pressure out at sea, as well as an ocean cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, in which water temperatures in the eastern and western Pacific seesaw between colder and warmer every 20 or 30 years. Add human-caused climate change, and even bold scientists grow cautious. “I don’t predict the future, only the past,” jokes researcher Jim Johnstone of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington. “That’s fairly safe.” In 2010 Johnstone coauthored a paper on this topic published by the National Academy of Sciences. Basing his findings on historic temperature data and measurements of fog ceiling heights from airports along the California coast, he concluded that fog had decreased by 33 percent over the past 100 years. “Coast redwood may be increasingly drought-stressed under a summer climate of reduced fog frequency and greater evaporative demand,” the paper concluded. Redwoods in trouble? That got land managers and conservationists’ attention. But it wasn’t the whole story. The previous year, a team led by San Jose State meteorology professor Robert Bornstein published a paper in the Journal of Climate. Basing his findings on records of air temperatures in Los Angeles and San

Coastal fog is formed by a complex interaction of land, ocean, and atmosphere. But the basics are as simple as a glass of iced tea. Just as moisture in the air condenses when it comes in contact with the cold glass, fog forms when a warm air mass comes in contact with cold ocean water. On a hot day in the Central Valley, the fog moves inland, pushed by the prevailing winds and pulled by the rising warm air in the valley. It’s an elegantly timed hydration system. In a daily, or “diurnal,” cycle fog often provides moisture at night and burns off during the day, when plants need sun for photosynthesis. Over the course of a year, fog is (conveniently) most abundant during our nearly rainless summers.

Emily Burns (above left) has been studying the relationship of fog and redwood forests for nearly ten years. That has taken her up into the canopy of redwood trees in Humboldt County (above) and Sonoma County (left), where she stopped to look out over a fog bank that soon enveloped her perch here at the Emily Burns

Grove of Old Trees.

Brad Perks

So how much have fog levels varied in the past? In 1998, UC Berkeley’s Dawson used analysis of isotopes — atoms of a particular element, such as carbon, with differing numbers of neutrons — to show that redwoods were absorbing fog directly through their leaves. His latest work uses isotope analysis to dig deeper, taking advantage of redwoods’ long lives. “Redwoods live 2,000 years or more,” says Dawson. “We can analyze their tree rings to go way, way back in time.” This is not your father’s tree-ring analysis, however, which simply showed how much a tree had grown each year. “Locked into the tree’s cellulose molecules are carbon and oxygen atoms,” Dawson says. By examining the mix of carbon and oxygen isotopes in the cellulose of a given tree ring, Dawson can distin-

Alicia Torregrosa of USGS and the Pacific Coastal Fog Team collects data from the fog monitor set up at Pepperwood Preserve near Santa Rosa.

guish rain from fog and a hot year from a cool one. “If rain falls, the oxygen isotopes that are incorporated into the tree rings are different from the oxygen isotopes from fog water,” Dawson says. “So I can tell you whether the tree built that ring using water dominated by summer fog or winter rainfall. Taking that information and combining it with the isotope information we get from carbon, I can tell you whether it was a warm year or a cool year — and how trees responded to that combination of water and temperature.” “We’re trying to look back before the Industrial Revolution, when we started putting CO2 into our atmosphere and changing the temperature,” Dawson says. “Are there natural cycles between foggy and less foggy years? Or have some of those changes in fog been linked to recent, human-induced climate events? The tree rings will tell us.” Another way to understand what’s happening to forests and fog is to start measuring here and now. Working with Dawson and other scientists at UC Berkeley and Humboldt State University, Save the Redwoods League began collecting comprehensive data on forest health in 2009. Through its Redwoods and Climate Change Initiative, the league has established study plots in 11 redwood forests along the coast and five giant sequoia forests in the Sierra Nevada. They’re mapping every plant in these one-hectare plots, and noting the size, age, and growth of the largest redwoods and sequoias. They’ll re-measure and remap each year, for as long as they can keep the effort going. So far, they’ve found no drought-induced mortality or declines in growth within the 450 mile-long native range of coast redwoods. The league has also confirmed these forests’ vital role in climate stabilization. With their expansive foliage and great girth, these old growth trees are actually growing faster — that is, adding more biomass — than younger ones, and hence storing more carbon. According to Burns, “These trees are pulling a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. I think the data is going to show that North Coast redwood forests [which contain the largest trees] are holding more carbon than any other forests on the planet.” The initiative will eventually help shape the league’s response to global warming. “These are the best old-growth forests we have,” Burns says. “We want to understand if there are climate Fog pours in over the East Bay hills at Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley at dusk.

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David Andersen, Pepperwood Preserve, pepperwoodpreserve.org

Francisco, Bornstein argued that “summer daytime temperatures on the coast have been cooling since 1970,” which suggests more fog rather than less. The likely reason? Global warming is adding energy to the diurnal cycle. Hotter inland temperatures are drawing in more fog to coastal areas. Before his paper was published, Johnstone pored over Bornstein’s numbers and found that “the calculations were perfectly good.” Johnstone decided that their differing conclusions stemmed from sampling in different places and looking at different time periods. “It matters a lot when you start looking for a trend,” Johnstone says. Recent weather data seems to bolster Bornstein’s case. Even Johnstone admits that “the coastal ocean has cooled and fog frequency has been considerably above normal, particularly in the past three summers.” But he points to evidence suggesting that those changes are more likely due to “natural variation,” age-old cycles in and over the Pacific, than to recent warming in inland areas. “Fog does not fit neatly into a greenhouse warming story,” he says.

Beyond the redwoods, fog is a powerful influence on other landscapes along the California coast. When U.S. Geological Survey landscape ecologist Alicia Torregrosa heard about a possible decline in fog, she first thought about salmon. Flows in the salmon creeks she was studying just north of San Francisco are sometimes very low in the summer. With less fog, those creeks might heat up more quickly, creating, she says, “a double whammy” for fish. (right) Shafts of sunlight slice through the fog and limbs of the redwood forest at Purisima Creek Redwood Open Space Preserve on the Peninsula. (below) Sword ferns grow over the base of a

Frank S. Balthis

downed redwood at Butano State Park.

Colleagues suggested other concerns. What about maritime chaparral, with its diverse array of fog-dependent plants found nowhere else on the planet? What about fog-fed dune plants and the amphibians adapted to life along the coast? What about the wine industry? What about human health and energy consumption? There were countless reasons to try to understand what was happening to fog. At first Torregrosa tried to figure it out on her own. “Using existing satellite data I thought I could get nice views over time,” she says. Soon, however, she was climbing “a mountain of atmospheric science research” designed to predict the weather and avoid plane crashes. “There was a lot of coarse data, but nothing biologically relevant,” she says.

So Torregrosa decided to build a fog brain trust. In April 2012, she hosted 36 atmospheric and natural scientists at the inaugural meeting of the Pacific Coastal Fog Team. The event gave scientists studying ocean currents and atmospheric pressure a chance to talk with scientists studying salamanders and manzanitas. There were revelations on both sides. “The wealth of information we found among atmospheric scientists was mindboggling,” Torregrosa says. “And a lot of them didn’t realize there was such an ecological need for their information.” Since that first meeting, the Fog Team has been knitting together observations from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the tops of the tallest redwoods. Before the end of the year, they hope to produce data for resource managers facing decisions about what lands to buy, what lands to restore, and how to minimize damage in an era of climate change. “A better understanding of fog patterns will give them a better understanding of where fog-reliant plants can live,” she says. Dawson of UC Berkeley is among the team’s biologists. “If we really want to see how the coastal climate is changing and how coastal fog is changing, we need to be making lots of measurements in lots of places,” he says. “No single person can do that. We need a consortium of people with like interests.” Fortunately, the mighty redwoods don’t appear to be fazed by climate change yet. Looking up at a tree as tall as a 20-story building, Save the Redwoods League’s Burns points to its silvery tips. “Those are the healthy redwood shoots pushing upwards,” she says. “That’s only possible if there’s enough water.” Such observations are reassuring. But we’re still at the beginning of the story about climate change and fog. We know fog so far has buffered the California coast from the big heat waves and droughts suffered by inland areas. But as to its future in a climate-changed world, “fog is so dynamic and ephemeral,” Burns says. “We don’t yet have the data to get a handle on the whole phenomenon.” Karl Gohl

change impacts. And if we see an area that’s a refuge from climate change, we are going to ramp up efforts to protect it.” The search for refugia does not mean turning away from efforts to preserve drier, more southerly forests, such as those along the Big Sur coast, however. “We don’t know the magnitude or even the direction of the climate changes we’re facing,” Burns says. “So we’re not planning on abandoning any forest land. That would be a big mistake.”

Joan Hamilton is a Berkeley-based freelance writer who focuses on nature and conservation issues. She also produces downloadable audio guides to the outdoors (audiblemountdiablo.com). Funding for “Dispatches From the Home Front” has been provided by the State Coastal Conservancy, The Nature Conservancy, and Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

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First Person Huey Johnson Takes the Long Road Interview by David Kupfer Huey Johnson began his career 50 years ago as the Nature Conservancy’s first employee west of the Mississippi River. As TNC’s western regional director, he established more than 50 land conservation initiatives before launching the Trust For Public Land ( TPL) in 1972. As president of the TPL, he helped preserve more than 100,000 square miles of undeveloped land, including many areas near urban centers. From 1978 to 1982 he served as Secretary of Resources, the state’s top environmental official, under Governor Jerry Brown. He established water and energy conservation programs for cities and industries, helped double salmon numbers off the coast, and strengthened forestry policy. He led one effort that preserved 1,200 miles of rivers and another that preserved several million acres of wilderness in the West. In 1983, Johnson founded the Resource Renewal Institute ( RRI.org), which advocates on behalf of “green plans”— long-term, comprehensive strategies for attaining environmental sustainability. In his spare time, he has founded the Grand Canyon Trust, the Environmental Liaison Center in Nairobi, Defense of Place, and the Aldo Leopold Society. Johnson lives in Mill Valley. DK: What was your relationship to nature as a child? HJ: I was lucky to have parents who cared a lot about the environment and who were determined to give me experiences important to that. We lived in a safe community in rural Michigan and as little kids we would go backpacking around Battle Creek River, a tributary of the Kalamazoo. My parents encouraged us to go out by ourselves and though it wasn’t wilderness, when I was seven years old, we’d often fish and camp. My parents trusted us, and that experience certainly impacted both my sense of independence and love of nature. DK: You worked for Union Carbide in the 1950s. How did you switch from that into doing environmental work? HJ: I was dead broke out of college and was offered a fine job at Union Carbide in Chicago. I was in a great position as a technical salesperson and was quite successful. One day I was in New York working out of the Union Carbide office there and after work, having a drink, could not hold my hand steady. I realized I hadn’t been in nature for weeks if not months, and one of my bosses who I really liked had just killed himself. In that moment, I began to question the whole thing. I submitted my resignation. b ay n at u r e

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With a round-the-world plane ticket in my pocket, I walked past hundreds of my colleagues at their desks at the New York office for my final meeting with the big boss, one of the top executives of Union Carbide. He demanded to know why I wanted to quit, since I had a great future with the company. I told him. He had his back to me and finally he turned around, held out his hand, and said, “You lucky bastard!” He patted me on the back while telling me he hoped I’d do well. He essentially conceded that I was right and I think he was jealous. DK: What did you learn from your world travels? HJ: Visiting many ancient places around the world taught me so much about the result of human civilization and the repeated ruin of human history through resource depletion and mismanagement. It influenced me greatly, in particular walking through and learning from the sites of struggles of ancient civilizations, right up to modern examples like the fall of Singapore in World War II, where the Japanese simply turned off the water main coming from Malaysia. No shots were needed to win that one. DK: When did you first come to the Bay Area? HJ: When I worked for Union Carbide back in the 1950s, they made the mistake

of sending me to San Francisco for a two-week seminar. They put me up at the Fairmont and gave me an unlimited expense account. One day I took the cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf and went salmon fishing the next day. It wasn’t long before I thought, why would anyone think to live anywhere else? DK: How did you first get involved with the environmental movement? HJ: I wanted to come back to the Bay Area but couldn’t find an environmental job, so I did these menial jobs: First, I was a janitor for the California Department of Fish and Game. I wanted to make a difference and was soon promoted to being a seasonal biologist. My last assignment was up in Lake Tahoe. One day at lunch I was told that it looked like the state was going to wipe out a large portion of Fish and Game’s budget and the program I was working for would end. After hearing that I said, “Let’s go to Sacramento to work it out,” but was told no, I couldn’t do that as I was not a “professional.” The next morning I saw a flock of geese flying north and thought that I didn’t want to make a career in a field where politicians could cut budgets and end good work. That day I resigned from Fish and Game, hitchhiked from Tahoe to the Reno airport, and flew north with the geese to Alaska. DK: What did you do in Alaska? HJ: I worked as a biologist for Alaska state Fish and Game. My first project was tagging 12,000 salmon and hiking, looking for spawning salmon on Admiralty and Chichagof Islands in the Tongass National Forest, in southeastern Alaska, the largest national forest in the United States. It has some of the greatest large brown bear populations in the world. I saw them every day, and you really had to communicate with them to get around them, learn about their moods and make a noise to let them know you’re not a bear. If you didn’t, you could be punished! DK: What did you do after your stint in Alaska? HJ: I went to graduate school: a masters

my work for the Nature Conservancy, I was dying to meet him. My big chance was at a cocktail party soon after I arrived. He asked me, “What do you do?” I told him I was with the Nature Conservancy, and he asked, “What’s that?” When I told him, he said, “If any land needs to be saved, the Sierra Club will save it!” Then he turned around and walked out! But we ended up becoming good friends. Caroline Livermore, founder of the Marin Conservation League, was something else, a wonderful and tough early environmental voice. We were able to

DK: What are your favorite nature spots in the Bay Area? HJ: I’ve had some very memorable times on a boat at sea out the Golden Gate, and I’ve done a lot of hiking in Marin on various trails; one of my favorites is the Dipsea Trail from Mill Valley to Stinson. I used to run the Dipsea Race. There are a lot of bluebird nests along that route. DK: Who were your mentors in the early days of your environmental career? HJ: Dave Brower was an important mentor in my life, and after I came out to begin

save the St. Hilary’s Church property in Tiburon because someone had found rare endangered wildflowers, the Tiburon black jewel flower and the Tiburon Indian paintbrush, under the front porch! DK: What changes, positive and negative, have you seen in the local environmental movement? HJ: Our popularity has certainly increased: We environmentalists have won enough to be socially respectable. People now happily pick up the green flag and adopt environmental values. But issues used to be much simpler: We used to be able to focus on a redwood tree or

forest, get people fired up and create a national park. Today there is far greater complexity to issues: air pollution and chemicals in the environment, loss of biotic diversity and climate change, threats to the ocean and loss of topsoil, things like economic issues and population pressures. Those things require far more explanation, education, and understanding for leaders to lead and to get the public behind individual initiatives. DK: Why do you think eco-consciousness and institutions have taken root and flourished here? HJ: The Bay Area is the destination for a lot of frustrated people who grew up somewhere else where things were polluted and falling apart environmentally. People who live here care enough to take care of the place, and there are many kindred souls here who came from somewhere that was damaged. You can feel the sense of environmental kinship. DK: What are you up to now? HJ: I’m working on projects that can have a large impact, can really make a difference. For instance, the Forage Fish and Rice project, which could be the start of a new industry to grow small fish in flooded rice fields between rice growing seasons. This is a new method to capture protein for a protein-hungry world. Another project addresses California’s tragically mismanaged water. We have just completed an interactive map that reorganizes state water records (ca.statewater.org). For the first time the public can access centralized water flow and water rights information so citizens can have an impact on water use decisions. I’ve started a program to capture the wisdom of people, often retirees, who had a career as part of the environmental era. There are currently 75 video interviews at theforcesofnature.com. Bruce Wolfe, courtesy RRI

at Utah State in resource management and then back to Michigan for a Ph.D. in resource and wildlife management, but I still couldn’t find a job in the environmental field. I didn’t give up, though. One day I happened by the graduate bulletin board and saw a guy posting a flyer for the job of western director of the Nature Conservancy in San Francisco. I called them right away and got the job, and my wife and I drove out. I was so poor that for the first few nights, my wife and I slept at Muir Beach. I’m lucky to have lived in Mill Valley ever since, for the past 50 years.

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Beavers Back in San Jose

Cheryl Reynolds, Worth a Dam

In the heart of San Jose, nestled between the glass and steel of hp Pavilion and a busy highway, beavers have returned to a spot at the confluence of Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River for the first time in 150 years, setting off a flurry of excitement among conservationists. “I was elated to hear about the beavers,” says Leslee Hamilton, executive director of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy. “The Guadalupe River seemed like a prime candidate [for beavers] so I wasn’t surprised when they appeared, merely ecstatic.” Roger Castillo, a San Jose–based salmon advocate, discovered the beavers in early March when he saw freshly chewed trees along the riverbank. Wildlife photographer Greg Kerekes soon

they were part of a colony from upper Los Gatos Creek, near Lexington Reservoir, and swam downstream. When beavers arrived in Martinez seven years ago, a host of other species came in on their coattails. Sacramento splittail, a native fish, and American mink made an appearance along Alhambra Creek. “Beavers do these really specific behaviors that create the conditions for the next species that will follow,” explains Perryman. Advocates hope the beaver’s return marks a milestone in the revival of the Guadalupe River, long known more for mercury contamination than for wildlife watching. “The beavers’ return is really a testament to nature’s resilience,” says Kerekes. “These species are working their way back into the ecosystem but only if given the right conditions.” See an interactive timeline with videos at bit.ly/SJbeavers. [Alessandra Bergamin]

profit with a center in the Marin Headlands, the program will allow people to set up their own cubic-foot projects and gather data that would add to a wider body of research into biodiversity. “It’s a personal-size piece of the world that you can look at, observe closely, and revel in,” says Liittschwager. He tested the project during a twoweek pilot this spring in the murky waters at the edge of Rodeo Pond, east of Rodeo Lagoon. Teams of schoolchildren got cubes and debated the finer points of where best to set them down. Then the kids waited to see what flew, swam, or Alison Hawkes

(continued from page 6)

Biodiversity, Cubed

started filming the newly arrived beaver family — a pregnant female and two yearlings — using infrared cameras at night. So far, he has captured them eating fennel and willow branches along the river and grooming one another. “Our environment is not in the same condition it was when the beavers left in the late 1800s,” Kerekes says. “Their habitat is a fraction of what it was and now they must put up with rusty metal, chemical pollution, and human disturbance.” How the beaver family got there is a matter of speculation. Heidi Perryman, president of Martinez beaver advocacy organization Worth a Dam, suspects

“Okay, this is going to be really messy,” says David Liittschwager, hauling a green-rimmed frame outlining the shape of one cubic foot to the swampy edge of a pond in the Marin Headlands. That’s pretty good news to the surrounding fifth graders. “Messy is good,” says one boy. You may remember Liittschwager as the National Geographic photographer who took succinct snapshots of earth’s biodiversity by plopping down his cubicfoot frames in nine locations around the world, including the waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge (see page 42). Now, Liittschwager, who lives in San Francisco, is part of a pilot program to crowdsource the concept, relaunched as BioCube. Developed in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute and NatureBridge, an environmental education non-

crawled into the confines of the cubes, journaling and photographing their observations. The final step was to extract everything from a cube — vegetation, water, mud, and all — and bring it back to the lab at NatureBridge to catalog and sort. “The kids go through with a spoon and pipette and pull everything out and sort it until you end up having the entirety of the diversity of this pond laid out from that cube,” says Seabird McKeon, a Smithsonian biodiversity scientist. The BioCube concept works just as well in backyards as it does in national parks. “Diversity is fantastic in a coral reef or rain forest, but that isn’t only where it is,” McKeon says. “It’s when you take the time and slow down and look that you find diversity.”

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[Alison Hawkes] Owls in the Hole

Philip Bouchard, Creative Commons

Most golf course managers wouldn’t want to see, let alone encourage, grounddwelling animals to live on their immaculately kept greens. But the people at Shoreline Golf Links in Mountain View are offering up habitat for burrowing owls, aiming to establish a healthy year-round population of the threatened birds, which make their homes in abandoned ground squirrel holes. Maybe it’s because of their charm factor, but the burrowing owls have become a bit of an attraction along the fairway. “The golfers take photos, tell us where they’ve spotted them — some have even named the owls,” says City of Mountain View wildlife biologist Philip Higgins. Burrowing owls are generally considered avian non grata in development zones, where the work of bulldozers and other grading equipment often means local extirpation for the birds. Consequently, the population has fallen steadily over at least the past 20 years, relegated to a few pockets of undeveloped grassland

around the Bay Area. The bird is listed as a California Species of Special Concern, but that designation provides little protection, and efforts to win endangered species status have so far failed. Some landowners, notably the City of Mountain View, have taken to supporting the burrowing owls that remain. The golf course is a part of Shoreline Regional Wildlife Area, city-owned property situ-

ated near the sprawling corporate campuses of Google and Intuit. The longterm goal is to support ten breeding pairs (right now there are five breeding pairs). “Mountain View has gone furthest to preserve and increase the burrowing owl population” in the South Bay, says Lynne Trulio, a burrowing owl expert and chair of the environmental studies department at San Jose State University. The success of the burrowing owls in the heart of Silicon Valley can help prove a point that owl advocates have long made: Burrowing owls are resilient and capable of living — even thriving — in cityscapes if we make some room for them. Read more about the South Bay’s burrowing owls at bit.ly/MtnVowls. [Constance Taylor] Big-time Preservation, Thanks to Carbon Credits

On May 31, the ink dried on the largest land conservation deal in Sonoma County history: $24.5 million to permanently protect the 19,000-acre Preservation Ranch from a long-threatened vineyard and estate conversion process. And that’s just one part of 58,000 acres of contiguous forestland in both the Gualala and Garcia river watersheds, all now owned by the Virginia-based Conservation Fund. For Chris Kelly, the fund’s California program director, the Preservation Ranch deal comes at the end of more than a decade of work that began when North Coast timber companies started selling off cut-over lands. “We were starting to see the fragmentation from bigger tracts to smaller tracts,” Kelly says. “That was our conservation case, why we needed to act. When we started doing this in 2003, there was one 58,000-acre parcel, a 28-mile stretch of forest lands with one owner.” Kelly’s organization purchased the northernmost 24,000 acres in Mendocino County, but the southerly portion, Preservation Ranch in Sonoma County, was slated for conversion into vineyards and estates on as many as 60 parcels. “Now we have reassembled that original 58,000-acre parcel over the course of a decade,” Kelly says.

Ecologist Peter Baye, who lives in the tiny hamlet of Annapolis near Preservation Ranch, fought the conversion from the beginning on behalf of the Friends of the Gualala River. “There’s a lot of diversity in the watershed,” says Baye, “and it’s mostly private, so there’s been very little exploration. This came out of the timber harvest era that didn’t have surveys. I just know what’s around the edges and up the streams. It’s pretty amazing.” To make this deal happen, a complex ballet of funds had to come together from the Coastal Conservancy, the Sonoma County Agriculture and Open Space Preservation District, the Sonoma Land Trust, and the Conservation Fund itself. That funding was enough to buy the land. But now there’s maintenance: dozens or hundreds of culverts, eroding logging roads, and other major costs. Carbon credits are the key to Kelly’s funding model and will make up some 90 percent of the revenue from the land for the near future. “One of the risks, and one of the reasons we have been acquiring forests in Northern California, is that the redwood forests have been intensely managed for the last 70 years at a pace faster than the forest grows,” Kelly explains. “The forest Peter Baye

Liittschwager plans to produce video tutorials to help people get started, while NatureBridge and the Smithsonian Institute hope to secure funding to establish BioCube programs in environmental education centers around the country.

now is so depleted of commercial timber that there’s very little value as timber, so what do you do? Maybe you sell the parcels, maybe you convert it to vineyards.” For Kelly, the carbon market offers a different path: “Carbon offsets allow us to be very patient and essentially wind back the clock to the way these forests were in the middle of the 20th century.” In exchange for selling credits, the Conservation Fund won’t log the land like a timber company would, so trees keep growing and absorbing (continued on page 57) j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 3

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su pport f or bay natur e By making tax-deductible contributions above and beyond the price of a regular subscription, Friends of Bay Nature invest in the continued growth and development of Bay Nature magazine and the Bay Nature Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Bay Nature Sustainers are businesses and organizations that make an annual tax-deductible donation of funds or in-kind services of $500 or more. (Contact david@baynature.org.) Bay Nature Funders are foundations, agencies, and institutions that have provided funding for general support, specific editorial Publisher’s Circle Anonymous (5) Gertrude & Robert Allen Brian Ashe & Cynthia Rigatti Lee Ballance & Mary Selkirk Carol Baird & Alan Harper Valerie Barth & Peter Wiley Louis Berlot & Joyce Cutler Susan Bodenlos & Ashok Khosla Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel Bob & Shelagh Brodersen Nina Brooks Kathleen Cahill & Anthony Chorosevic Minder Cheng & Wen Hsu Jon Christensen Ron & Rosemary Clendenen George & Sheri Clyde Meg Conkey & Lester Rowntree Bena Currin Christopher & Kathryn Dann Thomas Debley & Mary Jane Holmes Sean & Wendy Dexter Carol Donohoe & William Scoggins Paul Epstein & Jennifer Traub Margaret & Todd Evans Louis Fenn Elizabeth Fishel & Bob Houghteling Eric Folmer Catherine Fox David Frane & Charla Gabert Harald & Sabine Frey Norman Fritz & Fran Mueller Hayley & Hilary Gans Charles Garfield & Cindy Spring Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber Tracy Grubbs & Richard Taylor Lenny Gucciardi Rita Haberlin Bruce Hartsough & Leslianne Lee Hartsough Claudia & Scott Hein Glenn & Juanita Hemanes Jorgen Hildebrandt Karen & Robert Jachens Louis Jaffe & Kitty Whitman Harriet & Robert Jakovina Jerry & Lola Kent Nancy Kittle Gudrun Kleist & James Morel Kimberly & Matthew Krummel Peter & Sue LaTourrette Matthew Leddy & Gail Raabe Virginia Loeb Mark & Paula Lowery John & Valerie Metcalfe Mia Monroe

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content, or other programs over the past 12 months. (Contact david@ baynature.org.) The Friends of Bay Nature list includes donations of $25 and more received between February 28 and June 3, 2013. Donors of $500 or more become members of the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to special events and outings. To donate, go to baynature.org/donate, call (510)528-8550 x205, or email judith@baynature.org. Subscription Partners offer discounted subscriptions to members. Thank you for your interest and support! Carin Apperson Joseph Barbaccia Michael Barber Robin Bass Nance Becker & Bill Keener David Bennett Edward Bennett John Beviacqua Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel Roseanne Chambers Scott Chenue Michael Closson Katherine Cuneo Sandy Curtis Grant Davis Nona Dennis Sharon Farrell & Sue Gardner Barbara & Ronald Forsstrom Kathy Gervais Eugenie & Walter Halland Cricket Halsey Libby Ingalls Evy Kavaler & John Lau Jerry & Lola Kent Robert Kwong Mary Lough Jessica Martini-Lamb Robert Mauceli Ralph Mihan Elizabeth Moore Cindy Moreno Connie Munger Jim O’Connor Morris Older Pamela Price Armando Quintero Emilyn Sheffield Doug Siden Josh Sonnenfeld Malcolm Sproul John Steere Michael Stocker David & Marvalee Wake Meredith Williams Bay Nature Sustainers Clif Bar & Company Commerce Printing Give Something Back Office Supply Seyfarth & Shaw Bay Nature Funders Baraka Charitable Fund (Sacramento Region Community Fdn.) Cargill Corporation Coastal Conservancy, Bay Area Program East Bay Regional Park District Friends of the San Pablo Bay Wildlife Refuge Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy Google Inc. Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation

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carbon. Companies that buy the credits, of course, can then emit more carbon, within the overall cap. There’s been significant controversy about whether the state should accept forest-based credits, with much debate revolving around whether projects in other countries — Mexico or Brazil, for example — should give companies the right to pollute here. “People want a sense of proximity of the solution to the problem you’re trying to mitigate,” says Kelly. “Though they’re not in L.A., our forests are proximate to the problem we’re trying to address.” Read more about California’s forestbased carbon credits at sfpublicpress.org/ climate. [Dan Rademacher]

paign to enhance the habitat of this admirably adaptive species. They call it the “Tigers on Market Street Project,” as a parallel to the Better Market Street Project, a multimillion-dollar effort to reinvent San Francisco’s central artery. “The new [Market Street] design may not accommodate the butterfly habitat

Butterfly Canyon on Market Street?

On a mild, sunny afternoon in downtown San Francisco, office workers sit around a plaza eating lunch, for the most part oblivious to the beautiful insects fluttering around them. Western tiger swallowtail butterflies are attracted to the plaza off Market Street, too, for its flowering cherry and London plane trees, water fountain, and dappled sunshine. “Right there — look!” says butterfly expert Liam O’Brien, bounding onto the scene as cheery as the yellow-and-blackstriped lepidoptera around him. “It’s the largest butterfly in the county. It looks like it’s going for some nectar source. It’s unusual — what’s it doing in the most inhospitable part of the city?” This butterfly normally lives along riverbanks, using riparian hardwood trees as egg and caterpillar habitat, and flowering plants as food for the adults. Downtown San Francisco is a far cry from a riparian corridor — or is it? “Our species calls this a street. This butterfly species calls it the bank of a river,” says O’Brien. “That’s why it’s patrolling up and down Market Street like it’s the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The butterfly perceives it as a water concourse.” O’Brien and his partner in this endeavor, Nature in the City director Amber Hasselbring, have started a cam-

Liam O’Brien, sfbutterfly.com

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adequately,” says Hasselbring. “It could mean taking out the trees — that’s what we’re concerned with.” City officials are considering three options for the Better Market Street Project, one of which would replace all the London plane trees — a type of sycamore hybrid — east of Eighth Street with a dedicated bicycle lane. Two other options would remove only unhealthy trees. “Under those two scenarios, the trees can be preserved if healthy,” says Neil Hrushowy, who leads the project at the San Francisco Planning Department. “If sycamores are the ones we want to go forward with, that’s appealing — it saves money and preserves the urban forest.” O’Brien and Hasselbring want the butterflies to be a factor in discussions. They would like to see the city preserve the mature London planes or at least replace them with butterfly-friendly hardwoods. And the butterflies need more nectar sources downtown — hanging baskets with the right kinds of flowers, rather than the typical, useless garden varieties. [Alison Hawkes] Budget Battle Hurts Bay Area National Parklands

Visit the Bay Area’s national parks this summer and, whether you notice it or not, those parks will have suffered from Washington’s budget stalemate. The $85.4 billion sequester, as it’s

called, erased 5.1 percent off the top of park budgets, which translates into fewer staff, reduced hours, less maintenance, and delayed projects this summer, say parks officials in the Bay Area. So don’t expect to find pristine bathrooms or open visitor centers or rangers on hand to answer your questions. “You can best characterize it as a reduced level of programs, service, and maintenance in the park,” says Howard Levitt, director of communications for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. “It’s going to be a war of attrition rather than a big, dramatic overnight effect. It’s more insidious than that.” The national park cutbacks come a year after the California state parks system faced its own crisis with threatened closures and funding cuts. Nationwide, the Department of the Interior is planning to shutter 128 of the country’s 561 national wildlife refuges, in addition to an overall reduction in services. “Habitat restoration work in some areas will be delayed because we don’t (continued on page 59) have the full team in

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place to complete the reviews in a timely way, so things will get bumped back as well,” Levitt adds. At John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez, open days will likely be reduced from seven to five because the park is losing two interpreters. Only a year and a half ago, John Muir nhs got extra money to move to a seven-day schedule and remodel its visitor center, which welcomes 35,000 people a year to the homestead of the famous naturalist and so-called “Father of the National Parks.” “One of the big programs we have is for schoolkids,” Tom Leatherman, park superintendent, says. “And with the exception of the summer, being closed two days out of five will have a significant impact. We’re booked every day during the school year.” Point Reyes National Seashore has

Fred Sharples, Creative Commons

(continued from page 57)

shuttered its Ken Patrick Visitor Center at Drakes Beach through late December 2013, and the Point Reyes Lighthouse will be gated three days a week. “People can still see the lighthouse from the observation area at the top [on those days], but they can’t access it,” says John Dell’Osso, chief of interpretation at Point Reyes. The budget cuts have hit Point Reyes’ interpretive staff particularly hard because the park can’t hire seasonal employees. “We’re the ones interacting with the public. Sometimes it’s the one interaction people have with a uniformed employee of the park system,” Dell’Osso says. The closures and reductions will save $374,000 from the park’s $7 million budget, and deeper cuts are expected if a solution in Washington doesn’t appear by September 30, the start of the next fiscal year. [Alison Hawkes]

Ask the Naturalist m i c h a e l Q: Is there a way to tell the difference between male and female lizards? How do they attract their mates? [Saundra, Concord] A: One way, Saundra, is to wait until spring and watch them mate: The male is on top. But I bet you want more details than that. The Bay Area’s most common lizard (and reptile) is the western fence lizard, aka the bluebelly. We also have sagebrush lizards, northern alligator lizards, southern alligator lizards, western skinks, Gilbert’s skinks, western whiptails, coast horned lizards, and California legless lizards. Of all these, only the fence lizard is easily identified by gender. Luckily, almost every lizard you’re likely to notice will be a western fence lizard. So the odds are with you. Lizards and birds are evolutionarily related and resemble each other in many ways. In both, the males tend to be more brightly colored than the females: Male western fence lizards have metallic blue undersides with a dark median stripe, brilliant blue throats, bright yellow or orange coloration under the rear limbs, and large femoral glands (scent glands on the thighs). Males are more swollen at the base of the tail than females and have a pair of enlarged scales near their vent (cloaca). Females and juveniles have some color, but not nearly as bright. Even if you can’t get a look at the lizard’s belly, there are also behavior clues that help reveal gender. As with birds, the males tend to be more aggressive and demonstrative. And although you’ll often see both males and females doing push-ups (to regulate body temperature), the males are much more energetic. Push-ups have several purposes, including courtship. Breeding occurs mostly in the spring or early summer and is stimulated by an increase in day length. An irresistible aside: Lizards have a remarkable organ that birds do not, the parietal eye or third eye. You can see this tiny “eye” on the middle top of a blue-

e l l i s belly’s head — a magnifying glass helps (as does a gentle hand). This organ transmits information to the lizard’s brain, controlling body temperature and circadian (daily) rhythms. It measures the duration of light through the year, causing a reactivation of the lizard’s reproductive system in spring. Yahoo! Push-ups (you thought I’d never get back to them!) during the breeding season mostly demonstrate fitness by revealing the animal’s brilliant colors, which are indicative of good health, notably low parasite loads. Lizards (and birds) laden with internal pathogens tend to be duller-hued. Males use both physical displays and bright colors to drive off rivals and attract the opposite sex. This also occasionally works at the local gym for humans (so I’m told). Questions? baynature.org/ask-the-naturalist

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Fun o n Photo Contest Winners Racing at Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley. Jennifer Kroon

I was doing habitat restoration on a beautiful cold day in January when I noticed this individual creating an image on an enormous sand canvas. Margo Bors

Kids from San Franciscoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hunters View housing project on the Sausalito Ferry. We couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find a bus, so we walked all the way to the Bay Model. The adult, behind all the kids, is Tessie Ester, to many the soul of Hunters View. Margo Bors

Once a week, a few friends and I load up our kids and come to Crissy Field to enjoy the beautiful San Francisco Bay. Angie Ulitin

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Bay

San Francisco Bay is full of serious stories: huge restoration projects, epic development battles, long histories of use and misuse. But every day, the Bay brings out people who are just having a good time. We teamed up with Year of the Bay to celebrate. These are our top picks from 50 entries. See the others

After riding with SF Bike Party. Ivan Forcada

and submit your own at YearoftheBay.org!

These men are part of a swim club in San Francisco called the Dolphin Club. The tradition is to swim in the Bay without a wetsuit. Ian Ransley

The start of the menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s open outrigger canoe race off the Berkeley pier. All but four of the boats jumped the gun. Kara Guzman

Evedlyn Fluckiger has spent many hours in the water learning how to windsurf. Richard Gietzen

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Nature Doesn’t Waste

Noticias de CUHW

Waste is a human-created fiction we its atmosphere. The planet assimilates made up so we could disregard things all we give it and changes its climate weddon’t oletín e l owant s T r to a blook a j a at. d o But r e s the U n i d o saccording q u e C utoi dour a n behaviors’ e n C a s ainstructions. planet knows where every landfill Analysts have calculated that in DENTE is. It incorporates all the landfills’ California, achieving Zero Waste would es y toxic leachate (every landfill will que se nos haya dañado gas o se haya a nuestro personal político, yas asegure prevent muchdeclimate-changing uidado en los servicios de los individuos que abusado de nosotros mentalmente. leak someday) into its water system from entering the atmosphere as taking un mundo viven y respiran la política durante este into critico en ALL the cars off•Merecemos the road.el derecho de que atrapados and all the escaped methane tiempo la historia del cuidado

e, nuestra del hogar a nivel Federal y Estatal. se nos pague bajo el esquema del os a otros CUHW, al salir de la burbuja, Seguro Social por una vida de trabajo Sustainable Resource Management dor, usted emerge con nuevas ideas ahora que por un miembro de la familia. Key Principles manda que estamos en período electoral este Redesign •Merecemos vacaciones pagadas, sted es un agosto. Nuestras eleccionesHighest estatales and Best Use Reduce merecemos el derecho de que se nos Separation ed vive en incluirán dos semanas en Source las que EPR u relación puede votar en línea o llamando trate con compasión y respeto por las veedor de a un número sin costo, usando su familiar, número de celular o un teléfono fijo. diferente. Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra Zero Waste Recovery Landﬁll años y burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa Incineration proveedor de Voluntariado de Incentivos ar, pero de marcar un hasta aquí, de nuevo, para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros sobre el rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, miembros en los negocios al mostrar ador de siempre avanzando acercándonos, sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cual emas que representa un ganar-ganar para todos. Compost Reuse Recycle Collection Collection/Salvage endientes Hemos establecido oficinas Collection Repair/Remanufacture extraño. en más deSeparate 9 de nuestros condados. Processing Soil Distribution Processing Conventional Reuse UHW, ha La mayoríaRawde las oficinas tienen Promotion Materials Creative Reuse Educate Recyclability y capacidad Redistribute ya durante bancos deSell llamadas Educate Resell ención de de difusión de web y cuentan con Educate gidos por grandes pantallas. Contamos con a Loretta otra acción que es también otra campaña conforme continuamos construyendo burbuja que se rompe, y estas son las ndado de el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” actualizaciones por email y mensajes dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros Estamos reventando la dico yUrban los Ore salvages texto que alertan a los miembros de for reuse at Berkeley’s transferde station. People trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios burbuja nuestro dores.also Enbring los últimos us thingscuando and call for pickups.Comité We conserve about acontecimientos de IHSS. médicos y oportunidades de educación, de aConstitución sugiere un goods cambio un grupo 7,000 tons year and sell the reusable in retail sales.Yo personalmente quiero al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo. que until combine el (receiving espacio de nuestro To End sidoWe’re los open la burbuja en la the que Age se of Waste 7:00PM closes at 5:00)salirme 360 daysde a year h t t p : //u r b a n o re.com Secretario Tesorero una nueva considera la reforma de IHSS en uecidoatsus 900 Murray, near Ashby y@que 7th,cree Berkeley. ¡No solamente lo merecemos, plan para posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El California y sugiero que empecemos con

“CUHW está rompiendo todos los mitos al enfocarse en los miembros.”

Achieving Zero Waste - no burn, no bury - isn’t optional.

URBAN RE