Bay Nature January-March 2014

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JA NUARY – M A R C H 2 0 1 4

A AN N E EX XP PL LO OR RA AT T II O ON N O OF F N NA AT TU UR RE E II N N T TH HE E S SA AN N F FR RA AN NC C II S SC CO O B BA AY Y A AR RE EA A

Breakthrough:

New Science on California Orcas

Mount Diablo After the Fire Maps and the Stories They Tell Changing Climate for Native Fish

$5.95

c o n t e n t s

january–march 2014

Features

EBRPD

long-billed dowitcher

Nature’s Air Show

M A P SE N SE Fro m To po s to Ta bl ets at th e E a st Bay Re gio na l Pa r k Distr ict

O RC A S O F TH E C A L I F O RN I A C OA ST De ciph e r in g th e C u ltu re o f K il l e r Wh a l e s

A map means so much more than mere orientation. A map shows context, hints at relationships, suggests narratives. And of course every map tells a story about its maker and the time in which it was made.

What’s that story for the East Bay Regional Park District? You might say the District began with a map, and its history can be charted anew in a look back at 80 years of evolving cartography.

by John Hart

They’re among the most charismatic of marine mammals, but we know surprisingly little about Pacific orcas. Where do they live? What do they eat? And, really, who are they? Now, thanks to new technology, new sightings, new research techniques, and one incredibly rare opportunity out at Point Reyes, scientists have begun to tackle those questions and solve the mystery of California’s killer whales.

by Sarah Allen

Valley Rice Fields for food and rest. Wintertime is the peak of action as millions of birds travel along the Pacific Flyway. Take the journey with them.

Coming Soon from Heyday, a wildlife fold-up map and field guide of the Sacramento Valley from Naturalist, Artist and Educator John Muir Laws.

4 Bay View

On the Trail

5 Letters from Our Readers 7 Ear to the Ground News from the conservation community and the natural world

8 Conservation in Action Native ants battle Argentine invaders at Jasper Ridge Preserve.

by Brendan Buhler

10 Signs of the Season

calrice.org

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F IS H F OR EC A S T S w i m m i n g U p st re am Agai n st C l i m at e C h an ge Three decades ago scientists from UC Davis set out into the marshes of the Bay Area to see how many fish they could count. Lately those surveys have turned into snapshots of a sobering decline in native fish populations, one that’s only getting worse with climate change. Surprisingly, though, the surveys that have documented the losses may also be one of our best tools for helping these fish survive.

by Jacoba Charles

Departments Letter from the publisher

Nearly 230 wildlife species flock to Sacramento

Matt Manuel, Calif. Dept. of Water Resources

24 Tory Kallman, Monterey Bay Whale Watch

18

Versatile, elegant soaproot

by Sue Rosenthal

1 2 Oasis on Mount Diablo Perkins Canyon’s Trial by Fire In August of 2013, this quiet, streamnourished corner of Mount Diablo was the epicenter of the 3,000-acre Morgan Fire. But local experts expect to see Perkins Canyon and its diverse suite of plants and wildlife emerge better than ever from what some are calling “the perfect fire.”

by Joan Hamilton 17 Elsewhere . . .

Cross Marin, Sierra Azul, Mussel Rock

38 First Person “Coastodian” Richard James hauls trash . . . and whale bones . . . off the beaches of Point Reyes National Seashore. interview by Eric Simons

53 Ask the Naturalist Why do some whales have barnacles?

by Michael Ellis

54 Naturalist’s Notebook San Francisco Bay skimmers

by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.Baynature.org

bay v i e w letter from the publisher

Judith Katz

I

t was already midday when we stepped onto the steep, rocky singletrack of the North Peak Trail from the small parking lot at Devil’s Elbow. I’d taken this route many times, but almost always in the spring, because it’s a good starting point for one of my favorite Bay Area wildflower hikes: the six-mile circumnavigation of the summit of Mount Diablo. But it was late September, so I hadn’t come to see wildflowers. Instead, I’d come to check out the impact of a wildfire that had engulfed the northeast side of the mountain three weeks earlier.

I have a mixed reaction when I hear that a place I know and love has been hit by wildfire. On the one hand, there’s a visceral recoil: Will this cherished place survive? But on the other hand, there’s a thrill that comes from anticipating dramatic changes to a familiar landscape.

This post-fire walk of discovery was rather slow going, as we had to keep stopping to puzzle out what we were seeing along the trail. You hear that most wildfires are “patchy,” burning hot and fierce in one spot, but then only lightly touching — or completely jumping over — another. So I wasn’t surprised that some areas — such as the large stand of skeletal black coyote bush stalks below us — appeared completely scorched while other patches nearby were still green. But there were plenty of places that displayed an almost inexplicable diversity of impacts within a few yards of each other.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what might have happened to a gray pine with sev-

contr ibuto rs Alessandra Bergamin (p. 7, 42) is Bay Nature’s interim online editor.

Brendan Buhler (p. 8) is a science writer who has a wholesome fascination with roadkill. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, California magazine, and Modern Farmer. Follow him on Twitter @thebuhler.

Michael Ellis (p. 53) is a Santa Rosa-based naturalist who

eral branches completely blackened and devoid of needles, several other branches with needles scorched brown by the heat, and others with needles still fully green.

Or the ceanothus with shiny leaves that looked like they had been dipped in liquid bronze. But how to interpret a shady area of low-growing live oaks where the vegetation on the ground was completely charred, but the branches and leaves of the oaks, just four feet above the ground, appeared untouched by fire or heat? And those bright red flowers of California fuchsia on rock outcrops, with the evidence of fire all around them: Had these late bloomers survived the fire unscathed, or emerged afterward?

All in all, I came away with a sense not of tragedy but of resilience. For even though the Morgan Fire was large, I could see plenty of surrounding habitat that might provide temporary refuge for wildlife and seed banks for the recovery of burned areas.

So it’s not the changes wrought by one large fire that concern me. It’s the fact that as I write this letter it’s yet another beautiful, sunny November afternoon, and that only 1.6 inches of rain have fallen in Berkeley since July 1, after the driest January through June on record. We face the prospect of yet another dry year, and the worrying thought that this could be a harbinger of hotter, drier years to come as a result of climate change — with the associated threat of more frequent and more devastating fires.

The mountain itself, that iconic uplifted massif on the eastern edge of the Bay Area, will survive just fine no matter what nature throws at it. But what we find there may look quite different than it does now. So you might want to take advantage of a sunny winter day to get out and watch Mount Diablo heal itself. (continued on page 5) leads nature-based tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com).

Sean Greene (p. 42) is a multimedia reporter at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a Bay Nature editorial intern. Follow him on Twitter @seangreene89.

Native Texan Emily Moskal (p. 48) writes about owls, fires, and wild foods as a Bay Nature editorial intern.

Find more at petroform.wordpress.com.

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

Volume 14, Issue 1 january–march 2014 Publisher David Loeb Editorial Director Eric Simons Development Director Judith Katz Interim Online Editor Alessandra Bergamin Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Tech & Data Manager Laura Schatzkin 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 Rachel Diaz-Bastin, Paul Epstein, Hannah Gilfix, Sean Greene, Emily Moskal, Asbery Rainey, Kimberley Teruya Bay Nature is published quarterly by the Bay Nature Institute, 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 Subscriptions: $53.95/three years; $39.95/two years; $21.95/one year; (888)422-9628, baynature.org P.O. Box 92408, Long Beach, CA 90809 Advertising: (510)665-5900/advertising@baynature.org Editorial & Business Office: 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510)528-8550; (510)528-8117 (fax) baynature@baynature.org baynature.org issn 1531-5193 No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from Bay Nature and its contributors. © 2014 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

let ter s Dear Editor: I am writing to express my hope that the coming changes to your wonderful magazine, Bay Nature, will not be too drastic — I find the format perfect! I enjoy “Ear to the Ground,” “On the Trail,” the East Bay Regional Park District articles, and “Naturalist’s Notebook,” and I would miss them.

However, I did appreciate your recent segment on “Behind the Boom” [Oct.–Dec. 2013] to shed light on an environmentally destructive practice to leach out the last ounce of oil.

How many Californians know that the method of fracking is occurring in their state right now, and that fracking not only pollutes ground water, but also adds to global warming? (Is that why the government was so adamantly against enlarging Pinnacles National

Park by 18,000 acres to the south — the oil industry is eyeing that nearby parcel for fracking?)

If I may digress, I have a minor quibble with your October–December issue: the advertisement of “Drakes Bay” oysters — a polluting industry that does not belong in the pristine bay at Point Reyes National Seashore. I’m surprised to find it in your magazine.

Elaine McAndrews, Castro Valley We have received several letters objecting to our publication of ads from Drakes Bay Oyster Company. As stated in response to such a letter in the October 2012 issue, we acknowledge the controversial nature of the operation of the oyster farm and regret the deep fissures this controversy has produced within both the Bay Area environmental community and the community of west Marin. Bay Nature has chosen not to take a position on the issue and thus has no grounds for refusing to publish DBOC’s ads as long as they are not pejorative or argumentative. We continue to support both full protection for native wildlife and sustainable local food production.

Bay Area Wild

Dear Editor: Your note in the October–December 2013 issue regarding African Clawed Frog and chytrid fungus gave the impression that the acf’s days in Golden Gate Park are numbered. That is not correct. The issue has become embroiled in intraagency infighting, and the dread scenario of this frog and its devastating chytrid fungus disease (to which acf is immune) becoming at large in California is all too real. The interface between politics and biology is an exceedingly uncomfortable place to be, with the latter always losing.

Jake Sigg, San Francisco And if it starts raining hard, give thanks and put the trip off until spring. Then go out and chase some bright orange fire poppies up those fire-renewed hillsides. (bay view: continued from page 4)

note: This issue is the last to be produced by our long-time designer, David Bullen.

Thanks, Dave, for 53 gorgeous issues of Bay Nature.

bay nature’s annual local hero awards dinner

Sunday, March 23, 6–9 pm

Celebrating Bay Nature & the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act

keynote speaker

Michael Brune

Executive Director of the Sierra Club Front Cover: Orcas from the Transient ecotype, such as this breaching female, are often seen in Monterey Bay, where they prey on migrating gray whales and other marine mammals.

[Tory Kallman, Monterey Bay Whale Watch]

Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 54) is the author of the Laws Guide to Drawing Birds and teaches nature observation and illustration. Info at johnmuirlaws.com.

Sue Rosenthal (p. 10) is Bay Nature’s contributing editor.

Ann Sieck (p. 17) is dedicated to helping people with disabilities, including those using wheelchairs, find parks and trails they can enjoy. See her reviews at baynature.org/asiecker.

local hero award recipients

Conservation aCtion: Craig Anderson, LandPaths environmental eduCation: Liam O’Brien, Nature in the City Youth engagement: Cheyanna Washburn, John Muir National Historic Site

Scott’s Seafood Pavilion at

2 BroadwaY, JaCk london square, oakland

$125 per person RSVP: baynature14.eventbrite.com Info: judith@baynature.org 510.528.8550 x105

b ay n at u r e

j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 4

A benefit for Bay Nature Institute

photo: Stephen Joseph/stephenjosephphoto.com

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by david loeb

6

LOVE

ear to t he gro und

ful beauti SONOMA COUNTY?

news from the community and the natural world CNPS Treasure Hunt Unearths a Rare One

YOU’RE WELCOME! S O N O M A

LAND TRUST

Preserving what you love about Sonoma County SonomaLandTrust.org

August 31 – February 23 Welcome to the mysterious and amazing San Francisco Bay. Come explore its past, present, and future — above and below the surface.

Made possible by generous support from:

Media Partners: photo :

Doug Adesko. Courtesy of the artist.

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Photo taken by one of our 25 motion-activated wildlife cameras

Pepperwood is a refuge for over 900 plant and animals species and a Bay Area leader in conservation research. We offer environmental education programs for all ages.

Hikes | Lectures | Classes www.pepperwoodpreserve.org (707) 591-9310

Alessandra Bergamin

Seated in a wooden kayak at the mouth of Sycamore Slough, Danny Slakey peers through his hand lens at a plant no bigger than a sprig of thyme. Carefully, he inspects the small purple flowers growing along its stem, turning the specimen in his hand. Beside him, Brian Keelan reads from his iPad, asking Slakey questions like “Paired in the axil? Alternate, spatulate leaves?” When it comes to plant identification, the devil is in the details.

It’s early morning, but already the midsummer sun is beating down hard and hot. In the distance, Mount Diablo rises from the valley floor, its silhouette tinged by the color of the sky. The slough is dotted with dense reed islands and muddy outcrops surrounded by thick mats of water hyacinth, the invasive plant that has established itself throughout much of the Central Valley.

Keelan had first spotted the plant near one of those larger islands. Now, the botanizing pair continue their back and forth, checking off potential species from a mental list. Slakey is not one for exaggerated excitement. But as he calls to the rest of the kayak group to come take a closer look at the plant, you can tell there’s something special about this one.

Slakey, a botanist at the California Native Plant Society (cnps), is leading this group of volunteers on a treasure hunt through the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, focusing on a search for rare plants in Sycamore Slough. cnps has conducted such trips throughout the state, engaging plant enthusiasts through citizen science and focusing on areas where potential development could alter rare plant habitat — like the Mojave Desert, where solar power projects are in the works and only a small percentage of desert flora has been documented.

Now in its fourth season, the cnps

Rare Plant Treasure Hunt program has expanded to include sites in the Bay Area and central coast, and has added data on nearly 2,000 rare plants to the California Natural Diversity Database.

In the Delta, with proposal after proposal for water supply improvements and habitat recovery, establishing baseline data for the plants that are here now is an essential prerequisite for any successful project.

Paddling down Sycamore Slough, a tributary of the Delta some 14 miles west of Lodi, it is not hard to find the human touch: Streams of motor boats and jet skis zoom past, while just out of sight, beyond the riprap levees, sunflower fields crisp in the heat.

“You can have a rare plant that’s rare because it has always been rare and that’s just the way it is,” Slakey says. “But you can also have a plant whose habitat has been so altered or destroyed that it’s gone from being a common plant to a rare plant. The plants of the Delta are a good example of the latter.”

That’s the kind of plant that Brian Keelan found on a mud float no bigger than a bowling ball, and that Slakey and the volunteers have gathered around.

After deliberating, Slakey, with Keelan’s help, identifies it as side-flowering skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora), a perennial herb of the mint family. In California, this species is known from only 12 populations, most of which are in the Delta — (continued on page 42) and it has never been j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 4

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conse r vat i on i n a c ti o n

Dan Quinn

Battle of the Ants at Jasper Ridge

How do you win a land war in Woodside?

Know your strengths.

If, say, you are the Argentine ant Linepithema humile, famed as the most successful of all millimeter-scale invaders, you’ll want to stay close to your lines of supply: suburban streets and lawns. And if you are a beleaguered native winter ant, a Prenolepis imparis defending your colony and your queen with all the might that flows in a winter ant’s haemolymph? Then you will take to the hills and the wild places, you will fight in the cold, and you will use chemical weapons.

Such are the lessons from an 18-year survey of the invasion of the Argentine ant into the habitats of native ants within b ay n at u r e

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Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve volunteer Amy Bowers sucks an ant through a straw into a glass bottle so it can later be identified by researchers.

the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in the hills behind Stanford University. At nearly 1,200 acres, the preserve contains multitudes of environments, including creeks, a reservoir, oak and madrone forests, stands of Douglas fir, coast redwood groves, and serpentine grasslands.

The preserve is the purview of Stanford, and the ants are the purview of biology professor Deborah Gordon.

Gordon began her survey of ant species within Jasper Ridge in 1993. Since then more than 300 sites in the preserve have been monitored, and 121 of those

continuously. Every year, once in the spring and then again in the fall, Gordon and a succession of five grad students have marched into the field for weeks at a time to visit the sites, observing every species of ant they could find within 20 meters of a given point in every direction inside of five minutes. Gordon says she was motivated by a realization, when she first came to Stanford, “that Argentine ants were part of my destiny, since they’re everywhere around here.”

Argentine ants, as their name suggests, are originally from South America. They have since spread to six continents, invading Mediterranean climates around the world. L. humile is believed to have arrived in California around 1900.

One of the keys to their success is that Argentine ants are much less aggressive toward other Argentine ants than they are toward other species. They share information, resources, and trails; they are so cooperative with each other they appear to function as a single colony, with many queens and many nests. In human neighborhoods, Gordon says, Argentine ants enter every home at the same time and leave at the same time, making them almost immune to attempts at pest control. “Everything we do to get them out of our buildings is really just to create the illusion of control,” she says, “because they leave when conditions improve outside.”

When Gordon began her survey, she believed it would document the Argentine ant’s pitiless eradication of all native competitors at Jasper Ridge. But Gordon says that didn’t happen. Instead, as she and her grad students have learned, in the wilderness, the invasion has turned into a stalemate, because like Napoleon before them, the Argentine ants have outrun their supply lines and are illequipped for winter.

The Argentine ant may be a fearsome invasive species, but its success depends on an even more destructive invasive species: us. “Generally, globally, they decimate” native ants, Gordon says, but at the same time “it looks as though they really need resources provided by people.”

Specifically, they need our lawns, our trash, and — in cold and rainy weather —

our nice, warm homes. Where Jasper thrive and even repel Argentine Ridge abuts suburban development, invaders in big open spaces.

Argentine ants have been able to Even more interesting is that Gormove in and evict native ants. But don’s lab has discovered that the winthey can expand inward only so ter ant is a chemical weapons specialfar. ist. When greatly outnumbered by The Argentine ants invade in seaArgentine ants or when defending its sonal pulses, expanding their range in nests, it secretes a white liquid from the spring and summer. Since 2001, its abdomen that causes an “immedihowever, their expansions into new ate loss of coordination in the victerritory have been few and offset by tim,” her study finds. The result is an winter contractions. impressive 79 percent mortality rate Generally speaking, in those among attacking Argentine ants. It’s winter contractions they are giving a weapon that has allowed the winter ground back to the winter ant. ant to not only defend its territory P. imparis is one of 32 California from Argentine ants but to occasionnative species found at the preserve, ally regain ground from them.

Argentine ants mass around aphids. The nonnative invaders appear to and it is one of the few directly com- have been held at bay by native winter ants in parts of the Jasper Ridge And the ant survey that’s helped petitive species that has been shown to discover all of this? It’s still Biological Preserve. to resist Argentine ants. going on, only now the count is Research out of Gordon’s lab has shown that both species are being conducted not by grad students but by citizens volunactive all year round at Jasper Ridge, though at different levels of teering their time as scientists. Each spring and fall, groups activity. Argentine ants start to lose out to winter ants when they of hikers fan out to gps points within the preserve and collect and identify specimens of any ants they can find. Want to be move into more vegetation-shaded areas and onto higher elevaa part of it? Contact the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at tions, and California’s native ants, while they may not be everyhttp://jrbp.stanford.edu. one’s idea of a photogenic poster species for conservation, can Dan Quinn

by brendan buhler

si gns of t he s e a s o n

The Versatile Bulb: The Many Uses of Soaproot Months into the Donner party’s winter ordeal, an Indian man traveling past the group’s snowbound Sierra encampment gave one of its members an unfamiliar food. Donner party survivor Patrick Breen wrote in his diary on February 28, 1847, “Solitary Indian passed by yesterday come from the lake had a heavy pack on his back gave me 5 or 6 roots resembling Onions in shape taste some like a sweet potatoe, all full of little tough fibres.” Those “roots” were dried bulbs of the soaproot plant and must have been a strange but welcome addition to the boiled oxhide, bones, and worse that sustained Breen and his family.

Scott Braley

(carbon-containing) compounds called Food seems an unusual use for a plant saponins are responsible for the sudsicalled soaproot. In fact, food is just one ness: They reduce the surface tension of of many traditional California Indian water, allowing small, stable bubbles to uses for the plant, some apparently conform. Indians used soaproot to clean their tradictory. Soap, food, glue, medicine, bodies, clothing, and buckskin blankets, poison, and more — all from a hairy, fist-size underground bulb. but valued it most as a shampoo.

Even without the snow, the Donner Roasting the bulbs thickens the juice party wouldn’t have found soaproot near into a glue used for sealing baskets, their camp at Truckee (now Donner) Lake. The most common soaproot species, Chlorogalum pomeridianum, is widespread in California, but only below 5,000 feet. In grasslands, chaparral, and open woodlands, soaproot begins its annual cycle of growth with the fall or winter rains. That’s when the elongated bulb, layered like an onion and covered with coarse brown fibers, sends up several long, (above) Ramona Garibay, an East Bay Ohlone, gathers soaproot to make into prostrate, wavy-edged brushes. (right) In the spring, soaproot’s delicate flowers bloom late in the day. leaves. Harvested in early attaching feathers to arrow shafts, and spring and slow-roasted in a pit oven, even forming the handles of brushes those new leaves are sweet. So are the fashioned from the bulb’s outer fibers. bulbs when they’re cooked the same way.

Green sap from the leaves made tattoo But before cooking, the bulbs are bitter — and soapy. ink, and juice from the bulb made a hide Soap was likely the plant’s most tanning treatment as well as medicines important use for numerous California like antiseptics, laxatives, diuretics, and Indian tribes as well as Spanish settlers, pain-relieving body rubs. who called it amole. Crushing the bulb’s But one species’ panacea is another’s white inner layers produces a thin juice poison: The same plant that people used that foams easily with water. Organic as food, for cleaning, and for healing is b ay n at u r e

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toxic to gill breathers, and California Indians sometimes ex-ploited that property in fishing. While the men of a village constructed a netlike weir across a stream, the women mashed hundreds of soaproot bulbs and tossed them into the water. In a very short time, dozens of fish floated to the surface.

“The surface-active saponins stun the fish by interfering with uptake of oxygen through the animals’ gills,” explains organic chemist Margareta Séquin, author of The Chemistry of Plants: Perfumes, Pigments, and Poisons. But the effect is reversible, so the Indians had to gather the fish quickly before they revived. Because saponins pass through the human digestive system without causing harm, fish caught with soaproot are edible.

But fishing with poisons is now illegal and most non-Indians ignore native foods, so most of the attention soaproot gets these days is from insects that visit its flowers. From late spring into summer, numerous small white blossoms open late in the day on tall, branching stalks so slender the flowers look like low-hanging stars in the fading light. Each individual flower is ephemeral, opening a few hours before sunset and fading before dawn.

Soaproot flowers are white and night-blooming, traits that, along with sweet fragrance, often identify moth-pollinated flowers.

But contrary to popular assumption, soaproot flowers have no discernible scent. And while moths (as well as honeybees, hummingbirds, and wasps) occasionally visit them, soaproot flowers are primarily pollinated by large native carpenter bees and bumblebees.

By late summer, dozens of seeds drop around the mother plant, some of which will take root and eventually form a sizable colony. A few weeks later, the leaves and flower stalks wither and blow away, and soon the only aboveground sign of the plant is a short tuft of brown fibers marking the location of its bitter, soapy, toxic, gluey, medicinal, and very sweet bulb.

John Wall, wallphoto.blogspot.com

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by sue rosenthal

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here in June 2011, remains a green oasis even after fire poppies (right) appear in profusion this spring higher up in the canyon?

got ready to revisit the canyon a few days after the fire had been extinguished.

Adams, who was to be my guide, had driven by earlier in the week. “Prepare yourself,” he said.

The devastation was palpable the

minute we stepped out of the car. Perkins’ meadow was black and bereft of birds.

Heat waves rippled from the ground.

The air, though clear, was infused with a stench of smoke. As we walked, dozens of small black beetles we had never seen before bit our sweaty arms and necks.

Adams said that firefighters had been complaining about these “charcoal beetles” (Melanophila spp.), which are attracted to smoke. The beetles court when flames die down and then deposit their eggs in still-smoldering branches. In the mid20th century, when more people smoked in public, the beetles were occasionally known to invade events such as UC Berkeley football games.

We walked on through the meadow and past several big oak trees, their charred bases encircled with ashes. Their leaves were mostly a toasty brown, with

Scott Hein, heinphoto.com

caption

oa sis o n mo u n t d i a blo

PERKINS CANYON’S TRIAL BY FIRE

by Joan Hamilton

Perkins Canyon descends steeply from the eastern slopes of Mount Diablo State Park. Three miles south of the town of Clayton, this isolated section of the park has only a few miles of trails and no official entrance. Visitors park at a wide spot on Morgan Territory Road and step into a gracious grassland dotted with openarmed oaks. Bluebirds flit from tree to tree. “It has this wonderful pastoral feel,” says Seth Adams of Save Mount Diablo. “It draws you in.”

At least it did before September 8, 2013. That’s when a fire started on private land just north of Perkins Canyon, forcing the evacuation of 100 homes. Smoke

billowed from the mountain’s east side, with flames shooting up 80 to 100 feet.

“The way it sparked, it looked like fuel burning actual gasoline,” Cal-Fire batallion chief Mike Marcucci later told Diablo magazine. “It burned so angrily.”

Thanks to an all-out effort (involving 6 planes, 11 helicopters, 25 bulldozers, 142 fire engines, and almost 1,400 personnel), the fire was out four days later. Remarkably, no dwellings or people were lost. But the incident transformed more than 3,100 acres of meadow, chaparral, and woodland on the mountain’s south and east sides, including Perkins Canyon. “It was a once-in-

a-generation event,” says Adams — the biggest fire on the mountain since 1977.

Before the fire, I’d been drawn to Perkins Canyon for its giant, mushroomshaped “volcanic dome,” evidence of a time millions of years ago when magma the consistency of toothpaste oozed up from the earth’s mantle before the mountain itself was formed by uplift. That seemed fireproof enough.

But Perkins had also been a good place to hear a chorus of frogs, splash in the shady creek, and gaze at gorgeous wildflowers. So while I knew, in theory, about the ecological benefits of fire, I couldn’t help feeling anxious about those amenities as I Scott Hein, heinphoto.com

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A week later, I came back to the

Views of North Peak, pre- (left) and post-fire (right),

canyon with Mount Diablo Interpretive

tr ail

the Morgan Fire. Will

Association naturalist Ken Lavin. He leads hikes all over the Bay Area for Greenbelt Alliance and is especially fond of Diablo’s east side. “It’s very remote, the wilderness side,” he said. “I could always come over here and find solitude.”

As we walked up Ray Morgan Road, I fumed about the mess left behind by the firefighters’ bulldozers. They had rammed and leveled trees and bushes, making a kind of backcountry highway that was twice as wide and ugly as the old fire road. Yet this was the area that had been spared; there were no signs of fire on either side of the road. The apocalyptic approach seemed unnecessary.

Where a steep new firebreak crossed our path, though, I began to understand.

Above the break was charcoal and ashes.

Below was the oddly leafy woodland. The fire had roared downhill here on its second or third day, only to be stopped by the work of the swashbuckling machines I’d been cursing. The result was messy, but effective. Nearby homes — the bulldozers’ main concern — had been protected, along with the land around the dome and the creek. This accidental oasis would help reseed the barrens above. It would shelter wildlife, hikers, and horseback riders as the mountain recovered.

Above the firebreak, Lavin and I headed into the barrens on the singletrack Perkins Trail. “Before, this was a very wooded area,” Lavin said. “You had

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some green on the upper branches. Dozens of acorns fell from their limbs even as we watched. Were the trees living or dead? “The heat may have girdled some of them,” Adams guessed. “But it could take weeks for them to die.”

Some of the slopes above the meadow were completely bare. Others retained a few baked trees in odd fall colors: dusty green, pale orange, and funereal brown. Others were a maze of twisted black sticks. “The mountain’s bones are showing,” Adams said.

Many of the remaining foothill pines (or gray pines) were drained of their usual gray-green color. Also known as “gasoline trees,” foothill pines contain relatively large amounts of n-heptane, a chemical in gasoline. This makes them (and Jeffrey pines) much more flammable than other pines. Their cones explode like hand grenades in fires, spreading flames as they roll downslope.

Oddly, though, what I considered the heart of the Perkins Canyon experience was untouched by the fire. A half-mile stretch of lower Perkins Creek and the volcanic dome beside it were as lush as ever, with healthy-looking oaks, sycamores, foothill pines, grapes, manzanitas, mugwort, and clematis. Wilting from the smoke and heat, I decided to save that mystery for another day.

on

near the base of Per-

Aaron Schusteff

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on the trail

(left) Perkins Creek

looking northeast from the Mary Bowerman Trail.

Perkins Canyon runs down to the right.

Scott Hein, heinphoto.com

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allows the species to come back faster than shrubs that are killed by fire and depend on seeds to reproduce. Most of the mountain’s manzanitas are nonsprouters (including Mount Diablo manzanita, big berry manzanita, and the common or Contra Costa manzanita; Eastwood manzanita is the lone sprouter) and won’t win any races with chamise.

But they’ll still come back from seeds in the soil and in rodent caches. And they’ll be more genetically diverse than their stump-sprouting cousins.

1 Mile 1 Kilometer

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when the fire hit, however. Fall on Mount Diablo is tarantula time, when males that have reached maturity (at about seven years old) roam around looking for mates. In fact, Lavin leads field trips just so people can see them.

“Tarantulas can move fast for a bit,” Lavin says, “but they have lungs that aren’t well developed and don’t have good stamina. They weren’t going to outrun any fire. So they may have been roasted.”

What happens next?

Where the fire was angriest, no plants may emerge for a while. But over most of the five square miles that burned, Lavin says, we can soon expect a parade of plants. First up will be the grasses, and then a magnificent crop of annual plants called “fire followers,” some of which have been waiting since 1931 to bloom in this area. They come with poetic names — fire poppies, golden eardrops, whispering bells — and fascinating natural histories. Some have seeds that need the chemicals in smoke to germinate. Others’ seeds are cracked open by

Ben Pease, peasepress.com

the fire itself. “Then water can get in with the winter rains, and off they go,” Lavin says.

Bulbs also tend to do well after a fire.

At Perkins Canyon, that might mean a banner year for lilies, including elegant brodiaea and the Mount Diablo fairy lantern. Bulbs generally send up leaves each year, but some won’t flower in deep shade. “They’ve got their chance now,” Lavin says. “They’ve been waiting for a fire to burn off the overstory that was shading them out.”

Chamise, like most chaparral plants, can sprout from the crown of its roots. That John Wall, wallphoto.blogspot.com

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the fire, each time I went back to Perkins, the canvas — once wiped clean — grew more interesting. A month out, grass was poking up in the meadow; almost every depression had a little patch about one inch tall. Dozens of soaproot bulbs had sprouted, joined by the odd vetch and mustard.

Two weeks later, chamise, coffeeberry, yerba santa, and — wouldn’t you know it — poison oak were already beginning to resprout.

The charcoal beetles were long gone. But on one short walk I saw or heard quail, juncos, killdeer, sparrows, scrub jays, black phoebes, mourning doves, acorn woodpeckers, oak titmice, a couple of vultures, and a red-tailed hawk. Before the fire, I had often heard the bouncing-ping-pong-ball song of wren-tits that were hiding in dense chaparral — but had rarely seen the birds themselves. Now wrentits were hopping around in plain sight in the oaks and other shrubbery.

I found fresh deer and coyote tracks while walking up Ray Morgan Road, and signs of extensive work by rodents rototilling the blackened soil. I asked Lavin what he thought might have happened to a sassy alligator lizard we’d seen before the fire.

“I think he went down a rodent hole,” Lavin said.

“Do you think he’s okay?”

“I’m sure he’s okay. And he probably had a lot of company down there: gophers, ground squirrels, fence lizards, toads, tarantulas, even rattlesnakes.”

The science behind this chummy scene is simple: While chaparral fires generally burn at a withering 350 to 800 degrees F., temperatures are much cooler only a few inches underground.

Insulated by soil, seeds and small animals can survive all but the hottest fires.

Not every creature was sheltered

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A road bulldozed by crews fighting the

In the weeks following

leaving lower Perkins Canyon in peace.

After that fire, some local mountain lovers took up a collection to replant the mountain with handsome but out-ofplace Monterey pines and coast redwoods. Sanity prevailed, and park personnel planted native species — foothill pines and blue oaks — from local nurseries instead. “That seemed a lot better at first,” Lavin said. “But the nursery trees didn’t have the same genetics as the local trees. And almost all of them died. By that time, the mountain had come back on its own.”

Today the state parks department won’t be reseeding the burned areas. “We take the long view,” says state park resource ecologist Cyndy Shafer. “We want a natural species composition and density. Planting wouldn’t be appropriate.”

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to walk with your head on a swivel looking for both rattlesnakes and poison oak.

Not so much now.”

I was stunned by a wide sweep of skeletal shrubs. “But fires are not so unusual here,” Lavin reminded me. Some of the original photos in botanist Mary Bowerman’s seminal 1944 book The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mount Diablo show toasted trees and bushes. In that era, the biggest fires were the two that hit in 1931, consuming 25,000 acres, including most of Perkins Canyon. “There were so many people camping and starting campfires back then,” Lavin said. “It was always the bane of local ranchers.”

The next big fire struck Diablo in 1977. It hit hardest on the north side (including Mitchell and Donner canyons), sweeping across 6,000 acres, but

Mount Diablo in the fall of 2013 was the perfect fire: No lives were lost, no homes were torched, and mostly fire-hardy habitats like chaparral were hit. The end-ofsummer timing was excellent. Perkins Creek was dry, so frogs, snakes, and amphibians had already headed underground. Birds weren’t breeding or nesting. Plants were putting energy into their roots rather than their leaves, as they do in springtime. This dryer season not only gives those plants more oomph after the fire; it lessens the danger of a fire that produces steam, which can sterilize soils.

Still, there could be more drama ahead. The steep, bare slopes above Perkins Canyon are poised to erode in this winter’s rains. “The slopes of North Peak contain soils with a lot of clay,” Lavin says. “If we get heavy rains, it’s going to flow, slowly in some spots and faster in others.”

Happily for those who love a good mystery, questions abound. Will most

Wrentits (above) are generally hidden in thick brush, but are now quite visible in areas where the foliage has burned.

Alligator lizards (right) may have survived the fire by seeking refuge in rodent holes.

John Kesselring

Adapted from the map: Mount Diablo, Los Vaqueros and Surrounding Parks by Save Mount Diablo, ©2012. Used by permission.

Version 52 updated with Diablo Mine Trail, Meadow Trail, bolder fire edge, Curry Canyon Ranch, additional creek names..

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was untouched by the Morgan Fire, which did burn the gray pines in

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Road, which becomes Marsh Creek Road. Turn right onto Morgan Territory Road. Perkins Meadow, half a mile further on your right, has room for two or three cars to park.

“It will be interesting to see what survives and what doesn’t,” Lavin said as we circled back across the blackened meadow to our car. “But I suspect in just a few years it will look even better than new.”

Getting there:

The Perkins Canyon trailhead is on Morgan Territory Road. From the west, take the Ygnacio Valley Road exit off Highway 24. Turn right on Clayton

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Joan Hamilton is a freelance writer based in Berkeley. She and Save Mount Diablo will unveil an audio guide to Perkins Canyon in January 2014. Seth Adams and Ken Lavin are featured in this and eight other guides in the “Audible Mount Diablo” series.

Early Spring Hike at Perkins Canyon Saturday, March 29, 9:30 am–1:00 pm Join Bay Nature and Seth Adams of Save Mount Diablo to explore Perkins Canyon.

Space is limited. RSVP to hikes@baynature.org.

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Eric Simons

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elsewhere . . .

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Scott Hein, heinphoto.com

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of the big oaks survive?

What fire-following flowers and shrubs will emerge this spring, next spring, and the spring after? How long will it take for the chaparral to recover? Were some soils sterilized by extreme temperatures? How much soil will be washed down from those steep, bare slopes?

The 1931 and 1977 fires proved that the mountain’s flora and fauna are resilient.

The species and their relative abundance may be different from before, but the meadow, chaparral, and woodland communities will bounce back. Human attitudes are changing, too: This time, there will be no campaigns to replant sizzled slopes with redwoods. Now the parks department is “taking the long view,” and I’m out there with many other park visitors watching natural history unfold in real time. We’re no longer assessing destruction; we’re making discoveries.

Cross Marin Trail, Samuel P. Taylor State Park

Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve Woods Trail

This trail, at the entrance to Samuel Taylor State Park, provides easy access to the redwoods and mixed forest along five miles of beautiful Lagunitas Creek, quiet though close to busy Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Go north, on pavement shared with fleets of bicyclists, and you emerge from dark woods into patches of sunlight and even open meadows after the trail leaves the state park. But I suggest going south, where the less-used composite trail runs 1.5 miles in deep forest. Go after a winter storm has swelled the stream, and bring binoculars to scan gravelly eddies and flowing water for coho salmon or steelhead trout returned from the ocean to spawn. Most are two feet long or more, and the coho males can be bright red. They are sometimes seen leaping up a series of small waterfalls at Shafter Bridge and at the Leo Cronin Fish Viewing Area just across the road. But as in all Bay Area streams, spawning fish face daunting obstacles, and seeing them is never a sure thing. The Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (spawn) works to save the fish and leads outings to see them; its website spawnusa.org has information about this year’s migration.

River otters can be seen in and along Lagunitas Creek by alert and lucky hikers, though it may be perverse to delight in the otters since they no doubt devour every endangered fish they can catch.

Getting there: Samuel P. Taylor State Park is served by bus (marintransit.org) or take Sir Francis Drake Blvd toward Point Reyes; the park is 4 miles west of Lagunitas. $8 parking fee. Bikes and leashed dogs permitted. [Ann Sieck]

This is a place to go when winter storms have been blowing through one after another for weeks, when the thirsty earth has absorbed all the rain it can hold and is shedding overflow down every gully.

Maybe the sun is out at last, or maybe an excess of human proximity brings you to the point of braving wet weather, but Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve near Los Gatos has the peaceful wildness you need.

In its 17,300 acres of forest, grassland, and chaparral, you can wander for hours in solitude. And on this well-maintained gravel service road, you can keep your feet dry.

Sierra Azul’s terrain is punishingly steep, but Woods Trail is moderate, cut into a rugged forested hillside, with views up to Mount Umunhum. Above the trail, rocky walls are cloaked in diverse foliage and seasonal streams trickle or gush down among moss and ferns. In the lush explosion of California’s winter growing season, only a few wildflowers appear, but there’s color in new buds and 1 the red trunks of manzanitas and madrones. Past the rushing headwaters of Guadalupe Creek, the trail bends north and climbs gently in sparse woods and chaparral. In two miles, you’re in open country looking across to Mount Hamilton. Go 5.5 miles to the top of 2,999-foot Mount Sombroso, and you’ll get grand views indeed.

Getting there: From Highway 85, take Camden Ave south to Hicks Rd. Turn right and go 6.3 miles to Mount Umunhum Road. No fees; dogs not permitted; vault toilet. [Ann Sieck]

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Hang gliders soar above this stretch of coastline, and while it takes their aerial view to reveal Mussel Rock Park’s geologic story, there’s a satisfying intellectual charm in hiking the trails and beach, knowing you walk in a place too active on a landscape scale for an earthbound viewer to fully comprehend.

Mussel Rock was the epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and is one of the spots where the San Andreas Fault runs into the ocean. It is also the secondlargest active landslide on the West Coast.

What this means in human-scale terms is that you can meander in the park, following the wide trail up the lightly vegetated bluff for panoramic views of the coast or down to be mesmerized by the crashing surf; then, when you return home you can look on a satellite map and see that the entire area lies in a slowly sliding depression, like an enormous bite taken out of the ever-shifting coastal cliff of Daly City.

The land in Mussel Rock Park will end up in the ocean.

But plants and animals and human walkers flourish on it in the interim, making this a scenic place to watch the pale 2 winter sun dancing on the ocean while you ponder geologic time and our own shallow impressions on the landscape.

Getting there: Take Highway 1 to Pacifica and exit at Palmetto Ave; drive north on Palmetto until it turns inland and make a left on Westline Dr. Park at end of road (about 0.5 miles) and walk north along the bluff into the park. No fees; dogs allowed on leash. [Eric Simons]

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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 John Hart

M

ap Sense

From Topos to Tablets at the East Bay Regional Park District

The average map, I’ve always felt, is more interesting than the average book. It can certainly tell you more about a place, faster. A map shows relationships; it raises questions; it hints at narratives.

Those wavering contour lines on a topographic sheet, once you get the hang of reading them, build a whole land-shape in your mind. Here is an outward-leaning ridge, here an inwardcutting canyon. Here you see how a swelling ocean has invaded a tectonic depression, creating a San Francisco Bay; here, how a creek has maintained its course across a slowly rising ridge, carving a Niles Canyon. A green wash of woodland color on one side of a stream but missing on the other shows the power of sun-exposure, or “aspect.” A solid blue stream line promises water in summer; a dashed one does not.

Beyond topography, and with ever-increasing subtlety, specialized maps can show us what rocks underlie the land and what soils cloak it, what rain and fog and wind and heat beset it, what grows and bounds and creeps and flies upon it, what people have done and are doing to it, and what they may plan to do.

Maps used to be more or less fixed artifacts, often lovingly hand-drawn. But in the computer age, with its eyes in the sky, its geographic information systems, and its general explosion of data, that object you unfold on the trail or peruse on a screen has to be seen in a new way: not as a thing in itself but as one visible wave Hikers follow a winding trail through the East Bay Regional Park District’s Mission Peak Regional Preserve. Maps answer questions about whether to turn left or right, but they also tell stories about the past and present of the parks they depict.

on the surface of a sea of knowledge, a made-to-order sample featuring the aspects that the user of the moment requires.

That user may be a hiker mainly concerned about taking the correct fork of a trail, a botanist wanting to pinpoint the habitat of an endangered species, or a park district contemplating future possibilities for outdoor recreation and wildlife protection.

A his tory in m apS The East Bay Regional Park District might be said to have begun with a map. It was in 1928 that the East Bay Municipal Utility District took over 40,000 acres from a private water company. Much of that acreage, not tributary to reservoirs existing or planned, was in danger of being sold off. A citizens’ group hired Ansel Hall of the National Park Service and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (son of the designer of New York’s Central Park) to take stock of the territory.

The resulting image, published in December 1930, is the kind of map that is all about boundaries and ownership (above).

Already we see the big arc of public lands, like an E with the middle bar missing, its back along the first rank of the East Bay Hills and its arms extending eastward to Briones and Las Trampas, that still exists today. But closer study shows that the early planners had a more limited vision. Their dream was not of many parks but of one: a continuous “Grand Park” along the crest of the Berkeley-Oakland Hills. East of that first ridgetop, big blocks on this map are labeled “not included in proposed Reservations” or simply “Other land.” Some of this unclaimed acreage, including a large chunk west of San Pablo Dam Road

Jerry Ting

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master plan 1973

adjoining the future Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, was in fact sold off.

The East Bay Regional Park District was established in 1934.

Three years later, having acquired its first couple of thousand acres, the District announced its presence and purpose with a “Playtime Guide” (above). This depiction, with its amusing cartoon figures walking, golfing, peering into caves, or lolling on the grass, is in the style of another, perhaps more innocent time.

(Look at the figure bending to drink out of Lake Chabot.) It is also an example of map-as-campaign-document. You would not know at a glance that most of the land shaded as “natural park,” including the entire left-hand (southern) wing, was still in the hands of ebmud (and the subject of tough negotiations) when the map was drawn.

The very handsome Playground Map from the 1940 Tilden Park Master Plan (below), though credited to General Manager

planners were learning not to get too specific about planned acquisitions, for fear of alarming landowners, driving up land prices, or both. Thus this map illustrates another force at work in the creation of maps: the desire to leave certain information out.

There have been three more master plans for the District since 1973, each showing an increase both in territory and in cartographic sophistication. The latest and most sharply delineated plan map (bottom) displays new elements: the “land bank” areas, owned by the District but not yet open to the public, and an ambitious network of interpark regional trails, present and proposed. It is suitably coy about hoped-for acquisitions, specifying a few (as black triangles) that will surprise no one. The 2013 map is also the first in the series to reflect a technological revolution.

Albert Vail, is probably based on the work of National Park Service planners who came to the District’s aid in its early years. This is a technical map, intended less for the recreational public than for park managers, or for those citizens who like to peer over managers’ shoulders. Showing little of the natural endowment except tree cover, it is essentially a plan for recreational facilities: picnic areas (20), playing fields (12), foot trails (10 miles or so); horse trails (rather more).

During World War II and the immediate postwar years, the District added acreage slowly and almost exclusively in the Berkeley Hills. Things changed in 1962 with the arrival of an ambitious new general manager, William Penn Mott. Bursting the limits of the “Grand Park” vision, Mott proposed an archipelago of parks across Alameda and Contra Costa counties; his Forward 64–69 Plan (next page) shows acquisitions even outside the District boundaries of the day. With a growing park system, it was no longer possible to show all the District’s lands in one brochure, and the familiar single-park maps — now 51 in number — began to appear.

In 1971, the Legislature increased the District’s taxing authority, subject to preparation of a master plan showing how parks would serve all parts of the two East Bay counties. The map that resulted in 1973 (next page) is more polished but less communicative than Mott’s. Instead of blobs suggesting definite boundaries, this one uses cryptic symbols called “exemplars.” Park

Dig ita l magic When Lane Powell, publications coordinator, arrived at the District a quarter-century ago, mapmaking worked like this: You started with usgs topographic sheets, added layers of transparent vellum or Mylar on which were carefully drawn such features as trails, parking areas, and boundaries, and photographed the stack. “Very tedious,” he remarks.

This idea of layering information remains fundamental, but in the early 1990s a superior way of doing it emerged: the geographic information system, or gis. Credit its early adoption hereabouts to the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991 and the resulting push for better mapping of fuel types and flammabilities. In a gis, layers of data live in a computer, and they can be endless in number. Typically one consists of aerial photographs and one of usgs topo sheets. There is a layer for plant communities and one for creeks and water bodies. Several layers capture manmade features, and additional ones cover property lines and jurisdictions.

In fact, a well-developed gis contains more kinds of information than the human eye or mind could grasp at one go.

A powerful supplementary tool arrived in 1994, when the global positioning system was opened for nonmilitary use. By reading signals from satellites, a receiver on the ground can establish location, calculate direction, and measure distances and elevations traversed. In the old days, mapmakers might be lucky to locate a raptor nest, for instance, within a quarter-quarter section, one-sixteenth of a square mile; gps receivers can narrow this to yards. Newly precise information on every aspect of the land came flooding in.

The revolution did not happen overnight.

The first gps receivers were backpack-size and, by later standards, none too accurate.

Building a geographic information system master plan 2013

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required a lot of tedious hours as reams of data got translated into the proper digital forms. “I’m just glad I wasn’t the person sitting in front of the computer entering all this,” says Ecological Services Coordinator Steve Bobzien.

Being digital does not make information flawless. gps data has to be taken with a grain of salt; the readings from decent hand-held receivers can be off by 15 feet. If you simply superimpose a bunch of uncorrected layers in the database, any map you produce will show oddities like houses in the middle of streams.

An editor must intervene. “We do as much as we can to make it accurate,” says District gis Coordinator David Drueckhammer, “but it’s just as important to make it look right.”

“We use gps to get accuracy,” says botanist Wilde Legard.

“Then we fudge.”

T he h arves t It took about 15 years to get the new systems running smoothly. The years of information gathering, adjusting, and debugging had produced a system that could answer more questions faster than ever before.

To see how subtlety has grown with these new capabilities, compare the 1940 Tilden Park map with the recent vegetation map of Tilden and adjoining Wildcat Canyon regional parks (below). Where the old map merely shows trees or the absence

of trees, the new one charts the whole mosaic of vegetation: showing, for instance, the broad plantations of fire-prone eucalyptus and pine. Removing such stands wholesale is expensive and sometimes controversial. By combining the vegetation map with other gis layers that show temperature and wind patterns, the District can narrow its focus to certain stands where the risk of fire — and damage to valued things like buildings and redwood groves — is highest.

Or take the case of the large-flowered fiddleneck, an annual herb with bright orange trumpet-shaped flowers. It grows in native perennial grasslands, a vegetation type on the verge of extinction in the District’s territory. By 1997 the fiddleneck was down to two small populations south of Altamont Pass.

Attempted transplants struggled or died out. Botanists hope that gis will help them determine exactly what factors enable the plant to thrive and where to introduce it next.

Not all park mapping is of lands the District already owns.

“In the acquisitions department,” says gis analyst Beth Stone, “we start at the boundaries and look outward.” For this purpose, parcel maps of the two counties become more important, as does census data. District policy, reflected in its master plans, is to site new parks so that all communities get their share. This allocation “would be pretty tough to do with paper maps,” Drueckhammer says.

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diablo foothills park brochure 2013

1,750-square-foot inlaid representation of the Delta at Big Break Regional Shoreline near Oakley (above). Made by Scientific Arts Studios, it is placed so that map north and world north align.

Visitors can trace river channels across it, identify landmarks from it, even tip bottles of water onto it and watch a leisurely westward flow. “It is the anchor of this park,” says Supervising Naturalist Mike Moran. People who are striving to learn, or teach, about California’s toughest water issues come here for orientation. The Delta map is a complement to that other superb miniature, the Bay Model in Sausalito, with the advantage, Moran says, “that this map is in the place.”

M a p s f o r t he p u b l i c For most people, of

Mov ing w ith m aps For many people

course, the guide of choice is not a specialized sheet about fiddlenecks but the broad recreation maps embodied by the District’s single-park brochures (next page). These maps also now flow from the geographic information system, but with a different selection of detail. Many things found in the gis, like former Ohlone village sites, are naturally omitted. Mapmaker Powell sometimes adds an element not in the database, like a peak symbol for a locally prominent height.

The very precise trail mileages found on these maps have their own story. Between 1990 and 2003 a volunteer named Hal McDonald measured trail mileages with a very old-fashioned tool: the surveyor’s wheel. You push the wheel, equipped with an odometer, in front of you along a path, taking care to keep it on the midline of the trail, in a nicely vertical position, and running smoothly regardless of rocks or mud or other imperfections. It is exhausting work if done for long. McDonald, a chemist at the Lawrence Livermore

Lab, did it for long. To get the most accurate possible readings, he walked every trail mile in the District three times. If there was a discrepancy to iron out, he went back again.

Was all this effort, in the gps era, a waste of time? Not at all, says mapmaker Powell, who worked with McDonald for years.

“I’m not convinced that the new technology is as accurate as a wheel.” Typical gps readings have their own margin of error, and you lose the signal if you go under trees. In fact, the District’s current maps, being quite literally “ground-truthed,” are widely admired for their accuracy. And after nearly 50 years, they are still regularly updated and made available, free to the public, at each park entrance station.

Besides being offered on paper, park brochures in pdf format are now available on the District’s website, ebparks.org. Later in 2014, a sophisticated interactive District-wide map will also be posted. You can enter your location, for instance, and see instantly what parks and even what park entrances are most convenient to you. You can enter an activity, from dog-walking to backcountry camping, and see where you can go.

The ultimate in cartography for public education may be a map you don’t unfold or click on, but walk across: the

on the trail these days, the map of choice is an image on a smartphone, which may or may not be running a dedicated gps application. None of the widely available types of maps and terrain images — 14 variants are on my phone at the moment — contains as much key information as the ebrpd park maps. District maps themselves can be viewed on portable devices, in two forms: one lacking in topographical detail but crisp at all magnifications, the other more informative but fuzzy when expanded.

Me? I still prefer a paper map, whether original or printed at home from a computer. The telling advantage is the larger “screen size.” I would rather unfold than zoom out or scroll. Then, too, a paper map doesn’t run out of juice or break when dropped.

The most important program, in any case, is one you develop inside your head: “map sense,” the ability to line up map with landscape and keep track of yourself and what you are seeing as you move. What valley are we looking into now? What is the name of that pond? What bigger stream does this small stream flow into? How can we get to the top of that hill? Which loop will give us the least (or most) elevation gain?

With practice, a good map becomes much more than a tool for staying unlost. It’s a doorway into the great and little wonders of a piece of our planet. Land is fascinating. Maps, those shrunken, highly artificial, selectively annotated images of place, are only a little bit less so. To put map and land together is to walk with wider eyes.

Bay Area journalist and poet John Hart has written a dozen books on the California environment; his latest is An Island in Time: 50 Years of Point Reyes National Seashore (2012). Maps courtesy of Jerry Kent and the East Bay Regional Parks District.

tilden park vegetation 2010

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ORCAS of the

DECIPHER ING

O

THE

CU LTU R E

OF

KILLER WHALES

C A L I F O R N I A CO A S T

by Sarah Allen with Moe Flannery

Daniel Bianchetta /InsightPhotography, bigsurphoto.com

n a c o l d , b l u s t e ry d ay i n l at e F e b r u a ry , a group of killer whales known as “K Pod” was detected swimming down the coast of Northern California from an area around Fort Bragg.

The route the pod embarked on that day was straight south, hugging the coastline. As they neared Point Reyes, a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) fisheries researcher in Washington State, Brad Hanson, who had been following the whales using satellite tag information, sent out an email alert to a group of marine scientists along the coast. This was a thrilling call to action for a marine scientist who has lived near Point Reyes her whole life, yet had seen killer whales only twice from land, and I didn’t want to miss this rare opportunity. I grabbed my binoculars and spotting scope and headed out to the lighthouse to see if I could catch sight of this wayward pod so far from its spring and summer home in the Pacific Northwest, and so near to shore.

Killer whales are toothed members of the order Cetacea (which includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises), but as members of the Delphinidae family, they’re more closely related to dolphins than to true whales.

Globally, they’re lumped together into one species, Orcinus orca. Also called orcas, they’re one of the world’s fastest-moving marine mammals, able to swim at speeds approaching 35 miles per hour, easily outpacing slower whales such as the grays and minkes they sometimes feed upon.

Their size (males can range up to 32 feet and weigh 22,000 pounds) strength, and ability to echolocate all contribute to their prowess as hunters.

But while killer whales are found in all of the world’s oceans, their lives in the wild are poorly understood, in part because there are tremendous differences between different groups of orcas. Though the species’ range spans the globe from pole to pole, individual orcas belong to regional ecological groups, called ecotypes, that have distinct ranges and behaviors. Scientists recognize at least 10 ecotypes for the species worldwide, three of which can be found off California: Southern Resident, Transient, and Offshore. While our classification of orcas is likely to change as we learn more, our growing understanding of these orca Laura Wilkinson, California Academy of Sciences

Every orca that appears out of the water presents a valuable research opportunity, whether it’s a female Transient bursting from the waters of Monterey Bay (left) or a rare beach stranding—as happened to a young male orca in Point Reyes in 2011. The beached whale’s skeleton was preserved and reassembled by a team from the California Academy of Sciences (above), where it now hangs over the museum’s entry hall.

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ecotypes — bolstered by recent advances in research technology and protocols — has been a major key to unlocking the mystery of the killer whales of the eastern North Pacific.

The Southern Resident ecotype was one of the first

Tory Kallman, Monterey Bay Whale Watch

groups of Pacific orcas to be classified. In the 1970s, scientists learned how to identify individual whales by taking photographs and then studying the images to identify distinguishing characteristics such as size and shape of fins, nicks, scars, and markings on the saddle patch, the distinctive mark on an orca’s back just

(above) A Transient orca splashes back into the waters of Monterey Bay. Whale-watching boats are able to get close to orcas regularly in Monterey Bay (right), and individual whales, such as this Transient male, may visit a boat multiple times in a day.

behind the dorsal fin. The photos were collated into catalogs and used to compare whales and pods (groups of whales that are closely associated by behavior and genetics). In 1976, Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research used this technique to identify all the individuals in the three pods (J, K, and L) of killer whales that live around the San Juan Islands of Washington. Thanks to this research, we know that the Southern Resident ecotype is composed of three pods consisting of 20 to 40 individuals each and genetically tied through their mothers. The 26

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the pod by boat, collecting even more precious information about the pod’s winter habits and location. Email alerts, like the one I received, enlisted more trained observers in the study.

Through photographs of other individuals in the pod, Hanson and his group were able to identify the male’s traveling companions. And from collected whale poop samples they were even able to determine what the whales had been eating on their journey. This new information will greatly expand our understanding of Southern Residents and help guide recovery efforts.

population size of this ecotype (as of summer 2013) is 82, small enough to census all the individuals within it each year.

But even as the photos helped identify the individuals of the Southern Resident ecotype and document the relationships between them, another mystery soon emerged: Where did these Southern Resident whales go in the winter? Photo identification only works when the whales are present, breaching the surface in front of a human with a camera. For years, anecdotal sightings off the coasts of Oregon and Northern California, including some from as far south as Monterey Bay by marine biologist Nancy Black of Monterey Bay Whale Watch and others, suggested the whales moved south along the coast, but documentation was lacking.

We’ve recently started to fill this knowledge gap with the help of satellite tagging. To tag an orca on the open water, though, is no easy task; it requires a special understanding of the whales’ behavior and ecology, as well as extraordinary finesse. Greg Schorr from Cascadia Research Collective has both, and in 2012 he and noaa’s Hanson were able to attach a tag to the whale that was heading toward Point Reyes. Hanson told me how Schorr tagged the tall dorsal fin of this Southern Resident K Pod male with a dart gun at a distance of around 25 feet in the waters off the Washington coast.

The tag was an argos (Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite) system device, programmed to record the location of the orca for short periods throughout the day and transmit that information to satellites, which were then accessed online by biologists.

The effort to tag and follow the Southern Resident whales matters because, while the population was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 2005, marine resource managers had little information on which to base protective measures outside of the whales’ Washington/British Columbia home range. With the tag affixed, scientists were able to follow K Pod south to Fort Bragg, where the whales appeared to be feeding near the shore. The tag continued transmitting for 94 days, mapping the transit of the whale in near real time and allowing Hanson’s group to follow along the coast by car and intersect

Dec. 29, 2012

Seattle

February 4, 2013

WASHINGTON CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT

Portland

OREGON

While Southern Residents stick

mostly to their home in the Pacific Northwest and are rarely spotted in California, whales from the Transient ecotype are much more commonly seen in our waters. Transients can be identified visually by their robust size, solid saddle patch, and tall straight dorsal fin of the male, compared to the open saddle patch and slightly curved tip of a Southern Resident male’s dorsal fin. The females’ dorsal fins in all ecotypes are much shorter than the males’ and they’re more curved, similar to those of dolphins. Transients are frequently observed in and around Monterey Bay, though they have been observed as far north as southeastern Alaska and as far south as Southern California. According to noaa, there are around 100 individual Transient orcas off the California coast. As researchers have begun to better understand the Transients, they have divided the ecotype into West Coast Transients that range from Southern California to southeast Alaska and a second group that occurs farther west through Prince William Sound, Kodiak, and the Aleutians.

Transients of either group generally occur in small pods of 10 whales or fewer.

Scientists use differences in morphology, diet, range, behavior, and genetics to distinguish between ecotypes. They also increasingly use acoustic differences. With an underwater hydrophone, researchers can hear the echolocation clicks, whistles, and pulsed calls of the whales as they communicate, then compare the calls with those of other groups. This method of detection can also be quite useful for finding whales, especially when rough seas make sightings difficult.

Combining acoustic signatures with behavior has yielded some remarkable insights into the attack patterns of Transient whales in Monterey Bay. In contrast to the fish diet of Southern Residents, Transient orcas feed primarily on marine

David Wimpfheimer, calnaturalist.com

January 24, 2013

CAPE BLANCO

February 16, 2013

February 10, 2013 February 22, 2013

Eureka CAPE MENDOCINO

CALIFORNIA

February 18, 2013

January 11, 2013

Oakland February 25, 2013

K-25’S CALIFORNIA JOURNEY

On Dec. 29, 2012, researchers in Washington attached a satellite tag to the dorsal fin of a male Southern Resident orca known as K-25. Over the next few months K-25 made three visits to Point Reyes, the first a three-week January trip that halted just north of the point (red line). In February, K-25 hovered off the Humboldt Coast for several weeks and twice dipped south to Point Reyes.

(Data and K-25 tag photo from NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center.)

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Richard James, coastodian.org

To find an orca washed up on the beach in Point Reyes (left) is rare enough, but when researchers learned that this washed-up whale belonged to the Offshore ecotype, they knew they meant dismembering the carcass on the beach and then hauling it out to the road piece by piece (below).

mammals. Over the past decade, Nancy Black and other researchers have documented Transient orcas attacking and eating gray whales in Monterey Bay. It’s a perfect setup for the orcas: In April and May, mother and calf pairs of gray whales migrate slowly north from their breeding lagoons in Baja and warm waters around the southern Channel Islands, generally hugging the coastline. But rather than follow the long perimeter of Monterey Bay, they strike out more or less directly across the bay, using knocking sounds to navigate back up the slope on the north shore after crossing over the deep canyon.

This gives Transient orcas the opportunity to detect the gray whale pairs in the open water. In 2004, Black documented 16 attacks

by Transient orcas on gray whale calves. She noted that the several core family groups of orcas, numbering seven or less, gathered into groups of 15 to 32 individuals, all working together and sharing the kill. The adult reproducing females did most of the work while the young closely observed, though some males also participated.

Researchers also discovered, by listening with hydrophones, that the Transient whales go silent before attacking; successful attacks are followed by a burst of vocal calls and whistles. Southern Resident whales do not go silent before preying on fish, presumably because fish don’t detect their vocalizations. Harbor seals, though, know the difference between these two ecotypes and are known to ignore vocalizations of fish-eating Residents but react strongly to those of their Transient cousins.

Much less is known about the vocalizations — or any other 28

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90 years, though the average age of death for females is 50 years and for males 30, so this male died relatively young.)

The initial plan was to keep just the tissue samples and maybe the skull, but once Graeme had identified the dead orca as an Offshore, Flannery realized she needed to try and recover the entire skeleton, to archive it in the cas research collection.

Tides, waves, and steep cliffs limited access to the beached whale, but this was a rare opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. It was a monumental task, requiring the assistance of many individuals and institutions. So the group of scientists and volunteers mobilized by the Marine Mammal Stranding Network made the trip to the beach to undertake the long, stinky process.

The first step was to cut the whale into pieces to get it off the

Richard James, coastodian.org

had to preserve it, which

mojoscoast

scientists try to gather data before the carcass decomposes, and fortunately there was one local marine mammal biologist not at the conference. Moe Flannery of the California Academy of Sciences (cas) gathered a corps of volunteers to collect information and tissue (blubber, skin, and muscle) from the whale while it was fresh. Flannery also shared photos of the dead orca via email with other researchers, hoping for possible identification. The response was prompt and unexpected: Graeme Ellis at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada wrote back identifying the whale as a young male called o319.

The “O” stands for offshore, by far the rarest and leastunderstood of the three Pacific orca ecotypes and something extremely remarkable to find washed up on the beach in Point Reyes — or anywhere. Offshore whales are generally a smaller form than those of the other two ecotypes and their saddle patch is fainter. As with the other ecotypes, the female’s dorsal fin is much shorter than the male’s, is rounded at the tip, and often has nicks, and the male’s fin is shorter than those of the other two ecotypes and additionally has a rounded tip. Researchers first identified the ecotype off the Pacific Northwest, but Offshore individuals and pods have subsequently been observed ranging far across the eastern North Pacific from the Bering Sea south to California. Once, they were observed and photographed by a volunteer at Point Reyes, exuberantly leaping after rounding the point. Orca researchers were able to identify the pod from the photograph of a male, adding the observation to their database. Researchers believe that Offshore orcas feed primarily on schooling fish and sharks such as Pacific sleeper sharks, blue sharks, and opah. Their teeth are often heavily worn, perhaps because sharks have abrasive skin.

The orca known as o319 had originally been sighted in 2002 as a juvenile and had been photographed in the Pacific Northwest numerous Richard James, coastodian.org times — including just two months earlier off the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Based on its size and lack of secondary sexual characteristics like curled flukes and large dorsal fin, Graeme estimated that o319 was no more than 15 years old at the time of death, an age when males are starting to mature sexually. (Orcas can live as long as

aspect — of the third ecotype, Offshore orcas, because they are so rarely encountered. However, when they have been detected, scientists have noted that their vocalizations are distinct from those of the other two ecotypes.

One final way of learning about orcas is to study the rare cases in which whales have died and washed ashore. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that researchers here were able to learn about the rarest of the ecotypes through this rarest of study methods.

In November 2011, while most of the region’s orca specialists were away at a marine mammal conference, a local beach walker discovered a dead whale that had washed ashore on a remote beach at Point Reyes. Generally, when a dead orca washes ashore,

Once the rare Offshore orca had been brought to the Academy of Sciences, reconstruction expert Lee Post (above, in orange vest) was brought in to lead the process of putting O319 back together again (left).

beach. Volunteers with ropes, stretchers, and strong backs then hefted the bones and body parts up a steep, narrow path to the top of a ridge and then along the path to the parking area. Sarah Codde, a national park biologist who was one of the first to see the dead whale and participated in the whole removal process, said that packing out the skull was the hardest task of all, requiring six people using a stretcher and ropes. The necropsy, begun in the field and completed later in the lab, revealed hemorrhaging in the head, a broken rib, bloodstained vertebrae, and blood in the pleural cavity, indicating that the orca had died from trauma, perhaps caused by another orca or a boat strike. j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 4

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David Wimpfheimer, calnaturalist.com

Once the full skeleton had been brought to cas, scientists and volunteers used a process called maceration, in which bones are soaked in water for long periods, to remove the remaining flesh and grease. Soaking off the flesh took two months, and degreasing to whiten the bones with sodium perborate took another four months. Finally, in March 2013, the skull was moved to the cas roof so the sun could complete the whitening and degreasing.

Lee Post was chosen to orchestrate the next stage, the articulation of the bones. Post, known as “the Boneman,” is a resident of Homer, Alaska, who wrote the series The Bone Building Books and had worked on a similar project at the Marine Science Center in Port Townsend, Washington. The cas project was unique, however, because the entire articulation process was done in full view of the public inside the museum. Under the gaze of fascinated visitors, cas staff and volunteers carefully assembled all 286 pieces of the skeleton—a jigsaw puzzle of whale-size proportions—over the course of two months. John Eleby, a volunteer articulator and national park ranger at Point Reyes, participated in the entire process of handling the cleaned bones, including sorting, identifying, measuring, weighing, and mapping, and finally attaching the skull and lower jaw to the remainder of the skeleton.

Once completed, o319’s skeleton was put on display as part of the “Built for Speed” exhibit at cas during the summer of 2013.

It is now on permanent exhibit in the lobby at cas.

Orcas are seen regularly in Monterey Bay, but it’s much less common to spot them in the open water between the coast and the Farallon Islands.

While we have learned a lot from this rare beach-cast Offshore orca and from the satellite-tagged Southern Resident, there is still much to be discovered about these remarkable whales so we can properly manage our marine resources and give orcas a chance to survive in a rapidly changing marine environment subject to rising water temperature, acidification, and declining food resources. If, for example, scientists discover that Southern Residents feed only on Chinook salmon all the way south to Monterey Bay, should fisheries biologists revise how these salmon are managed along the Pacific coast? Whether orcas can adapt to such changes will be the subject of future scientists’ research,

applying constantly evolving technologies not even imagined today.

Many orca researchers believe that there may be two new ecotypes in the eastern Pacific. An “L.A. Pod” was identified in the 1980 and ’90s near Los Angeles with individuals that are much smaller and display more superficial gashes compared to the other three ecotypes. (Members of this pod were filmed in 1997 just off the Farallon Islands attacking and killing a great

Berkeley

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Sarah Allen is the ocean and coastal resources program lead for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service. She has studied birds and marine mammals from California to Antarctica. Moe Flannery is the ornithology and mammalogy collections manager at the California Academy of Sciences.

Hardware

We Accept the Following for Recycling: All Batteries All Lightbulbs Electronic Waste Christmas Lights and Wire Small Scrap Metal Empty Compressed Cans: Propane, Butane, Oxygen, Compressed Air (excludes spray paint) Clothing/Shoes (bin in parking lot)

The East Bay Regional Park District celebrates 80 years of connecting parks to people.

white shark, a behavior not observed before or since in orcas.)

And a research group led by Jaime Jahncke, a marine biologist with Point Blue Conservation Science, observed another previously unidentified pod of five killer whales during a research cruise in July 2013, directly west of the continental shelf near the Farallon Islands. The whales looked similar to Transients but members of the pod did not fit any of the photo-ids for California. With the continued discovery and potential identification of new ecotypes, efforts to protect and restore these populations become both more illuminating and more challenging.

Back at Point Reyes, I waited out near the lighthouse for several hours on that raw February day, straining to see the bold black-and-white markings against the gray seas, but I never saw the tagged male of K Pod. I found out later that not long after I had arrived at the lighthouse, the pod had turned around near Tomales Point, just beyond the range of my spotting scope, and headed back toward Fort Bragg. Why? We’ll never know. But we know they did eventually come back. According to the satellite data, the K Pod did visit Point Reyes another time that winter — at night when no one was looking.

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Fish Forecast: Swimming Upstream Against Climate Change

accelerates the decline that’s already going on.”

The research that Moyle started decades ago now has a dual purpose: It offers evidence for the free fall, but it also may ultimately contribute to one of the best opportunities to soften this decline.

by Jacoba Charles

Feeling the heat Trapped in their streams, fish are under more pressure from climate change than many other groups of organisms. Not only are most fish (left) UC Davis researchers Jacob Montgomery and Brian Jacoba Charles

Williamson drag a seine net through the water for the monthly fish survey in Suisun Marsh and then later head to another site (right). This long-term study is helping scientists understand the impact of climate change on fish populations.

restricted to the particular water body they were hatched in, but their ability to move upstream or downstream in response to changing conditions has been constrained by dams, erosion, and other human-caused obstacles.

“Vegetation communities can move, birds can move,” Moyle says. “But the fish really can’t move; they are pretty much stuck where they are.”

Under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s highest emissions scenario, climate models predict a sevendegree increase in air temperature by the end of the 21st century, says Rebecca Quinones, a co-author of the study. As a result, there are many predicted changes coming down the pike for the fish to cope with. One of the biggest is warmer water temperatures, which kill or weaken the many species that have adapted to living in cooler water temperatures. The droughts that are expected to become more numerous compound the problem, as stream waters get even hotter than usual — or dry up entirely.

“We estimate that we will lose 57 to 99 percent of cold water

Jacoba Charles

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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.

T

wo researchers toss a long loop of net over the stern of a boat chugging slowly through Suisun Marsh, the extensive brackish wetland system south of Fairfield.

The wet slap of rope on metal echoes against a bank of reeds as the trawl net is tugged down by the water, opening into a billowing mouth scooping up any fish in its path.

There are a few minutes of stillness while the net does its work. One scientist checks her cell phone; redwing blackbirds rasp their shrill call from the reeds; a startled egret rises and flaps away up the brackish slough. Then captain Brian Williamson ends the trawl and UC Davis researcher Jacob Mont-

gomery and California Fish and Wildlife biologist Melissa Riley spring into action, quickly hauling the net in hand over hand so no fish have time to escape. The catch is dumped into a large tub full of water, and each fish is identified, measured, and released.

Scientists have been conducting surveys in Suisun Marsh every month for over three decades, tracking the fluctuations of species in the marsh. It was this ongoing survey, spearheaded by Dr. Peter Moyle of UC Davis, that helped reveal the precipitous decline in the delta smelt population in the 1980s.

And now, Moyle predicts that surveys such as this one will reveal even greater changes in coming decades — not only here in Suisun Marsh, but all across the state. The culprit? Climate change. An estimated 82 percent of California’s 129 native fish species have been deemed highly likely to dwindle in number — or go extinct — as a result of climate change over the next century, according to a recent article Moyle coauthored that appeared last May in the online journal PLoS One. “There is already a general decline in native fishes — which is why climate change is such a problem,” Moyle says. “It

Knowledge is power For Moyle and Quinones — and many other researchers — the same careful documentation and massive database that enabled them to predict the damage in the first place offers unprecedented insight into how we might design more effective conservation strategies.

This type of planning is innovative for several reasons, Quinones says. First is simply the ambitious scope of developing a statewide database of all species and their habitat needs.

Second is the attempt to actually apply the knowledge to practical solutions.

Coho salmon jaw and spine in Lagunitas Creek watershed in West Marin, one of the potential “salmon stronghold” areas that could be targeted Richard James, coastodian.org

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habitat,” Quinones says. “Fish that can migrate will shift their distribution northward, but most rivers have barriers on them so even those fish that could move won’t necessarily be able to.”

What’s more, winter storms and flooding are also expected to become more intense as weather becomes more variable. These events scour streams, destroying habitat and clouding the water with gill-clogging runoff. And the vibrant estuarine nursery habitat of mudflat and reeds will be eroded, as the zone between human development and rising water levels shrinks.

While such forecasts are bleak, researchers at UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences aren’t just throwing up their hands and walking away. As climate change stresses all species, and as we try to do more with increasingly limited resources, it becomes ever more important to know the specifics of fishes’ habits and preferences. If blanket ecosystem-level protection is not an option, the best hope for the fish is to deploy those scarce resources where they can deliver the most bang for the buck.

for protection.

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Natives vs. alien

Jacoba Charles

To nurture step two, the Center for Watershed Sciences (cws) has secured additional funding from a coalition of environmental groups to plan conservation strategies for California and beyond. Quinones recently finished a project as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität München in Germany to compare California and Bavarian watersheds. Both areas have similar ranges of habitat and similar fish assemblages (including salmon and whitefish), and both pose similar challenges (including dams, introduced species, and climate change). So even though many of California’s natives have never made it out of their own local creeks, their woes reflect issues found around the world.

In California, salmon “strongholds” are one conservation measure being considered by the cws team. The basic idea, which has been around for over a decade, is that areas with particularly robust populations should also receive priority for conservation, instead of those with already threatened populations that may have little chance of survival. If the worst happens, the theory goes, at least the stronghold populations can act as living seed banks for the future.

Expanding on this concept, the team at the Center for Watershed Sciences is now looking for areas that are overall biodiversity strongholds — in other words, places where other fish species, not just salmon, can thrive. And they are making sure that climate factors are part of their evaluation. “Ultimately, we want to identify not only where protected areas should be, but also how those habitats may shift in the future,” Quinones says. “You may not be protecting the areas you need to if you are just looking at the context of what you have right now on the landscape.”

Another serious challenge already facing our native fish is the rise of nonnative species introduced into California waters either intentionally for sportfishing or accidentally through negligence. According to Moyle, the suite of native fishes found in California is a distinctive one containing a very large number of endemic species, that is, species that live only here. But this diversity is threatened if his predictions pan out — because nearly all native species would fare poorly in a changing climate,

Barrie Rokeach, rokeachphoto.com

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go out to sea, bulk up on protein-packed marine life, and after several years return upstream to spawn, die, and fertilize the inland ecosystem with all those nutrients that otherwise would have remained at sea.

A more widely mourned loss might be the green sturgeon, a dinosaur-like fish that was popular for sportfishing until it was listed as threatened by the federal government in 2006. This massive yet secretive fish can live 70 years and grow to more than eight feet long. It is sometimes called a living fossil, as it and other sturgeon have remained largely unchanged for the last 200 million years. Yet because the green sturgeon both produces few young and depends on cold inland water to spawn and rear its young, it is highly vulnerable to climate change. And because it lives so long, it could stop reproducing and effectively be extinct before anyone would notice.

stickleback, with its lightly speckled sides and perpetual pout, to the silver, bullet-shaped Sacramento splittail, it is hard to imagine losing any one of these unique species.

Yet according to the report, 100 of California’s native fish are highly vulnerable to climate change.

This includes all salmon and steelhead species, as well as the less-charismatic yet highly publicized delta smelt and many lesser known fish — each of which is valuable in its own way, even if it lives its life well away from the public eye.

For example, no one might miss the Red Hills

The imperiled While the impact of climate change can seem abstract, it becomes very tangible out on Suisun Marsh, watching the researchers haul in net after net full of fish. From the diminutive three-spined

already created across the landscape, and which will become increasingly common due to climate change.

“Our aquatic ecosystems will become much less like what they were historically and more like what they are everywhere else in America,” Moyle says. “We’ll become boring.”

For example, the largemouth bass, originally brought into the state from the Midwest and currently found in the drinkingwater reservoirs of Marin County, would likely expand into nearby waterways that support a fragile coho salmon population, says Marin Municipal Water District biologist Eric Ettlinger.

“When the reservoirs are full in the wintertime, some of those fish spill out of the reservoirs and into the creek,” he says.

“Right now the bass don’t survive because the creek water is too cold for them — but if the creek is warmer, they probably will.”

Of course, not all parts of the Bay Area will be affected in the same way. For example, climate models are ambiguous about how coastal areas such as Marin County will be affected, Ettlinger says. “In fog-dominated areas,” he says, “we may actually get cooling with climate change, so if we get more fog, we’re going to get cooler summers, and that would be good for the salmon and other native fish.”

Knowledge meets local conditions

The Center for Watershed Sciences’ conservation planning hinges on details of local climate, habitat, and other siteMatt Manuel, Calif. Dept. of Water Resources specific conditions. For example, the fish database is being used to recommend changes in the management of dams, such as altering the timing and size of water releases from some of the state’s 1,400 major dams.

“The whole idea is to re-operate dams to make the flow regimes more favorable,” Moyle says. “This is one of the ways to provide better habitat for fish statewide, especially in the face of climate change.”

The changes being suggested wouldn’t significantly reduce the amount of water available to homes, farms, and habitats farther downstream, Moyle says; but by taking into account the details, the proposed changes could make the rivers much more favorable to fish in the long run.

(From upper left) Barred morph of a native tule perch, caught and counted in the Suisun Marsh survey; the small and endangered delta smelt is considered a bellwether species for the health of the Delta; green sturgeon are caught, measured, and released by researchers with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission; the front end of a Pacific lamprey.

roach, says Peter Moyle. This minnow only grows to be a few inches long; it’s mostly brown, though the tips of its fins blush red during breeding season. Yet this plain little fish is one of the only vertebrates known to be confined to streams bordered by California’s iconic serpentine soils; it lives in only a few small streams that pass through the harsh and nearly barren environment created by deposits of this magnesium-rich soil.

The forearm-length Pacific lamprey also might not be missed — this eel-like fish was a beloved food of native Californians but has fallen from popular favor due to its bony body, disturbingly toothy suction-cup maw, and habit of sucking the blood, flesh, and fluid from salmon and other prey. Yet despite this grisly resumé, lampreys are an important part of the food chain. Their prey generally survives, and their young are filterfeeders that spend up to six years living in the gravel riverbed, cleaning the water of algae and other tiny particles, before they migrate to the ocean like salmon. And like salmon, they serve as a nutrient conveyor belt—the diminutive four-inch-long young

while nonnatives are not expected to suffer as much as the climate changes. Why? Most Californian species evolved to fit a narrow range of conditions particular to our unique Mediterranean climate. Conversely, the nonnatives tend to be generalists with the flexibility to adapt to diverse living conditions; this is why they have been able to thrive here in the first place. Making matters worse, the newcomers are generally better adapted to warm, quiet waters of the type that humans have Richard James, coastodian.org

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Put the San Francisco Bay Trail in your pocket…

“We aren’t just saying ‘We want more water in the rivers,’ but ‘We want more water in this stretch of river at this time of year to benefit these species,’” Quinones says.

And those biodiversity strongholds? By matching up the details of climate modeling and the fish database, scientists can more accurately identify creeks likely to stay cool and support salmon over the next 50 or 100 years.

Other aspects of the project include looking at ways to enhance connectivity among waterways and habitat types, researching what scale of restoration is most effective, and determining which areas are likely to be most resilient as the climate changes. Once the research has been completed, the team will begin an outreach phase, sharing its results with land managers and decision-makers who have the power to implement change.

Quinones says she’s energized by the possibilities, despite the project’s grim predictions. “Sometimes you get these predictions and you wonder how the fish are ever going to survive — so really linking that to how it can be applied on the ground is pretty innovative,” she says. “To me that is the exciting part.”

With this new boxed set of 25 map cards

With over 330 miles of trail ringing the San Francisco Bay, there’s a ride or a stroll for everyone, from the long-time local to the first-time tourist.

Jacoba Charles is a freelance journalist based in the North Bay. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Point Reyes Light, Bay Nature, and on Salon.com.

Available for $14.95 at baytrail.org, and at the Bay Crossings store at the S.F. Ferry Building and local bookstores.

Funding for “Dispatches From the Home Front” has been provided by the State Coastal Conservancy, The Nature Conservancy, and Pacific Gas & Electric Company.

Brought to you by the association of bay area governments & metropolitan transportation commission

The District has protected almost 85,000 acres of agricultural land and open space in Sonoma County.

Los Vaqueros Interpretive Center and Marina Come us!

Free Nature Programs visit Offered on Weekends!

Check out the schedule at www.ccwater.com/losvaqueros.

Los Vaqueros Marina A free outdoor exhibition of eight exuberant sculptures by the internationally acclaimed artist, on view by the bay through May 2014.

Learn more at sfmoma.org/onthego

Open 7 days a week, dawn to dusk 925-371-2628 Directions: From Vasco Road, turn north onto Los Vaqueros Road and drive to the end.

John Muir Interpretive Center

Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field is presented by SFMOMA in partnership with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

Saturdays and Sundays 9:00 am–4:00 pm 925-240-2440 Directions: Drive to 100 Walnut Blvd., Byron, then drive about a mile to the southern end of Walnut Blvd.

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Presentation of this exhibition is made possible by extraordinary support from the Fisher family.

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Major support is provided by Agnes Gund in memory of George Gund III, and Robin and Virginia Wright.

or call

Mark di Suvero, Are Years What? (for Marianne Moore), 1967; installation view of Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field, May 22, 2013–May 26, 2014; Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund and Gift of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, by exchange, 1999; © Mark di Suvero; photo: Ian Reeves

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The Wild Life of a Coastodian Interview with Richard James, by Eric Simons From the western edge of the continent, Richard James blogs about life and litter at Coastodian.org, takes photos, and dreams up art projects that challenge our view of the world. Like the five giant bottles he fashioned out of plastic bottles washed up on the beaches and then arrayed like some dystopian Stonehenge at Drakes Beach. James and I went for a walk on North Beach at the Point Reyes National Seashore, where we sat down near one of the several trash caches he maintains, to talk about his life as a park volunteer and his mania for keeping the beaches clean.

ES: What brought you to Point Reyes?

RJ: Nature. I was coming up to help as a volunteer with a salmon and steelhead monitoring project. I would drive up from Menlo Park, sometimes two or three times a week depending on the workload, and do fish work throughout the year. My first volunteer day was spent installing wattles above Horseshoe Pond. I helped with water quality, then

all manner of salmonid monitoring.

Then I got into plovers, elephant seals, harbor seals, invasive plant surveys, intertidal surveys . . . I made maps for other litter projects, and then started my own major litter removal operations.

But it was crazy. It’s a long distance, there’s bridge tolls, all that driving. And my rent kept getting raised, and I had an epiphany: Jeez, why don’t I move? So the

let children have immersive experiences with animals so you don’t have to trap animals. People seem to be glued to their screens — well, let them look at their screens, and let those animals live, and protect them in the wild!

ES: How did you first notice the trash on the beach and think of this as a call to action?

RJ: I’ve picked up trash my whole life. In the city trash doesn’t stand out as much, because the city’s all human-contrived stuff. But out here, in contrast to sand and waves and birds and kelp, it really jumps out at you. I can’t really walk by. I just feel compelled to pick it up. Because if I don’t, who will?

I go to remote beaches and I pick up litter that no one gets to. I can easily find 100 to 200 pounds of litter on one beach.

I grab what I can. You ask why the litter — why not? It’s horrible, all the damage that gets done. I’ve got a picture of a murre tangled up in a salmon rig, and I’m sure it drowned because of that. All the birds that eat this stuff, the turtles that eat balloons and plastic bags thinking they’re jellyfish, those whales with 300 to 400 pounds of fishing net in their gut that killed them, that’s just wrong.

ES: Do you remember at all the first time you came out to the beach out here and thought, I’m going to collect some of this stuff and bring it back with me?

RJ: I can’t remember the first time, but in the beginning I didn’t bring a backpack.

I just had a jacket, and I would pick up bits and pieces and shove it in my pocket.

Well, you can imagine, it doesn’t scale very well. Your 501 jeans only hold so much. So then I’d find a bait bag, or a plastic bag. But then I’d have bags full of stuff, and the bags would tear. So I’d have to find another bag, and then I thought, oh, maybe I should bring my own bags. For a while I would bring plastic bags, but that was just adding to the mess.

ES: You took some of this trash you collected and turned it into art: human-size bottles made from

fish brought me, initially, and once I got here I just started exploring the park.

ES: You left behind a past as a Silicon Valley tech worker, right?

RJ: Yeah, I had worked for different tech companies but at the time I was selfemployed as a computer consultant in Silicon Valley. I just got burned out. I used to go to Macworld all the time.

And then the last Macworld I went to I watched this guy give a demo on one of those first-person shooter games, and he was so excited that the latest model had the graphics processors that could very very realistically simulate blood. Look at that blood!

So I thought, instead of spending all this money to make Grand Theft Auto and all this crap that just pollutes children’s minds, why don’t you make a fully cyber zoo? Instead of having guys wear goggles where they control drones that kill people, develop that technology to

Richard James poses at sunrise on Drake’s Beach at Point Reyes with his signature artistic creation: 10-foot-tall bottles crafted of chicken wire, filled with plastic bottles he had found washed up on the beaches of Point Reyes.

Richard James, coastodian.org

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First Person

A persistent photographer as well as dedicated park

plastic bottles you found on the beach. Tell me about the origin of the exhibit.

RJ: All 2010, I’d been picking up bottles.

I decided to store a year’s worth of bottles and make something of them. I hadn’t figured out what that was, but I had to do something, so I decided I’m going to make these giant meta-bottles.

I made the chicken-wire frames, I had buckets to make the caps. I wanted to keep the aspect ratio of a real water bottle, just scaled up so it looked like a bottle. I made five of them. I got permission to drag them out onto Drakes Beach one morning, where I photographed them. I knew I wanted those iconic white cliffs of Point Reyes in the background.

ES: You’ve been out here enough to see the park in a lot of different ways. Can you talk about how that’s changed you and what you see out here?

RJ: It’s often a multi-mission: I come out here to photograph, I come out here to be here, I come out here to pick up trash.

I’m always ready to pick up trash because it’s always here. Sometimes I play games where I’ll only pick up red things, or blue things. I’ll kind of tune my visual radar.

And I’ve noticed that when I’m focusing on something, whether it’s a red thing, whether it’s a water bottle, whether it’s Styrofoam, whether it’s a float, it’s very easy to miss everything else. We’re destroying our planet because we get

volunteer, James shot this burrowing owl and cow after waiting several hours for the owl to emerge from a badger hole.

distracted by meaningless things. Being out here has taught me to look at things differently. I’ll be out here and I’ll be so focused on picking up trash — looking at the ground — that I have to thump myself upside the head, like, look at the waves! Because there will be huge waves, and it’s crazy! I think of all the people in skyscrapers in downtown anywhere, usa, that would die to be where I’m at, and I’m just mindlessly walking through this gorgeous scene picking up trash! So I’ll say, dude, look at the seagulls. Or 40 pelicans will fly by six inches off the deck and I’ll catch sight of them and it’s like, OK, stop what you’re doing, and revel.

Revel in that beauty.

ES: You’ve seen a lot of remarkable natural moments. Like, you once saw two gray whales practically in the surf next to you.

RJ: Oh, yeah. That was up at Kehoe Beach. I actually went out there to gather some mussels to cook ’em for a friend.

I go out there, and oh my god, that was incredible. Those whales were closer than from here to that kelp right there. A big one and a little one. And then there were bigger ones farther out. I’ve seen bull elephant seals, two-ton beasts duking it out, beating the tar out of each other. And I j a n ua ry – m a rc h 2 0 1 4

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incredible. A few months later, I came across five vertebrae on McClures Beach in the surf, intact. I called the park dispatch, because I didn’t know the park’s whale people yet, I only knew the fish people. And they said, “Oh, Sarah Allen’s going to want to know about this.” So I told them right exactly where it was, and they came down and got it.

That was the first time I met Sarah. She subsequently learned how nutty I was and how much trash I was packing off the beach, so she said, “Well, you know, that sperm whale, all that net that was in its gut”— because that’s probably what killed it, that was one of three sperm whales that washed ashore on the Pacific coast that year, all males, all with big chunks of net in their gut —“would you pack that net off the beach?” So she loans me her little itty-bitty Kelty backpack and says, “Here, you can borrow my backpack because it’s going to stink.”

Well, that thing wasn’t going to fit in that tiny pack! There was a lot of net!

But Gregory Packs had learned what I was doing, and they gave me a backpack.

It was a return, it was already destroyed.

So I packed about 350 pounds of really stinky net off that beach in that pack. It took me five trips over two days. Later Moe and some other volunteers came out and we packed all the bones of that whale off the beach.

ES: Where does your love of the outdoors and nature come from?

RJ: I don’t know. My grandparents had a homestead, 160 acres in the foothills of California with cows and an apple orchard. So as a youth I picked apples and I dealt with steers. And I dealt with fixing fences. And then we would go deer hunting, dove hunting, quail hunting up there on the property. Fishing too; I was exposed to trout fishing as a child. But then in college that’s when I first started going backpacking. My friend took me on my first 10-day trip. We were in Kings Canyon, Sequoia. That’s my favorite home, up there in the Sierra. That’s when I really got the bug. I got to immerse myself, get away from cars, get away from everything. And that’s when it all really blossomed.

ES: What are you working on now, with your art?

operation has turned into a major obsession for James, who describes this as a

Richard James, coastodian.org

“high-volume day.”

like pelicans; I call walking on the beach pelican therapy. A couple years ago, I probably took 10,000 photos of pelicans because I was so into pelicans. I got some good shots. I got a lot of not good shots.

ES: How’d you find out about the dead orca?

RJ: Well, I was in the midst of an art exhibit where I was exhibiting some of my work when I got a phone message from Moe Flannery at Cal Academy of Sciences, and she’s like, “Richard, there’s an orca, can you help?” Because there’s nothing like a cetacean to get a museum curator excited; I’ve learned that. I went, “Aw, man, I am sooo busy right now, um, OK, I’ll see what I can do.” I couldn’t do anything that day because of the show, but the next day, I got up at 5 in the morning, grabbed my camera gear, and hiked out there and went down to that beach, and here’s this orca in the surf. I took shots from the cliff right above it; then as I approached it I took some more shots, and took some video. But I didn’t have a lot of time, the surf was coming in, the whale was in the surf, and I had to get back to the show, so that was it for that first day. But then Moe and her crew came and took some tissue samples off the whale, and took pictures. Then they sent their pictures out to the orca net-

work, if you will, and someone who knows orcas saw what’s called the saddle patch, which is kind of like the license plate for orcas, and they went, ohmygod, that’s o319, we know that whale — he was last seen off Vancouver. It was an Offshore orca, meaning it belongs to this orca ecotype that we don’t know much about. [See article, page 24] So Moe went holy crap, we need to get the whole whale.

I got climbing gear, I got my backpack, and I went down there and helped with the slicing and the dicing. I photographed mostly, but since I was the guy with clean

hands, I would give Moe water, I would give people tools. Then I helped them pack out the parts, doing four trips. I carried out both flippers, one [that was] kind of de-tissued but still very heavy, with two vertebrae, and then the next one, no-body de-tissued it, it was full-on flesh. Those flippers weigh 50, 60 pounds apiece.

Plus two vertebrae again. I just got what I could get. I did a lot of trips for that whale.

ES: Was it a nice reward to see it so well articulated in the museum?

RJ: Yeah, that was cool. It’s gorgeous.

Seeing that flipper, just the bones, it’s basically a big hand.

ES: Was that the only beached whale you’ve found out here?

RJ: No, in January 2008, just before I moved up here, a sperm whale washed ashore on that same beach where the orca washed ashore. I smelled it first, then I saw the bones, then I saw the net.

So I documented it, I gps’d it, I took photographs. I thought, wow, this is

“Jewels of the sea”: whale teeth, baleen, red and black abalone shells, glass fishing gear, and kelp.

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RJ: I’m working on a project about heat sinks. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked inside a big desktop computer but the little chip, just the size of your pinky fingernail, that little thing generates so much heat, they’ve actually got a very intricate aluminum or copper device inside the computer to bleed the heat off these chips. I’ve read about the Google and Apple and Amazon server farms that are literally built next to rivers or the ocean because they generate so much

beauty. Just let the sounds, the sights, the beauty nourish my soul. Sometimes I’ll get an email or a comment on the blog, someone will say, man, thanks.

Thanks for what you do. That helps.

Someone recognizing the effort. Because it’s a lot of work. I’ve destroyed my knees. Walking on loose sand with an 80-pound bag is not advised. I wouldn’t recommend it. Take smaller bags. Take smaller bites — even though there’s so much to bite out here. There’s

heat and consume so much electricity.

So I’m trying to figure out a way to poignantly point out that we are wasting the resources of the planet just so Google can make money selling ads, so you can look up the best restaurant or who’s got the best Yelp rating. And we’re mining the planet for metals and rare-earth metals to generate all this technology and destroying the natural world in the process.

ES: It has to be frustrating to keep coming out here and keep finding trash — what do you do to remind yourself this is why we have to do this and maybe we can make it better?

RJ: Sometimes it’s very depressing.

Sometimes I don’t come out. Sometimes coming out without a single bag, I’m not going to pick any trash up, which is really hard; I’m just going to focus on the

Pelicans fly over the ocean off Point Reyes at

Richard James, coastodian.org

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What started as a small-scale

sunset; James calls walking on the beach “pelican therapy” and says he once took 10,000 photos of pelicans in a year.

so much trash. One thing I’ve learned, there could be a thousand Richards, or anybody else who’s out here doing it.

The picking up isn’t the issue, it’s the putting in. We need to change. We are killing the ocean. The pendulum swings back and forth. I sometimes get very distraught at what we’re doing to the planet. To the sharks, to the turtles, to the whales, to everything. I frankly am not very hopeful. Because the bulk of society is too obsessed with gadgets and iPods and iPhones and things that don’t really matter. But I don’t stop. The human spirit is strong I guess. I don’t stop. I still come out.

Richard James, coastodian.org

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documented in this

location.

The last time side-flowering skullcap was recorded in the slough, Slakey says, was in 1892 by the early California botanist Katharine Brandegee. But she found it on Bouldin Island, about two miles south of here, meaning this is most certainly a new population.

“Also, it’s never been seen flowering in California in July, so we now know that the blooming period is a little longer than previously known,” Slakey says.

Near the end of the trip, Slakey points out one last endemic “treasure,” towering over the edge of a levee. With its white petals and deep pink center, the woolly rose-mallow (Hibiscus lasiocarpos var. occidentalis) seems to belong more in the tropics than in the Central Valley.

“Field botany in California is fascinating because of the range of habitats created by varying elevation, latitude, soil, and precipitation,” says Keelan, a volunteer who has participated in several cnps rare plant treasure hunts. “Many native species are quite restricted in distribution because of the combination of factors they require, so it’s challenging and rewarding to search them out.”

[Alessandra Bergamin] Point Molate Beach Park Reopens

Point Molate Beach Park reopened at sunrise on a clear October morning after being closed for more than a decade due to budget woes.

The 11-acre park, stretching along a third of a mile of Richmond’s shoreline just north of i-580 and the Richmond/ San Rafael Bridge on Western Drive, provides boast-worthy views of Mt. Tamalpais, San Pablo Bay, and San Francisco. It has remained relatively

Bruce Beyaert, Trails for Richmond Action Committee

(continued from page 7)

unchanged since it closed in 2001, and volunteer groups have worked to clean up the park, which for more than a decade had been blocked by a chain link fence.

After the Richmond City Council decided last March to reopen the park, the Richmond Public Works Department installed new picnic tables and barbecues in addition to a wheelchair-accessible path, picnic area, and parking lot. The city also added a portable restroom until it secures funding for a permanent facility. While the city upgraded the facilities, groups of volunteers coordinated by Baykeeper conducted a thorough clean-up of the shoreline, removing 96 tons of debris from the beach, including hundreds of old creosote-contaminated pilings.

Down the line, the city will tackle bigger problems the park faces, including shoreline erosion. There’s also the possibility of designating a swimming area or kayak launch facility and developing an

interpretive program featuring the site’s ecological history, according to a city staff report. Such large-scale improvements are dependent on funding.

Beachgoers can only access the park by car, since there are no pedestrian or bicycle access points to the site yet. The city and the East Bay Regional Park District have plans for a Bay Trail linkage from Point Molate to the rest of the Point San Pablo Peninsula, according to

the Trails for Richmond Action Committee, which has advocated for the Bay Trail all along the Richmond shoreline.

In the 1930s, the park was privately owned and undeveloped but it was a popular recreation site for Richmond residents. During World War II, the park was part of an active naval base. The U.S. Navy developed and maintained the area until the late 1960s, when the city leased the park for $1/year.

Point Molate Beach Park is now open sunrise to sunset. [Sean Greene]

InternatIonal Bird rescue Saving birds of the Bay and beyond since 1971

Ashy Storm-Petrel Denied Endangered Listing

After four years of consideration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (usfws) announced in October that the ashy storm-petrel — a seabird that breeds on 35 islands and rocky outcrops in the northeast Pacific — has been denied protection under the Endangered Species Act (esa).

“It’s frustrating,” said Shaye Wolf, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The ashy storm-petrel is a rare and unique California species that is often overlooked and hasn’t been given the management or conservation attention that it deserves.”

The usfws denied the ashy stormpetrel protection under the esa for the first time in 2009, a decision challenged by the Center for Biological Diversity.

After reassessing the findings, the usfws defended its original outcome.

In a public statement, the usfws explained its finding that despite a range of threats, the ashy storm-petrel is experiencing “natural population fluctuations” rather than long-term population decline. The statement also suggested the bird’s historical range has remained the (continued on page 44) same, indicating that

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Visit www.goldengateaudubon.org. “Like” us on Facebook. Or contact ggas@goldengateaudubon.org to get email notices about field trips and other events.

415.493.2501

pschmale@fp-ins.com

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www.fp-ins.com

Bird photos by Bob Lewis.

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there has been no loss

over time.

Wolf disagrees. “I think that conclusion is problematic,” she said. “In my mind and based on the science, the ashy storm-petrel should be protected, as it faces a multitude of threats and needs the safety net of the act.”

Sooty brown and about the size of a swallow, the ashy storm-petrel is endemic to the California Current, nesting on offshore islands and rocks from Mendocino County to Ensenada, Mexico.

Russell Bradley, a senior scientist at Point Blue Conservation Science, estimated that about half of the global population of ashy storm-petrels nests on Southeast Farallon Island each summer.

While the Farallones are a sanctuary for migratory and nesting birds, an abundance of house mice has become a major threat to the storm-petrel. Because there are so many mice, migratory burrowing owls that might otherwise move on are now overwintering on the island.

But during the colder months the number of mice decreases and the burrowing

owls, looking for a new food source, prey upon adult ashy storm-petrels.

“When you have predation like we’re seeing in the Farallones, it has a really big impact on the bird population,” Bradley said. “These ashy storm-petrels are not very quick to reproduce or replace their population, and additional stressors can cause a lot of problems.”

The usfws is accepting public comments on a project that would apply Ilana Nimz, Point Blue Conservation Science

(continued from page 42)

While Wolf said she finds it contradictory to deny the ashy storm-petrel protection under the esa but then cite its population decline as a justification for the mouse eradication, she also said the project could help the birds.

“Regardless of whether it’s disappointing that the ashy storm-petrel isn’t protected under the act, they will still very much benefit from the removal of house mice from the island,” she said.

The ashy storm-petrel is listed as a species of special concern by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

It is also considered to be endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. [Alessandra Bergamin] Journey of the Leatherbacks

rodenticide on Southeast Farallon Island to remove invasive mice. Eradicating the mice could encourage the burrowing owls to continue their migration rather than search for an alternative food source on the islands.

On an isolated beach on Bird’s Head Peninsula in Indonesia, a female leatherback turtle shuffles out of the ocean and onto the shore, ready to lay her eggs.

Under the cover of night she excavates a hole in the sand, depositing some 80 eggs inside. With a flicking movement, she uses her flippers to (continued on page 47)

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Bay Natives Nursery, the purveyor of local Bay Area native plants, enables property owners and professional landscapers to connect their gardens to the wider watershed. Come visit our retail garden center at Pier 96 on the north side of India Basin in San Francisco, where Cargo Way meets Heron’s Head Park at cross-street Jennings, and see what all the birds, butterflies, and bumblebees are buzzing about.

Point Reyes National Seashore Association

Join us!

• Become a member • Take a Field Institute Class • Enroll a child in Point Reyes Summer Camp • Volunteer in the park

As the friends group of the Point Reyes National Seashore, Point Reyes National Seashore Association raises funds to support projects that maintain and restore trails and preserve wildlife habitat and historic sites in the park. We offer an exciting array of year-round classes and programs for children and adults that deepen our understanding of nature and inspire the next generation of stewards.

For more information visit

www.ptreyes.org or call 415.663.1200 Photo by Carlos Porrata

species of the Dermochelys genus, which traces its evolutionary roots back more than 100 million years. While most sea turtles are known for their hard, bony shells, the mottled ink-blue carapace of the leatherback is flexible and leathery, with ridges that provide a greater hydro-

David Rabon, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

46

cover the nest with sand to protect the eggs from potential predators. Then, shuffling away, she returns to the turquoise waters to make an 8,500-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean to the California coast.

That migration hit its peak this fall, as leatherbacks arrived to feed on brown sea nettle jellyfish, and October 15 was California’s inaugural Pacific Leatherback Conservation Day. In 2012 the critically endangered turtle became the state’s official marine reptile.

Even at the height of their presence here, the turtles remain largely elusive both to the public and to science. It has only been during the past 10 years that researchers have really begun to learn about these rare animals, said Teri Shore, program director at the Turtle Island Restoration Network.

“We didn’t know where these turtles came from and we didn’t know what their status was,” she said. “So this is not only new for Californians, it’s also new to science.”

Leatherbacks are the only remaining (continued from page 44)

~ C e l e b r a t i n g 5 0 Ye a r s o f E n v i r o n m e n t a l S t e w a r d s h i p ~

dynamic structure. One of the reasons for leatherbacks’ obscurity is their tendency to dive deep: They can dive to depths of 4,200 feet, deeper than any other turtle. And they never venture onto California’s beaches.

“I think the reason people don’t know a lot about them is because they’re out of

sight,” Shore said. “They live in an ocean environment and only stick their heads out to take a breath, so they spend most of their time underwater diving and eating.”

Another reason for their obscurity is their low numbers. Scientists estimate that there are only 2,000–5,700 nesting female leatherbacks in the world. Ricardo Tapilatu, a researcher who studies leatherbacks in Indonesia, said leatherback turtle populations have declined more than 78 percent since 1981.

“We have identified reductions caused by invasive species such as feral pigs and dogs that live in the villages surrounding the beach,” Tapilatu said. “They wander onto the beach, dig up the nest, and eat the eggs.”

Rising sea level and alterations in ocean currents also threaten the turtles by increasing erosion and changing beach topography, resulting in damaged nests and affecting hatching success. Climate change is also changing the temperature of leatherback nests, which need to be around 85 degrees Fahrenheit to produce (continued on page 48) a mix of male and

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birds’ ability to find these conditions in Alameda County is threatened by a proposed land exchange between the city of Dublin and the U.S. Army. Under the exchange, 189 acres of open grassland that are now part of the Camp Parks Reserve Forces Training Area will be turned over to six major development projects, including new military facilities, 2,000 residential homes, an elementary U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Land Exchange a Threat to Burrowing Owls

The western burrowing owl (Athene cunicularia hypugaea) doesn’t ask for much.

The once-common California resident requires only a few basic ingredients to survive in quasi-urban settings: open, well-drained soil; short, sparse vegetation; and underground burrows.

But Bay Area biologists say that the b ay n at u r e

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school, and commercial properties. The developments threaten one of the few remaining colonies of burrowing owls in Alameda County.

“Trying to preserve the burrowing owl has been the most frustrating aspect of my career as a conservationist to date,” said Craig Breon, past director of Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society, in an email. “It wouldn’t take too much

to save these guys, and we’re just not willing to do it.”

In California, burrowing owls feed mostly on crickets and meadow voles, and require the presence of the California ground squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi).

Despite their name, burrowing owls do not dig burrows but rather take advantage of abandoned ground squirrel burrows.

In 2003, the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies were denied a petition to protect the California population of burrowing owls under the California Endangered Species Act. The petition showed that breeding owls had lost an estimated 60 percent of their former range in California, but the decision by the state Department of Fish & Wildlife (dfw) stated that owl populations in the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys were healthy.

Jeff Miller, a conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity and one of the petition’s authors, said the decision assumes that there will be repopulation of declining or extirpated populations by Imperial (continued on page 51)

Enjoy the Winter!

Explore the winter beauty of California’s native plants through plant walks, talks, and other activities organized by the California Native Plant Society.

Photograph © Margo Bors

female hatchlings.

Warmer temperatures mean more female hatchlings, and temperatures that are too hot can result in failure to hatch.

“We have been monitoring beach temperatures since 2005, and we found that the nest temperatures are exceeding the tolerable temperature for leatherback egg development, resulting in biased sex ratios and low hatching success,” Tapilatu said.

Shore said that closer to California, commercial fisheries are the primary threat to adult leatherback turtles. Because leatherbacks travel such long distances across the ocean, they are at risk of being accidentally hooked by longline fishing boats. “Along our coast we have protections in place that have significantly reduced their capture in the swordfish fishery,” she said. “But the longliners in the Pacific and around Hawaii are still taking their toll.”

Earlier this year the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) designated nearly 42,000 square miles of ocean along the West Coast, from Point Arena in Mendocino County to Point Arguello in Santa Barbara County, as critical habitat for Pacific leatherback turtles. During the leatherback migration season from August to November, both longline and gill-net fishing — also a threat to turtles — are banned along the West Coast.

“Although the state of California has a really good record of protecting these turtles from the fisheries, the turtles are still declining,” Shore said. “Even though in Indonesia they are protecting their nesting beaches and the waters off the beach, the turtles are still declining. So what more could we or should we, on either side of the ocean, be doing to protect them?” [Alessandra Bergamin] (continued from page 47)

Events

Jan. 9, Plant ID Workshops, 2nd Thursday of the month, San Francisco, (SFSU)

Feb. 1, 10-2 pm, Pt. Isabel Native Plant Restoration, 1st Saturday of the month, Richmond

Jan. 18, San Bruno Mt. Walk, Daly City

Mar. 6, Lecture: Sweet Smells of Spring, Speaker: Margareta Sequin, San Francisco

Jan. 13, Lecture: Tiburon Jewel�lower & Other Rare Species, Mill Valley

Feb. 18, Lecture: Sonoma County Vegetation & Habitat Map Project, Santa Rosa

Jan. 21, Speaker: Dan Gluesenkamp (CNPS Executive Director), Santa Rosa

Mar. 18, Lecture: Soils, Santa Rosa

Jan. 25, 9-12 pm, Field Trip & Work Party, San Pedro Valley Park, Paci�ica

Apr. 12, 10-3 pm, Spring Plant Sale, Green Point Nursery, Novato

For details, check www.cnps.org/bayarea or (916) 447-2677

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support f or bay natur e The Bay Nature Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes exploration and stewardship of the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. By making tax-deductible contributions above and beyond the price of a regular subscription, the Friends of Bay Nature invest in the continued growth and development of our capacity to serve as an independent voice for local nature and conservation.

The Friends of Bay Nature list below includes individual donations received between Aug. 30 and Dec. 3, 2013. Donors of $500 or more

become members of the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to special events and outings.

Bay Nature Funders are foundations, agencies, and institutions that have provided grant or sponsorship funding for general support, specific editorial content, or other programs over the past 12 months.

To learn more about how you can support Bay Nature, contact Development Director Judith Katz at (510)528 – 8550 x105 or judith@baynature. org. You can also donate directly online at baynature.org/donate.

Thank you for your interest and support.

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Maria Beamer Ben Bierman Ed & Helen Bodington David Cameron Joanne Castro Edith Copenhaver John & Sara Donnelly Joan Ferguson & Craig Uhrich Tim Forell Sam Foushee Robert Fox John Giles Keith & Rise Goebel Sherry Goodman & Joe Luttrell Gary & Nicola Gordon Joyce & Marty Griffin Lucile Griffiths Sue Haffner John & Liisa Hale Sarah Jones Lilli Keinaenen Katharine & William Loughman Carol & Edward Lyke Bonnie Mackenzie & Arthur Tressler Sylvia McLaughlin Arlee & Dragana Monson Michael Mooney Charles & Meredith Moore Steve Mullin Karin Nelson Bill & Nancy Newmeyer Terry Pedersen Marianne & Pierre Pelet Dominique & Donna Pinkney Diane & Don Rhett Ed & Ruth Satterthwaite Martin Schiffenbauer Fred Setterberg Howard Shellhammer Kenneth Smith Gary & Judith Smith Susan Smith Gina Solomon William Toaspern Sharon Tsiu Jack & Trudy Washburn Kristen Wick David Zalatimo Matt Zinn $25–49 Anonymous (5) Michael Alaimo Donna Allen Kenneth & Sharon Bancroft Michael Barber John Beviacqua Vivian Boyd Thomas Branca Robert Chatfield Elizabeth Clark Mark Cocalis

and San Joaquin Valley populations — but no source populations have been found to exist. “Once lost,” Miller said, “forever lost.”

Breon, who also helped author the petition, said opposition to listing the owl as endangered is a result of the owl preferring valley grasslands, a highly desirable habitat for development.

Sandra Menzel, a wildlife biologist with resource consulting group Albion Environmental, said that in the Bay Area, populations of burrowing owls have been and still are rapidly declining.

Joe Aguirre, a representative of SunCal, told the news site Around Dublin that SunCal plans to construct habitat away from the project area and direct the owls there. However, biologists who have studied mitigation strategies say transplanting or relocating owls generally does not work. A draft environmental impact report released in June by SunCal does not specify the habitat or location for the proposed relocation.

In one recent paper, Lynne Trulio, a professor of environmental studies at San (continued from page 48)

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Publisher’s Circle Anonymous (4) Gertrude Allen Robert & Angela Amarante Brian Ashe & Cynthia Rigatti Steve Atkinson Carol Baird & Alan Harper John Bennetts Louis Berlot & Joyce Cutler Bob & Carol Berman Sandy Biagi & David Ogden Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel Bob & Shelagh Brodersen Nina Brooks Andrew Butcher Kathleen Cahill & Anthony Chorosevic Roseanne Chambers Minder Cheng & Wen Hsu Jon Christensen Ron & Rosemary Clendenen George & Sheri Clyde Terry & Zeo Coddington Meg Conkey & Lester Rowntree A. Crawford Cooley Bena Currin Bay Nature Funders Christopher & Kathryn Baraka Charitable Fund of Dann the Sacramento Region Thomas Debley & Community Foundation Mary Jane Holmes Cargill Salt Company Nona Dennis Coastal Conservancy Jacqueline Desoer Dorothy and Jonathan Sean & Wendy Dexter Rintels Charitable Carol Donohoe & Foundation William Scoggins East Bay Regional Park Ed Ehmke & District Mary Jane Parrine Federated Indians of Graton Clayton Englar Rancheria Paul Epstein & Give Something Back Jennifer Traub Golden Gate National Parks Margaret & Todd Evans Conservancy Elizabeth Fishel & Google Bob Houghteling Horace W. Goldsmith B. Mason & Anne Flemming Foundation Eric Folmer Jewish Communal Fund Catherine Fox Pacific Gas & Electric Charla Gabert & David Frane Company Harald & Sabine Frey San Francisco Bay Wildlife Norman Fritz & Fran Mueller Society Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber San Francisco Estuary Tracy Grubbs & Partnership Richard Taylor San Francisco Public Lenny Gucciardi Utilities Commission Rita Haberlin Sonoma County Water Bruce & Leslianne Lee Agency Hartsough Thomas J. Long Foundation Claudia & Scott Hein

Glenn & Juanita Hemanes Jorgen Hildebrandt Richard & Terry Horrigan Karen & Robert Jachens Louis Jaffe & Kitty Whitman Harriet & Robert Jakovina Jerry & Lola Kent Ashok Khosla & Susan Bodenlos Nancy Kittle Gudrun Kleist & James Morel Kimberly & Matthew Krummel Philip Landon Peter & Sue LaTourrette Matthew Leddy & Gail Raabe Ann & Michael Loeb Virginia Loeb Mark & Paula Lowery John & Valerie Metcalfe Mia Monroe James Morgan Karen Musalo Bruce Naegel & Constance Roberts Hortensia & John Nelson Russell Nelson & Sandy Slichter Teresa O’Neill Larry Orman & Marice Ashe Jane & Richard Peattie George & Read Phillips Dan Rademacher & Tamara Schwarz John & Frances Raeside Margit & Richard Roos-Collins Margaret & Oscar Rosenbloom Sue Rosenthal Jean Rusmore Mike Sabarese Sara Sanderson & Eric Weaver Janet & Victor Schachter Bob & Brenda Schildgen Sue Schoening Mary Selkirk & Lee Ballance Jake Sigg Chuck Slaughter & Molly West Virginia Slaughter Patricia Snow Cindy Spring & Charles Garfield Max Stoaks Aleks Totic Scott Van Tyle Barbara Vance John Waterbury Phoebe Watts Mariquita West Nancy & Bart Westcott Peter Wiley & Valerie Barth Trevlyn & Jumbo Williams David Wimpfheimer

Jose State University, followed 27 relocations in Northern California and found that 63 percent of the owls disappeared, 26 percent flew back to their original site, and 7 percent bred successfully in the new habitat; the rest were subject to predation or unsuccessful breeding.

Dublin Mayor Tim Sbranti said development will not only provide a connection between the eastern and western parts of Dublin, but will include a 30acre city park. Sbranti said open-space corridors within the city park will allow long-term preservation by preventing future development.

“The development at Camp Parks is a win-win for everyone — the Army gets new facilities in exchange for their land, the city will become connected rather than divided by the base, and the owls will be provided trails linking an open space corridor [in the city park] to the adjacent grasslands,” Sbranti said.

Menzel said managing undisturbed habitat adjacent to the project provides the best hope for burrowing owls at Camp Parks. A set of guidelines developed in

e r rata Anne Duwe, Public Relations Manager at Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), has submitted the following correction related to the advertisement placed by POST in the previous issue: We regret having misidentified the photo and the photographer in our advertisement in the October– December 2013 issue of Bay Nature.

The photo we used is of Lower Tubbs Island rather than Bair Island, and it was taken by Russell Lowgren, not by Judy Irving.

1993 by the California Burrowing Owl Consortium states that if off-site mitigation is necessary, at least 9.75 acres of suitable burrowing owl habitat per pair or single bird should be preserved.

“They are a hoot to observe,” Menzel said. “It is an absolute privilege to have them in the neighborhood, and any local extinction is an immense loss.”

[Emily Moskal]

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Q: Why do you see so many barnacles on gray and humpback whales, but not on sperm whales or killer whales? [Beth, Berkeley] A: Beth, as your question indicates, the crustaceans known as barnacles are generally found only on baleen whales. Barnacles are considered semiparasitic because, though they do require something to attach to, they do not actually live off of the whale; like their hosts, barnacles simply filter the water column for food.

But they are a drag, literally: One humpback whale killed during the whaling era had more than 1,000 pounds of barnacles on its body. That could slow you down!

Why only baleen whales and not the toothed whales? The simple answer is that it’s easier to “infest” slower-moving whales, and baleen species are usually the ones that densely concentrate on breeding grounds and/or feeding grounds.

Even blue whales, the fastest of the baleen whales, attract one strange barnacle, Penella balaenoptera. This barnacle keeps the hard part inside the whale’s body, with only a soft appendage for feeding sticking outside the whale’s skin.

But generally, Beth, you are correct, most faster whales, porpoises, and dolphins are not burdened by such external parasites; they may not slow down enough to allow barnacles to infest them. And some scientists believe that because dolphins do more social rubbing, that too may deter the barnacles from settling on their skin. Incidentally, there was a group of striped dolphins that suffered a mass stranding and many individuals did have barnacles attached. This could be because they were sick and slow, or perhaps their immune systems were compromised, making them more susceptible.

In all, 27 species of cetaceans have been found with Xenobalanus barnacles located on the trailing edges of flippers, fins, or flukes. Another barnacle genus, Coronula, are generalist barnacles found on many kinds of baleen whales. Two Coronula species are the ones found commonly on humpbacks.

e l l i s During winter off the coast of Northern California, thousands of gray whales pass by on their way to and from their breeding grounds in Baja California. On their backs and sides rides a lowly hitchhiker — Cryptolepus rhachianecti — found only on gray whales. Reproduction of this particular species occurs in the Baja breeding lagoons where the barnacles shed sperm or eggs into the water. Fertilization is external and the larval forms mature quickly into adults. These adults then attach themselves within three days to newly born gray whales.

At the beginning of the environmental movement there were bumper stickers that said “Save the Whales.” As far as I can recall, there were none that enjoined us to “Save the Barnacles.” Nevertheless, had the gray whale gone extinct, we also would’ve lost another remarkable creature — those hitchhiking barnacles.

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LA VERSIÓN DE LA CONVENCIÓN

Should Recycling Be Free?

Noticias de CUHW

equipment; overhead; and taxes. Each What’s the best way to dispose of discards that can’t be reused? Easy: recycle them. If they can’t commodity has its own cost structure. Recyclers oletín de los Trabajadores Unidos que Cuidan en Cas a need disposal service fees to serve the goal of be recycled or composted, they may become DENTE conserving, not wasting. trash to be landfilled.

Garbage is a long-term liability Recycling is a disposal system that competes es y de que se nos hayabecause dañado oall se haya a nuestro personal político, y asegure fills are perched uidadowith en wasting. mentalmente. los servicios de los individuos que abusado de nosotros un mundo above water and viven y respiran la política durante este Disposing of •Merecemos el de que atrapados tiempo critico en la historia del cuidado allderecho will leak. garbage has se nos pague bajo el esquema del e, nuestra del hogar a nivel Federal y Estatal.

Landfills are the become very una vida de trabajo os a otros CUHW, al salir de la burbuja, Seguro Social porbiggest humanexpensive; dor, usted emerge con nuevas ideas ahora que por un miembro de la familia. caused source disposing of manda que estamos en período electoral este of methane gas, pagadas, sted esrecyclables un agosto. Nuestras elecciones estatales •Merecemos vacaciones up to 100 times is cheaper ed vive en incluirán dos semanas en las que merecemos el derecho de que se nos worse than por CO2. because y respeto las u relación puede votar en línea o llamando trate con compasión In the new can veedorrecyclers de a un número sin costo, usando su familiar, número de celular o un teléfono fijo.

Zero Waste sell their diferente.

Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra world, as product. años yWhen burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa garbage shrinks proveedor de Voluntariado de Incentivos and recycling recycling de nuevo, para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros ar, pero de marcar un hasta aquí, DISPOSAL DISPOSAL expands, cities was new, sobre el rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, miembros en los negocios al mostrar that rely on communities THROUGH WASTING THROUGH CONSERVING ador de siempre avanzando acercándonos, sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cual income from emas called que it “free” representa un ganar-ganar para todos.

Where do you want your money to go?

“CUHW está garbage fees must to encourage endientes Hemos establecido oficinas extraño. en más de 9 de nuestros condados. change how they charge for services.

They must participation.

Then they embedded the actual rompiendo todos los UHW,costs ha in garbage bills. Now “diversion”Larates mayoría de give las oficinas tienen recycling its own fee structure. Some, like mitos al enfocarse en ya durante bancos de llamadas y capacidad Berkeley, are paying for rate studies. of 75% have exposed the truth: wasting can no ención de de difusión de webNow y cuentan is ourcon chance! If we ensure that recyclers longer pay los recycling’s costs. miembros.” gidos por grandes pantallas. Contamos con can charge full-service fees, then our cities can Costs include people to sort and process a Loretta otra acción que es también otra find ways CUT valuable resources; trucks;construyendo processing burbuja que se rompe, conforme continuamos campaña y estastoson las LANDFILLING TO ZERO!

ndado de el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” actualizaciones por email y mensajes Estamos reventando la de texto que alertan a los miembros de dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros dico y los Urban Ore salvages for reuse at Berkeley’s transfer station. People trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios dores. En burbuja cuando nuestro Comité los últimos acontecimientos de IHSS. also bringdeusConstitución things and callsugiere for pickups.

We conserve about médicos y oportunidades de educación, un cambio un grupo Yo personalmente quiero 7,000 tons a year and sell the reusable goods in retail sales. al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo. que combine el espacio de nuestro salirme de la burbuja sidoWe’re los open en lathe queAge se of Waste To End until 7:00PM (receiving closes at 5:00) 360 days a year Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva considera la reforma h t t de p : //u r ben a nore.com uecido sus Murray, IHSS at 900 near Ashby @ 7th, Berkeley. ¡No solamente lo merecemos, posición, Vicepresidente segundo.

El plan para California y sugiero que empecemos con

URBAN RE