Bay Nature April-June 2017 by Bay Nature Institute

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

Cormorants on the Bridge

Celebrating Local Heroes The Birth of Eastshore State Park Mt. Umunhum Opening Soon

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Tuesday

Wednesday

R A snowy plover seen on Crown Beach in Alameda faces the threat of losing habitat due to urban development and non-native, invasive plants.

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

0 New Moon

Ramadan Begins

G First Quarter

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T Last Quarter

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MAY 2016 S 1 8 15 22 29

M 2 9 16 23 30

T 3 10 17 24 31

W 4 11 18 25

T 5 12 19 26

JULY 2016 F 6 13 20 27

S 7 14 21 28

3 10 17 24 31

4 11 18 25

5 12 19 26

6 13 20 27

7 14 21 28

F 1 8 15 22 29

S 2 9 16 23 30

Photos: top: Nancy Parker, top inset: Steve Zamek, left: Dave Gordan

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MOUNT UMUNHUM

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A MOUNTAIN MADE OF STORIES COMING FALL 2017

www.mountumunhum.com

Thomas Dunklin

Sometimes to save a river, you have to buy it. Western Rivers Conservancy buys and conserves land along the West’s greatest streams. We do it for the sake of fish, for imperiled wildlife and to improve public access along our most treasured rivers. On northern California’s redwood coast, WRC is working with the Yurok people to acquire 47,000 acres and conserve a stream that sustains some of the greatest runs of salmon in California: Blue Creek, the cold-water lifeline to the Klamath River. Without it, the Klamath’s salmon, and all that depends on them, would cease to exist. Please support our effort to protect this invaluable stream at www.westernrivers.org.

contents

april–june 2017

Features 30

The Making of M c Laughlin Eastshore State Park Lessons in Activism The East Bay shoreline from Emeryville to Richmond—much of it landfill—was slated to be developed as high-rises and shopping malls. But today it’s a ribbon of public beaches, meadow, and trails. And it’s all thanks to organized citizens who never stopped pushing. by Lisa Krieger

Maika Horjus, canopy

Steve Zamek, Featherlight.com

Hajib Joe Hakim, hajibjoehakim.smugmug.com

The Old Bay Bridge Is Coming Down Wh e re Wi l l A l l Th o s e Cor morants Go? For at least 40 years double-crested cormorants have nested by the hundreds under the Bay’s major bridges. This spring the last section of the old Bay Bridge will be dismantled and with it the home of the colony that lives there. by Mark J. Rauzon

Celebrate Local Heroes Re c o g n i z i n g t h e G o o d Wo r k A ro u n d U s The new Administration has made it clear that it is no friend to the environment, least of all in the Bay Area. Now more than ever we need to support and join the work of local heroes. This year we honor David Lewis (Save The Bay), Rebecca Johnson and Alison Young (California Academy of Sciences), and Uriel Hernandez (Canopy). by John Hart, Eric Simons, and Alison Hawkes

Departments Bay View

Letter from the publisher

Letters & Comments

Feedback from our readers

Opening Shot

14 Conservation in Action

Breeding a tanoak resistant to Sudden Oak Death. by Alison Hawkes

A northern gannet far from home by Alison Hawkes 9

On the Trail

Mount Umunhum Almost Open This fall, for the first time in more than 50 years, the nearly 3,500-foot South Bay peak with the iconic “Cube” on top will open to the public, accessible via a new four-mile trail and road. by Elizabeth Devitt

16 Santa Cruz Mountains

Currents • Notice that our beaches have shrunk? • Remembering Harold Gilliam • The efficient beauty of starfish larvae • Trout make it to Orinda! • African American National Parks Event • Signs of the Season: The bold Bewick’s wren

22 Elsewhere

Owl Trail, West Marin; Philosopher’s Way Trail, San Francisco; Limekiln Trail, South Bay

53 Ask the Naturalist How wet was this wet winter? by Michael Ellis 54 Naturalist’s Notebook

Australian tube worms at work by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.Baynature.org

Andrea Cobb

by david loeb

bayview letter from the publisher ater water everywhere! It’s been a while since we’ve had a winter like this. No surprise, it’s raining as I write this note in late February, and we’ve already had rain in 36 out of the 54 days in this calendar year. Of course, this is mostly a good thing, given the preceding five years of drought in the region. Water is essential to our economy, our ecosystems, our lives. But can you have too much of a good thing? In some places, yes indeed, as water simply doesn’t respect road signs, property rights, or even people’s lives in its inexorable gravity-propelled descent toward the ocean (or into our basements). And on the minor annoyance end of the scale, it’s been hard to get outside for hikes (or restoration work days) because it’s been raining or the trails have been so muddy. Attempting to look on the bright side, several people have remarked to me, “Well, at least we’ll get great wildflowers this spring!” Perhaps; but there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between rain and great wildflowers. There are many factors that lead to great wildflowers, and ample moisture is certainly one of those. But lots of rain can also lead to prolific growth of the nonnative annual grasses that form most of that lush green carpet on our Bay Area hillsides. The thick mats of exotic grasses such as ripgut brome and wild oat that are going gangbusters right now may very well outcompete the native wildflowers waiting underneath for a little warm sunshine in order to germinate. So, as of late February, the jury is still out on this

contributo rs Elizabeth Devitt (p. 16) is a freelance science journalist based in Santa Cruz. She draws on her “first” career in veterinary medicine to write about the links among animals, people, and the environment. Alex Fox (p. 9, p. 12) is a Bay Nature editorial intern. Eric James Schroeder (p. 13) is a lecturer emeritus and former director of study abroad at UC Davis. He still organizes summer academic trips that include a

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april–june 2017

Todd Kolze

year’s wildflower bloom. Of course, we could just enjoy the ubiquitous sourgrass (Oxalis pes-caprae) that’s carpeting yards and fields with its bright lemon-yellow blooms. If pretty color was your only criterion, you could say, well, what’s wrong with sourgrass? The problem is, like the now-dominant Mediterranean annual grasses, this oxalis is not only nonnative, it’s also invasive. Which means that in our local environment, it’s not subject to the factors that limit its spread in its South Africa homeland; when let loose here, it quickly crowds out local native species and converts formerly rich and diverse native ecosystems into veritable monocultures. Let’s be clear: Working to keep nonnative species out of our local ecosystems is not equivalent to the xenophobic antiimmigrant policies of the new administration in Washington, as some have suggested. All human beings are one species, Homo sapiens. Ergo, in places where people already live (leaving aside the question of whether we should be living there), no human being is “nonnative.” Immigrants tend to increase diversity; invasive plant species decrease it. One final thought about all this water and its destructive potential: The climate scientists told us so. Their models for California have long predicted extended periods of drought, punctuated by extreme flood-causing rain events. So, you know, the worst of both worlds. The Trump administration’s reversal of recent hard-won baby steps away from reliance on fossil fuels will only exacerbate this destructive pattern. So it looks as if we’d better install bigger rain barrels for droughts and more powerful sump pumps for bigger storms. Create defensible space against wildfire and purchase (continued on next page) flood insurance. Buy birding component. Michael Ellis (p. 53) is a Santa Rosa–based naturalist who leads nature-related tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com) and waxes eloquent for KQED’s Perspectives series. John Hart (p. 36) of San Rafael is the author of fifteen books in the environmental field. Alison Hawkes (p. 8, p. 14, p. 39) is Bay Nature’s contributing editor.

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

Volume 17, Issue 2 April- June 2017 Publisher David Loeb Editor in Chief Victoria Schlesinger Editorial Director Eric Simons Contributing Editor Alison Hawkes Research Editor Sue Rosenthal Copy Editor Cynthia Rubin Art Director Susan Scandrett Advertising Director Ellen Weis Associate Director Judith Katz Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Information Technology Manager Laurence Tietz Development Associate Laney Ennis Board of Directors Catherine Fox (President), Tracy Grubbs, Bruce Hartsough, Reed Holderman, David Loeb, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott Volunteers/Interns Alexander Fox, Jacqueline Gauthier, Carol High, James Jordan, Audrey McNamara, Mary Helen Rowell, Kimberly Teruya, Benjamin Whiting, Emily Williams Bay Nature is published quarterly by the Bay Nature Institute, 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 Subscriptions: $62.95/three years; $45.95/two years; $25.95/one year; (888)422-9628, baynature.org P.O. Box 92408, Long Beach, CA 90809 Advertising: (510)813-1903/advertising@baynature.org Editorial & Business Office: 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510)528-8550; (510)528-8117 (fax) baynature@baynature.org baynature.org issn 1531-5193 No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from Bay Nature and its contributors. © 2017 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

Cover: The striking aquamarine eye color of the double-crested cormorant is almost as surprising as the coloring inside its mouth— a bright powder blue. [Alice Zhuk, zhukphoto.com]

Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 54) is the author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds and teaches nature observation and illustration. johnmuirlaws.com. Brittany Shoot (p. 22), a freelance journalist and writer, lives in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in Time, The New York Times, Fortune, The Guardian, The Economist, and NewYorker.com. Eric Simons (p. 22, p. 37) is Bay Nature’s editorial director. Emily Williams (p. 10, p. 22) is a Bay Nature editorial intern.

letters & comments Parrot mushrooms Waxcaps of many different species grace our wet winter woods in the Bay Area. The parrot mushroom, so called because of its typically bright green cap, is also known as the chameleon waxcap, because it comes in many colors and it changes from one to another as it dries out and then rehydrates. As to that “infamous” blue-green form, you do not need to head on up to Humboldt to see it; they also occur right here in the Bay Area! You can see my photo of this mushroom, found at the EBRPD’s Huckleberry Preserve, on MushroomObserver.org. —Debbie Viess, Bay Area Mycological Society co-founder Pacific chorus frogs When we moved to our new home in the wet winter of 2010-11, I didn’t know what that sound coming from an old stock pond at the back of our lot could be—it sounded like Jurassic Park out there! Discovered they were Pacific chorus frogs. I love the joyful noise they make each rainy night! Thank you for this great article. —Christa Romanowski, Auburn The Bay I lived on my boat for several years. When I first got there I was speaking to a sweet, silver-haired, self-proclaimed “wharf rat.” He convinced me to lie on my stomach and hang my head over the edge of the dock and take a look while he was telling me about how the water is now cleaner and healthier than he has ever seen it. I saw healthy kelp and (bayview continued from page 6) stronger sunscreen and better rain gear. And then write our public officials to tell them what we think. And keep an eye out for those native wildflowers, because it just might be a good year for them after all. And wouldn’t that be a welcome balm in troubled times.

coral-like growths and many little fish swimming through it. I even saw what I’m pretty sure was a Garibaldi (state fish). All the environmental protection rules and the free pump-out stations and oil-changing stations have made a huge difference. Love our Bay. —Lia Trocano, Sebastopol The Bay I loved reading Eric Simons’ story “The Bay” in your January-March issue— from his observations of the way our lovely Bay breathes the tides like a set of lungs to his speculations about why you can still be the only person walking a Bay trail on a “nearly perfect Friday afternoon.” I know the passage of Measure AA was indeed a reassurance to the many San Francisco Bay Joint Venture (SFBJV) partners who have been working to restore and protect the wetland areas around the Bay for the last 20 years, and I feel certain the people who make up the many organizations and agencies involved in that effort don’t believe their work is doomed, as Simons states. As long as the needed funding keeps coming in, there are well-vetted plans, informed by sound science, such as the Baylands Goals Update and the SFBJV implementation plan (under revision right now), to guide their future actions. I want your readers to have faith

in these efforts and to know that wetland restoration is working. A good way to follow the action and see firsthand where and how this is taking shape is to watch the series of one-minute video shorts available on YouTube, Vimeo, and www.sfbayjv.org. —Caroline Warner, San Francisco Bay Joint Venture Franklin Point Taking notice of the On the Trail story in the January-March issue with the fine aerial photo of Franklin Point and the California Coastal Trail, I may assume some readers of Bay Nature are pilots, as am I, who find flying the coast to be a spectacular way to pass time and one of the benefits of personal flight. For those pilots, I would remind or inform them that the California coastline incorporates a considerable part of our National Marine Sanctuary, in particular National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Gulf of the Farallones and Monterey Bay national sanctuaries, which extend from Point Arena south to beyond Carmel. I bring this up because flight over this stretch of the coast requires flight at or above 1,000 feet AGL (above ground level) to avoid disturbance of marine life both above and below the waterline. —Ron Darcey, Castro Valley

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april–june 2017

b ay n at u r e

opening shot

first encounter A powerful seabird, renowned for compressing its svelte body to make torpedo-like dives for fish, the northern gannet is an Atlantic species. In spring, it nests in massive colonies along the rocky coast of Newfoundland up to the Arctic reaches of Spitsbergen. But five years ago this April, a male arrived on the Farallon Islands, becoming the first northern gannet ever recorded in California. Morris, as Bay Area birders dubbed him after the species’ scientific name, Morus bassanus, probably ended up here due to melting ice in the Arctic Ocean. Northern gannets winter at sea and can travel as far as the ocean is ice-free in search of mackerel and herring. A passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is opening for the first time in more than 100,000 years and species long isolated on either side are now crossing over. A recent paper in Global Change Biology identified more than 70 species of birds and mammals that will likely journey between the two oceans in the years ahead. Now a year-round resident of the Central California coast, Morris still reliably visits the Farallones’ Sugarloaf islet, though more recently he’s taken to perching on a guano-covered rock off Mavericks Beach in Half Moon Bay among a flock of Brandt’s cormorants. And while Morris is just one lonely vagrant offering his mating call and dance to no avail each spring—“The cormorants aren’t impressed,” notes Russ Bradley of Point Blue Conservation Science—the fact that he’s here at all is another sign that ecosystems are changing. —Alison Hawkes

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photog raph by dan maxwell

news & notes from around the bay

currents

Where Have Our Shorelines Gone?

Christine Hegermiller U.S. Geological Survey

Santa Cruz, 2016

in Memorium

Harold Gilliam In December, the pioneering Bay Area environmental journalist Harold Gilliam passed away at the age of 98. Gilliam was not only a giant in the field; he was also the first in the field, at least here in the Bay Area, when he began writing his weekly environmental column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1961. He continued writing that column until he retired in 1995. He also found time to write 13 books about the natural world of the Bay Area and the important environmental issues of the day. By the time we launched Bay Nature in 2001, Gilliam had already retired. But he graciously accepted an invitation to speak at our public launch party, conferring credibility on this upstart nature publication that hoped to walk down the trail he had blazed. In his remarks, he traced the history of Bay Area nature writing and conservation advocacy back to John Muir, situating Bay Nature within that proud tradition and admonishing us to keep faith with it. So we were delighted when he agreed to return for our 10th anniversary celebration in 2011 and accept the first Bay Nature Local Hero award for environmental journalism. We at Bay Nature owe Harold Gilliam an enormous debt of gratitude for his legacy of environmental and nature writing. And all of us in the Bay Area owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his contributions to the legacy of protected and undeveloped open space that makes the Bay Area such a remarkable place to live. Thanks, Harold, for showing us the way. —David Loeb april–june 2017

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Courtesy of Harold Gilliam

The El Niño of 2015–16 was not the drought panacea Californians might have hoped for, but it was still one of the strongest El Niños on record, and a new study shows how it dramatically reshaped the state’s coastline. A team led by U.S. Geological Survey coastal geologist Patrick Barnard determined that last winter generated either the most powerful, or second most powerful, waves ever recorded in the Eastern North Pacific, and those waves, combined with elevated sea level caused by El Niño’s warm water, ripped tons of sand and sediment off California beaches and out to sea. After the El Niño had ended, Barnard’s team surveyed 29 beaches along 1,200 miles of the West Coast and found that shorelines had retreated an average of 115 feet—76 percent more than a normal year and 27 percent more than in the previous record year. They reported their findings in February 2017 in the journal Nature Communications. Of the 18 sections of shoreline Barnard and his team surveyed in California, there are now 11 farther inland than ever before recorded. From Capitola to Moss Landing, the team measured an average of 150 feet of shoreline retreat; at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, the Pacific has closed in on the Great Highway by as much as 180 feet. The stretch from Ocean Beach to Pacifica is the fastest eroding coastline in the state, Barnard says, and this lost ground is unlikely to be made up soon. A combination of dam construction and drought has reduced the amount of sediment delivered to beaches by rivers and streams, which typically replenish what is lost to storms each winter. The effect is especially pronounced in the Delta, where damming, aggregate mining, sand mining, and dredging have reduced the amount of sediment carried into the Bay from 4 million to 1 million cubic meters annually. Winter rains in 2016-17 washed a substantial quantity of sediment to the coast, but Barnard says the sediment will mainly build up near river mouths and will take years to evenly distribute to farther off beaches. It took about 10 years for beaches to recover after the similarly powerful waves of the 1997-1998 El Niño, he says. With less beach to absorb the force of violent waves, seaside infrastructure is more vulnerable to damage from future extreme events, Barnard says. Some climate models predict an increase in the frequency of El Niños, and Barnard recommends using the extreme conditions of last winter to identify problem areas in coastal infrastructure and address them now. “This is not our grandchildren’s problem,” Barnard says. “We are getting these climate-change influenced events now and we should expect more of them in the future.”—Alex Fox

currents

science

The Efficient Beauty of Starfish Larvae

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spent floating through the ocean, constantly alternating between feeding and moving. And as the researchers found through observation and mathematical modeling, the ciliary bands are an ideal structure for maximizing the larvae’s ability to do both. Algae particles pulled into the vortices swirl toward the larva’s body, and once a particle touches the body, the cilia move it toward the larva’s mouth. Meanwhile, the vortices also propel the tiny larvae through the ocean. In their study, Gilpin, Prakash, and Prakash observed that the ciliary bands changed the patterns of vortices depending on the density of algae in the water around the larvae. If a larva

sensed an abundance of food, then the ciliary bands could create more vortices to trap the food, while in lower-nutrient areas the ciliary bands would decrease the number of vortices for more efficient movement. The complex dual-purpose action hadn’t been observed before, Gilpin says. “The starfish have found a new trick that we didn’t know about; it was hiding right beneath our noses the entire time. It’s always exciting to see that nature has found a solution that we haven’t.” After their larval stage, bat stars grow to an average diameter of eight inches and can be found in Bay Area tide pools. —Emily Williams

Prakash lab, Stanford University

In the summer of 2015 three Stanford scientists took a class in embryology at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove and found themselves transfixed by a bat star larva that moved water around itself in swirling patterns. Using a microscope with video capacity, the scientists could see vortices of water slowly rotating, merging, and splitting apart around the millimeterlong larva. “We were totally surprised,” says Vivek Prakash, a bioengineering postdoctoral scholar. “They were so beautiful, and we were never expecting to see a really complex pattern of fluid flow around the starfish larvae, so that really got us hooked.” As the baby starfish waves its cilia—the small hairlike structures covering its body—the water begins to swirl. The linear bands of cilia drape around its body like necklaces; it’s a common structure found across various types of aquatic invertebrate larvae. But, the researchers wondered, “Why would it be that all of these animals develop the same structure, this sort of way of stirring the water with these cilia?” William Gilpin, an applied physics graduate student, recalls. “By looking at the fluid dynamics, we think that we have an idea.” Gilpin, Prakash, and bioengineering assistant professor Manu Prakash (no relation) detailed a potential evolutionary explanation in the December 2016 issue of Nature Physics. The first two months of a bat star’s life are

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success & celebration

The Trout Return to Orinda

Brian Waters

It’s not unusual for a retired fisheries biologist to get an email with a fish picture, but the photo of a rainbow trout that Orinda resident Brian Waters received from the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) last fall was different. It was visual proof of the more than 100 trout that had been observed in the southern reach of San Pablo Creek after an absence of at least half a century, and it sent Waters into a fit of fist-pumping elation. San Pablo Creek flows roughly southeast to northwest for 19 miles from its headwaters in Orinda to its terminus in San Pablo Bay, feeding San Pablo Reservoir along the way and draining roughly 43 square miles of East Bay watershed. Trout have not been officially recognized in the southern reach of the creek, upstream from the reservoir, since a report in 1953, though there have been anecdotal sightings over the years. The trout disappeared following the construction of SP201, a small dam near the reservoir’s south end. Members of the group Friends of Orinda Creeks, including Waters and his friend Reginald Barrett, a professor emeritus of wildlife biology at UC Berkeley, spent more than

Orinda Creek flows over dam SP201 upstream from San Pablo Reservoir.

a decade calling, emailing, and attending meetings to argue that the dam simply needed to be cleared of debris and sediment for the upper reach of the creek to support trout. Their faith finally paid off late last summer after EBMUD removed debris and shortened the metal crossbars from the sluice gate of SP201. Within a few months EBMUD emailed Waters the photo showing that trout had passed the dam. “This is exactly what we have been working toward in our interactions

Celebrate with the #AANPE

Four years ago, Teresa Baker, tired of seeing so few people of color while she visited Yosemite National Park, decided to launch the African American National Parks Event. She created a Facebook page, sent out some emails encouraging people to visit their local national parks on the first weekend in June, and, just like that, a tradition was born. Baker headed to the Presidio in San Francisco to honor the Buffalo Soldiers—the African-American army troops who served in California parks as some of the country’s first national park rangers—that weekend in 2013. She received some 250 emails, photos, and Facebook posts from people around the country sending selfies from their parks. “It is amazing how people respond to having a complete stranger send them an invitation to get out in their parks,” says Baker, an outdoor activist and organizer living in the Bay Area. She started AANPE not only to support the parks, but to demonb ay n at u r e

april–june 2017

with EBMUD for more than 10 years,” Waters says. Waters hopes that moving forward, the presence of trout will help bolster arguments to protect and restore San Pablo Creek and the habitats it supports around Orinda. “It has all the values of an urban stream, from being an educational resource to raising property values,” he says. “Having a healthy creek encourages people to take better care of it, and right now I’m optimistic about where this is headed.” —Alex Fox

strate the willingness of communities of color to “support campaigns that purposely reach out to engage and welcome us in outdoor spaces,” reads the African American Nature & Parks Experience Facebook page, where the event details are promoted. It goes on to say, “The conservation movement in this country is hurting for additional audiences as we fight the challenges ahead.” The response to AANPE has only grown. Last year 2,000 people, and groups, shared photos and messages from national parks through social media using the hashtag #AANPE. Baker is pleased with the response, but she’s quietly hoping that this year she can spend the AANPE day alone. “I love being around people, but my takeaway from being in nature is the serenity of it all.” —Victoria Schlesinger

Courtesy Teresa Baker

currents

signs of the season

“adorable” is how my wife, Susan, describes the Bewick’s wren. Brown on their backs, wings, tails, and heads, these slender wrens are gray on their bellies. The bill is curved, the tail is long and often upright, and the outer tail feathers show white. Its long, pronounced white “eyebrow,” or streak, helps easily distinguish the Bewick’s (Thryomanes bewickii) from the house wren (Troglodytes aedon), which it most resembles. Those eyebrows give it a cocky look, contributing to the “adorable” effect. For such a small bird, the Bewick’s wren has tremendous vocal range and power—a male bird can sing up to 16 different songs. They are tireless, too—in early spring, a male can spend half his time singing. It’s no wonder a group of wrens is sometimes called a “chime”—or a flock, a flight, or a herd. On a recent bird walk in the Oakland Hills, local bird expert Bob Lewis said that when you hear a bird you can’t immediately identify by song, Bewick’s wren is often the right guess. I’m becoming more familiar with my resident male’s repertoire, but he’s still capable of fooling me. The Bewick’s was formerly beloved as the familiar wren of the Appalachians and the Midwest, but the species today has almost disappeared completely east of the Mississippi. Ironically, competition from the house wren has, in part, led to its steep decline in the East and in parts of its traditional range in the western states. The Bewick’s intrepid character echoes the Old High German alternate name for wrens, kuningilin, or “kinglet,” which is reflected in the fable of “The King of the Birds.” In a story that even Aristotle referenced, there was a contest among the birds to see who could fly the highest—the winner would be king. The eagle appeared to have beaten all the other birds but was tricked and bested by a wren that had hidden in the eagle’s plumage. I observed the Bewick’s forward and inquisitive temperament last spring when I put up an old birdhouse on the side of our garden shed. Within minutes the Bewick’s was giving it a once-over. He was constantly moving about, getting a look at the birdhouse from different vantage points, wagging his tail feathers and cocking his brow at the vacant birdhouse. This was the same birdhouse that a pair of Bewick’s had nested in several years earlier when it was in a different spot. Back then the structure was new and the wrens settled right in. The wrens’ family name is Troglodytidae, which comes from the word “troglodyte,” meaning cave-dweller—not only do some wren species forage in dark crevices, but many wren species are also cavity breeders, including four of the six species that live in the Bay Area. To the Bewick’s the birdhouse must have seemed like a dream home. The male brought his mate to check out the new address and they built a nest together inside the birdhouse. Generally the female Bewick’s will start laying eggs one to three days after the nest is complete and will lay an egg a day until she has a clutch of five to six ovalshaped eggs that are white in color with spots that range from reddish brown to lilac or purple. Two weeks later the chicks begin to hatch. When my pair’s chicks hatched, the female remained inside the birdhouse on the nest while the male brought food for her. Both the male and the female feed the chicks, which aren’t able to leave the nest for roughly two weeks. When they do leave, young birds can fly well enough to avoid ground predators (a good thing in our garden, since we have a cat and two Scottish terriers). Our fledglings avoided the resident pets and after about two weeks they moved off on their own.

Wrens are insectivores and their diet consists mainly of gleaned insects. In the 1930s and ’40s, noted UC Berkeley researcher Edwin Miller observed Bewick’s wrens feeding in Strawberry Canyon near the UC Berkeley campus. He concluded that the preferred habitat of the species was dense brush, both for the shelter it afforded and the forage it provided. Miller also noted that the western populations of Bewick’s wrens occurred in greater numbers away from human habitations. From what I’ve observed, the Bewick’s has adapted nicely to living in our suburban “forests.” When the Bewick’s male made his appearance last spring, he announced himself immediately. Soon he was studying the old birdhouse in its new location. After a cursory inspection, he was off in the dense leaf cover of the weeping willow tree, seeing if it might be more suitable. He didn’t seem bothered by my presence, just choosy, even kingly, about his new house. —Eric Schroeder

Alice Zhuk, zhukphoto.com

A cheeky singer coming to your neighborhood soon

To hear the Bewick’s wren sing, visit baynature.org/bewicks

A male Bewick’s wren can sing up to 16 different songs.

april–june 2017

b ay n at u r e

Steve Zamek, featherlightphoto.com

The Boldness of Bewick’s

currents

A tanoak seedling from an acorn collected in San Mateo County will be planted in a new orchard at a UC Berkeley research facility. That preserves this humble native’s disease-resistant genetic stock.

by alison hawkes

Andrea Laue, sparebeauty.com

conservation in action

Breeding a SOD-resistant Tanoak Often lost, or at least overlooked, in Northern California’s inspiring redwood forests is the unassuming tanoak, a scruffy tree compared to its towering neighbors. But it’s almost always present, filling out the forest understory and adding to the complex architecture of redwood and Douglas fir stands. And, truth be told, it has its own admirable features: a full canopy; crackled bark that tends to become shaggy with moss like a scene in an elf forest; and a prolific acorn crop. All of which make the tanoak (not actually an oak, but both belong to the beech family) a dependable source of food and habitat for dozens of animal and plant species, an important host for essential soil fungi, and a significant traditional cultural resource for California Indians across its range from southwestern Oregon to Ventura County. Probably what now most comes to mind with tanoaks, though, is Sudden Oak Death, a disease caused by Phytophthora ramorum, a pernicious water b ay n at u r e

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mold that slunk from nursery plants into Northern and Central California wildlands two decades ago. Transmitted largely through infected plant material, the pathogen can also be carried in water and even hitch a ride in the soil on hiking boots and car tires. P. ramorum is known to kill three oak species and cause branch dieback in well over 100 other species of plants, but tanoaks are the most susceptible and P. ramorum has felled millions of them. Since its arrival, land managers have been deploying a variety of imperfect techniques to stop its spread—from culling bay laurels, whose leaves can serve as a reservoir of the pathogen, to inoculating valuable oaks with a chemical prophylactic agent. Every spring, hundreds of citizen scientists fan out across public and private lands to record signs of the advancing disease in “SOD Blitzes.” In 2016, the rains unleashed the largest expansion of P. ramorum in a decade, causing it to pop up for the first time

as far east as Mount Diablo, while new outbreaks were found from Mendocino to San Luis Obispo counties. Even the San Francisco Botanical Garden now has it. This year, it could be even worse. Matteo Garbelotto, a plant pathologist at UC Berkeley, has devoted much of his professional life to dealing with the problem of P. ramorum. While working to deploy these measures, including leading the SOD Blitzes, Garbelotto has also been steadily advancing another approach to saving tanoaks. He’s been studying the tree’s genetic lineages in search of natural reserves of resistance to the disease. Tanoaks, like other reproducing species, have familial lines in which genes are passed along. “At the very beginning we asked, ‘Are there any differences in tanoaks or are all the families equally susceptible?’” he says. Fifteen years later—and with the help of dozens of landowners and collaborators—Garbelotto has not only found significant differences in the abilities of tanoak families to withstand P. ramorum, but believes he’s closer to identifying a set of genetic markers that confer some degree of tolerance to the disease and could become a powerful tool in managing tanoak stands. He began in 2005 with a “common garden” experiment in which his team fanned out across California to collect acorns from tanoak families throughout the species’ range. Assembling the specimens in the same place and subjecting them to the same conditions allowed the researchers to scientifically compare the outcomes. His team ultimately grew 25,000 plants in a small, gated nursery just off UC Berkeley’s main campus, later inoculating them with P. ramorum in a quarantined laboratory to see how they performed. Disease resistance has been found before in trees and even harnessed through breeding programs. Notable examples include elms and American chestnuts, both of which suffer from fungal pathogens. That gave Garbelotto some hope

that tanoaks, too, might harbor such genetic reserves of resistance within populations. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence has suggested that individual tanoaks, sometimes within the same area, behaved differently toward this nemesis. “You’d be walking along a trail with so much devastation,” recalls Cindy Roessler, a senior resource management specialist at Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, one of the study’s participants and funders. “You’d turn a corner and there would be a beautiful, large tanoak with a full canopy and no signs of leaf loss or bleeding, and heavy with acorns, and you’d go, ‘Why this one?’” During the tests, not only did about 18 family lines, about 5 percent of the samples, show some level of tolerance to P. ramorum, but these traits were found wellrepresented across the state—including about 20 percent of the 35 trees sampled on MROSD lands, according to Roessler. But a laboratory setting is different than a natural one, and so to confirm his results, Garbelotto took a thousand of his tanoaks that had not been inoculated, including the most promising families, and planted them in a P. ramorum-infested setting in the wilds of the Santa Lucia Mountains. “We left them alone and five years later we measured survivorship,” he says. “We were happy because the ones we called ‘more resistant’ were the ones

Pete Veilleux, eastbaywilds.com

Shown here in 2014, this tanoak was infected with SOD around ten years ago and yet has continued to survive. Tanoaks typically die within six months of infection (like the tanoak in the background).

that survived, and there were other survivors from ecologically fit families. So, that was very promising.” With his identification of resistant family groupings confirmed, Garbelotto then used a mathematical model to calculate a theoretical picture of disease resistance in these tanoaks’ genome. He estimated that between six and eight genes helped the tree tolerate the disease, suggesting that the tree might still get sick but its chances of survival would be higher. “In our case, it was clear we didn’t have real resistance,” Garbelotto says. That’s actually not a bad scenario, he points out, because single-gene resistance could easily turn into an Achilles’ heel for a plant facing a mutating pathogen, while multiple-gene resistance in tanoaks potentially makes them more durable. Just why these genes are present in tanoaks remains unclear—after all, P. ramorum is an exotic species that has not been around long enough for tanoaks to have evolved to combat it. Garbelotto suspects these genes weathered the natural selection process as the tanoaks combated a similar pathogen, perhaps another species of Phytophthora, and fortuitously the genes work against P. ramorum. He next tried to identify the P. ramorum resistance genes by monitoring the tree’s molecular response, specifically to ascertain which proteins battle an onslaught of P. ramorum. First he had to differentiate the tree’s proteins from the proteins produced by all the other organisms present in a tiny specimen of tree tissue—including bacteria, fungi, and insects, and of course P. ramorum itself. “It was a big mess,” Garbelotto recalls. Then from the proteins produced by the trees, he determined which genes were expressed in the P. ramorum-resistant tanoaks but not in the susceptible ones. And the work paid off. He found that the tanoaks tolerant to P. ramorum strongly expressed, or activated, genes involved in identifying microbes, signaling action within the cell, and producing antimicrobial compounds. That part makes a lot of sense in the context of an infection—but there’s a twist. These trees were expressing the microbe-bashing genes prior to the infection, meaning

something other than P. ramorum was causing the genes to activate. Garbelotto hypothesizes that the “something” is perhaps another organism, possibly even a symbiont, like a beneficial fungus, or a pathogen of no consequence. The tanoaks may depend on such “priming” of these genes by other organisms to effectively resist P. ramorum. “Maybe it makes sense that the only way plants can resist a pathogen is by using their own experience with their own garden-variety pathogens.” Though the prospect is theoretical, Garbelotto also hopes that exposing uninfected tanoaks to the priming organisms might jump-start resistance in individual trees, sort of like a vaccine. “That exposure is going to cause gene expression that might make it more tolerant.” Gabelotto is finishing the analysis and developing a set of biomarkers to test for the presence of the resistant genes. Ultimately he wants to be able to go into the field, clip a tanoak leaf, pass it through a test and—presto!—he’ll know that particular tanoak’s genetics. “It’s going to tell me this tanoak is tolerant to Sudden Oak Death, and then I’m going to use this [same] one in a reforestation project.” Already, Roessler has identified a spot on MROSD lands that could be reforested with SOD-resistant strains of tanoaks. A portion of Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve in Los Gatos was once a vineyard, but today invasive French broom (and P. ramorum) overruns it. She says, “We could go into those areas, and kick out the broom and restore it with resistant tanoak trees. Wouldn’t that be amazing?” This spring, Garbelotto is planting trees from close to 30 of his bestperforming tanoak families at UC Berkeley’s Global Campus at Richmond Bay. There they will live as a repository, their precious genes preserved as a resource for when the time comes to bring back the tanoaks. “Remember, I have families that are resistant and it took me 15 years to find out,” he says. “So, those are really valuable to me.” Interested in joining an SOD Blitz this spring? Visit SODblitz.org

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mount umunhum opening this fall by Elizabeth Devitt To stand on top of Mount Umunhum is to step back in time. Up here at 3,486 feet, spring blossoms and buzzes and a cool wind blows, while down below you can almost watch San Jose roasting under the July sun. At these heights winter is harsher and longer, causing spring on the mountain to begin a month or more later than in the Santa Clara Valley below. Colorful blooms lure butterflies and hummingbirds to the summit, where they seem to congregate, a phenomenon so long a part of the mountain’s existence the region’s Ohlone Indians called it “the resting place of the hummingbird,” or umunhum. For decades, nature’s quirks have carried on here without much of an audience. Soon, that will change. Umunhum’s 12-acre mountaintop, with its rare panoramic views of the Bay Area, will open to all after being off-limits to the b ay n at u r e

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general public since the Almaden Air Force Station became operational in 1958. An interpretive center and almost four miles of new trails for hikers, mountain bikers, and horseback riders are under construction. The grand opening, slated for mid-September 2017, comes after years of logistical wrangling by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD) to include the mountaintop in the surrounding 18,000 acres of the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve. “It’s time for Mount Umunhum to take its place in the green circle,” says district general manager Steve Abbors, referring to the swath of open spaces that ring the Bay Area. The Summit

Opening the mountaintop has been a long time—and almost $20 million of

Looking northeast from the leveled peak of Mount Umunhum, across San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley, to the Diablo Range.

MROSD’s Measure AA funding—in coming. MROSD purchased the site from the military in 1986 for $260,000, but planning for the overhaul only began in earnest after 2009, when the district received $3.2 million from the federal government to remove toxic waste from the site. After that massive cleanup, all that remain of the mountain’s former military life are a flat top—the ridge was leveled for buildings—and a squat fivestory tower, known to locals as “the Cube.” This Cold War remnant, which housed a radar installation from 1958 until 1980, appears at odds with the conservation space. Yet supporters rallied hard for its historic building designation, a status granted last summer by unanimous vote of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Both the mountain and the tower have long been iconic visual references for area residents, notes Bern Smith, trail director for the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council. A seasoned hiker and cyclist, he promises that anyone who’s seen the landmarks from afar will get “a whole different feel from the top.”

on the

Sally Rae Kimmel, Flickr.com/people/sallyraekimmel

Hylkema, a tribal liaison and archaeologist for California Department of Parks and Recreation. “Places like this trigger a sense of the holy.” For the Amah Mutsun, descendants of tribal groups that once populated the San Juan Valley, an area that radiated outward from the Pajaro River basin,

Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna) are drawn to the late-blooming flowers near the summit of Mount Umunhum.

Mount Umunhum is the place the story of creation began. “The top of mountain is where our ancestors came to pray, to be closer to the creator,” says Valentin Lopez, the tribal chairman. When MROSD moved forward with the summit restoration, the Amah Mutsun were invited to partner with

the district on the project—an alliance that brought members of the tribal band back to this land for the first time in centuries. When the mountaintop reopens, a ceremonial space awaits the Amah Mutsun, a place of contemplation that will be available to all visitors. Lopez hopes to spread awareness of the tribal band’s ethos about the land, a view that goes back millennia and is steeped in traditional knowledge and nurturing relationships with animals and plants. It includes the tale of Hummingbird, a creature the Amah Mutsun credit with bringing fire to their people. In part of the tribal creation story, Hummingbird and a handful of other birds were hungry and needed fire to cook their food. Hummingbird went to get fire from the Badger People underground, but they refused to share it. When Hummingbird returned a second time, the Badger People hid the fire under a deerskin. But the skin had a hole in it where an arrow had gone through, and clever Hummingbird reached in with his long narrow beak to remove a hot ember. As he carried the ember it flamed, turning his throat a brilliant red. Anna’s hummingbird, easily recognized by its ruby-colored breast, is april–june 2017

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He’s right. Mount Umunhum may not be the highest of the Bay Area’s peaks, a commanding crowd that includes Mount Hamilton (elevation 4,200 feet) to the east, Mount Diablo (3,849 feet) farther north, Loma Prieta (3,786 feet) just south, and Mount St. Helena in Napa, which stands at 4,341 feet. (Mount Tamalpais, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, tops out at 2,575 feet.) But the view doesn’t feel small. On a clear day, the vistas sweep over hundreds of miles, sometimes all the way to the Sierra Nevada. “These elevated points add a tremendous expansion of perspective, and Mount Um is one of those places,” Smith says. “It will be a keystone destination for the Ridge Trail.” Remember those words when you’re standing on the summit taking in the 360-degree view, a stiff breeze tousling your hair. If you turn your back to the vast blue of the Pacific Ocean and gaze above the urbanized valley floor, you can trace the rugged green ridgeline—punctuated by the white dome of Mount Hamilton’s Lick Observatory—around the Bay. It’s breathtaking; it also feels breath-giving. “Viewsheds from high elevations are often seen as sacred,” says Mark

The Lay of the Land

The story of Mount Umunhum reaches back much further than human occupation. It traces the evolution of some species and the ongoing shifts of the underlying rock foundation. “As you go up in elevation, you go back in time,” says Ken Hickman, a naturalist and wildlife researcher who’s been surveying the mountain’s flora and fauna for MROSD the last few years. Mount Umunhum’s long winter—with rainfall, ice, and snow, and winds that can howl at more than 100 miles per hour—sets the stage for a late spring. But the mountain’s eclectic flora and fauna are drawn to the summit by more than wild weather. Likely due to Umunhum’s elevation and location on the inner edge of the Santa Cruz Mountains, four different plant communities converge at the summit: chaparral, pine woodland, mixed evergreen forest, and summit “rock gardens.” These plant communities include species typically found across the valley El Sombroso

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in the Hamilton Range and to the south in the Santa Lucia Range, such as oak violet, whitestem rabbitbrush, and Brewer’s rockcress, which haven’t been found elsewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Hickman says. Other species that make their home here are uncommon relicts like the California nutmeg tree (Torreya californica), “a conifer from the time of the dinosaurs,” Hickman says, “with needles like a redwood, the bark of an elm, and crazy-looking fruits instead of cones.” Only six species in the Torreya genus are left in the world. There’s also the geology. With a complex of faults beneath the mountain— including the infamous San Andreas Fault along its western flank—the soil is full of serpentinite, a rock that contains too much chromium and nickel and too little nitrogen to allow many plants Hicks Rd. to thrive. (It’s also our state rock and

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a year-round resident and frequent flier on Mount Umunhum, enticed by the California fuchsia and red beardtongue.

Officially called the Radar Tower, but known by locals as “The Cube,” this is an iconic vestige of the summit’s former status as a military installation.

a source of asbestos ore.) Yet here the Mount Hamilton fountain thistle and Loma Prieta leather root have adapted to grow on seeps where water moistens the surfaces of these nutrient-poor rocks. (Another rock type found around the summit is Franciscan chert, a hard rock brought to the surface by tectonic uplift and used by native peoples to make arrowheads and other sharp-edged tools.) So far, Hickman and his colleagues have documented 14 mammal species, 60 birds, 8 reptiles, 25 butterflies, and 352 different plant species around the Umunhum summit, and they’re sending “voucher specimens” of the plants to the Carl Sharsmith Herbarium at nearby San Jose State University. It’s the most complete survey of life on the mountaintop to date. Still, he’s pleased to point out a bouquet of rock buckwheat erupting from an outcropping—a favorite plant of butterflies. “Here’s another one of the crossovers from Mount Hamilton,” he says. “Doesn’t grow anywhere else in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I joke that ‘Lord Hamilton’ sent them over here to woo ‘Lady Um.’” The Trail

I feel lucky to have Hickman as my guide as we leisurely make our way down the trail-in-progress that will offer visitors a scenic descent from the trailhead shelter near the summit to the Bald Mountain parking lot. Close to four miles long, the trail traverses an elevation change of 1,165 feet. At the 0.4 mile marker, there’s a turn off that ultimately

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Mount Umunhum: A Partial Field Guide

Rock Buckwheat (Eriogonum saxatile): A tough perennial that grows on rocky outcrops around the summit, which is the plant’s only known location in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Its nearest neighbor: on Mount Hamilton.

California Whiptail (Aspidoscelis tigris munda): A lightning-quick predator that will even chase down fence lizards, whiptail lizards can be seen prowling around the rocky outcrops and chaparral along the new trail. It can be identified by its long, slender tail with a dark or bluish tip.

Bigberry Manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca): Common in the drier ranges of Southern California, bigberry manzanita—with the biggest berries in the genus— grows nears the summit of Mount Umunhum.

Unsilvered Fritillary (Speyeria adiaste): Because this butterfly, shown here on the rare Mount Hamilton fountain thistle, is highly sensitive to human disturbance, it is an important indicator of ecosystem health.

Gray Fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus): A young adult at a seep pool caught by a researcher’s camera trap. Gray foxes are common on Mount Umunhum, where they thrive on the berries found in the chaparral around the summit and on south-facing slopes.

California Nutmeg (Torreya californica): A relict conifer endemic to California, it grows in the deep shade of the mixed evergreen forests along upper Guadalupe Creek and can be easily seen along the new trail.

Red Beardtongue (Keckiella corymbosa): A small shrub and hummingbird favorite that blooms in July around Umunhum’s summit and rocky slopes.

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Sally Rae Kimmel

connects with the Bay Area Ridge Trail, which runs through the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve and beyond. We start at the summit, where drops of water slowly coalesce under the scree, eventually gathering downslope to become the headwaters for Guadalupe and Rincon creeks. Even on a hot day, it’s a comfortable walk that winds, by turns, under a canopy of madrones—readily recognized by their peeling red-brown bark—and then along less-shaded trail. Sometimes it feels like the Sierra foothills. And then we pass lots of big berry manzanitas, one of the many fruitbearing shrubs that draw gray foxes and overwintering birds, Hickman notes. In open areas there are pockets of grassland species, stands of white-flowered yampa with tuber roots that were a staple in the Ohlone Indian diet, and tarweed plants whose seeds (a favorite with many birds) were gathered and ground into flour. The lizards hustle for cover and I look out for snakes—perhaps not for the same reasons that Hickman might. The trail is quiet at midday, with the occasional chorus of cicadas and rustling of birds in the underbrush. I spy a duskyfooted wood rat stick house, a surprisingly stout affair of thick twigs stacked into a foot-high shelter. Twice we’ve spotted scat at the trail’s edge, and we speculate about bobcats and mountain lions. We zig and zag across streams (now with bridges constructed to cross them) and pass a “dwarf forest” of leather oaks that typically grow as large shrubs in chaparral. But here, Hickman notes, fire cleared the ground and when the oaks grew back all at once, their density and competition for the sun, along with the nutrient-poor soils, caused them to grow like a grove of small, upright trees. Soon we stop to check one of Hickman’s camera traps, set to overlook a small natural water hole less than 20 feet off the trail. He’s been setting up his digital cameras—rigged with motion sensors and a tough outer casing—at spots where wildlife will likely show up. It’s been two weeks since he last checked this one, and I’m eager to see who made an appearance. Hickman’s not surprised by any of the images: black-tailed deer,

Venus thistle (Cirsium occidentale var. venustum) can grow 8 feet tall and is much loved by hummingbirds and silverspot fritillary butterflies.

two gray foxes, a Merriam’s chipmunk, western screech owls, a band-tailed pigeon, a yellow warbler, and a blackthroated gray warbler, among others. Another camera, set on a chaparral slope, has captured views of a bobcat, more gray foxes, a brush rabbit, scrub jays, blue-gray gnatcatchers, a California thrasher, and a spotted towhee. Hickman’s cameras have also caught coyote and mountain lions, but he’s really hoping for a cameo of a ring-tailed cat or a spotted skunk. They’ve been documented in the general area, he says. Even though he’s set traps near water and madrone trees with berries to spare—a ringtail favorite, he says—no luck yet. “One neat detail,” Hickman notes about this small sample set, is the way animals stick to their habitats. “Even though the [camera trap] locations were quite close together, you won’t catch the California thrasher in the forest, or those warblers in the chaparral. But the scrub jays, they’ll go everywhere.” When the trail angles off to a vista point overlooking Guadalupe Creek, we can look back up toward the sheer southeastern face of Mount Umunhum. Already it seems far away. Golden eagles have been spotted around here, but they aren’t soaring overhead today. Instead, Hickman draws my attention toward terraced places along the slope, telling me how Bigelow’s spikemoss helps create the terraces by binding loose rocks and soil together with its roots, allowing moisture to collect and seeds to grow in those steep spots. They anchor rock

garden plants such as canyon live-forever and the rare Diablo snakeroot. It’s an easy stretch from there to the Bald Mountain parking lot and a staging area for horse trailers, an amenity Los Gatos horsewoman Magda Bartilsson is looking forward to using. “It’s always good for equestrians to have connectivity between the public lands,” she says. “How lucky we are to have this open space available to us. As soon as it’s open, we’re going!” The mountaintop will open soon for other reasons too, as MROSD’s Abbors notes. “Open space has always been thought of as a nice thing—but it’s absolutely critical on a planetary scale,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of work on Mt. Umunhum, but in terms of restoration, we’ve still got a lot of time to make up.” Check out Ken Hickman’s cameratrap photos of life at the watering hole. The Western screech owls are pretty darn cute. Baynature.org/extra

d e ta i ls Note: The Mount Umunhum summit area will open to the public on September 16. It’s worth noting that we started our one-way hike from the summit, enjoying an all-downhill experience. Once the restoration is complete and the trail opens, an upper trailhead shelter will be located less than a half-mile from the top of the mountain, with parking available there, as well as a bathroom and a water trough for horses. But there won’t be any water sources for people, so be sure to bring plenty to drink. This trailhead is also where cyclists and equestrians must exit the trail; the remaining climb to the summit is steep and not constructed for multiuse access. However, cyclists and riders can still get to the top via the road. The entire Mount Umunhum area is currently closed to dogs. It’s also forbidden for visitors to leave dogs behind in vehicles, which puts the animal at risk for heatstroke. Getting to the mountain might not be the easiest part: Although the roads will be open for public use, the twists, turns, and narrow passage make for slow going. But that shouldn’t keep anyone away.

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trail

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Eric Simons

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Emily Williams

marin county

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Owl Trail

Philosopher’s Way Trail

Limekiln to Priest Rock Trail

Most visitors stay mere minutes at the Muir Beach Overlook, an area managed by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, with sweeping views of the Pacific coast just a mile north of Muir Beach on Highway 1. But you can take an unmarked trail along the plunging headlands for an easy walk through the wildlife-rich coastal scrub living on the Pacific edge. Near the overlook’s overflow parking area, you’ll see the only sign for the Owl Trail, directing you 0.9 miles to Slide Ranch, a nonprofit, educational farm perched on a bluff above the ocean. On the relatively straight, narrow, and mostly shadeless trail you’ll be accompanied by monarch butterflies, dragonflies, and lizards that skitter through sagebrush. You’ll pass several cypress trees, home to the trail’s namesake birds. Even if you don’t spot any great horned owls, you’ll likely see their pellets littering the ground. Wind along a few dusty, sharper descents to the farm, following the bleating of goats and sheep, as well as clucking roosters, turkeys, and ducks. Watch for bees buzzing around apiaries and California quail pecking near the fowl enclosures. Slide Ranch’s signs direct you along a fennel-lined path down to North Beach, the rocky shoreline patrolled by cormorants, pelicans, and gulls. If you time it to hit a low tide, you’ll encounter hundreds of shore crabs, black turban snails (or hermit crabs disguised as such), cluster and starburst anemones, and colorful sea stars. details: Twenty parking spots and restrooms at overlook. Drinkable water at Slide Ranch’s outdoor sinks. No dogs on Owl Trail. —Brittany Shoot

This spectacular 3-mile loop trail around the edge of McLaren Park purposefully recalls the days when people who studied nature called themselves philosophers. A stone sign at the trailhead describes the trail as “conducive to thought and contemplation.” Stone plinths with engraved arrows mark the path, offering occasional food for thought about the interaction of local history, environment, and ecology. Starting from McLaren Upper Reservoir parking lot on John F. Shelley Drive, the trail winds east and downhill through groves of eucalyptus, redwood, cypress, and willow. Breaks in the trees afford beautiful views. If you walk the entire loop you can see most of the landmarks of the Bay Area. There are also meadows of annual grasses and coyote brush. The signage along the way varies to appeal to wherever a person finds herself in life that day—some days you feel like reading about San Francisco’s immigration history mapped onto its street names, and some days you want to look at a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at the Cow Palace. 11 Conclude the walk at the base of the famous blue water tower by taking a victory loop around the tower for one of the most breathtaking panoramic views in a city full of them. details: Parking at the McLaren Upper Reservoir or lot at Mansell St. and Visitacion Ave. From Balboa Park BART, the 29 MUNI stops at Visitacion. Dogs on leash allowed; numerous off-leash areas, too. Restrooms available. —Eric Simons

The Limekiln Trail, shaded beneath a bower of bay trees, winds up a steep slope in the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve. Nestled between Highway 17 and Almaden Quicksilver County Park, the trail takes you deep into the park’s Kennedy-Limekiln Area, and it’s a gateway to a figure eight of trails that offer either a 4.7- or a 10.8-mile hike. Limekiln’s initial couple of miles is a wide fire road that feels wild, with views over the undeveloped hills of the preserve. It climbs along the side of Limekiln Canyon, where California bay trees and small oaks cling to the steep slopes. When the trees occasionally thin there are views of the wooded ridges ahead and a less natural view of the limestone quarry—the namesake of the canyon, trail, and creek. At the junction of the Limekiln and Priest Rock trails, the trees finally fall away for a 360-degree view of the surrounding Santa Cruz Mountains, with nothing but the overhead power lines to remind you of the cities below. It makes for a natural turnaround spot, or the place to pick up an alternative return route via the Priest Rock Trail (part of the Bay Area Ridge Trail). Ambitious hikers can continue on the Limekiln Trail along the chaparral ridgeline for an33 other 3.5 miles toward Mount El Sombroso, but they’ll have to retrace their steps on the return trip. details: Park at the Lexington Reservoir County Park ($5 fee, restrooms available) and walk half a mile to the trailhead. Dogs welcome on leash. —Emily Williams

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

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Wildflower Viewing on the Scenic Limited

ALL ABOARD! Every Wednesday, Saturday & Sunday in April at 11am, 12:30pm, 2pm

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Photo: Don Jedlovec

Your investment of $21 a month ($250/year) will enroll you in the 1-in-a-Million Donor Circle. This circle of 4000 donors will help raise $1 million dollars annually to fund environmental restoration, protection of open space, and vital programs for underserved members of the community.

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e x p l o r i n g t h e e a s t b ay r e g i o n a l pa r k s This story is part of a series exploring the natural and cultural history and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). The series is sponsored by the district, which manages 119,000 acres of public open space in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

a shoreline of for the people

walk through the Berkeley Meadow along the San Francisco Bay is a walk among the healing ruins of the fiercest and most protracted battle for a state park in California history. You wouldn’t know that underfoot lies a layer of construction refuse—old asphalt, concrete, and building materials—12 feet thick, covered now by a lush landscape of willows, coyote brush, and native grasses. Meadow voles have moved in. Raptors circle overhead, as if doing victory laps. The 72 acres of re-created coastal prairie and scrub lie at the heart of McLaughlin Eastshore State Park, today a necklace of open public spaces along the bayshore north of the Bay Bridge. But for a long time it was a polluted and legal quagmire that not even California State Parks really wanted. The land—an 8.5mile waterfront stretch from Emeryville to Richmond—worth millions, seemed destined to be paved over. One development proposal wanted twin 18-story hotels, and another a “stilt city” of high-rises, at the Emeryville Crescent. There were visions of office buildings, restaurants, [Clockwise from upper right]: Bike riders on the Bay Trail at Point and shops in Berkeley, as well Isabel; great egret hunts along as shopping centers in Berkeley the Bay Trail; sailboat leaves the and Albany. Yet another set Berkeley Marina; burrowing owl. april–june 2017

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clockwise from upper left: Rick Lewis; Sally Rae Kimmel, Flickr.com/people/sallyraekimmel; © Najib Joe Hakim, najibjoehakim.smugmug.com; Kathy Barnhart, flickr.com/photos/25136646@N07

by lisa Krieger

he success of saving the Bay from being filled in and reduced to a shipping channel is an inspiring and oft-told tale, an illustration of our region’s changing relationship to our waters. It started in the early 1960s, when California’s population was surging and garbage was filling the Bay at the rate of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of acres per year. Distressed, McLaughlin and friends founded Save San Francisco Bay Association, later called Save The Bay, to end the practice. But the concluding chapter of the story— the politically divisive, exasperating, and expensive creation of Eastshore State Park—is less well known. The ideas of saving the Bay and creating a park were twins, connected and co-conceived, says Norman La Force, author of Creating the Eastshore State Park: An Activist History. As early as 1963, Save The Bay’s shoreline park committee met to discuss fundraising for a small Berkeley-based park. “Our first thought was to acquire the land,” recalled McLaughlin in a 2006 interview recorded by the Regional Oral History Office at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “You couldn’t really plan for somebody else’s land.” But the Bay’s destruction, through dumping, was a more urgent problem. “You sort of go from crisis to crisis,” she said.

Rick Lewis

Clockwise: Striped shore crab; paddleboarding in the Bay near Cesar Chavez Park; white-tailed kites hunt over open fields, like those at the Berkeley Meadow.

have hauled out garbage and delivered truckloads of fresh dirt. Tractors are furrowing and seeding gentle dunes. Oyster beds and rocky reefs have been built just offshore. New trails are under way. More educational panels will be erected. The enhanced and restored areas provide habitat to hordes of waterbirds, including less-common visitors such as the wandering tattler, red phalarope, black skimmer, and common murre. There are sweeping views of Mount Tamalpais, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco skyline, as well as of the East Bay hills. “Everything doesn’t need to be developed—not this,” says Alex Saunders, 60, of Berkeley, as he casts for bat rays near the Berkeley Marina, a stiff wind luffing his worn shirt like a sail. “I come every day for the peace of mind. I love it.”

Rick Lewis

of development plans embraced by many civic leaders in the 1980s called for ten million square feet of construction, roughly equivalent to 14 buildings the size of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. The Santa Fe Railroad Company and its allies would have benefitted handsomely. East Bay environmental activist Sylvia McLaughlin was appalled. Beginning in the 1960s, she helped launch a nearly 50-year campaign that prevailed, against all odds, to turn the damaged Berkeley Meadow and the East Bay shoreline into a 2,000-acre sanctuary now managed by the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD). “Somebody said, ‘Well, it’s just a dump,’” recalled McLaughlin, a housewife-turned-crusader who passed away a year ago. “I said, ‘Well, it’s our dump … and we want it to be our park.’” She and her allies faced four big hurdles: They needed to halt shoreline development and activities that were filling in the Bay, in order to protect the Bay. Money had to be found to buy the shore land. They needed to permanently protect it through official park designation. Then, if all that could be accomplished, there was this: Clean up the mess, make it beautiful, and welcome the public. “People willed this park into existence,” says Robert Cheasty, a former Albany mayor and current executive director (and founding member) of Citizens for East Shore Parks (CESP), which works to conserve habitat and secure public access to the shoreline and was established in 1985. What started as a small movement grew into a large and determined coalition of environmental and community groups and five East Bay cities. It took lawsuits and legislation, zoning changes and lobbying campaigns, bond measures and propositions, and determined individuals who refused to take no for an answer. Today the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park is a place of recovery and gradual rehabilitation. At different sites, workers

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©Najib Joe Hakim

A man and his pooch relax at the tip of Point Isabel, watching the early evening light fall over the Bay. Mount Tam rises in the background.

The dream of a park became more real when the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) went from being an interim agency to a permanent state planning and regulatory entity in 1969. The commission’s landmark Bay Plan cited, to the joy of local environmentalists, the need for new shoreline parks, marinas, beaches, fishing piers, and pathways, especially in urban stretches where people live close to the water but are shut off from it. But city officials hungry for growth were initially dubious. So was the state parks system, which had little experience managing urban land and little interest in the complicated challenges of this particular polluted parcel. Even the East Bay Regional Park District was wary; while it already managed eight urban shoreline parks, officials thought the state should take the lead. And there was this one big problem: landowner Santa Fe Railroad’s development ambitions. Although trains never ran here—there was only a rail spur, built with the expectation of industry that never materialized—Santa Fe owners knew it was valuable real estate. In one meeting, Santa Fe’s principal planner looked at the Bay and said, “‘See, it’s not being used,’” McLaughlin recalled. Her response: “I’m using it. I’m looking at it right now.”

A turning point came in 1972 when the Berkeley City Council voted against building a regional shopping center on landfill. There was a second success when Santa Fe’s planned development in Emeryville—a “stilt city” of high-rises on wetlands—was rejected by BCDC. Santa Fe sued Berkeley over the shopping center, but in 1980 the state Supreme Court ruled against the company’s construction plans. The California State Park and Recreation Commission soon placed the shoreline park on its list of priority projects to fund. The state Coastal Conservancy issued an official East Bay Shoreline Report recommending establishment of an East Bay shoreline park and identified key lands for inclusion. But then progress suddenly stalled. Republican George Deukmejian, who held no great love for the Bay Area, was elected governor in 1983. State Parks put the Eastshore park planning on a back burner. “They were always very polite and seemed to agree but nothing much happened,” says retired UC Berkeley adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences Doris Sloan, a board member of CESP who joined the effort early. “Things just sort of collapsed, basically.” Worried, the disparate groups of park advocates realized they needed to organize as a unified force, agree on a common strategy, seek grant funding, and elect more progressive civic april–june 2017

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Cove area, and North Basin Strip (together considered of greater value than the narrow shoreline parcels). Catellus wanted $80 million for the land, but ultimately settled for $27.5 million under the district’s threat of eminent domain. “We spun garbage into gold,” said Bates at the park’s 2006 dedication ceremony. Now the healing could begin.

Rick Lewis

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Sally Rae Kimmel

Rick Lewis

leaders. A coalition called Save Our Shoreline was formed—the progenitor of today’s Citizens for East Shore Parks. “We decided to keep pushing [in] other ways,” Cheasty says. Santa Fe pressed forward with massive development plans along the shorelines of three cities. But after a decade of back-and-forth battles, Catellus, then the real estate subsidiary of Santa Fe, gave up in 1990 after losing court battles and elections in Emeryville, Berkeley, and Albany, concluding that it made more economic sense to sell its East Bay property than to keep fighting. “We built a juggernaut,” Cheasty says. “Support for the park had built to a crescendo. More and more people saw the rightness of the cause. At this point, there was major commitment from everywhere. Santa Fe realized the wisdom of getting out,” he adds. “We could finally tell developers: ‘Don’t even bother calling.’” But how to pay for a park? Without the support of State Parks, the citizens couldn’t afford it, although that had begun to change in 1988 when voters approved two bond measures, one state and one regional, for a total of $40 million to acquire land for the Eastshore State Park. And who would manage it, if not State Parks? State Assemblyman Tom Bates led a unique legislative effort that gave the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) the authority to act on behalf of the state and use the state’s funds to buy and run the park. “I don’t think there is anything anywhere in a metro area in the United States where you have nine miles and six urban cities that are connected through a shoreline park like this,” says EBRPD General Manager Robert Doyle. “It’s an environmental justice issue. It’s a small miracle. But it really took a lot of effort and would not have been done without the park district being willing to step into a very difficult situation.” By 1992 the Emeryville Crescent, Albany Mudflats, and part of Hoffman Marsh had been purchased. But the prize acquisition came in 1998, when the park district bought the coveted acres encompassing the Berkeley Meadow, Brickyard

(Upper left) Flying kites in the bayshore breeze at Cesar Chavez Park, owned by the city of Berkeley but close to the Meadow; (middle) playing ball along the shore at the North Basin Strip; (lower left) a Forster’s tern carries a snack north of the Berkeley Meadow.

hat does victory look like? You can find out during a visit to the park, where you’ll experience the results of a contentious two-year planning process wherein many disparate groups asserted, in good faith, their own visions of the park, culminating in the final plan in December 2002. The plan provides for a wide range of users—soccer clubs and Little Leaguers, kayakers and windsurfers, anglers and birdwatchers, dog lovers, and the Let It Be group, who loved the rebar, concrete and weeds—all brought together by CESP. Environmentalists successfully argued that the park should receive designation as a state seashore rather than a recreation area. And recent revisions to regulations have strengthened protection of wetlands. “We thought public access to the Bay was a good thing, and back then there wasn’t any. It was measured in feet,” McLaughlin, who the park is named in honor of, noted at the dedication ceremony. “Today it’s measured in miles.” The Berkeley Meadow flanks the western terminus of

Kathy Barnhart

(Above) The Emeryville Crescent shoreline at low tide; (right) a black turnstone blends into the environment near the Berkeley Pier.

Jerry Ting

University Avenue and marks the official entrance to the park with an expansive sign adorned with the image of a great egret. Just to the south, in the area called the Berkeley Brickyard, renovations of 31 acres tucked between Interstate 80 and the Bay are under way. Last year, large piles of soil that had been stored on the property for more than a decade were regraded and spread over the property; trails have been built. There are plans to plant grasses and native wildflowers this spring, followed by installation of a parking lot, interpretive display, picnic tables, new concession building, and a small service yard. Currently the Brickyard’s opening to the public is slated for winter of 2019. The neighboring Berkeley Meadow’s reconstructed seasonal wetlands and coastal prairie are transected by two trails and protected by fencing. To build this meadow, EBRPD delivered truckloads of dirt from the construction of UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, Oakland’s Kaiser Permanente building, and other projects, says Chris Barton, EBRPD’s environmental programs manager. Historically, “there were a lot of seasonal wetlands here— pockets of perched water in upland areas,” Barton adds. “So to create the seasonal wetlands in the meadow, we took clay soils that collect rainfall and hold water over time.” The new meadow’s diversity of habitats—including dense willow forest, shrubs, open grasslands and deep standing water—attracts many kinds of birds, notes Douglas Bell, EBRPD wildlife program manager and a raptor specialist. Song sparrows perch on fennel stalks. In the winter, look for yellow-rumped warblers. Northern harriers, white-tailed kites, and red-tailed hawks may be overhead. In standing water there might be ducks, greater yellowlegs, great blue herons, and great egrets. Small, round burrowing owls, mostly female, have been seen in the meadow, using ground squirrel holes for their homes. There’s even been a bobcat sighting in the area. Farther north is a long landfill peninsula

that juts out into the Bay. This peninsula, once open water, was created when asphalt, concrete, rebar, tile, brick, and household waste was dumped here between the 1960s and 1987. Now part of the park, the “neck” is being restored by the park district. It leads you toward the Albany Bulb, owned by the City of Albany and not yet managed as part of the park, and formerly home to a flourishing outlaw culture of artists and homeless people. Visible in the water are crescent-shaped oyster-shell reefs and tide pools favored by nudibranchs, sea squirts, and other aquatic invertebrates. When the tide rolls in, the peninsula offers a great view of sea ducks like surf scoters and bufflehead, diving ducks like scaup and wigeons, and dabbling ducks like mallards and gadwalls. Cormorants perch on rocks, spreading their wings to dry. The park concludes at Richmond’s Point Isabel (which USA Today dubbed one of the “10 Best Amazing Dog Parks”), a 23-acre off-leash canine mecca with paved trails and sweeping views of Mount Tamalpais and the Golden Gate Bridge. Nearby is 40-acre Hoffman Marsh, an intertidal salt marsh that is a remnant of the vast marshes and tidal flats that once ringed the Bay. The delta for the mouth of a creek that drains portions of Richmond and El Cerrito contains a complex channel system and upland vegetation where birds can roost, forage, and nest during high tide in a habitat now rare in the East Bay. Someday, this kind of ribbon could be copied elsewhere along the Bay, creating a park that protects us from a threat early activists never imagined: climate change. “Buffer zones” of wetlands could defend against a rising sea level and storm surges. Setback lines for coastal development could prevent deaths and destruction of homes. Then the shoreline we saved may end up saving us. Lisa M. Krieger is a science writer at The Mercury News.

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bird’s eye view “Don’t look down,” instructed our

Caltrans escort. That’s cold comfort when you’re stepping over the railing of the Bay Bridge. I try to ignore the bouncing of the bridge, a cold thrumming vibration with the background roar of traffic. Staring over the rail at the opaque, jadecolored Bay 160 feet below, I take a step on the iron catwalk to descend to the undercarriage of this giant erector set. I’m about a mile east of Treasure Island and actually quite relieved to be off the road and under the eastbound lane of the bridge. Ten feet above some 10,000 vehicles pass by every hour. I see mounds of cigarette filters that have blown into the scaffolding’s steel corners, an accumulation of butts flicked b ay n at u r e

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The last of the Old Bay Bridge is coming down this year and with it will go a 40-year-old colony of double-crested cormorants.

out of car windows for 50 years. And I notice a potential gold mine of bird guano that Caltrans could sell as boutique fertilizer. Wearing a full body harness with two six-foot lanyards attached to clasps, I position myself on “the traveler,” a motorized platform suspended from rails under the bridge used by maintenance crews. Lying on my back, I slowly inch along—cargo netting slung beneath me in case I accidently roll off the traveler—and stare up at the bridge’s underworld. As I inch closer to the roosting birds, they watch me with a mix of curiosity and (Above) A double-crested cormorant nest with eggs; (right) adult cormorants perch on a pier tower of the old Bay Bridge, with the new Bay Bridge in the background, June 2016.

Courtesy of CalTrans/Laura Duffy (2)

By Mark J. Rauzon

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Rick Lewis

alarm. Heads nod and necks crane, suggesting they are growing more concerned as I approach. Since I first began looking beneath bridges in 1988, I have leaned over, stepped off, or crawled below the old Bay or Richmond-San Rafael bridges a dozen times in search of the double-crested cormorants that have nested, for at least 30 years, amid the structure’s iron lattices. I’ve surveyed the birds’ changing population in the Bay Area and monitored their tolerance of people during bridge maintenance. Over the past three decades, the Bay Area cormorant population has fluctuated from around 1,200 to 2,200 pairs—that’s about 30 percent of California’s double-crested cormorant population and 10 percent of the Pacific coast population. In 1999, my colleagues and I counted at least 794 nests beneath the old Bay Bridge. It’s a remarkable world to witness. Under the bridge, the messy stick nests line the horizontal beams, at times by the hundreds, often built just out of striking distance from a neighbor’s beak. The sides of the oldest nests can be stacked two feet high. Other nests are tucked into the angles and intersections of iron beams. Brooded by the parents until they grow strong, the chicks climb from the nests and fill the girders, nodding heads begging for attention and food. It is an apartment complex like no other. But in April, as the last of the old Bay Bridge comes down, this classic and lengthy In April, as the case of wildlife claiming our urban world as last of the old its own will be over.

A double-crested cormorant a moment before it takes flight.

crests—some white, some black or salt-andon both males and females pepper—emerge Bay Bridge comes You may be familiar with cormorants’ and last just about two weeks in April or down, this classic habit of perching with their wings May. Their namesake feature appears only outstretched. There’s a biological during the height of the courtship phase and lengthy case explanation for that behavior, just as when hormones are running high and before of wildlife claiming there is for double-crested cormorants they get down to raising chicks, molting into (Phalacrocorax auritus) choosing to make their their plain plumage. our urban world homes under our bridges. Cormorants are Back in the late 1800s before bridges as its own submarine feeders, catching their meals spanned the Bay, several thousand doubleunderwater. After a feeding session they’re crested cormorants nested on Lands End will be over. often soaked because their feathers lack near Seal Rocks off the coast of San the waterproofing most birds have to repel Francisco and on the Farallon Islands. The moisture. Less buoyant feathers make underwater foraging more great ornithologist of the era, Robert Ridgway, described the efficient, but it also means cormorants must dry off with their Pacific Coast bird as a subspecies of the double-crested cormorant wings “spread-eagle.“ found throughout North America and he gave them their own The cormorants’ throat pouch and totipalmate feet—the moniker—the Farallon cormorant (P. a. albociliatus). The Latin webbing stretched between the four toes—place it in the pelican refers to its white crests, unique to the West Coast birds, and its order, Pelecaniformes. Those flipper feet power their underwater common name to the locality in central California where the first foraging as they hunt in the Bay. But unlike other cormorants in specimen was scientifically described. But through years of nest the San Francisco Bay, double-crested cormorants can use their disturbance and coastal development, the mainland population totipalmate feet to grasp branches and railings, enabling them dwindled to fewer than 50 pairs by the early 1900s. Another few to nest in trees and on bridges where they build their colonies hundred pairs survived on the remote Farallon Islands. of bulky nests, not only from sticks, but also from leaves, Double-crested cormorants struggled to survive in the region seaweed, and marine debris like rope, caution tape, plastic and nationwide due to habitat loss, fishermen who viewed the containers, and even condoms! birds as competition and thus persecuted them, and the effects Those nests become especially important in the spring, when of pesticides on nesting success. But new habitat awaited with the double-crested cormorant’s pair of filamentous, nuptial the completion of iron truss bridge works over the Bay in 1936 b ay n at u r e

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and 1956. It took time before the cormorants exploited that. They were first documented nesting on the Bay and RichmondSan Rafael bridges in 1984, though bridge workers reportedly saw them 20 years earlier on the latter.

Mark Rauzon

Stuart Moock

I began studying those double-crested cormorants under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge with Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO, now Point Blue Conservation Science) in 1988. I was a seabird biologist trained in Alaska and Hawai’i, had recently moved to Oakland, and found cormorants were the neglected seabird that appeared to have few admirers. At that point, double-crested cormorants were undergoing a population expansion both locally and nationally from their near extirpation in the last century. When Chevron contracted PRBO to conduct a three-year study of cormorant nesting success, because the company was cognizant that an outfall pipe being relocated to deeper Bay waters might impact the corms’ feeding grounds, we had a chance to study them in the Bay for the first time. To survey the population on the Richmond Bridge, my colleagues and I needed two methods. To gather breeding success data, we coordinated a closure of the passing traffic lane early on Saturday mornings during breeding season (March to August) from 1988 to 1990. From the bridge deck we could look over the rail and eight feet below the roadway to see birds nesting in a row on the I-beams. We used a long “prodder” to move the adult birds and count the eggs and observe how the chicks developed. The pale blue chalky eggs hatched into fat squabs, looking like big black ticks, and eventually feathering out into the gawky, downy stage (think 11-year-old tweeners), always flagging their orange throats at the parents, begging for food. But the “beamers” were not the whole colony. We also needed a boat to count the birds nesting underneath the bridge in the ironworks. We surveyed from the boat early Friday mornings and conducted the road survey at the same hour on Saturday mornings. As the captain positioned the boat, we would agree what section to count, and then, like reading a sheet of music with binoculars, our eyes played up one beam and down the next, noting the black birds clumped together at a nest or positioned alone. Trying to stay focused while on the rocking boat was the big challenge; losing count

meant a redo and a step closer to seasickness. After the Chevron contracts to study cormorants—from ’88 to ’90, followed by a one-year intensive study in 2000—were completed, we volunteered to continue conducting population counts and collect other data on the birds. It had become clear that cormorants are a sentinel species for the open waters of the Bay. As full-time residents, catching fish from a variety of contaminated shallow-water habitats, they can reflect the ecosystem’s health. For example, serious birth defects, like crossed bills, had shown up in the Great Lakes cormorants due to pollution, and we wanted to know if that was happening in the Bay. Our results were encouraging. Not only was the population increasing, the Bay cormorants appeared free of genetic defects. Their tissue samples showed decreasing levels of pesticide residues, although the results were mixed for PCBs, mercury, and selenium—all of which can impact embryo development—at the Richmond Bridge colony. Our findings reflected the declining use of organochloride pesticides in farming since the 1970s, which has helped eliminate eggshell thinning and the consequential effects on reproduction. Our research was also motivated by the changing marine ecosystem. Overfishing meant different species of fish were available to cormorants; as “fishing down the food web” resulted in fewer larger fish, smaller prey populations grew. As an opportunist, the

(Above left) The “corm counters”—author Mark Rauzon, Eric Lichtwardt, and Meredith Elliott—under the old Bay Bridge; (lower left) a decoy, mirror box, and “nests” fashioned from old wreaths are meant to attract birds to the “corm condos” created on the underside of the new Bay Bridge.

double-crested cormorant benefited, feeding on a wide diversity of fish, from plainfin midshipman in Sausalito to stocked trout in Lafayette. Add to that the increase in invasive marine species, development, pollution, and a reduction in freshwater flows, and it’s clear cormorants are among the rare examples of indigenous marine species that have successfully adapted to the april–june 2017

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drastic ecological shifts in the Bay, where a significant portion of marine species (more than 50 percent of the fish and most of the bottom creatures) are introduced from other parts of the world. The Bay bridges have provided the cormorants with both benefits and challenges: They got a short commute to feeding grounds and a cool place to nest, but they have also had to contend with required bridge maintenance. It’s an “only in San Francisco” story.

Steve Zamek, featherlightphoto.com

All this changed on October 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta

earthquake cracked the Bay Bridge right above the colony (not the birds’ fault!). Although it took years of political wrangling to settle on a new bridge design that was acceptable to all parties, the resulting plan included an agreement to provide habitat replacement for the cormorants on the new bridge. In the fall of 2001, I met with the bridge designers to discuss what a couple thousand cormorants might need for nesting habitat. As I provided the birds’ measurements, the designers provided the space. Given the landmark status that drove the bridge project forward, as well as the gleaming white cement signature style, the cormorant colony had to be situated in the center of the bridge, out of sight. Six thousand square feet of stainless steel “corm condos” were built in long rows facing each other under the roadway, designed to be an accessible and manageable replacement given the design limitations and as a mitigation for the colony on the old bridge. Phil Matier of the San Francisco Chronicle harped about b ay n at u r e

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The cormorant colony under the east span of the Bay Bridge consisted of approximately 65 nest sites in May 2014. Girders, gussets, and I-beams offer myriad nooks and crannies for nests.

the half-million-dollar price tag, but Caltrans was in fact complying with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Also, if nothing were done, the birds would relocate to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and the power towers of the South Bay, adding greatly to those maintenance costs. Public money would likely have to be spent one place or another. Since 2000, I’ve worked on the cormorant surveys with Meredith Elliott, a biologist with Point Blue Conservation Science. Working as volunteers, Elliott and I go out by boat each June to count the corms on both bridges. We’re joined by Eric Lichtwardt of LSA Associates, who has been monitoring the Bay Bridge demolition. Our annual one-day survey tallies, when added to Point Blue’s cormorant counts on the Farallon Islands, have become an invaluable long-term data set showing the health and size of double-crested cormorants at the sites of their largest colonies in the San Francisco Bay estuary. In 2002, construction activities began on the new Bay Bridge, introducing loud, concussive pile-driving and increasing boat traffic near the colony. Fortunately, the corms didn’t abandon their nests during the 12 years of construction; in fact, our research showed they’re pretty tolerant of noise—and, perhaps surprisingly, the colony continued to grow. The birds reached a population peak in 2003 and then again in 2007. However, in 2009 the cormorants largely failed to breed, likely due to a region-wide population crash of northern anchovy, one of their main prey species. Overall in 2009, the bridge colonies declined to 252 nests from a high count of 1,296 in 2007. As the bridge-nesting cormorant populations recovered from the 2009 collapse, and the new bridge construction progressed, new nesting sites were discovered in the South Bay. After the new (continued on page 44) east span of the bridge opened to traffic in

Photo ©Pamela Rose Hawken Northern Harrier, adult male

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Celebrating Our Local Heroes ILLUSTRATIONS

ANDREA COBB

Dan Sullivan

A lot of the national environmental news since January 20 this year has been sobering, to say the least. But in the face of that, we think it’s more important than ever to celebrate the work of those people who are protecting the Bay Area’s environment. Bay Nature Institute’s annual Local Hero Awards are given to individuals selected by the Institute’s board and staff for their outstanding work on behalf of the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. The 2017 awards were presented to the people who appear on the following pages at Bay Nature’s annual Local Hero Awards dinner on Sunday, March 26.

conservation action award

dav i d l ew i s

I wonder at first why David Lewis has chosen to meet at Point Isabel, a somewhat nondescript stretch of filled Bay shoreline at the south edge of Richmond. “What we’re standing on shouldn’t be here,” Lewis admits. “But look around!” He gestures toward the hills. “Up there is where Kay Kerr lived.” Kerr, one of the three founders of Save The Bay, the organization Lewis now heads, looked down on this shore when it was a row of active landfills pushing into the Bay—and knew she must take a stand. At home in Kensington, b ay n at u r e

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Lewis enjoys a similar but now less alarming view. He gestures toward the Golden Gate. Under a streaky gray December sky is the glimmering reach of the Central Bay, bounded by its three big bridges, cradling its four big islands. In the campaign for Measure AA, the wetland restoration measure, “we learned what people see in their minds when they hear the word ‘Bay’.” It’s this: the bridges, the islands, the cities next to the water. Other stretches of bayshore are wider, wilder than Point Isabel. There are better places, north and south of here, for marshland restoration; there are better places to be alone with a big sky. Lewis is especially fond of China Camp in Marin and the vast expanses near Alviso. “But people like nature with people. That’s what we learned.” Lewis grew up on an urbanized bayshore not unlike this one, in Palo Alto. The waterfront the family liked to visit had everything proper to such a shore: a duck pond, a sewage treatment plant, an airport where they went “to watch planes land,” and a dump. “Of course we went to the dump. The dump was a destination.” His parents “sent in their dollar a year to Save The Bay,” the organization’s original and symbolic membership fee, but Lewis’s activism came home with him from school. During the 1976-77 drought, “I was the water police,” the monitor of running taps and lengthy showers. A summer class in natural history also planted some seeds. These would not sprout, however, for 20 years. After high school, instead of following in his parents’ footsteps to Berkeley, Lewis chose the other coast, winding up at Princeton. He majored in politics and American studies, writing his senior thesis on the evolving nuclear freeze movement in the early 1980s. This interest led him to the arms control field and to Washington, D.C., where he worked successively for Friends of the Earth, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan), and the League of Conservation Voters. But the Bay kept pulling him back. He and his family had already decided on the move when, in 1998, Save The Bay tapped him as its second executive director. It didn’t take long for lobbying skills honed in Washington

the waters for bat rays, points out the mud banks where endangered Ridgway’s rails loaf at low tide. Across the marsh is a culvert where an urban creek pours into the tide. This one, it turns out, lacks even a name: It is mapped as Fluvius Innominata. Several neighboring streams, however, have been “daylighted” here and there, reopened to the sky. It’s symbolic of what Lewis is looking for. “Daylighting helps the creeks and builds interest, awareness, stewardship.” He speaks of the tension sometimes felt between access and preservation. “I have no patience with excluding people too much from nature.” He corrects himself: “I have patience with a lot of things, actually. But it’s not necessary to wall off all of the wildlife from all of the people. We have a big enough canvas to have strict nature preserves and recreational access areas, too.” —John Hart

Alison Young

to come into use in California. In 1998, San Francisco International Airport released a plan to add runways on Bay fill, the first big Bay encroachment proposed since the 1980s. The powers that be lined up in unanimous favor. “It looked unwinnable,” Lewis recalls. Some conservationists toyed with the thought of a grand bargain: SFO would get its expansion but fund the purchase of all the restorable former wetlands around the Bay rim. Lewis wasn’t tempted. “If there was going to be any accommodation, it should be at the end of the environmental review process, not the beginning. Even if we lost, we would have represented the Bay well.” The ensuing campaign followed the classic Save The Bay model—factual, science-based, polite, equipped with reasonable alternatives, implacable—arguing that the airport could clear up its rainyday delays with gentler, cheaper, more sophisticated means. That would prove to be the case. “Later,” says Lewis, “SFO Director John Martin thanked me.” Lewis would gladly declare victory in the generation-long battle against Bay fill, but “an old-style fight” continues at Redwood City, where Cargill hopes to develop 1,400 acres of crystallizer beds once used for salt production with 12,000 homes. Opposition has slowed down this new juggernaut, and the public is increasingly skeptical of the plan. “Meanwhile, the sea level keeps rising and the traffic gets worse.” The restoration of the wetland rim, more urgent than ever as sea level rise gains speed, is proceeding without Faustian bargains. Lewis threw himself into the campaign to pass Regional Measure AA. Now the citizens of nine Bay counties are taxing themselves to plow ahead with the restoration job. Save The Bay has recently raised and widened its sights, from the here and now to the long-term future and from the immediate shoreline to the wider Bay watershed. The streams that feed the Bay are carrying too much pollution, too many plastic bags, and often too little sediment to help rebuild marshes, Lewis says. “We need to look upland and upstream and influence what’s happening there—the way cities develop and adapt and conserve.” The watershed vision leads to these bold words in the organization’s year-old 2020 Strategic Plan: “We must help save the Bay Area as a sustainable community with a healthy Bay at its heart.” How do you do that? “You build more and deeper relationships where the [land] development is happening, with elected officials and agency staff. You look for community organizations and businesses to ally with. And you go after the money! It doesn’t work otherwise.” Acknowledging that Save The Bay is one of many partners, Lewis notes with pride, “We are more active than others in getting more money. We endorsed ten local ballot measures in November, and nine of them passed.” Walking back to the Bay Trail trailhead, next to the joyful dogs of the Point Isabel off-leash area, we pause at the channel that nourishes remnant Hoffman Marsh. Lewis eyes

environmental engagement award

A l i s o n Yo u n g & r e b e c ca j o h n s o n

Rebecca Johnson and Alison Young don’t do guided nature walks. They’re not the kind of scientists who stand outdoors and point at things and talk at you. No, they are far more democratic than that. As citizen science coordinators at the California Academy of Sciences, they galvanize ordinary people to hunt and document species, and their philosophy on that is to make it rewarding for you and for science. There’s an addictive joy in finding things in nature, and Johnson and Young are our region’s prime enablers. april–june 2017

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When you volunteer on their outings—as I’ve frequently done over the last few years—you’re signing up for a kind of guided discovery. Johnson and Young identify the questions scientists have that only an army of observers can answer, and then unleash volunteers to find it. It’s empowering to be one of their finders—it’s thrilling to stand at the edge of the wave-battered Pacific Coast while trying to identify some unusual nudibranch, and to know that every observation has a value to the wider world that will be apparent to Johnson and Young, even if it’s not immediately apparent to you. Johnson learned the hard way about ensuring benefit to both volunteer and science when, a decade ago, she was part of an academy team that coordinated volunteers to count and measure strands of Fucus, a kind of common brown algae, in intertidal quadrats. “It was like a case study of how you shouldn’t do citizen science,” Johnson says. “I can’t think of anything more boring than pulling up each Fucus and measuring each plant. And the data wasn’t even being used!” Young, meanwhile, was working at the academy to determine how citizen observations could be useful to scientists, and how to engage the public in a way that didn’t involve unidentified specimens turning up in the academy’s mailbox. “People were just sending us things, not even data, just things that might get turned into data,” she says. “People were literally sending me live spiders in the mail. I’d open the envelope and, ‘Ack! What’s in here! Is it dead? Is it alive?’” Five-and-a-half years ago the academy paired Johnson and Young and created a formal citizen science program to solve the problem—and to build a bridge between education and research, help scientists figure out appropriate uses of citizen science, and help observers channel their energy into answering scientific questions. “We had to convince people that making observations was an important part of science,” Young says. “That through building up observations, that’s how we’ll get hypotheses that we can get scientific questions from.” “One of our mantras has become, ‘Every observation is important,’” Johnson adds. “All science is based on observation.” Technology has helped: Under Johnson and Young’s direction, volunteers upload photos of their observations onto the academy’s citizen science app, iNaturalist. Photos offer visual proof and when taken on a phone are time-stamped and geotagged. But a bigger part of the job is determining the kind of questions citizen scientists can reliably answer—what lives in one area versus another and how that changes over time, for example. “We’ve always said you should never design a protocol that you’re not going to trust,” Young says. “Ask people to do something you can trust.” One of the academy’s defining citizen science projects takes b ay n at u r e

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place amid the tide pools at Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay, where over the last decade 148 citizen science volunteers have made 11,725 observations of 547 species (at last count). Young shares a time-lapse animation at conferences that shows observations obliterating the view of the map beneath, like heavy raindrops on glass. Observers under Young and Johnson’s direction have covered every square inch of that reef and continue to cover it several times a year. When the tides are right, coordinators and volunteers meet in the parking lot an hour or so before the peak of low tide, quite often in foggy twilight. It has the feel of a social gathering, like a church barbecue or a beer league hockey game; it’s relaxed and friendly and the veterans help take care of novices. Johnson and Young, in standard-issue waterproof overalls and rubber boots, make introductions and lead everyone out onto the reef. They find the anchor bolts they use to make sure they’re observing consistently, roll out markers to create a circular plot around each anchor, and then set the volunteers to finding. People peer into crevices, look under thick mats of kelp, and call out targeted species of sea stars, nudibranchs, urchins, and crabs as they find them. Either Johnson or Young starts in the middle with a clipboard to tally observations, but inevitably they get drawn down into the pools to help identify, and photograph, and to share in the discovery. After a focused hour or so of observing in the name of science, volunteers start to wander off to look outside the study plot or see what other cool stuff they can find. “When the state set up its marine protected areas, they left Pillar Point as a control,” Johnson says. While a nearby state marine conservation area covers the area west of the rocks, most of the reef itself is unprotected. “No one was doing any work there. We didn’t even have a species list, so that was our beginning. It’s amazing because it’s under-studied, but also because it’s a multiple-use area. There’s the harbor, people picking mussels, people fishing, people with their dogs. There’s something special about that, I think, when it’s a place that’s used by everybody.” The emphasis on fun and community, the titles of “citizen science coordinator” rather than “researcher,” tend to obscure just how much Johnson and Young actually know about the world they’re helping people explore. They are, in this sense, a rare kind of creature: academic experts who can identify, and seemingly know, everything, but never make you feel dumb for asking them. Young has a marine biology master’s from Humboldt State and began observing at Pillar Point as a citizen science coordi-

There’s an addictive joy in finding things in nature, and Johnson and Young are our region’s prime enablers.

Maika Horjus, Canopy

nator with the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary’s student citizen science program LiMPETS (Long-term Monitoring Program and Experiential Training for Students) even before she arrived at the academy. Johnson has a Ph.D. in nudibranch molecular phylogeny and did fieldwork in the South Pacific. “I went to school for a really long time to be a scientist,” Johnson says. “But I’ve always worked at a museum, so I’ve always had the public outreach part of the job. It’s inspiring to marry the things I really like: the natural world, connecting people to the natural world, community building, the places that I love, the Bay Area—mixing science and history, civic engagement, and community organizing to bring the right people together.” They share the intertidal expertise, but they’ve led bioblitzes all over Northern California, in every kind of habitat. “I feel like I’m a nature geek at heart,” Young says. “I’m driven by the fun of discovery. I get excited every time we go to the tide pools. I spend my weekends hiking and putting things on iNaturalist. Now I can do that at my job, and do it with people who are like that, too.” “For me,” Johnson says, “it’s the fun of the discovery, and the discovery that someone else might care about what you’ve found. There’s a huge social aspect in being a naturalist. You can make a connection like, ‘I saw this bird, and I’ve never seen it. I took a picture, somebody else knew what it was, and it was really important to somebody else. I can learn about it.’ You remember more because someone else cares.” Citizen science isn’t easy to organize, but it also feels more imperative than ever. A variety of indicators show natural history as a discipline is in serious decline, and study after study finds that people have a diminished connection to nature. Bigbudget nature documentaries show the natural world in great glory, but they also emphasize a kind of nature that’s exotic, far away, and beyond the reach of average people. Johnson and Young are here to restore the power of citizens and to connect empowered observers, and often in the places where they live. “When we first started citizen science, we did this three-day bioblitz at Pillar Point,” Young says. “One of the questions we asked was, ‘What was something unexpected?’ and the number one answer was, ‘hanging out with people who love the same place I do. Meeting other people who love tide-pool creatures.’ There’s something about iNaturalist, where you personally might have been interested in tide-pool creatures and doing it on your own, but this place-based citizen science allows people to find each other.” “Now more than ever, it’s important to think about how to mobilize people and empower people to make observations, not only for science and conservation, but to be more connected to each other around nature,” Johnson says. “I don’t think there are many scientists who are employed who get to do all those things together. I feel lucky…that keeps me going. If you start caring about the bird in your backyard then you’re more likely to care about a bird in Africa, or wherever. I don’t think it works as well the other way around.” —Eric Simons

youth engagement award

U r i e l H e r na n d ez

Uriel Hernandez opens the gate of an elbow-high, chainlink fence and knocks on the front door. The house, a modest singlestory dwelling in a tidy neighborhood of East Palo Alto, has a healthy patch of grass lined with dormant rose bushes, and a dead yucca tree. An elderly woman answers in a housedress and slippers this Saturday morning. Uriel coaxes: “Hiiiyy, good morning, how’re you doing?” She’s warm and cheery right back: “Great, doin’ alright. I’m an old lady, I’ll be okay.” Uriel gets down to business. “So, we talked on the phone yesterday, and we’ll be in your neighborhood on February 11th [planting trees]. So, we can probably get that tree removed and plant something else... Let’s figure out another tree. You said avocado? Would you mind two trees? Because we’d also like to plant a big tree.” She says: “Just give me as many as you could. Just fill me up with them!” That’s music to Uriel. In August, the urban forestry nonprofit Canopy put Uriel in charge of the Branching Out april–june 2017

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Federica Armstrong, courtesy of Canopy

initiative, a recipient of proceeds from California’s cap-andtrade program to drastically slash the state’s carbon emissions by 2020. Uriel’s tall order is to make sure 500 carbon-trapping trees are planted in the socioeconomically disadvantaged town of East Palo Alto by that deadline. And so he pounds the pavement of his hometown, directing a half-dozen TUFs (teen urban foresters) to fan out with clipboards and ready smiles to try to persuade the residents, one by one, of the merits of having more greenery in their lives —better air, more beauty, and lower energy bills. Affable and persistent, Uriel, 25, is ideal for the job—and he’s finding his footing as a community leader. He regularly tables at schools and community events to promote trees and, importantly, to build a volunteer base for his planting efforts in the area. As Canopy’s community forestry coordinator, he oversees the planting and maintenance of more than a thousand trees in the group’s service area of East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. His hard work is proving fruitful. In October, he organized a community work party of 80 volunteers in East Palo Alto that planted 72 trees in this same University Village neighborhood, becoming the largest neighborhood tree-planting event in Canopy’s 20-year history. But for Uriel, the trees—and the work parties he organizes to put them in the ground—are the backdrop for a deeper purpose. “There are the obvious long-term benefits of trees … but I’m often more focused on the immediate benefits of bringing people out for service work and becoming more engaged and taking pride in their community. They hear about trees and they start caring about the condition of their neighborhood and taking action. You get the new people who just moved in and the old people coming out and intersecting with each other.” Surrounded by some of Silicon Valley’s poshest towns, East Palo Alto has long been a redoubt for working-class communities of color. The town of 30,000 has dealt with the usual challenges that come when 28 percent of the population lives below the poverty line—too much asphalt and concrete b ay n at u r e

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being just one of them. With Facebook on the town’s northern flank and a revved up housing market, East Palo Alto is facing the forces of gentrification, another source of tension in the community, Uriel explains. “East Palo Alto is really at a crossroads where it can go in many different ways. People can come in and completely change the identity of this city and turn it into just another suburb. But right now, East Palo Alto is kind of this oasis of culture. People came here because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. This city has a long history of doing its own thing.” Uriel is a part of that history. Born to immigrant parents—his father a certified nurse assistant from Mexico and his mother a nurse from Nicaragua who fled the country’s civil war—Uriel grew up in a home not far from where we’re canvassing. It was his Nicaraguan greatgrandmother, Bertha, who often put him and his siblings to bed while his parents worked late into the evening. She claimed Uriel guides a team from a spot in the center of the backyard Girls’ Middle School in for a peach tree, which she carefully planting a madrone tended. “It wasn’t the biggest tree in the in the Beech Street neighborhood of East backyard. All the other trees I would Palo Alto, October 2015. play on and pull the branches, but the peach tree was my great-grandmother’s tree and you respected it and took care of it.” Uriel lifts his shirt and shows me a large tattooed peach tree spanning his shoulder blades, the fruit softly colored among the spreading branches. “It’s a reminder of home and of simpler times,” he says. Beyond his beloved peach tree, Uriel says his early life didn’t include much venturing into the wild. “It’s just not something my family did, culturally. People of color don’t camp and hike as much, and at school there was a lack of exposure to nature. Growing up in the Bay Area, yeah, nature is all around but I wasn’t immersed in it.” But he says he was always fascinated with nature. Then, as a junior in high school he got the chance to head to Vermont for a semester with the Mountain School, where (continued on page 42)

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he worked on a farm and got his first taste of forestry. That intensive experience set him off on a new trajectory. “I was immersed in nature in Vermont,” he says. “When I came back home, I was really able to see it every day in the Bay Area.” Two years later he was back in Vermont pursuing a bachelor’s degree in architecture at Middlebury College, where he developed a sense of how to bring nature into a built environment—especially in places that are lacking it. “Architecture is all about designing an experience. You have to walk through buildings and feel the space around you. That’s what attracted me to trees. Trees make you feel a certain way. I want tree equity. I want everybody in East Palo Alto to have a nice, tree-lined street.” Going door to door, though, he’s found that not everyone in the community feels that way. Canopy offers a pretty good deal to residents: The trees are free and come with a guarantee of four years of pruning and other maintenance. But that morning, Uriel talks to a man cleaning out the gutters on his roof who wasn’t ready to line his sidewalk with a couple of trees: “You know what, let’s just pass on that for next time,” the man says. It’s also a no-go with an elderly woman in a walker who smiles and says, “I don’t think I need any more trees … this is plenty.” He hands her a brochure and soft-sells her into spreading the word around. “Okay, I’ll be asking,” she says. “Thanks a (heroes continued from page 40)

million.” Out of earshot, Uriel says: “She’s super sweet. A lot of these old residents are pretty good about passing on the word. They’ll talk to their pastor, their church.” Uriel explains his sense of the response: “For a while there was a push to get rid of a lot of trees in East Palo Alto because people were scared that people would hide behind them and commit crimes. That’s something I hear way too often when I go door to door and talk to people about trees. And then other people don’t want trees because they’re not-in-my-backyard type people. There are a lot of homeowners who rent out their property … and don’t want to deal with the hassle.” He has his work cut out for him. Uriel found his way to Canopy in 2015. He’d moved back to East Palo Alto to stay with his family after graduating, and within a year he was working with Canopy. “Sometimes it’s a little strange because I never saw myself back here, but it’s just really nice, especially working in the schools. I like to see a lot of familiar faces. And I’ve really grown to appreciate the roots I have in East Palo Alto, with a new role and purpose.” He’s not sure he’ll stay in his hometown forever. But for now he’s satisfied with the ordinary nature that surrounds him, like the trees he’s planted growing taller and sturdier, and the marshes he passes along his bike ride to work. “It’s not a national park, it’s just my backyard and I love it.” He’s helping others see that too. —Alison Hawkes

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2013, demolition of the old span began in earnest. It was the beginning of the end of a modernage marvel, not only for one of the “seven civil engineering wonders of the world” (circa 1990), but for a classic example of bird adaptation to urban architecture. (cormorants continued from page 34)

The “Old Gray Lady” is on her last legs, so the cormorants have

a limited tenure. They were already evicted from the core of the colony as that section of the bridge was dismantled in 2016. A portion of the colony (187 nests were counted) moved farther east on the old bridge to an area they had never nested in before. And in the evenings, many birds have roosted on what is left of the superstructure—old habitats die hard. But this spring, they will have no choice but to move. We’re hopeful the cormorants will adopt the structures built for them on the new span, but it will take time. So far Caltrans has tried to entice the birds to relocate to the new stainless steel “corm condos” on the new bridge through social attraction methods: cormorant decoys, prerecorded sounds of calling birds playing over outdoor speakers, mirrors to reflect their numbers, and old holiday wreaths to suggest previous nesting. But the cormorants haven’t been won over yet. Perhaps it is too different, more exposed, brighter at night? Plus they still have their old (continued on page 46) nesting grounds.

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We figured that some of the displaced colony would move to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, which offered familiar habitat. But in our annual survey in 2016, we were surprised to see the underside of the Richmond Bridge closed off for large-scale maintenance and construction work. The core of the cormorant colony area was shuttered with what looked like huge yoga mats, preventing birds from landing on the girders under and alongside the bridge deck. Some of the birds had moved farther west on the bridge, higher over the water. The young fledgling birds there will have more difficulty reaching a safe landing place where the parents would continue post-fledging care. In other regions, it seems cormorants are too successful for their own good. The recent sightings of cormorants banded in Oregon on the old Bay Bridge indicate the Bay population is part of the larger West Coast meta-population (albociliatus). Unfortunately, the northern colonies in the Columbia River delta are being culled because of their reputation for eating endangered salmon and steelhead. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service developed a comprehensive cormorant management plan that called for eliminating 11,000 cormorants from the world’s largest colony located there. A federal judge recently upheld the plan, and in 2015-16, over 7,000 cormorants were killed and over 6,000 nests had their eggs oiled. It is no surprise, then, (continued on page 48) that the colony collapsed in 2016 and the (cormorants continued from page 44)

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(cormorants continued from page 46)

beleaguered Columbia River cormorants began showing up on the old Bay Bridge, color-banded and fitted with transmitters. Losing the unique cormorant bridge colony in the central Bay is the end of an era. Our urban cormorants are at a crossroads. Where will they turn? Will they learn to live on the new bridge? Relocate to the South Bay salt ponds? Fly out to the Farallones, or wait out the Richmond Bridge work? I hope that once the old Bay Bridge is gone some genius cormorant will discover that the new bridge platforms are open, and the colony will begin to settle in. We could potentially help the cormorants by rehabilitating the derelict portions of the Berkeley Pier as bird islands. Money from the Cosco Busan oil spill settlement would pay for it. Artificial islands created using the western portions of the pier could help mitigate for damage to seabird populations as a result of the spill. These

“islands” would provide refuge for corms and other seabirds from sea level rise as habitat is destroyed, as well as protection from land-based predators—people, dogs, cats, rats, and cars. But cormorants are doing fine, thank you. Double-crested cormorants have colonized urban habitats and benefited from human manipulation of San Francisco Bay. Where many species are failing to survive, the cormorant is thriving. They deserve respect for their adaptive qualities and commiseration for their commuting lifestyle. The next time you’re stuck on the bridge, watch for cormorants flying by; understandably, you might wish you could join them. Mark Rauzon is a seabird biologist with extensive experience in restoration programs, detailed in his latest book Isles of Amnesia. He also teaches geography at Laney College, is a founding member of Friends of Sausal Creek, and is a Point Blue research associate.

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Support California’s Rare and Endangered Species research and conservation programs. Make a tax-deductible donation on line 403 of your state income tax return or ask your tax preparer to do so. Learn more at www.wildlife.ca.gov/Tax-Donation. b ay n at u r e

april–june 2017

s u pp o r t f o r b a y n a t u r e

The Bay Nature Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes exploration and stewardship of the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Through tax-deductible contributions of $25 or more, the Friends of Bay Nature support this independent voice for local nature and conservation. Listed below are individuals whose donations were received between December 1, 2016 and March 7, 2017. All Friends receive advance notice of Bay Nature’s “In the Field” outings. Donors of $500 or more become members of Friends of Bay Nature $2500+ Jane & Richard Peattie Tracy Grubbs & Richard Taylor Bart & Nancy Westcott

Craig Anderson & Lee Hackeling Julie Barney A. Crawford Cooley Ray Evans Kay & Leslie Filler Pamela & Timothy Gray Lenny Gucciardi Kathleen Hall & Leslie Murdock $1000-2,499 Daniel Alegria & Mary Mary Ellen Hannibal Eva & Paul Heninwolf Hufty Jorgen Hildebrandt Carol Baird & Alan Richard Johnsson & Harper Nancy Teater Jon Christensen Peter & Sue Ron & Rosemary LaTourrette Clendenen David Loeb Meg Conkey & Les Peter Mayer Rowntree Clare Murphy Christopher & Gary & Robin Nosti Kathryn Dann David Parks & Maggie Margaret Hand & Sharp John Hartog Dan Rademacher & Louis Jaffe & Kitty Tamara Schwarz Whitman Mark & Paula Lowery Frances & John Raeside Mia Monroe Lynne Russell Sue Rosenthal Pat Sandoval Guy & Jeanine Saperstein $100–249 Susan Schwartz The Laney Thornton Anonymous (6) Susan Aaron & Foundation Steven Sherman John Waterbury Frank Adams & Susan Bryan $500–999 Cynthia Albro Anonymous (2) Brian Ashe & Cynthia Gertrude Allen Scott Atthowe & Rigatti Patricia Thomas Marice Ashe & Larry Rebekah Ayers Orman Valerie Barth & Peter Linda & Stephen Barnhart Wiley Janice Barry Richard Boswell & Tina Batt & Bob Doyle Karen Musalo Natasha Beery & Daniel & Kathleen Sandy McCoy Brenzel John Bennetts Mary Burns Sandy Biagi & David Hortensia Chang & Ogden John Nelson George & Sheri Clyde David Bogart Carol & Richard Cynthia Daniel & Campbell Doug Lipton Gil Caravantes Carol Donohoe Elizabeth Fishel & Bob Kathryn Carpenter Thomas Charron Houghteling Martha Chase Anne & Mason Chevron Humankind Flemming matching gift Catherine Fox program David Frane & Charla Brian & Jennifer Cilker Gabert Harald & Sabine Frey Mark Cocalis & Lisa Ann Erburu Iliona Frieden & Mark Christine Codding Jacobson Thomas Colton & Lou Gold Ellen Simms Jommer Gryler Bruce & Leslianne Lee Paul Craig Paul da Silva Hartsough Cynthia David Reed Holderman Amy Dawson Jerry & Lola Kent David De Leeuw Jaynie Kind Dennis Dougherty Craig Lanway Roberta Elias Russell Nelson & Mark Eliot & Kelly Sandy Slichter Moran Margaret & Oscar David Elliott Rosenbloom Deborah Elliott & Bob & Brenda Glenn McCrea Schildgen Rolfe Erickson Madeleine Shearer Ron Erskine Virginia Slaughter Elizabeth & Joseph Christopher & Livia Eto Stone David Wimpfheimer Evan Evans Craig & Sally Falkenhagen $250–499 Anne & Tom Farrell Anonymous Jeannette Alexich & Matthew & Susan Feldmeir Bruce Harris

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Gary & Linda Felt Alf & Corty Fengler Cheryl & Tom FieldsTyler Stephen Foster Helene Frakes Jeri & Tom Fraser Barbara & John Friedenbach Norman Fritz & Fran Mueller Marilynn Gallaway Mark Glusker Gary & Nicola Gordon Thomas C. Grey Diane Guerin & Grant Spencer Lisa Hall Joan Hearing & Sam McFadden Jane Hiatt David Hill Darla Hillard & Rodney Jackson Marc Holmes Geoff Holton & Margaret Norman Frank & Theresa Huzel Peter Ingram & Yvette Pirie Susan Jacobson & Michael Tigges Sue Johnson Karla Jones William Junor Patricia Kale Jonathan Karpf & Kathy Zaretsky Judith L. Katz Beth Keer Allison & Doug Kidder Shani Kleinhaus Gudrun Kleist Kathy & William Korbholz Beth & Bill Krumbein Linda Lancione Barbara & Phil Leitner Howard Levitt Elizabeth Littell Reta Lockert Larry Lund Larry Madsen Tamia Marg Claire Max Jeffrey Mayer Nancy McKown Carole Meredith Peter Metropulos Ralph Mihan Louise Millikan Susan Mines Jeanie & Norma Minor Kathryn Morelli Suzanne Moss Christine Mueller Steve Mullin Marjorie Murray Bruce Naegel & Constance Roberts Peter Neal New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Audre & Roger Newman Ruth Nuckolls Susan Ohanian Anne & Charles Olsen Laura Owens Penny Pollock Rosendo Pont Mary Power Derek & Janice Ransley Joanna & Thomas Reynolds Merna Richardson &

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Larry Wright Bruce Riordan Sarah Rivers Lennie Roberts Wayne Rodoni Anaya Rose & Gary Stroud Jeanne-Marie Rosenmeier Michael Roth Richard Rowland Erika Rowntree in honor of Les Rowntree Liz Ryan Warren Siegel Stuart Siegel Molly & Wesley Smith Patricia Smith & Thomas Theodores Tommi & Strether Smith Elinor Smith Mindy Spatt Gail Splaver Max Stoaks Craig Strang Katherine Szabo Dan & Janet Tankersley Suzanne Taunt Sally Taylor Lee Vierra Richard Walker Tanis Walters Rebecca Wendt Carolyn West Kitty Whiteside John & Sallyanne Wilson Matthew Wilson & Lyle York Karin Zahorik Matt Zinn Lewis & Patricia Zuelow $50–99 Anonymous (10) Adobe Systems matching gift program Judy Adler Elizabeth Agnello Peter Alley & Carolyn Strange John & Marlene Arnold Brenda Bailey Keith Bancroft Susan Bellone Gordon Benner Barbara Benson & Robert Hinz Adam Beyda & Lauren Webster Norma Jean Bodey Gareth Bogdanoff Patricia Bradford Eleanor Brainerd China Brotsky Phil Brown & Carol LaPlant Michael Brownstein Barbara Callison Robert Cash Dennis Clark Sarah Connick Christine & Paul Cooper George Crowe Sheryl Davenport Jay Davis Karen DeMello Kimberly Dickson Sue Duckles Wendy Eliot & Michael Fitzgibbon Ayesha Ercelawn

the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to additional special events and private outings. Bay Nature Funders are foundations and institutions that have contributed $500 or more over the past 12 months for general support or organizational development. To learn more about how you can support Bay Nature, contact Associate Director Judith Katz at (510)528-8550 x105 / judith@ baynature.org. You can also donate directly online at baynature.org/ donate. Thank you for your continuing interest and support. Robert Farina Ron Felzer Erik Fisher Susan Floore Kate Frankel Heather Furmidge Dana Gallo Anil Gangolli Genevieve GetmanSowa Ralph Goldsticker Google matching gifts program Kirk Gould Mitchell Green Daniel Greene Joan Greer Barbara & Eugene Gregor Joyce & Marty Griffin Christine & Craig Hagelin Kat Hartman Susan Heckly & Thomas Howard Ann Heurlin David Hibbard Frederick & Leelane Hines James Huang Constance Hunter Eric Jaye & Jeannene Przyblyski Denis Jones Otak & Belinda Jump Adam Keats Diana & Robert Kehlmann Annie & Jack Kenny Brian & Gail Kerss Robert Kidd Jinny Koehler Arvind Kumar Hildegard Kural Michael Kwong Joseph Laclair David Larson Tara Lee Catherine Leonard Christopher Leupold H J Lindqvist Cynthia Lloyd Donald Lorenzen Lynn Lozier & Larry Serpa Linda Lustig Mary Manzer Jill & Piero Martinucci Nicole Matthiesen Ingrid Mau Jeannie McCormack John Michels Russell Miller & Kirk Pessner Jennie Mollica Beverley Morse Harriet Moss Zenaida Mott Petra Mudie Edward Munyak David Nelson Hannah Nevins Monica Padilla James & Marcia Parker David Peacock Jeff & Paula Pearce Doris Petersen Nadine Peterson & Mike Tuciarone Mary Pierce Eleanore & James Plessas Linda Post Hanson Quan Gil & Pat Raposo Katherine Reisinger Mertin Ritchie James Roach

Robert Haxo Sandra Hopkins Howard Hornig Alan Houser Egon Hoyer & Annette McCoubrey-Hoyer Mary Ann Huckabay Eliot Hudson Bernice & Joseph Humbert Karen Jernstedt Karen Jolliffe Sheila Jordan & Martin Nicolaus Les Junge Judy Kelly Harry & Mary Kenney Katheryn Kenworthy Roger Koppel Ann Lage Leslie Leland Ann Linsley Carolyn Longstreth Andrea Lopinto Richard & Victoria Luibrand Sandra Lundgren Melanie Lutz Peter McElligott Jane McKean Mary & Miles McKey Oona McKnight Don McLaurin John Mekisich Barbara & David Meschi Tim Morgan Madeline Morrow & James Rumbaugh $25–49 Margaret Morse Anonymous (13) Beth Moseley Andrew Aldrich Linda & Robert Alwitt Tom Muehleisen Ellen Murland Calvin Andre Sheldon Nelson Jean Arndt Patrick Nevis Barbara Baker James Odell Rob Bakewell Wendy Parfrey Joe Balciunas Anastasija Petrosova Joan Barbour Andrea Pflaumer Donald Barbour Patrick Phelan Donald & Mai-Liis Piera Piagentini Bartling Alyssa Pinkerton Darlene Beal Petra Pino Vicente Bennard Mary Judith Pollock Marc Benson Jay Price H. A. Bok Caesar Quitevis Giana Borgman Terrel Brand & Gillian Sarah Rabkin Dawn Ramm Garro Mary Lou Ramsey Jane Brekke John Rice Sharon & Ronald Steve Rockwell Brown Sandra Rosenzweig Annie Burke Cindy Russell & David Geoffrey Chandler Smernoff Michael Closson & Marguerite Ryan Catherine Milton Ellen Sampson Marion Cowee Eric Schroeder Hilde Demarco Drew Shell Mary Devereaux Greg Silverman Pat DeWhitt Beth Slatkin Nancy Dowell Nancy Slavin Judy Fenerty Harvey Smith Karen Fremstad Frank Snitz Lee Friedman Norma Solarz Karen Froming Daniel Spelce Jack Fulton Jenny Stampp John & Tena Jim Sternberg Gallagher Jack Tolvanen Rose Gee Marilyn Trabert Lorrie Gervin Mary Valentine Gretchen & Walter Monica Ventrice Gillfillan Larry Vivian Margaret Goodale David & Marvalee Carol Gould Wake Connie Graeber Penny Wells Barbara Haimes Margaret Wilkes Susan Hampton Carol Wilson Mary Ann Hannon Terry Hart Janet Roth Shanti Rubenstone Steven Ruley Julie & Ralph Schardt Josh Schechtel Sandra Schlesinger Peter Schmale Lisa Schmidt Charlie Sharp Doris Sloan Sergei Smirnoff Ileana Soto Amy Southwick Susan Stanley Louis Stoddard Roy Takai Caroline Tanner Delia & John Taylor Glen Tepke Alicia Thomas Stephanie Thomas Vicki Trabold Karen Van Epen Douglas Vaughan Isabel Wade Linda Walls Wallace Ward Irmgard Waring Alice Webb David Weckler Karen Wehrman Ronald Welch Drew Wenzel Sandra Whisler David White Kristen Wick Martha Winnacker Marjorie Wolf

Funders craigslist Charitable Fund Dean Witter Foundation Rintels Charitable Foundation Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Jewish Communal Fund JiJi Foundation Event Sponsors Individuals Lee Ballance & Mary Selkirk Louis Berlot & Joyce Cutler Barbara Bessey Bob & Kim Carroll Christopher & Kathryn Dann Catherine Fox Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber Jorgen Hildebrandt Harriet & Robert Jakovina Ron & Sandy Linder Andrea Mackenzie & Jenni Martin Mia Monroe Maryann Rainey Sara Sanderson & Eric Weaver Sam Schuchat Don Weden Bart & Nancy Westcott Institutions Conservation Strategy Group East Bay Municipal Utility District East Bay Regional Park District Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy Google Greenbelt Alliance March Conservation Fund Mechanics Bank Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District Pacific Gas & Electric Company San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority Santa Clara Valley Water District Save The Bay Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger LLP Sonoma County Water Agency Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District Union Bank Foundation Special thanks Jaqueline Gauthier Jim Hanson Shin Kao Phil Osegueda Mallory Scyphers Lydia Shih-Day

Wildlife donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t file tax returns...

...but you can help them when you file yours.

Support Californiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rare and Endangered Species research and conservation programs. Make a tax-deductible donation on line 403 of your state income tax return, or ask your tax preparer to do so. Learn more at www.wildlife.ca.gov/Tax-Donation. Thank you. Sandhill Cranes at Sunrise Bob Burkett Photo

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q: How does this winter’s flooding in the Bay Area and Northern California compare to other wet years? a: It is not your soggy brain’s imagination: It was the second wettest July through February recorded in California since record-keeping began in 1895, as well as in my city of Santa Rosa (52.07 in.). The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is 180 percent of normal and climbing. Some of the consequences of all this rain have been mudslides, sinkholes, damaged roads, power outages, fallen trees, lost property, streams and rivers jumping banks, and the dramatic breaching of the Orville Dam spillway, resulting in an evacuation order that affected 180,000 people downstream of a potential catastrophe. Longtime Bay Area dwellers will remember a number of fairly recent floods. January 3-5, 1982, brought a particularly bad one. There were 231 destroyed homes, 1,500 damaged businesses, 33 deaths, and $280 million in damages, mostly from landslides. Around Valentine’s Day in 1986 came another big one, followed by severe flooding in March 1995 and again around New Year’s Day 1997. I believe you get the picture. We have periodic drought, usually followed by disastrous fires and then catastrophic floods. The only thing we are missing here in California is a biblical plague of locusts, and perhaps I should not mention that. But the biggest flood in historical times occurred during the winter of 1861 and 1862. There were no satellite images, but most likely it was an “atmospheric river,” the same type of rain event we’ve heard so much about An aerial view of the damaged Oroville Dam spillway on February 27, 2017.

e l l i s this winter. This thousands-of-mileslong narrow river of water vapor carries a volume roughly equivalent to 7.5 to 15 times the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River! It can form from tropical air masses near Hawaii and so has become colloquially known as a Pineapple Express. Not only is the rainfall heavy, but the warmth associated with the tropical air mass also rapidly melts the snowpack. This one-two punch overwhelms the ability of the earth to absorb the water and the creeks and rivers immediately flood. This winter saw the most flooding in modern history, but our man-made reservoirs absolutely moderated the impact. There were no dams in 1861: It began raining around Christmas and essentially did not stop for nearly 40 days. The entire Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys were under water, at times 30 feet deep and covering telegraph poles. Fourteen miles from any river channel, steamers rode across the floodwaters to rescue people. In Sacramento the newly sworn-in governor, Leland Stanford, was delivered by boat to the second story of his mansion. Oyster beds in San Francisco Bay died from the fresh water and sediment intrusion, 800,000 head of livestock perished, and approximately one-quarter of the taxable real estate in California was destroyed. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people drowned. And, by the way, the California Indians in the region knew what to expect and headed early to higher ground. They had seen it before. So as bad as the flooding was this season, it actually could’ve been much worse. Stay tuned. april–june 2017

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dor, usted manda que sted es un ed vive en u relación veedor de familiar, diferente. años y proveedor ar, pero de marcar un hasta aquí, de nuevo, sobre el rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, What Is ador de siempre avanzando acercándonos, emas que endientes extraño. UHW, ha ya durante ención de gidos por a Loretta campaña conforme continuamos construyendo ndado de el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” Estamos reventando la dico y los dores. En burbuja cuando nuestro Comité un grupo de Constitución sugiere un cambio sido los que combine el espacio de nuestro uecido sus Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva plan para posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El

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

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