Bay Nature July-September 2018 by Bay Nature Institute

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BayNature 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 C O B AY A R E A

MEET THE URBAN OSPREY

A Little Bit Punk, A Little Bit Geeky.

INSIDE

Explore Cool Coast Redwoods Walking San José’s River Designs on Sea Level Rise

THE WILDLANDS CONSERVANCYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

JENNER HEADLANDS PRESERVE OPEN LATE JULY Â&#x201A;Â&#x192;Â&#x201E;Â&#x2026;

FREE PARKING AND ACCESS TO MILES OF TRAILS Located on the Sonoma coast, one of fi een California nature preserves owned and stewarded by The Wildlands Conservancy, a private nonprofit dedicated to preserving remarkable landscapes and providing free public access.

HELP US BUILD A BETTER FUTURE FOR THE OCEAN You can create a personal legacy for the ocean. A gift from your estate plan will support our conservation work for generations to come. Learn more about naming the Monterey Bay Aquarium in your estate plan. Contact Jennifer Ledfors, Gift Planning Officer at 831.648.4877 or lastinglegacy@mbayaq.org. Create a future for the ocean that sustains us all.

MontereyBayAquarium.OceanLegacyCircle.org The Monterey Bay Aquarium is a nonprofit 501(3) C organization. Federal tax ID: 94-2487469

Paul Vecsei/Engbretson Underwater Photography

Sometimes to save a river, you have to buy it. We all want a California with healthy runs of salmon. But given the challenges these juvenile coho face, their odds of survival are slimmer than ever. Western Rivers Conservancy hopes to change this—for good. In northern California, we purchased a ranch on the South Fork Scott River, the largest, cleanest tributary to the Scott. And the Scott is California’s most important river for native coho salmon. Now, we’re working to boost flows in the South Fork Scott by up to 20 percent and conserve 2.5 miles of designated Critical Habitat for coho—because water and healthy habitat is what these fish need most. Learn more and support our river conservation efforts throughout California at www.westernrivers.org.

30 YEARS

contents

july–september 2018

Features 41

The Field Operation Team

Mike Shoys, Save The Redwoods League

Golden Gate Audubon’s SFBayOspreys.org livestream

MEET THE URBAN OSPREY There are no historical records of ospreys—those pescatarian raptors—having ever nested along the San Francisco Bay. And then in the ’90s the birds started showing up, building nests amid the cranes and aging naval shipyard on Mare Island. Today it’s a booming population. What’s a light post got that a redwood doesn’t? by Kim Todd

RISE Sea level rise is coming for the San Francisco Bay’s shore, and Bay Area planners say it’s time to get ready. To galvanize the region, they launched the Resilient by Design challenge and, after almost a year of touring the nine counties and partnering with local communities, this spring unveiled nine proposals for reimagining our shoreline. by Zach St. George

THE MCAPIN TREE The oldest living coast redwood tree south of Mendocino County was discovered by Save the Redwoods League this spring. Protection of the tree and the surrounding forest of old-growth giants comes as the League celebrates its centennial and prepares for a new, more complicated era in redwood conservation. by Brittany Shoot

Departments 6

Bay View Letters & Comments

Feedback from our readers

Opening Shot

Fur seals coming back strong

Currents

On the Trail

Guadalupe River Fourteen miles of trail follow the Guadalupe River as it threads through the nature, culture, and geography of San José. by Eric Simons

14 San José

Letter from the Editor

• Essay: Revisionist Natural History • Flower Piano’s roots • Heron and egret expert flies south • City Nature Challenge winner is… • Big nature in California • Signs of the Season: Cabbage white butterfly

19 Elsewhere

Cross Marin Trail, Marin County; Meeker Slough, Richmond; Grandview Park, San Francisco

Expert Essay

Why the West Antarctic ice sheet matters to the Bay Area by Cooper Elsworth

36 East Bay Regional Park District

Last year more than 24,000 volunteers contributed 168,700 hours of service to 73 parks in the East Bay. Meet the volunteers (and maybe join them!). by Aleta George and Serena Ingalls

61 Ask the Naturalist

What to know about poison hemlock. by Michael Ellis

62 Naturalist’s Notebook

Antlion pits by John Muir Laws

VISIT US ONLINE AT WWW.BAYNATURE.ORG

BY VICTORIA SCHLESINGER

bayview letter from the editor ummer…that time of year we imagine we’ll slow down, stretch out into the longer days, and enjoy the extra three or so hours of sunlight. It’s when nature relaxes after all the busy blooming and birthing and growing in spring. It’s when we hope that schedules will leave us alone a little, that time feels more our own. There’s not much new to say about time, the idea, but summer’s a good moment to remember how much of it we do and don’t have. How long some things take, how quickly others pass. Many of the stories in this issue of Bay Nature touch on time and our ever-shifting perceptions of it. In western Sonoma County, Save the Redwoods League, which is celebrating its 100-year anniversary, took a number of core samples from coast redwoods on a property the League had been eyeing for purchase for a few years. They found that one of the trees is more than 16 centuries old; it was a seedling when the Western Roman Empire began to crumble. The property is now protected in perpetuity. Historically, there’s no record of osprey ever having nested along the San Francisco Bay, even though it’s good hunting grounds for a fish-eating species. A 2,600-year-old Ohlone Indian shell mound in Emeryville full of animal remains contained no signs of osprey. Then, in the last several decades, osprey started to arrive. More than 40 pairs now nest along the Bay, including Rosie and Richmond, whose every feather ruffle is chronicled by the wonderfully addictive (ahem, time suck?) osprey cam in Richmond. Their three chicks are due to fledge any moment.

Susan Moffatt

contributo rs Wendy Dreskin (p. 19) is a nature educator and freelance writer based in Marin County. wendydreskin.com Michael Ellis (p. 61) is a Santa Rosa–based naturalist who leads nature-related tours with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com) and waxes eloquent for KQED’s Perspectives series. Author and journalist Aleta George (p. 36) writes about the nature, culture, and history of California. Serena Ingalls (p. 38) is a junior at Albany High School

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The Bay water those young birds will begin perusing for dinner is rising. For at least 120,000 years the West Antarctic ice sheet has been its current size, and now it’s melting at a speed that is under intense study and of great significance to the Bay Area (and the West Coast and Eastern Seaboard). As the ice sheet shrinks, it correspondingly increases sea level rise on the West Coast due to some neat tricks of physics, and in a single day its rivers of ice, which rival the size of New Hampshire, can move about 10 feet, dumping massive amounts of ice into the ocean. The moderate estimate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which doesn’t include the latest science on West Antarctica, predicts sea level will rise about three feet in the Bay Area over the next eight decades. Bay Area planners know this well, and last fall some of them launched Resilient by Design, a competition among designers to reenvision our shoreline where it’s most vulnerable to sea level rise. The participants presented their nine practical, implementable, community-driven concepts in May. Coming up with ideas is fun compared to paying for and executing them, we all know. It’s taken a good 20-years-and-counting of diligent, difficult work to remedy the flooding problems along the 14-mile Guadalupe River in San José, as well as bring back some of its natural processes. But today it’s habitat for salmon, beaver, and egrets and protects more than 6,000 homes and 300 businesses, along with schools and institutions. A project based on a good idea from the Resilient by Design challenge could take 20 to 30 years to complete, but 2050 is right about when sea level rise will begin to impact our daily lives. So now is the time to start. This summer (Bayview continued on next page) and an editorial intern at Bay Nature through the EDSET (Environmental Design, Science, Engineering, and Technology) program. Kaitlyn Kraybill-Voth (p. 13) is a freelance journalist and recent graduate of UC Berkeley living in San Francisco. Naturalist and illustrator John Muir Laws (p. 62) is the author of The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds and teaches nature observation and illustration. johnmuirlaws.com.

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

Volume 18, Issue 3 July-September 2018 Executive Director/Publisher Regina Starr Ridley Editor in Chief Victoria Schlesinger Editorial Director Eric Simons Art Director Susan Scandrett Research Editors Sue Rosenthal, Erica Langston Copy Editor Cynthia Rubin Advertising Director Ellen Weis Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Information Technology Manager Laurence Tietz Development and Editorial Associate Laney Ennis Board of Directors Catherine Fox , Tracy Grubbs, Bruce Hartsough (President), Reed Holderman, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott Founder David Loeb Volunteers/Interns Hayley M. Davis, Jacqueline Gauthier, Trish Hare, Serena Ingalls, Shidonna Raven Johnson, Phil Osegueda, Kimberly Teruya, Benjamin Whiting 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. © 2018 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

Cover: Osprey are a conservation success story with an estimated half million breeding pairs distributed worldwide. This one was photographed by Marin County photographer Randall Bryett in the waterways of Venice, Louisiana. Photo by Randall Bryett, aussiewildphotography.com Nate Seltenrich (p. 8) is a Bay Area-based, award-winning independent journalist specializing in science and the environment. Priya Shukla (p. 9) is a PhD student based at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Laboratory studying the effects of climate change on shellfish aquaculture. priyashukla.com; Twitter @priyology Ann Sieck (p. 19) is dedicated to helping people with disabilities, including those using wheelchairs, find parks and trails they can enjoy. baynature.org/asiecker.

letters & comments The New California State Parks, Apr-June ‘18 Yes, the California Department of Parks and Recreation is remaking itself, but the details of that hard-won transformation get short shrift in this article in favor of a vague and largely anonymous fear that allowing anyone other than a State Parks employee to help manage parks will somehow lead to bad consequences. Those consequences—real or potential— are not detailed. The fact is, nonprofit organizations and for-profit concessionaires have helped state parks for decades. State Parks leaders, doggedly carrying out the 2015 recommendations of the Parks Forward Commission, recognize the important benefits these partnerships bring and are fostering them through a new Office of Partnerships. The

department also has reorganized itself, created new paths to leadership, developed new budgeting tools, and modernized its fee collection and camping reservation systems. The 201819 state budget invests $80 million to help State Parks maintain and improve infrastructure that directly affects visitors. The new funding also allows establishment of a recruitment and training office to diversify staff. It rectifies a structural budget imbalance and gives State Parks a stable, sustainable source of funding. Recent voter passage of Proposition 68 will deliver more than $1 billion to local and state parks in coming years. The “new” State Parks system has moved well beyond the somewhat tired and stale fear of privatization that pervades this article. Parks leaders today recognize that they must always be open to new ideas for collaboration that achieve their stewardship goals. Michael Mantell, President Resources Legacy Fund

Correction Where Have All the Surf Scoters Gone? Apr-June ‘18 The story incorrectly stated that “as many as half the world’s surf scoters overwinter in the Bay some years.” It should have read that as many as half of the Pacific Flyway’s surf scoters overwinter in the Bay some years.

bayview continued Bay Nature itself will be putting the finishing touches on design changes—plans that have been underway for the last year, to freshen the look of the magazine and our website. We’ll have new regular story slots, both in the print publication and online, allowing more voices to be heard. But as before, we’ll continue to publish exceptional science journalism, nature writing, art, and photography about the Bay Area. We’re excited about sharing our new look with you this fall. Until then, may your time be well spent in nature. —Victoria Schlesinger

CONGRATULATIONS TO SAVE THE REDWOODS FOR

100 YEARS

PROTECTING THE NATURE THAT PROTECTS US

www.openspace.org

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opening shot

FUR-IOUS COMEBACK The return of northern fur seals to the Farallon Islands has become one

Since then the seals’ recovery has continued apace, with growth rates

of the Bay Area’s great conservation success stories. But it’s not over

increasing annually through at least 2016, says former Point Blue Farallon

yet. Summer is pupping season, and the islands’ fur seal population

Program Leader Russell Bradley, who has studied the population since

continues to grow so rapidly that the animals not only are snatching

2002 and spent roughly 1,700 nights—almost five years—based at a

prime beachfront territory from larger yet less aggressive California

research station on the main island. (Last year’s figures appear to show

sea lions, but could someday potentially displace other, more sensitive

a leveling off, though survey estimates are likely low, Bradley says.) The

species, including Cassin’s and rhinoceros auklets, whose nesting

colony now includes roughly 2,000 individuals, more than half of which

season partially overlaps with the fur seal pupping season.

are pups born last summer.

When Bay Nature last covered the story in 2011, the return was

“If it continues to grow, and they come back to the main islands,

already considered a comeback. The colony had been extirpated from

that may have much larger impacts potentially on seabirds and sea lion

the islands by hunters in the early 19th century. But thanks in part to a

species,” Bradley says. But for now, it’s time to celebrate the northern fur

hunting ban and other environmental protections, the fur seals officially

seals’ success, especially as their population globally is on the decline

returned in 1996 with the birth of their first big-eyed pup (whose

and listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of

mother had traveled from Southern California’s Channel Islands, home

Nature (IUCN). “It’s pretty incredible to see the recovery of this species

to another recovered colony). Within 15 years the local population had

in one of the few habitats that’s suitable for them,” Bradley adds.

ballooned to 476 individuals.

—Nate Seltenrich

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P h o t o b y Ja s o n Ja ack s , j a s o n j a ack s . c o m

news & notes from around the bay

CURRENTS

Revisionist Natural History

Kristopher Roller

s the daughter of Indian immigrants in the Bay Area, where multiculturalism was and continues to be ordinary, I always felt at home in my community. I spent weekends with my father chasing quails in Coyote Hills or exploring tide pools in Half Moon Bay, mostly oblivious to the people around us. But just as I began my career in environmental science, my father unexpectedly passed away. I turned to our traditional common ground, nature, for solace, but in the company of my white colleagues and without Pappa, my brown skin and un-anglicized name made me feel alone. Before starting graduate school, I attended my first Western Society of Naturalists meeting hoping to find other Indian marine scientists. There were none. As a marine science master’s student, I idolized Jacques Cousteau, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earle, and Jane Lubchenco, but I wanted to see Indian faces—even a brown face— among the textbook marine biology legends. Craving a role model, the symbol of possibility that my colleagues found so effortlessly, I scoured the Internet and discovered Ali Abdelghany and Syed Zahoor Qasim, male marine biologists from Egypt and India who advocated for aquaculture. While closer to my heritage, they still didn’t reflect my immigrant and female identities. It is rare to find people of color in the natural sciences. Yet we are by no means anomalous in natural history. Over the last decade, as I have studied declines in salmon populations and the effects of climate change on seagrasses, kelp forests, mussels, oysters, and abalone along the California coast, I have learned about the mosaic of people who worked in the same space: Paleo-Indians who harvested shellfish, Chinese immigrants who founded an abalone fishery, and Vietnamese refugees who fished using gill nets. The natural landscape of the Bay Area has been shaped by prescribed burns by Native Californians, Chinese laborers who helped establish California’s signature vineyards, Sikh farmers who began cultivating almonds and prunes at the turn of the 20th century, and African slaves who mined the Sierra Nevada for gold using mercury that remains in the San Francisco Bay to this day. It’s common now to hear organizations and conservation leaders talk about bringing more people of color into the outdoors and

into natural science. It is harder to do that, though, without a reckoning with the past. We need an act of revisionist natural history to color in the environmental and conservation movements. We should remind every hiker, biker, birder, citizen scientist, and field researcher that innumberable diverse people have shaped our natural spaces. History matters. Not only does it provide context for the present, but stories from our past also help people feel like they belong. And stories, and the communities they reflect, have been removed from narratives of nature and science. The result is that while discussions about diversifying conservation necessarily consider affordability, many people still feel unwelcome in the natural world and in the sciences. The untold narratives are waiting to be found and created. Sharing diverse origin stories will help make Bay Area landscapes more emotionally accessible to those of us who feel excluded. We should also celebrate the nascent efforts underway to make this happen. California’s marine protected area monitoring has started to include tribal ecological knowledge. Leaders like Rue Mapp at Outdoor Afro and José Gonzalez at Latino Outdoors have changed the perception of people of color and recreation. I finally found my own sense of possibility through social media, in the accounts of Sri Lankan whale ecologist Asha de Vos and Indo-American oyster ecologist Yaamini Venkataraman. At the Western Society of Naturalists conference last year, I was part of a coalition that introduced bylaws to make our society more diverse, equitable, and inclusive for current and future marine ecologists. This fall, I will follow in the footsteps of Drs. Abdelghany and Qasim and begin a Ph.D. program at U.C. Davis to study climate change’s effect on shellfish aquaculture. I hope doing so will advance the narrative of women of color in the natural sciences. In joining an international industry that aims to feed our growing global population, there’s potential to be part of an inherently inclusive enterprise. Perhaps by showcasing the diverse stories within this industry—both the growers and the communities their work affects— we can make the word “representation” truly meaningful, and generate a universal sense of belonging in the natural world like the feeling my father created for me so long ago. —Priya Shukla j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 8

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CURRENTS

art & science

F l o we r P i a n o’s Ro o t s

A RARE BIRD After 30 years of wading in mud, hopping aboard questionable dinghies, and counting birds—lots and lots of birds—John Kelly has hung up his professional binoculars. In June, Kelly retired from his long-held position as director of conservation science with Audubon Canyon Ranch (ACR), a local nonprofit based in Stinson Beach that’s been instrumental in studying the avian ecology of Tomales Bay in Marin County. In 1988 Kelly started as a resident biologist at ACR’s Cypress Grove Research Center, a cluster of white Victorian cabins surrounded by Monterey cypress conspicuously perched on the edge of Tomales Bay’s eastern shore. Within his first year, he stepped up to director of conservation science and has spent the intervening three decades documenting that Tomales Bay provides essential habitat for shorebirds, waterbirds, and birds of the coastal marsh. Kelly, who has a doctorate b ay n at u r e

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Garden. The treasure hunt for the 12 pianos inspires people to explore the full extent of the garden’s collection, says botanical garden spokeswoman Nina Sazevich, and pianists are “surprised by the interaction with the wind and hummingbirds, the nature soundscape, and playing in concert with that.” Flower Piano runs from July 5 to 16, sfbotanicalgarden.org/flowerpiano; ffortissimo and Mermell’s collaboration and their various happenings can be followed at sunsetpiano.com.

Travis Lange

Kitten on the Keys performs in San Francisco Botanical Garden’s Garden of California Native Plants at the 2017 Flower Piano.

in ecology from UC Davis, has published ACR’s management of 5,000 acres of land in dozens of peer-reviewed research papers Sonoma, Marin, and Lake counties. “His and reports and brought scientific rigor to long-term, ongoing studies of shorebirds, waterbirds, and herons and egrets have a major continuing value in addressing local and global conservation issues that involve bird population dynamics, principles of habitat conservation, and the effects of climate change,” says John Peterson, executive director of Audubon Canyon Ranch. Thanks in part to Kelly, in 2002 Tomales Bay was recognized as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention, the intergovernmental treaty that provides a framework for the conservation of wetlands. Another colleague, Steven Albert, with the Institute for Bird Populations, adds, “[John] is one of those rare people, the kind I admire so much, who takes his job very seriously, and himself not so much.” Rumor has it that Kelly will be taking his next endeavor— surfing in Southern California—very seriously, too.

Jocelyn Knight

Some ideas are so obviously great, it’s hard to imagine they were ever a little bit illegal. Like piano-playing on the coastal bluffs in Half Moon Bay. Actually, that’s still against the rules, but an impromptu performance there of Schumann’s Arabesque on a dilapidated grand piano by artist Mauro ffortissimo over 14 evenings in 2013 seeded an idea that has grown into one of San Francisco’s most beloved summer spectacles. When ffortissimo began to serenade the setting sun, his intent was to bring people together, to shake us out of our routines, and to revel in the past and the now. ffortissimo and his artistic accomplice Dean Mermell have since spread the outdoor piano-playing idea up and down the San Mateo Coast and to the streets of San Francisco and documented it on film, and for the fourth summer in a row they will bring it, fully sanctioned, to the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. Flower Piano, a 12-day nature-meets-music extravaganza, situates a dozen pianos throughout the 55-acre garden and invites everyone— the public and scheduled professionals—to come and play anything, from their favorite Schubert to the blues to calypso to chopsticks. There’s a piano set amid the buckeye trees in the California natives section and another near the garden’s century-old redwood grove. Miniature grand pianos are a perennial favorite in the Children’s

global & local

Giants of Land and Sea

C I T Y N AT U R E C H A L L E N G E R E S U lt s :

And the winner is…

For three days at the end of April, citizen scientists shared wildlife pictures on apps like iNaturalist in a competition among regions worldwide to find and document the most species. The third annual City Nature Challenge, organized by citizen science leaders Rebecca Johnson and Alison Young at the California Academy of Sciences and Lila Higgins at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, attracted almost 17,000 participants in 68 regions on five continents. Spoiler alert: The Bay Area beat L.A.—and everyone else. Counted

only in the Bay Area: Andrena nigrocaerula

429,912

Observations made worldwide in three days

42,690

Observations made in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most of any region

3,201

Species observed in the Bay Area in three days, the most of any region

370

Observations made during the competition in the Bay Area of the California poppy, the most commonly observed species here

Worldwide observations of Taraxacum officinale, common dandelion, the most commonly observed and most widespread species in the competition

565

Number of confirmed species found only in the San Francisco Bay Area during the competition Counted

only in the Bay Area: Gilia tricolor

Number of species observed in every participating region

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From top: Eric Simons; Mike Baird, flickr.bairdphotos.com; clarkia11; iNaturalist

2,285

Several years ago, the California Academy of Sciences started to plan a long-term exhibit dedicated to exploring California. Immediately, of course, they faced the question: What is essential California? What makes this place what it is? The answer forms the physical heart of the “Giants of Land and Sea” exhibit, which opened in mid-June on the west edge of the Academy’s main floor. A circular display in the center of the space connects the natural phenomena that define Northern California: ocean upwelling, fog and redwoods, and plate tectonics and carbon. Each section of the circle radiates out into immersive explorations, including a room where ultrasonic vibration generates a permanent fog set to an aural backdrop of marbeled murrelets, distant foghorns, dripping water, and wind. Although the exhibit is built around iconic giants, there’s plenty of nuance for more seasoned California nature enthusiasts. Video displays explore the physics of fog formation. Light-up pinniped skeletons reveal secrets of comparative mammalian anatomy. Side-by-side photos illustrate the striking similarities between redwoods and giant kelp, from root and holdfast to canopy. An assemblage of living native plants from the redwood forest floor creates the understory beneath a towering wall photograph of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. Which is maybe the other essential piece to loving nature and loving California. There is spectacular detail beyond and beneath the giants, subtlety to explore during a day trip or for a lifetime. California always rewards your attention. “The details add richness whether you’re here for the first or fifth time,” Director of Exhibit Development and Strategic Planning Tamara Schwarz says. “Hopefully there’s something new to discover.” —Eric Simons

Fog room

Kathryn Whitney, California Academy of Sciences

CURRENTS

signs of the season

Creative Commons

Cabbage Whites

CURRENTS

Perspectives on the world’s most common butterfly

When food shortages gripped the United States during World War II, the country responded with a “Dig for Victory” campaign that resulted in more than 20 million “victory gardens” in backyards and public parks and the harvest of more than 8 million tons of fruits and vegetables. Among the most popular produce in these gardens were cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, turnips, and Brussels sprouts—all plants from the cabbage family (Cruciferae or Brassicaceae). And among those who ate most heartily from the victory gardens was the caterpillar of the small white butterfly Pieris rapae, or cabbage white. Cabbage whites ate so many victory crops in the United States and in England that one British newspaper called for exterminating the butterflies on sight, calling them “Hitler’s ally.” People still refer to Pieris rapae as “rat but“Butterflies and Poppies,” painted by Vincent van terfly,” “cabbage moth,” and a “weedy” spe- Gogh in 1889, hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in cies—but the extermination never happened. Amsterdam. Bay Area lepidopterist Liam O’Brien saw The cabbage white is one of the most comit there one day and stopped to marvel at van Gogh’s mon, easily visible flying things in the Bay eye for natural history—the butterflies are captured Area and possibly the most common butterfly in a realistic mating behavior, the female (two dots in the world. An incredibly rapid spreader, it on the forewing) in a receptive pose and emanating pheromones as the smaller male wafts above. is North America’s only introduced butterfly, and once you’re looking for it, you’ll see its languorous, wafting flight just about everywhere. As is generally the nature of the commonplace, though, I’ve found there’s more to the cabbage white than meets the eye. In a typical year the cabbage white population rises rapidly in the spring and peaks late in the season when the butterfly’s weedy mustard host plants are abundant. When those annual hosts die off in summer, cabbage white butterflies move to other plants, often in watered vegetable gardens, that stay green. The cabbage white was introduced to the eastern United States and southern Canada along with European cabbage imports in the 1860s. It’s less clear how this species arrived in California. There are no documented appearances in San Francisco before the 1880s, though the butterflies were flourishing in the city by the time of the 1906 earthquake. One Gold Rush-era specimen from Yreka suggests they might have arrived with the Spanish in the Mission period. Cabbage whites have a darkened underside of the hind wing, which enables them to heat up quickly in the sun. Because the degree of darkening differs from individual to individual and is controlled by temperature and day length, ecologists want to document how the hind wing color changes over time. “That makes them very good subjects for study, because we would expect the regulation of phenotypes to evolve in response to climate change, as well as to our gardens,” says Arthur Shapiro, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolution at UC Davis. For decades Shapiro has offered a pitcher of beer to the person who brings him

the first cabbage white of the year in the Davis-Sacramento area. He’s been tracking first-flight dates and has watched them vary from the beginning of January to the end of February, though when looked at over decades, the first flights are clearly trending earlier and earlier. A citizen science effort called the Pieris Project uses cabbage whites as a stand-in for other creatures to study environmental change. The project’s website teaches backyard ecologists how to make their own butterfly nets, trap and preserve the butterflies, and mail them to researchers who can study their genetics. “They are the perfect ambassador to other species because we can engage a whole lot of people who can actually catch these butterflies, and it wouldn’t be too bad if they caught too many,” Pieris Project founder and director Sean Ryan told me recently. To contribute to the Pieris Project, I have begun to search for the cabbage white. Walking my dog around Lafayette Park in San Francisco, I pass an overgrown median. A white butterfly floats over the weeds and overgrown grasses with that signature lazy waft. I stop to watch the sunlight reflect off its wings, so it seems to disappear and then reappear under a reflective cloak of afternoon light. The cabbage white’s white wings reflect ultraviolet light, which we can’t see but the butterflies can. To our eyes the butterflies seem plain, drab, vanilla—but to each other, females are a gentle lavender and males shine with a deep royal purple. Evolutionary biologist Nathan Morehouse has shown that brighter males are more attractive to females and that the color’s strength reflects the amount of protein the males ate as caterpillars. And so, for a few moments, I just stop to marvel at even this commonplace, humble creature, imagining the rainbow it sees that I cannot. —Kaitlyn Kraybill-Voth april–june 2018

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FOLLOW THE RIVER

Caption modifies opening image + Above right: Roger Castillo and salmon tkCastillo tk tk tk tk tk tk tk and his dog Zoe go tk ttktktk tktktk tktktktover tk the rapids in the southern reach of tktktktktk Guadalupe tktkthe tktkk tktktk River.

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SEE SAN JOSÉ’S NATURE The Guadalupe River, the major waterway in the tenth largest city in America, connects the human and the natural world in unusual ways. by Eric Simons

This spring, I decided to hike and bike San José by following its river. I started by walking north from the Tamien Caltrain

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Photo courtesy Roger Castillo, silichip.org

o hear Roger Castillo tell it, all of the City of San José—its million inhabitants, its sprawling residential neighborhoods, its glittery glass highrises and office-park tech campuses—is more or less floating around on the backs of a bunch of salmon. This is not so implausible as it sounds. San José is a river city, split neatly from north to south by the Guadalupe River, a 14-mile waterway that can flood with 14,000 cubic feet per second of water in the winter and shrink to mostly dust in the summer. Over the years the water that flows inevitably from the hills and reservoirs in the Santa Cruz Mountains northward into the San Francisco Bay has been diverted into culverts and storm sewers to tame the river’s once vast, wandering path. But the water flows nonetheless. And where there is flowing water, there might be salmon. Castillo describes times of wading hip-deep through the underground storm sewers of the city, amid a thousand juvenile salmon fry. A monster fish he rescued from a pump station near Great America is now taxidermied and hanging on the wall in his small office; in 1996 he caught a 30-inch Chinook in a drainage channel near the Norman Y. Mineta international airport. (“People don’t know the airport was built on top of the river system,” Castillo told me. “In wet years, the runway floats.”) Castillo, a lifelong San José resident, semi-retired semiconductor assembler and forklift driver, and recent board president of the Guadalupe-Coyote Resource Conservation District, took me a few months ago to a spot where Highway 101 runs through a deep road cut just east of Interstate 880. Tenth Street crosses over this, and from just on the shoulder of the overpass, Castillo dropped to his knees over a storm drain leading into a gushing sewer. I found it physically disorienting in an M.C. Escher sort of way. Like, you are standing looking down at an open eight-lane freeway of rushing cars two stories beneath your feet and then somehow also peering down six feet into a sewer full of rushing water where, Castillo says, he saw several dozen baby salmon just last week. People ask, and argue, about what it means that there are imperiled fish living in the San José sewers, says Castillo, but at heart it’s simple. It means that where water flows everything is connected. In his head Castillo carries a map of the entire network: The old river and its pathways, the new river and its drains and ponds and pumps and how it is all one big web of interconnectedness. The historical ecology of the Guadalupe River is never far from the surface.

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San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) San José Director Teresa Alvarado grew up in San José just down the road from here and says she first noticed the river the way a lot of residents did back then—when it flooded. In March 1995 a massive storm led the river to overtop its banks. A pool formed along the Highway 87 embankment downtown. A Water District report measured a flow b ay n at u r e

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An adult salmon approaches Roger Castillo’s underwater camera in Los Gatos Creek, one of the main tributaries of the Guadalupe River.

of 9,000 cubic feet per second under the St. John Street bridge. “We could not travel east on our street because of the floodwaters,” Alvarado says. “That was the first time I was aware of the river, and it blew my mind.” After those floods the Santa Clara Valley Water District and the Army Corps of Engineers spent two decades rebuilding the edges of the river, widening the channel in many places to increase capacity and support a more natural river system. Now, as that work nears completion, people have caught on to visions Castillo, Alvarado, and many others have put forth to bring the Guadalupe back to prominence. River advocates see the period of rapid development and transportation investment downtown as an opportunity to capitalize on the river’s new edge and to revitalize the once-and-future natural heart of the city. “We want to create a place that’s a central green space in San José, that’s built for people, that gives people an opportunity to connect with one another and with nature,” says Alvarado, who is working with San José Mayor Sam Liccardo on a new design vision for the Guadalupe and downtown. “We want to create a central focal point, a stronger sense of place for San José.” San José was one among many cities to successfully pave and forget its river in the 20th century. Los Angeles did so too, but on a much larger scale. In Los Angeles, as major restoration work began to bring the 51-mile L.A. River back to life, a UC Berkeley team led by Marcia McNally surveyed people who lived near the river. Only 31 percent said they knew it was there. But in Studio City, where the edge of the river had just been turned into a natural

park, the number of people who knew about the river jumped to 78 percent. River parks, McNally concluded, could both create a reminder of nature and improve community health. San José’s Guadalupe River advocates, particularly SPUR’s design group, watched and learned from Los Angeles. SPUR has since conducted its own surveys among San José residents. Support for revitalization is high, but only 37 percent say they’re proud of the river. “They don’t feel proud of it as it currently is, but they do feel invested in the future of the park,” Alvarado says. One reason people still shy away from the river is obvious. This neglected space through the city’s core is also where booming Silicon Valley pushes the societal injustices it wants to ignore. San José estimates more than 4,000 homeless people live in the city, and many of them make a life along the river. Walk or bike the trail, and you see tents under every overpass. Makeshift shelters grow thick in the willows lining the east bank of the river near downtown. It is clearly an environmental concern: Roger Castillo told me he sees homeless people poaching salmon and disturbing redds, leaving trash in the river, and digging into restored banks. Others told me people avoid the river because they fear the encampments. The 2017 SPUR survey showed that SPUR members think the Guadalupe River Park & Gardens, which cover the two miles from the Children’s Discovery Museum north to Hedding Street, is the most unrealized gem in the city; solving the homelessness problem there was by far the SPUR members’ highest concern. You can only ignore the presence of the homeless along the upper Guadalupe

Photo courtesy Roger Castillo, silichip.org

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station, where quiet suburban pocket gardens overlook the river. At West Virginia Street the beginning of the Guadalupe River Trail is commemorated with a salmon bas-relief on a bridge and a sun-shape cut into the base of a balcony overlook. A shady hiking and biking trail leads north along the riverbank for about a quarter-mile through a eucalyptus grove. As you approach the Highway 87–Interstate 280 junction, the river enters a constricted channel that also marks the river trail’s unofficial entrance to downtown. The pillars of the freeway overpasses sprout like giant trees, and the calm water meanders through this shady forest, reflecting a sort of shimmery concrete white. Historically this stretch of the river was the heartland of the Tamien-speaking Ohlone, and it passes through what once would have been a vast freshwater meadow fringed by several miles of sycamore groves and a dense willow forest now named, unsurprisingly, Willow Glen. The Guadalupe once began in this willow grove, merging several smaller creeks, springs, and wetlands that then flowed north with the more forceful intent of a river. “It is no coincidence that San José is located immediately north, just downstream of the perennial water that emerged from Willow Glen through the Guadalupe River,” wrote Erin Beller, Micha Salomon, and Robin Grossinger, historical ecologists at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, in a 2010 report about the history of the West Santa Clara Valley waterways. These former meadows were rich agricultural land, and the first instinct of white settlers was to drain the swamp, plant agricultural crops, and build levees to prevent the river water from coming back. Subsequent generations continued to tighten the straitjacket.

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The river runs along a deep, narrow channel through downtown. But for the tenth largest city in the country, downtown is deceptively relaxed. In one spot near West San Carlos Street, I stopped to watch a merganser paddle in the shade of a California bay laurel. It is surprising to contemplate the natural placidity of the ivy-tangled banks, the water and the ducks, and think of the human energy

all around: The riverside park meanders around grassy lawns past the Children’s Discovery Museum and the San José Center for the Performing Arts. The Convention Center, on the east bank, was hosting the F8 Facebook developers conference. The SAP Center, on the west bank, was hosting a San José Sharks playoff hockey game. I walked along the flood-protecting, restored bank of the river, decorated with cutout salmon art, under banners celebrating San José’s Little Italy. I passed the Piazza Piccola Italia. Then I crossed to the east bank, where bike paths dance north through a forest of sycamore trees, to the city’s historic orchard, heritage rose garden, and river-themed children’s Rotary play garden. On signs dotting the riverwalk, the city labels the Guadalupe River Park & Gardens as a “2.6-mile-long oasis of discovery, peace and pleasure.” It is close to achieving that feel. Since the main park opened in 2005, additional pieces have come online, like the Rotary play garden in 2015. Now that the park exists, Teresa Alvarado says there’s another lesson to learn from Los Angeles. “How do we enhance what’s happening,” she says, “but really pump up the volume and call attention to the fact we have an urban river there in our midst?” Alvarado imagines the parks with live music, outdoor events, and festivals. “When they step off the high-speed rail or Diridon, we want to see folks walking around,” she says. “You want to hear music, see young people doing whatever they’ll be doing in 10 years—hovercrafting. You want to see a place that feels fun, invites people

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River if you ignore the river itself. It works backward, though: Now that more people are paying more attention to the river, the extent of the problem in San José becomes inescapable. “By placing all of these people into the hidden reaches of the waterway, it really masked the severity of the problem we had in homeless population numbers,” says Steve Holmes, the executive director of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition. “The creeks are a subset of a larger problem, the homeless problem, but why can’t we have better streams and housing for the homeless?” Castillo, as we drove around, echoed the same thinking. “I’m finding all these miracles, but meanwhile the city is using the streams to hide social problems,” he said. “I’m running around trying to save this river system, but we’re using the river system to house people.” There is no obvious answer here, no particular wisdom from the river. But the river is a reminder that nature connects everything and that restoration projects are as much about people and our society as they are about fish.

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Courtesy of the City of San José’s Parks, Recreation and Neighborhood Services Department

Andrea Laue

Willows, rushes, and wild radish crowd the Guadalupe River channel near the James Lick Mansion in Santa Clara.Right, Lupe, a life-size mammoth sculpture, marks where the remains of a Columbian mammoth were discovered in 2005.

to be creative. You want to hear laughter.” And, as Castillo has always emphasized, you want to see fish. You want to know about the beavers that returned to live in a pond downtown, and the dozens of species of birds that rely on the river’s riches. For Stephanie Moreno, the executive director of the Guadalupe-Coyote Resource Conservation District, community interest will follow as ongoing restoration and investment increases. “If the river supports fisheries again, it naturally supports other wildlife and makes it healthier for people who want to recreate,” she says. “I wish we could get more corporations interested in the river. It’s a quality of life issue, and for their employees to have a healthy river system they could walk along, bike along, paddle down—it’s a different dimension than being in a concrete jungle.” North of the park and gardens I picked up a rented bicycle to navigate the next seven miles of the Guadalupe River Trail. A continuous paved pathway, opened to the public in 2013, connects downtown San José to the Alviso Marina and the restored wetlands beyond. From Hedding Street and the end of the Guadalupe River Park & Gardens, the river runs north for about three miles past the airport, then under Trimble Road, where Castillo had shown me one of his most special sites. Santa Clara Valley Water District controls the release of water through the river’s many pumps, and Castillo compares following its rhythms to watching a heart monitor. On a summer day in 2005 he saw what looked like cardiac arrest and went down to the river to explore. A massive water release had b ay n at u r e

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scoured the bank and exposed some animal bones. Castillo called a geology professor, who in turn called the assistant director of UC Berkeley’s paleontology museum. Excavations over the summer turned up a femur, pelvis, toe bones, rib bones, and part of the skull of a juvenile Colombian mammoth. The bones are on display now at the Children’s Discovery Museum, and a silver mammoth statue guards the Trimble Road bridge over the river. Right around here the river picks up a tidal influence from the Bay and, on a typical day, a sea breeze. The river trail swings with the waterway past low corporate offices and apartment complexes and grows crowded at lunchtime with walkers and bikers. A mile and a half north of the mammoth you reach the best stretch of the trail for natural history lovers. At Riverview Park on the east bank, a bike and pedestrian bridge crosses over into Santa Clara at the site of the onetime mansion of wealthy 19th-century businessman, land baron, and science patron James Lick. From there it’s another three-quarters of a mile to the Ulistac Natural Area, a 40-acre refuge of native plants, birds, and butterflies. A ramp drops down from the levee into the natural area and immediately you’re in among California sagebrush and flowering buckeye. Mockingbirds and woodpeckers dart through the canopy and a variety of butterflies patrol the flowering meadows, while giant tiger swallowtail butterflies flit through sun and shade. Parallel trails lead through Ulistac for about a third of a mile before rejoining the Guadalupe River Trail on the unpaved west bank. The river itself grows wider and

marshier as it nears its mouth, although nothing like what it once was. Two centuries ago the Guadalupe spread into a vast wetland fringing the Bay. It would have been hard to pick out the main channel amid acres of dendritic outlets. You can still get some feel for this by continuing past the end of the Guadalupe River Trail and into the restored salt ponds of Alviso. But I chose to stop where the river trail did. At the edge of the Bay I turned away from the sea breeze and pedaled it all in reverse: past soccer fields and apartment complex pools and a cormorant surveying the lower river from a wire, past the 49ers stadium and the Ulistac Natural Area and the mammoth discovery site, past the airport and the jail and the heritage park, past the rose garden and the tent camps and the hockey arena, past the skyscrapers and the museums and the freeway interchanges, to the train station. For all the individual things to see along the way, it was ultimately that final 10-mile ride that I found maybe the most remarkable piece of the whole day. You can traverse, without stopping, 10 miles of a city built to be navigated by car. Driving across the city is inconvenient now, a story of stops and starts and impediments and missed connections. Meanwhile nature has resurfaced, and in a few hours of following the water you chart the complex and diverse systems of the South Bay: geographic, social, environmental. The Guadalupe River, as we sometimes need reminding that rivers did and do, brings the big city together. Eric Simons is Bay Nature’s editorial director.

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Creative Commons

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The Cross Marin Trail, which wends through Samuel P. Taylor State Park, offers people of all ages and abilities a walk or bike ride amid redwoods and riparian habitat. Mostly shaded, it is very enjoyable even on hot summer days. Lagunitas Creek runs parallel to the path and flows year-round. Samuel Penfield Taylor purchased this land for $505 in 1854, before it had roads. A sign alerts you to a very short detour to the site of the paper mill Taylor built in 1856, the first on the Pacific Coast. The paved 3-mile (one-way) main trail follows the bed of the North Pacific Coast Railroad, which began carrying passengers in 1875. When the Woodacre tunnel collapsed in the 1906 quake, much of the line was abandoned. In early summer, bleeding hearts, columbine, and cow parsnip are still in bloom along the trail. I spotted an acorn woodpecker granary tree and heard the wild, piping call of the pileated woodpecker. I saw pipevine swallowtail butterflies floating by, and one laid an egg on trailside California pipevine. DETAILS: Take Sir Francis Drake Blvd. past the intersection with Platform Bridge Road. Immediately after crossing a concrete bridge, turn right on an unmarked road and park on the abandoned street. Walk toward an old bridge. Take the signed tunnel under the road to start the hike. Alternatively, turn in at the marked Camp Taylor signs, where there is paid parking. Restrooms, water, picnic tables are available at Camp Taylor entrance. Accessible. Bikes allowed. Dogs on leash allowed on Cross Marin Trail but not side trails and not allowed in the creek. —Wendy Dreskin

“I can see the whole city!” the boy shouted, spinning with arms outstretched as he reached the top of Grandview Park. Child or adult, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the 360-degree view of San Francisco when you reach the summit of this hilltop park in the Sunset District. The view extends from downtown San Francisco around to the Marin Headlands to the ocean and down to Daly City. It’s one of the best spots in the city to enjoy the sunset. Another reason to take the short hike to the top of this one-acre park (also known by its old name, Turtle Hill) is to experience the natural environment of San Francisco the way it used to be. Grandview Park is among the very few remaining areas still home to the sand dune plants and animals that used to cover the western half of San Francisco. Native coastal scrub plants here include the orange bush monkeyflower, beach strawberry, seaside buckwheat, bush lupine, and dune tansy. You’ll also see an outcropping of 140-million-year-old Franciscan chert. If it’s spring, and you’re lucky, you might also see the nickel-size iridescent green hairstreak butterfly. Informational panels describe the park’s ecology. 11 DETAILS: Street parking is available near the two stairways that lead up to the top of the park: on the eastern side at Moraga St. and 14th Ave., and on the southwestern side near Noriega St. and 15th Ave. Or park at Moraga St. and 16th Ave., and climb the beautiful mosaic-tiled Moraga Stairs. When you get to the top, you will see steps to your right that lead up to Grandview Park. —Regina Starr Ridley

Miles of the Bay Trail in south Richmond run on riprap seawalls protecting humanmade structures, connecting a series of small city parks, but east of Marina Bay Park nature reasserts itself on a half-mile link that turns inland. After crossing the wide Marina Bay Parkway, the paved path enters the shade of tall eucalyptus trees. Nearby condominiums are obscured by shrubbery, mostly exotic species, but natives like toyon and ceanothus grow along the muddy creek, which winds through stands of cattails. A nest box for barn owls has been placed here, and we saw black phoebes, nuthatches, and blackbirds. Farther toward the slough a sign warned of “ducks crossing,” so we weren’t surprised to find clusters of mallards resting in a sheltered spot where a second stream in a concrete channel spills into Meeker Slough and the fresh water flows into the marsh. We watched the ducks, and a few Canada geese, coming and going or dabbling in the shallow brown water. A blue heron near the bank snagged a fish, but a few yards away a snowy egret seemed to be waiting in vain. At a bridge over Meeker Slough we were back on the main trail across Western Stege Marsh, a restored tidal salt 33 wetland where clapper rails are said to live, and avocets, oystercatchers, and sandpipers are often seen, though cleanup of this “toxic hot spot” is far from complete after 20 years. It’s 1.5 miles to the dog park at Point Isabel. DETAILS: Leashed dogs and bikes permitted; buses, maps, toilets, and picnic areas provided at Marina Bay and Point Isabel. —Ann Sieck

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

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URBAN

OSPREY

Andrew Carothers-Liske, wilderness-press.com

BY kim todd

t first glance, the osprey is easy to overlook. Resting, it lacks the noble profile that made the bald eagle an American icon; in fact, the osprey’s head seems awkwardly small for its body. Orange eyes peer out from behind a black bandit mask. The feathers at the back often ruffle up, disheveled. It’s a little bit punk. A little bit geeky. Hunting, though, the bird is something else. Circling high over the shallows, catching sight of a promising shadow or burst of sand, an osprey flicks from horizontal to vertical. Wings cant up and back over the head, beak juts down, right above a sharp star of talons—a spear hurling itself at the water. This single-minded devotion to fish and fishing is the bird’s defining characteristic. “There’s a handful of stories of an osprey maybe picking up an eel; there’s at least one of an osprey carrying something like a young grebe or a cormorant, and my guess is that they thought it was a fish. It was a mistake,” says Allen Fish, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, an organization that tracks raptor migration in the Bay Area. And when the osprey emerges, soaking and hauling itself out on mighty wings, gaining the air and then pausing a moment to adjust the wriggling fish forward to reduce drag, well, a hunting osprey might not be noble, but it is incredibly cool. Until recently, this was a rare sight in the Bay Area. “The funny thing is there were no historical records of them nesting on the Bay,” says Tony Brake, who has been documenting the growth of the osprey population here for the past six years. “It’s kind of mysterious because it seems to be really good habitat.” Ospreys occur all over the world, migrating thousands of miles, from Sweden to West Africa and Canada to Peru, but few j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 8

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seeing if we could document the population,” Brake says. Brake and Wilson ended up charting a booming species. As Brake suspected, ospreys weren’t just concentrated near Mare Island. A survey the next year found a pair trying to build near the San Mateo Bridge and a couple raising two chicks on a light pole at Hunters Point. By 2017, numbers were up to 61 young fledged from 43 nests, in locations ranging from Hercules to Pier 80 in San Francisco to Belmont Slough in the South Bay. The ospreys might or might not have returned, but it’s clear that they have arrived. Which raises a question: Do these large, wild, fearsome fish predators prefer our built-up shoreline bristling with apartments, cargo ships, and manufacturing equipment? And what does it mean if they do?

Photo by Randall Bryett aussiewildphotography.com

n top of a rust-red crane next to a gray ship draped with bunting, the ospreys are courting. The SS Red Oak Victory is the last surviving supply ship built at the Richmond Shipyards, part of the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park. If the nearby crane, once used to lift and place sheets of iron on the ships, looks vaguely like a camel, then the osprey nest perches right on its hump. It’s only March (2017) and there are no eggs yet—the birds are still building, displaying, feeding each other. Their perch offers a view out over the water all the way to the Bay Bridge. The nest is large enough that where a robin would weave in a twig, the osprey has placed a tree limb. Like most nesting birds, ospreys use what they find, and industrial areas like the shipyards provide ample inspiration. Six-foot-wide osprey nests can incorporate everything from kelp to cardboard to bicycle tires. Here, a yellow rope dangles in the breeze. As a tour of the ship passes underneath, the male floats up to the east. A retired scientist who worked in molecular biology at UCSF, Brake counts and maps nests and records which parents suc-

Eric Dugan Photography

documents show them breeding around San Francisco Bay. Naturalists like George Grinnell and Margaret Wythe, who surveyed the Bay Area for a 1927 report, called osprey a “very rare resident.” An excavation of the Emeryville Shellmound, a site of the Ohlone dating back 2,600 years, uncovered parts of loons, peregrine falcons, and barn owls—a total of 64 species—but no ospreys. And even a casual observer would have noticed. Ospreys build big nests. That’s because they are big birds, with a wingspan just smaller than a bald eagle’s. In addition to their fishing feats, ospreys perform flamboyant display flights. The naturalist John James Audubon described the male wheeling high above the nest before diving back toward the incubating female, who “partially raises herself from her eggs, emits a low cry, resumes her former posture, and her delighted partner flies off to the sea, to seek a favourite fish for her whom he loves.” On top of all this, they are loud, calling kyew, kyew, kyew. But for centuries they have scarcely been mentioned. That is, until in the early 1990s, when Robin Leong, a supervising naval architect at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo and an avid birder, got reports from men in the field of a new bird nesting. He went out to investigate and first found a pair of ospreys on a pile driver on a floating barge. They fledged two young. The pile driver moved, but the ospreys persisted, as Leong noted on his spreadsheet, “hanging around.” Before long, Leong saw ospreys nesting on light poles on the island itself. When the shipyard, the first naval yard on the Pacific Coast, closed in 1996, equipment left behind included cranes, light towers, supports for ships in progress. The ospreys settled in. By 2011, 13 pairs had built nests in the spring. At about this point, Brake moved to Point Richmond, and he realized he could see an osprey nest from his house—by the SS Red Oak Victory, a ship docked on the Richmond shoreline. And his friend Harvey Wilson, who lived in Alameda, found a nest there. Maybe, he and Wilson thought, there were more ospreys than people realized. “Initially, just out of our own curiosity, [we] started going around

A new U.S. naval ship called the Montford Point travels south along the Napa River toward San Francisco Bay in January 2015. It passes the Mare Island Naval Shipyard’s many cranes, favorite nesting spots for ospreys.

cessfully raise young to fledging. Coming back repeatedly, watching for egg laying, noting the characteristic motion of the female as she rips bits of fish to feed chicks too small to see over the lip of the nest, is different than birding, where you might glimpse a species once. “It’s just a marvel that they manage to pull this off year after year,” he says. It’s even more of a marvel because some of the sites near the Chevron oil refinery and the former Mare Island shipyard and the rooftops, channel markers, and cranes where the ospreys build aren’t exactly pristine wilderness. What makes the bays suddenly desirable when they’ve seemingly never been before? Are the birds sending us a message we should be able to decipher? For example, is climate change altering habitat, creating new opportunity? Allen Fish says, “Raptors for me aren’t birds; raptors are climate change indicators.” Ospreys are no exception. Maybe, as a result of temperature shifts or some other disturbance, a new kind of

fish has moved in. Certainly the fact that birds nest right next to each other—on adjacent light poles at times—indicates food is plentiful. Or maybe sediment washed into the bays from Gold Rush placer mining, dredged in some places until recently, now provides the shallow waters ospreys prefer? Or does the now idle industrial equipment offer nesting opportunities along a shoreline traditionally treeless? Maybe those high perches on abandoned cranes, near the water, safe from raccoons, with excellent views of the Bay, are irresistible real estate. No one is sure. Either way, it doesn’t hurt that bald eagles are scarce. In his 18th-century book The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, naturalist Mark Catesby commented on the bald eagle’s criminal tendencies. The osprey, which he calls the Fishing Hawk, “seldom rises without a fish; which the Bald Eagle (which is generally on the watch) no sooner, spies, but at

him furiously he flies; the Hawk mounts, screaming out, but the Eagle always soars above him, and compels the Hawk to let it fall; which the Eagle seldom fails of catching, before it reaches the water.” (Benjamin Franklin thought these thieving ways should have disqualified the eagle from representing America, deeming the national bird “of bad moral character” as “he does not get his living honestly.”) But bald eagles tend to be more people-shy than ospreys, which don’t seem to care if a raucous tour of a ship’s gunnery equipment takes place right beneath them. The closest osprey population to those living by the Bay is at Marin’s Kent Lake, which at one point in the mid-1990s had 52 osprey nests. In 2008, though, when a couple of bald eagles settled in, the number of nesting ospreys plummeted. According to a report commissioned by the Marin Municipal Water District, given that Kent Lake is close to the Bay and that one population fell at the same time as another’s numbers rose, ospreys fleeing bald eagles j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 8

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The osprey is the only raptor in North America that survives almost exclusively on fish and dives into the water, as deep as 3 feet, to hunt them. Their success rate is a catch at least once out of every four tries. This bird, fishing the Carquinez Strait in June at the Glen Cove Waterfront Park, came up empty-taloned.

They like tall, exposed sites near water and maybe that’s all they need. Birds can focus on certain traits—of landscape, of mating partners—in an obsessive way. For example, in a study on widowbirds, an African species whose males’ tails grow very long in the breeding season, a scientist glued extra tail feathers to some males, creating tails longer than ever appeared naturally. These artificially enhanced males had more females in their territory than those who had tails of a normal length. Maybe ospreys have a similar idea of “more is better” when it comes to nest locations. It’s as if someone were tempting them: “You like dead trees; what if you found a spot even higher, and even more inanimate? Would you like it better?” Apparently so. Of course, nesting in the middle of an industrial landscape has its risks. A chick raised on a power pole was electrocuted several years ago. Once, a neighbor mentioned to Brake that he’d seen a young osprey dangling from a piece of fishing line woven into the Red Oak Victory nest. Pulled from his role as counter and observer, Brake climbed up and cut the chick free. But the line had become embedded in its skin, so Brake and arborist James Woods brought the bird to WildCare to have the line surgically removed and the wound cleaned. Two days later, he says, he put the chick back in the nest. And osprey and human interests do, sometimes, conflict. In Alameda, ospreys repeatedly tried to nest on the mari-

MARE ISLAND OSPREYS Since 2013, the Mare Island Shoreline Heritage Preserve has been hosting Osprey Days, a weekend of education and celebration about the newcomers that draws 300 to 500 visitors out to see them, some from out of state. Dolphin Charters runs boat tours that pass by the Mare Island nests, Brake shares his latest research, Leong gives talks about the history of the shipyard, and the preserve offers information on a variety of hikes with views of the nests. This year’s Osprey Days are June 22–24, although there’s a lot to see through early summer, says Myrna Hayes, the preserve’s volunteer manager. For more information, visit mareislandpreserve.org.

time ship Admiral Callaghan, where their nests were dismantled by the Maritime Administration. They finally settled onto a navigation light. Ospreys building on Pier 80 where they might have interfered with the America’s Cup yacht race also had their nests removed and destroyed. And pollution from human-dominated landscapes caused dramatic osprey population declines in the middle of the last century, as the insecticide DDT thinned osprey eggs and resulted in breeding bird declines of up to 90 percent along the northeast coast. Pollution remains a concern, particularly near oil refineries. “There’s sort of an A mated pair of ospreys—affectionately called Rosie and Richmond—built their nest on a historic Whirley crane near the Richmond shore. Golden Gate Audubon hosts two webcams that stream round-the-clock live footage of the pair’s domestic life and home.

screen capture from Golden Gate Audubon’s SFBayOspreys.org livestream

might have learned to live on cranes rather than coastal redwoods and hence been the origin of these new residents. Mare Island these days features parking lots reclaimed by bushes, houses with windows blown out, fire escapes that lead nowhere, signs advertising “office and industrial space.” In this landscape, the cranes from shipbuilding times are so outsize, this part of the island has the feel of Jurassic Park: two separate senses of scale operating in the same small space. An osprey wheels over the ferry parking lot and alights on a green crane, near its nest. Another nest sits on the top of a pulley. Even a dangling hook has sticks on top of it—the abandoned attempt of a great blue heron. In Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History, Alan F. Poole quotes a scientist who pictured the remote and wild birds of Scotland when he thought of ospreys and who wrote in 1911, “My surprise can therefore be imagined when I saw my first American Osprey’s nest. It was at a popular seaside resort in New Jersey, and perched on a tree overlooking a lake full of row boats and noisy holiday makers.” In his introduction to Poole’s book, Roger Tory Peterson writes, “Of all the raptors, the Osprey is the one that can live most happily with modern man, if given a chance.” “Ospreys’ cosmopolitanness is outrageously exciting,” says Allen Fish. “How does an industrial environment provide what an osprey needs? We didn’t have industrial environments 300 years ago, so what is it that makes this work?” In terms of nests, ospreys aren’t just indifferent to human constructions, they seem to prefer them. In Chesapeake Bay in the mid-’90s, all but 7 percent of thousands of ospreys nested on human-built structures. Brake says the most unusual nest he encountered was on a Mare Island palm—it was the only pair in the Bay Area nesting on a tree.

Eric Dugan Photography

enigmatic question of, if the area’s so polluted, what the heck are the osprey doing coming back,” says Fish. “Actually, we can’t say ‘coming back,’” he reminds himself. Animal history and human history often weave together, but sites like the shipyards at Mare Island and Richmond make the ties explicit. Exhibits chart humans migrating and then, sometimes, departing from these places as their purpose changed. In Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Abandon,” she writes that a “ruin” is “a human construction abandoned to nature, and one of the allures of ruins in the city is that of wilderness: a place full of the promise of the unknown with all its epiphanies and dangers.” At the southeastern tip of the island at the Mare Island preserve, formerly a naval ammunition depot, ospreys have found another landscape in flux. A tourist can explore the visitor center, located in a 1934 bomb storage magazine with a porch

covered in flowers in half barrels, then can wander along overgrown paths where the pavement is marked with spray-painted arrows pointing to osprey nests. There is another dense neighborhood of nests by the shore: light pole, channel marker, light pole, light pole. And another doubledecker light pole. Preserve manager Myrna Hayes, who only bought her first pair of binoculars recently as a 60th birthday present, spends days out there—putting on a Tyvek suit and pulling poison oak or stringing Christmas lights for a holiday hike, her pink headband holding back gray curls. The ospreys are another way to draw people to the preserve. Visitors send her excited texts about birds they’ve seen, post their sightings on Facebook. The presence of the osprey creates investment, on the part of the public, in this plot of land. “That’s a quiet, stealthy guerrilla gift,” she says.

The arrival of a species so dramatic leaves us casting about for a way to frame our most recent arrival. Will it be treated with disdain, like raccoons that dive into urban life, leaving a trail of tipped-over garbage cans in their wake? Or with delight, as with peregrine falcon pairs that nest on the PG&E building, a San Francisco emblem? For now, just as the ospreys look at industrial landscapes and see nest sites, construction material, threats or benign passersby, human viewers look at the osprey and see shifting meanings: a citizen science project, a climate change harbinger, a gift. The Golden Gate Audubon Society has installed a webcam at the Red Oak Victory crane, showing both the nest and the ospreyeye view out over the glinting water (sfbayospreys.org). The society named the couple “Rosie” and “Richmond,” something that grates on Brake’s scientist sensibilities; he worries it turns the birds into pets. He thinks such names “sort of take away the dignity of wildlife” but is ultimately resigned: “It’s a price to pay to have an engaged public.” Remote viewers can now watch as Richmond soars to the nest. He carries a yellow baseball cap in his talons and spends a long time finding the perfect placement in the nest wall, until finally Rosie scoops up the hat, flies high over the waves, and drops it in: Two raptors feuding over specifications for a new construction project by the Bay. Kim Todd’s essays and articles have appeared in Orion, Sierra, and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. Her most recent book is Sparrow.

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Resilient by Design teams stand on Cougar Mountain and gaze across San Pablo Bay to the San Francisco skyline in October 2017.

San Francisco Bay waters will have climbed shorelines by at least three feet in 2100. Resilient by Design shows us an ideal future. If we plan for it now. by Zach St. George

n October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy washed into the eastern United States. The storm killed 191 people, razed much of the Jersey Shore, flooded part of Lower Manhattan, and damaged or destroyed 600,000 homes. All told, it caused something like $65 billion in damages and economic loss. Sea level rise alone wasn’t responsible for the destruction, but sea level rise made it worse. Since 1900, the world’s oceans have risen about eight inches, due both to thermal expansion of the warming waters and to meltwater from glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The scientists of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change estimated that by the end of this century, the waters might rise another three feet, and quite possibly more than that. Higher water means bigger surges during storms, which push masses of water ahead of them. Surveying Sandy’s wake, federal and state officials realized that rebuilding the coast as it existed before the last storm wouldn’t help prepare it for the next one. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a contest it titled Rebuild by Design, calling for architects and design firms to pitch their ideas on how to design a more disaster-ready shoreline in New York City and New Jersey, with an eye to protecting particularly impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged communities. Now, five years later, the seven winning project proposals are on their way to real life. One will improve flood protection in Hunts Point in the Bronx; one will create a series of breakwaters offshore of Staten Island; another will reshape the entire southern edge of Lower Manhattan. “Rebuild by Design is leading the way in the development of resilience projects that are not just about brick and mortar,” says New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, quoted in a commemorative book about the project. “They create jobs, promote business and education, and ensure safety in waterfront communities.” The contest was the kind of feel-good success story that translates well, disaster or no. After Gil Kelley, the then-director of the planning department in San Francisco, attended a conference about the contest, he returned to the Bay Area wondering if the region

could pull off a similar contest of its own. So far, the rising Bay’s visible effects are mostly limited to the occasional king-tide flooding at the Ferry Building—but eventually the rising waters would begin to cause real trouble here, too. Maybe a contest like Rebuild by Design could ultimately help make rebuilding unnecessary. He put Diana Sokolove, another planning department employee, in charge. She began a research campaign about the Bay, talking to various county governments and regional organizations. “I tried to take the temperature of the region,” she says. “Are people ready for this? Do they want it to happen?” They were, and did. The city partnered with the Coastal Conservancy, the Bay Area Regional Collective, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others and hired the Rebuild by Design nonprofit as a consultant. In June 2017, at a conference on the Oakland waterfront, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf, Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguín, Richmond mayor Tom Butt, and other local officials gathered to announce the launch of the “Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge.” The contest organizers set out ambitious and idealistic goals: Over the next year, ten teams of architects, engineers, and designers would identify ten especially vulnerable sites around the Bay and would propose design solutions. The teams would bear in mind the connections between healthy ecosystems and healthy communities, between sea level rise and social inequity, between displacement in the future and displacement in the present. They would gather input from scientists, economists, politicians, and local community members, and they would design projects that could actually be built. They would raise awareness of climate change and sea level rise, and they would be creative. The new Resilient by Design put out a request for qualifications, and also a request for suggestions from community members about areas for the designers to focus on. It was a heady moment. Schaaf was quoted in a release from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (she is also an MTC commissioner): “Now is the time,” she said, “for cities to rise up, and for regions to collaborate.” In the prospectus that Resilient by Design sent out, it vaguely dangles prizes. “A generous awards program to honor the winning

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AFTER project(s) is currently in development,” it says, “and will be publicly announced as soon as the details are confirmed.” This was perhaps in lieu of lucrative design contracts, because, as the prospectus also noted, “funding has not been identified for the implementation of these designs.” The East Coast’s Rebuild by Design contestants were vying for a slice of roughly $1 billion in disaster relief funding. “The big difference between this process and Rebuild by Design,” Amanda Brown-Stevens, the managing director of the Resilient by Design nonprofit, told me, “is that we don’t have a huge pot of disaster recovery funds.” After the contest was over, the projects might get built, or they might not. That uncertainty didn’t seem to deter designers, though. By August, more than 50 teams of designers had applied. The Resilient by Design jury (which included designers, urban planners, policy makers, and scientists) selected 10 teams, with members from the Bay Area, Los Angeles, the East Coast, Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and elsewhere. The teams submitted their ideas for potential projects, which included artificial lagoons connecting to the Bay, plus lagoonside housing; “hyper-creeks,” which are basically just the creeks that already exist, but rehabilitated; an “infra-cloud,” which is basically just infrastructure except in the cloud, somehow; “micro-deltas,” where creeks (or hyper-creeks) enter the Bay; a new trans-Bay tube from Oakland and Alameda to San Francisco; and many others. Judges matched each team to one “Design Opportunity” out of 10 Bay Area communities or regions for which each would design a polished, final project: Marin City, North Richmond, San Leandro Bay, Alameda Creek, South Bay, South San Francisco, Islais Creek, San Rafael, and San Pablo Bay. The teams would have until May 2018 to come up with one or more projects to improve their location’s resilience and to rally local support, so that the projects would have some chance of continuing after the contest was over. Then they were off. b ay n at u r e

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At the corner of Giaramita Street and Grove Avenue in North Richmond, houses on small vacant lots supported by a community land trust would strengthen the North Richmond community, proposes the Home Team. Lowering the barriers to home ownership helps ensure residents can be involved and invested in responding to climate change. “Home ownership is important for us out here because that’s another way of building community,” says Courtney Moore, Urban Tilth Watershed Program Manager and Home Team advisory board member. “It’s something to live for. It’s something you can leave to your loved ones, your children.”

n effect, preparing for sea level rise means calling a retreat from the water even before it’s obvious to most people that the battle has started. Our impulse for most of the last 150 years has been to do the exact opposite, to charge forward, to get as close to the water as possible. Once, the Bay was ringed by tidal flats and marshes, but by the late 1990s, little of this original shoreline remained, having been diked or developed, turned to pasture or salt ponds. As of 1979, the original 850 square miles of marsh that ringed the Bay were reduced to just 32 square miles. Discontent with the boundaries nature provided, we’ve even piled up fill in the Bay’s shallow edges, building buildings, treating this stolen space as solid ground. The Bay once covered nearly 800 square miles; it now covers just 550. But the Bay may reclaim much of its lost territory. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s sea level rise online viewer shows one vision of the future. As you slide the sea-level rise button to one foot above its present level, the space to the west of North Richmond, between Wildcat and San Pablo creeks, is immersed, along with the space north of San Pablo Creek. The sea also nibbles the edges of Milpitas, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Bruno, Santa Venetia, Novato. At three feet of sea level rise, which is about the median level that the scientists of the UN ’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts by 2100, the runways at the San Francisco Airport disappear under the water, along with parts of Treasure Island and

most of Suisun City. The water approaches Napa, Petaluma, and Martinez; Belvedere Island, at present more of a peninsula, begins to live up to its name. At six feet, which is the maximum shown by the viewer but is still less than the most extreme projections of sea level rise by the end of the century, the water has reached Richmond Parkway. It’s flooded large swaths of West Oakland and Alameda, the Oakland Airport, the Coliseum, and San Francisco’s eastern shore. The Louisiana shore has retreated back to Baton Rouge, and Miami is part of an archipelago. Mark Stacey, a professor of environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, described one of the ways that Bay Area communities might collectively respond to the rising waters. He pointed to Foster City, a town of about 34,000, located on the west end of the San Mateo Bridge. The entire town is built on fill. In 2014, the

Federal Emergency Management Agency, which designates which parts of the United States are flood zones, informed the town’s government that its riprap levee wouldn’t protect it in the event of a 100-year storm. (FEMA’s levee failure prediction was based on improved modeling, not sea level rise, says Patrick Clancey, a FEMA project manager, but Stacey says the example here applies all the same.) If FEMA designated the town as a flood zone, owners of any homes with federally backed mortgages would need to carry flood insurance, which could cost them thousands of dollars every year. To prevent both that unpleasant cost to its residents and the even more unpleasant possibility of the entire town flooding, the city council voted in March to put on the ballot a $90 million bond to raise the levee. City engineer Jeff Moneda says the bolstered levee would protect the town through at least 2050. In June townspeople

ESTUARY News Preview The June issue of ESTUARY News explores the nine sites, visions, and communities that participated in the Resilient by Design challenge. For a detailed look at each project, plus youth involvement, visit sfestuary.org/estuary-news. The Grand Bayway, North Shore The oft-flooded State Route 37 connects commuters from Solano County to Sonoma and Marin, yet it divides its diverse stakeholders. A unifying vision, including a vast ecological park, could accommodate both car and duck habitat. Team COMMON GROUND By Isaac Pearlman San Rafael, Reimagined San Rafael’s dense, flood-vulnerable waterfront serves as a regional hub and houses disadvantaged citizens. An equitable path forward could help the city adapt and survive. Team BIONIC By Nate Seltenrich Marin City, The People’s Plan Might disaster planning be reimagined as a community-led process grounded in permaculture design principles? Team P+SET By Audrey Mei Yi Brown Hyping Islais Creek, San Francisco The Islais Creek watershed has been called a “hazard sandwich” of flooding, earthquake risks, and toxins. A hypercreek combines parks and jobs with restored natural connections. Team BIG+ONE+SHERWOOD By Joe Eaton

Unlocking Alameda Creek, East Bay Can a giant flood control channel, where both sediment and steelhead often get stuck, be remodeled to be more resilient? A laser-like design focus on mud could be the ticket. Team PUBLIC SEDIMENT By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto

Connect & Collect, Colma A freeway, a creek imprisoned in concrete, and a shoreline no one can reach have given South San Francisco an identity crisis. Would free-flowing water and bike paths help resolve them both? Team HASSEL+ by Alastair Bland

San Rafael Bionic

San Pablo Bay Common Ground

Marin City Permaculture & Social Equity

North Richmond Home Team

Islais Creek BIG + ONE + Sherwood

San Leandro Bay All Bay Collective

South San Francisco Hasssell+

Alameda Creek Public Sediment

South Bay Field Operations

South Bay Sponge Silicon Valley faces a housing crisis, traffic gridlock, and rising tides. Increasing the absorbency of 20 miles of shoreline could be a solution. Team FIELD OPERATIONS by Cariad Hayes Thronson

Estuary Commons, Oakland San Leandro Bay is encircled by a wealth of transportation and redevelopment opportunity—but for whom? Developing equitable flood protection for East Oakland residents. Team ALL BAY COLLECTIVE By Isaac Pearlman A Community Shoreline, Richmond North Richmond already has a strong foundation of community. How would creating affordable housing as a part of a comprehensive plan increase local resilience? Team MITHUN HOME TEAM By Daniel McGlynn Youth Compete in Resilient Design Why include kids in a climate conversation that’s complicated and sometimes scary? Project Y-PLAN By Alissa Greenberg

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n mid-April, I attend a community meeting at the Multicultural Senior and Family Center in North Richmond, nor theast across the Bay from Foster City. The neighborhood was built during World War II, settled mostly by African Americans who came to Richmond to work in the shipyards. Fenced in on the east side by the railroad tracks and the west by Richmond Parkway, the low-lying area is unincorporated, a Vatican b ay n at u r e

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State Route 37 edges San Pablo Bay and already undergoes flooding, a problem that will only worsen with sea level rise. The design team Common Ground envisions elevating the highway by 20 feet to create a scenic causeway that allows both tidal flows and marsh migration as the Bay rises while a multitude of users—walkers, bikers, and vehicles—traverse the scenic wetlands.

City–style island contained within the City of Richmond. It relies on Contra Costa County for infrastructure and emergency services. Two creeks run through the community—San Pablo to the north and Wildcat to the south. Sea level rise will reduce the downhill grade of the creeks, making them more likely to back up during storms and overflow into town. The meeting is put on by one of the design teams, the Home Team, headed by Mithun, a design firm with offices in Seattle and San Francisco. When I arrive, about 20 people are huddled around Teams from Bay Area high schools partnered with designers to devise holistic environmental solutions to specific challenges in their communities as part of Y-PLAN Resilient by Design. Here students present their ideas at the Youth Challenge Regional Summit at UC Berkeley in April 2018.

YOUTH CHALLENGE REGIONAL SUMMIT

Kingmond Young

overwhelmingly voted in support of the bond. Foster City’s response, Stacey says, is the logical thing to do: “The financial risk is new and immediate. They’re going to raise their levee a little bit. It’s a completely rational decision for them to make.” He says the following set of events would also be completely logical: Sea level continues to rise, and one by one, each bayside community faces a situation similar to that of Foster City, maybe with actual flooding or maybe just the threat of rising flood insurance. One by one, they all build or bolster their levees and seawalls. But then, finally, the entire shoreline of the Bay is ringed in by levees and seawalls, and we find ourselves in an accidental New Orleans, completely cut off from the Bay, forced to work harder and harder to defend ourselves from it. It’s a place nobody wants to build that we might build anyway.

WHY THE WEST ANTARCTIC SHEET MATTERS TO THE BAY AREA that has not been extensively studied for very long. We’re improving As the climate warms, changes in sea level won’t occur equally our understanding of these processes quickly by connecting novel around the world—some areas will see a greater increase than othobservational techniques—such as satellite observations and airborne ers. In the Bay Area, the future of sea level rise is closely tied to the radar—with computer climate models that predict ice sheet behavior. melting of the vulnerable West Antarctic ice sheet. Susceptibility of the California coast to sea level rise is intrinsically To understand the significance of the West Antarctic ice sheet tied to the vulnerable West Antarctic ice sheet through an unintuito California, we first need to grasp what contributes to sea level tive consequence of physics in the Earth system: Sea level does not rise. Two related factors are at work—global mean sea level (GMSL), which is affected by the volume of ocean water distributed across the change uniformly across the globe. The vertical motion of tectonic plates, ocean currents, and the gravitational pull of massive objects globe, and relative sea level (RSL), which is driven by local changes affect relative sea level (RSL) locally. This concept is similar to our in sea surface and land elevation. Global mean sea level increases as experience of daily tides, with the moon causing the sea surface to warming ocean water expands and ice resting on land (i.e., mountain rise and fall locally. A similar process makes the melting of the West glaciers and ice sheets) melts, adding large amounts of water to the Antarctic ice sheet particularly alarming for the California coast. sea. Over the past century, expansion of the warming ocean water Melting of large, polar ice sheets reduces the gravitational pull of has been the primary contributor to GMSL and is well understood. In these massive bodies on local oceans. The reduction in gravitational the past decade, the melting of ice sheets and mountain glaciers has pull causes the RSL to drop near accelerated and now dominates the melting ice sheet, and this the changes in GMSL. Unfortudisplacement causes oceans nately, the connection between elsewhere to rise correspondglobal climate and the melting ice ingly. Gravitational effects from sheets is not straightforward. the melting of the Greenland ice The polar ice sheets store sheet cause maximum sea level enough water to raise the sea level rise in the southern hemisphere. (GMSL) by hundreds of feet and For the vulnerable West Antarcare melting in complex and vartic ice sheet, the corresponding ied ways. Perched atop land, the maximum RSL takes place off the Greenland ice sheet measures half Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the the size of the contiguous United United States. As a result, sea States and is largely melting like level rise in California is espean ice cube left outside on a hot cially tied to the rate at which the day—from the outside inward. MAP: Rignot, E., J. Mouginot, and B. Scheuchl. 2017. MEaSUREs InSAR-Based Antarctica Ice Velocity Map, Version 2. [NSIDC-0484]. Boulder, Colorado USA. West Antarctic ice sheet melts. This suggests that the Greenland NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center. We expect it could more than ice sheet will melt slowly over cendoi: https://doi.org/10.5067/D7GK8F5J8M8R. [May 30, 2018]. double sea level rise estimates. turies to millennia. However, the While uncertainties associated with the melting ice sheets are Antarctic ice sheet is a different matter. Much of the West Antarctic notable, this shouldn’t paralyze decision makers and stakeholders. ice sheet is comprised of large rivers of ice flowing from the ice sheet’s Instead, our evolving understanding should underscore the necessity interior to the coast where large icebergs are generated. (See map.) of building and maintaining nimble coastal mitigation strategies that These processes are dynamic and efficient at melting ice and able to can incorporate improvements in predictions and observations. Varievolve quickly, as compared to the ice sheet in Greenland. Individual ous California government agencies are leading the way, through the rivers of ice, called ice streams and outlet glaciers, can reach the size of New Hampshire and flow up to 10 feet per day, transporting vast quan- periodic “State of California Sea-Level Rise Guidance Document” report, which provides an avenue for the latest science to be incortities of ice into the sea. These flow processes introduce the potential for the sea level to rise over decades to centuries, rather than millennia. porated in stakeholder discussions. Significant uncertainties remain about the physical mechanisms Cooper Elsworth is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Stanford Univercontrolling the fast-flowing ice and the processes by which icebergs sity’s Department of Geophysics. His research focuses on the coupled calve off the margins of the continent because the underlying proprocesses governing streaming ice flow in West Antarctica. cesses are challenging to observe and predict. For example, water lubricates the contact between the base of the ice and underlying earth, To read the 2018 “State of California Sea-Level Rise Guidance impacting the speed of the flowing ice. Understanding the physics of Document” report, visit opc.ca.gov/updating-californias-seathis contact requires studying processes, occurring under miles of ice, level-rise-guidance. that vary over an area the size of the United States, and in a region

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three long tables. Along with the usual senior center information about bus passes and Internet training, one of the signs on the wall summarizes what would happen during a chemical leak from one of the area’s refineries; in 2012 the nearby Chevron refinery caught fire, sending gouts of black smoke washing over the town. The people at the tables include members of Mithun, employees of Contra Costa County, and members of the community advisory committee that the Home Team has assembled (and paid stipends to) to get their input on their resilience projects. This is their fifth and final time meeting before the Home Team presents its projects to the Resilient by Design jury. Right now, they’re studying colorful posters that show three of the projects the Home Team is proposing. The first is a “horizontal levee,” a wide, gently sloping strip of coastal land that would serve the same purpose as a more traditional, wall-type levee, but would also provide space for buffering coastal marshes to migrate inland as the Bay water rises. This would go between Wildcat and San Pablo creeks, at the very edge of the Bay, and would protect both a wastewater treatment plant and an industrial park to the west of town. The second project is an upgrade of the trail that runs along Wildcat Creek. An improved trail would connect the Richmond BART station and the center of Richmond to the east and the Bay Trail to the west via a new pedestrian bridge over Richmond Parkway (four to six lanes, speed limit 50 mph). The third project is simply an effort to provide more affordable, community-owned housing, as well as b ay n at u r e

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In South San Francisco the HASSELL+ team turned a former historic bank building into a design and education center for the public. Placing an enlarged photo of the city that shows Colma Creek flowing under Highway 101 toward the Bay, they invited residents to tell stories about area flooding using Post-it notes. The team ultimately proposed a variety of ideas, including widening the canal to prevent flooding and create access to Colma Creek, as well as a parkway from Orange Memorial Park to the Bay.

“20,000 Trees of Justice,” to be planted along Richmond Parkway and in groves throughout the community. Right now, it seems that sea level rise is not the most concerning thing about living in North Richmond. When the meeting breaks into group discussion, a man in a maroon suit named Henry Clark, whom everyone calls Dr. Clark, points out that the pedestrian bridge over Richmond Parkway might attract sketchy characters. North Richmond, he says, is where people come to pick up prostitutes, to buy drugs. The community is plagued by violence. “We haven’t talked too much about the public safety aspect of it,” he says. “That has to be part of it.” After the general discussion people around the room take turns talking about what they are most excited about, which, mostly, is affordable housing. “I definitely like all the ideas,” says Princess Robinson, one of the community advisers. “I just had a question—can you do all three? Or are you just choosing one out of the three?” “I think all three have ways forward,” says Debra Guenther, a partner and landscape architect at Mithun, “but it’s definitely going

to be a collective effort to figure out how that happens.” At times, the design team and the people they are designing for seem to be working toward somewhat different goals. Partway through the discussion, Guenther asks what the group thinks of the title the Home Team came up with for the project: “R-Home.” The letter R, Guenther explains, can be read as either “our” or “Richmond” or “reclaiming.” “We’d love to hear if that sounds right to people,” she says. “I feel like it’s less important,” says Sequoia Erasmus, director of community engagement in the office of Richmond mayor Tom Butt. “It helps your branding, but I don’t know if it should be decided right now.” “I’m not too sure about the catchy phrase,” Dr. Clark says.

After the meeting, I ask Dr. Clark about sea level rise. He was born in North Richmond in 1944 and has lived here ever since. “I don’t think a lot of people in this community really know about sea level rise in a global sense,” he says. “But they do know about flooding.” Until about 10 years ago, when the county raised a levee around the north edge of town and widened the creekbed, San Pablo Creek often overflowed, flooding part of the town. “Every time it rained,” he says.

have to confess: A part of me wonders about the whole Resilient by Design contest. I wonder—in a world of climate change and melting ice sheets and extinction and overpopulation and political stagnation—about how a design contest with no money attached

Ocean acidification and the effect it will have on the San Francisco Bay hasn’t received the scientific study you might imagine, given how frequently climate change comes up in discussions of the Bay. To date there has been almost no long-term monitoring of the Bay’s carbon chemistry, for example. Ocean acidification is “expected to impact estuaries on the West Coast,” one scientific report concluded in 2016, but “chemical and biological data on acidification threats and impacts are lacking.” There are a lot of basic questions. Does ocean upwelling bring acidified—CO2rich and oxygen-poor—water into the Bay? Does acidification threaten the Bay’s marine life, and which life, and how much? Do restored tidal marshes soak up or burp out carbon? How much carbon, and are all estuaries like that? Could local projects to capture and store CO2 before it’s emitted become part of the carbon offset market? “You can’t do adaptive management if you don’t have a baseline,” says Karina Nielsen, director of San Francisco State’s Estuary & Ocean Science Center (EOS). “If you don’t measure, you’re operating blind.” This past winter, scientists from SFSU, UC Davis, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administraton–backed Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System (CeNCOOS) dropped a seawater-chemistry-monitoring buoy and companion mooring into the deep green

water just behind the EOS in Tiburon. The buoy and mooring are intended to continue operating for decades as part of NOAA’s global ocean monitoring system, meaning scientists will operate blindly no longer. You can follow two of the buoy’s measurements in real time: CO2 in the air, and in the water at its surface. All other things being equal, water and air will exchange gases while moving toward equilibrium, so you’d expect the two numbers to be pretty close if they were near equilibrium. But seawater can change rapidly, and in the new Bay buoy, the first months were characterized by differences between CO2 concentration in the air and water. The air held mostly steady at around 400 parts per million, basically the global atmospheric level. But the seawater CO2 level has fluctuated, spiking to nearly 900 ppm. Water in the Bay is somehow finding a lot of CO2 from somewhere. But where? One influx, according to UC Davis ocean scientist John Largier, comes from the ocean. The natural phenomenon of ocean upwelling is constantly flooding offshore areas with cold, acidic water from the deep. Some have questioned whether that dense upwelled water can slither over the sandbar just outside the Golden Gate and so enter the Bay. Largier has argued it can and does, magnifying the importance of the Pacific as a watershed for the Bay. Largier now wants

to determine the influence of the ocean watershed relative to the Bay’s various terrestrial watersheds and internal cycling as sources of CO2. So he was interested to see that over the buoy’s first few months of operation, active upwelling periods offshore corresponded to the new buoy’s recording of very high CO2 concentration in the seawater relative to the air. Further solidifying the case that the CO2 is coming in from the ocean, the Bay water CO2 peaks around the high tide and drops during the ebb. And that’s just a few months of information on a single data point. The buoy and mooring are designed to capture much more, including chemistry at depth, pH, salinity, and temperature. Largier says scientists will start to be able to answer some of the basic Bay questions after they’ve watched for at least a year, through cycles of strong and weak ocean upwelling, through summer and winter, dry and wet weather, perhaps through an algal bloom or other low-oxygen event. That long-term view, absent so far when it comes to water chemistry, can help scientists make meaning of the millions of dollars spent improving the Bay in anticipation of climate change. “It’s sort of catching up a little bit, isn’t it,” Largier says. “You’d think by now, given the intensity of this issue, that people, somebody, would have invested already in knowing what’s going on.”—Eric Simons

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Eric Simons

AN ACIDIFIED SF BAY? NO ONE’S STUDIED THAT YET.

SOUTH BAY

The Field Operation Team

F UT

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Encompassing 20 miles of South Bay shoreline from Menlo Park to Santa Clara, the concept proposed by the Field Operations Team would restore tidal marsh (or create a “sponge”) to large amounts of low-lying areas through land swaps, building up soil levels around important real estate, dense urban development, and restoring creeks with added parks. Here kids race along Cooley Landing in East Palo Alto during a community design meeting in March, in which ideas like a greener Moffett Field (above) were explored.

some great minds on it?” Robin Grossinger, an S.F. Estuary Institute senior scientist and member of the scientific advisory panel, cautions against judging the contest’s success by the number of its projects that (continued on page 50)

COOLEY LANDING TODAY

Kingmond Young

to it really changes the balance. I wonder whether a few months is actually enough time for the teams to come up with anything meaningful and new, and also whether there will ever actually be something called a hyper-creek. I wonder whether anyone but a designer gets excited about a design contest. I ask Andy Gunther, a member of the contest’s scientific advisory panel, whether the contest really matters, and he acknowledges that some people would be cynical about it. “Designers, they’re really good at drawing these pictures. There’s always smiling people in these pictures,” he says. But Gunther, like most everyone else I spoke with about Resilient by Design, sees the contest in a more charitable light. He says it would be useful even if none of the projects get built: “In 10 years, we’ll look back and say, ‘Are any of these designs under construction?’ I don’t know, but I do think the images they create, the designs they create, are going to help us think in new ways about the future Bay Area, and I think that is a very valuable product.” John Rahaim, the San Francisco planning director, agrees. “Some of the designs will be quite bold, and people will roll their eyes and say we can’t do them,” he says. But by pushing the bounds of what’s realistic, he adds, the designers might come up with something new and useful. “The entire planet will have to deal with this in some fashion, so as a starting point, why not get

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Meet the

Volunteers For Bay Nature by Aleta George and Serena Ingalls Illustration by John Hersey

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S P O N S O R E D B Y E A S T B AY R E G I O N A L PA R K D I S T R I C T

t’s not an exaggeration to say that volunteers are vital to the East Bay Regional Park District. With 73 parks and 121,396 acres of parkland, the district is dependent on, and committed to supporting, its volunteers. In 2017, the district had over 24,000 volunteers, who contributed 168,700 hours of service to the parks. That translates into nearly $5 million in labor, according to Independent Sector, a national nonprofit that tracks charitable works. The district’s volunteer program is a human web of support. It’s also a giant hug that goes both ways. There are all kinds of volunteers, both district-wide and park-specific. Trail people build and maintain trails. Gardeners weed, propagate, and collect tiny and large seeds in several gardens. Bird lovers monitor western bluebirds and bald eagles, participate in field research, and pitch in on habitat conservation projects. Safety volunteers patrol the trails on foot, on bikes, or on horseback. Thousands of trained docents assist park naturalists with interpretation in the parks and at events. Not all volunteers work outside. There are also board members, website managers, newsletter editors, and book cataloguers. Oh, and we can’t forget the families, service organizations, nonprofits, and corporations that help at annual public volunteer events, when everyone is invited to get involved, like on Earth Day, the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, and the annual California Coastal Cleanup. Volunteers also help with special projects that staff wish they could complete if only they had the time. Staff at several parks are at capacity with their workloads, explains district recreation supervisor Jeremy Saito. After mowing, weeding, emptying garbage cans, and opening gates, staff members don’t always have time to do things on their wish list, like converting a lawn to a drought-tolerant garden, something volunteers at Shadow Cliffs Regional Recreation Area took on in 2017. “Our volunteers help the district meet its mission and vision,” Saito says. “We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without them.”

Trail Ambassadors Christine Chesters calls herself a stayat-home mom, but technically she’s not. Chesters hikes three times a week all over the Bay Area, and at least one of those hikes is on a trail in the East Bay Regional Park District with radio in hand. Chesters is a member of the EBRPD’s Volunteer Trail Safety Patrol, or VTSP, as she calls it. The VTSP began in the 1970s when volunteers walked while accompanying police mounted on horseback. Over the

next two decades, bicycle, hiking, and companion dog patrols followed. The marine patrol, which has been inactive, is expected to relaunch in August. The patrollers—identifiable by their brightly colored patrol shirts—observe, report, and educate, says volunteer coordinator Heather Gilfillan. They consider safety and look for things that need fixing. They provide information and act as ambassadors for the park. And they call dispatch or park staff about damage, felled

trees, or graffiti. “We’re not out there to enforce,” Gilfillan says. “If we see something happening, we educate the person about the rules or the law. If they were to be stopped by a park officer for the same infraction, they might receive a citation.” Chesters is a member of the volunteer hiking patrol, which with 72 people has the largest number of volunteers in the VTSP. They walk the trails, direct lost people, answer questions, and report illegal activity. “The only requirement is to be a nice, decent person,” Gilfillan says. Patrollers carry police radios and the radio dispatch unit always knows where they are. Chesters hikes alone and feels safe in the parks. “I’ve always felt comfortable there. It’s my second home,” she says. Carl LaRue, chair of the bike patrol, has volunteered for the district for 14 years. He hikes and bikes Alameda Creek Trail, Hayward Shoreline, and Coyote Hills Regional Park. It’s easy to get on the bike patrol, he says. “They just want to make sure you’re riding safely and that you know how to talk to people.” He and Chesters agree that the education they receive is one of the best parts of volunteering for the district. Speakers at monthly meetings teach them about wildflowers, mountain lions, spiders and snakes, bats, salamanders, and blue-green algae. “When people stop and ask us questions we want to be able to help answer them,” LaRue says. Chesters joined the Search and Rescue team because she wanted to learn even j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 8

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S P O N S O R E D B Y E A S T B AY R E G I O N A L PA R K D I S T R I C T

Coco, a longtime companion dog that recently passed away, was loved by all, especially kids.

A typical day on Albany Beach, a small stretch along the east shore of San Francisco Bay, sees locals and their canine companions romping on the pale-gold sand, enjoying this often overlooked strip of land. One day last October, the scene was a bit different. Alongside the usual beachgoers and their animals, several dozen volunteers worked in pairs to shake the sand through what looked like hammock-size nets. The wire mesh filters of the nets are coated with a polymer that captures microplastics by electrostatic attraction. The process leaves behind a beach less polluted by plastic—and also leaves piles of pillowy soft sand. “There were beachgoers who weren’t even part of the cleanup who expressed appreciation,” says Jeremy Saito, who helped organize the “Sift the Sand” event spearheaded by the Albany Landfill Dog Owners Group. “People loved the powdery sand.” Microplastic particles are pieces of plastic less than five millimeters long and a growing environmental problem worldwide. One of the maAbove: The Pack 53 Alamo Cub Scouts jor concerns is that aquatic at Iron Horse Regional Trail in Walnut organisms ingest them, eiCreek. Right: The Albany Landfill Dog ther unintentionally or beOwners Group leads the microplastics cleanup at Albany Beach. cause the creatures mistake the particles for food. Ingestion not only can cause abrasion or blockage of organisms’ digestive tracts, but also may bring toxic side effects: Microplastics are generally created with fossil-fuelbased chemicals and impregnated with various solvents and additives like plasticizers, flame retardants, and dyes. They are capable of absorbing contaminants from the water as well. When a marine organism ingests a microplastic particle, “there is a danger of [our] b ay n at u r e

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and are retested annually. Horses on the volunteer mounted patrol are also tested before they can participate: They are put through the paces on a trail ride wherein they cross a bridge over water, walk by a person on a bicycle that’s sounding a bell, and suffer the indignity of people waving colored pool noodles by their faces and rubbing them on their heads. Thirtysix people and their horses currently serve on the volunteer mounted patrol team. Perhaps Chesters speaks for others in the program when she explains why she loves being on the VTSP. “The parks are some of the best in the Bay Area, and I meet a lot of wonderful people,” she says. “I enjoy my time out there every time I head out.”—Aleta George

absorbing these chemical contaminants,” says Rebecca Sutton, a senior scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI). The extent to which absorbed chemicals may harm aquatic organisms, or humans who eat affected organisms, is largely unknown. Sutton says the San Francisco Bay is an area of special interest for this topic because of the geography and hydrology of the Bay and because the area is so heavily urban. The Bay’s surface water appears to have a higher concentration of microplastics than other urban water bodies that have been sampled, such as Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes. Sutton says areas in the Bay where the tide doesn’t flush water out to the ocean as often can register even higher levels of microplastics. California banned microbeads in personal care products in 2015 and some single-use plastic bags in 2016, part of a growing recognition that while cleanups can help mitigate the problem, there’s no long-term solution except to keep plastic from getting into the environment in the first place. “Any actions to reduce use of disposable plastic and packing plastic are thought to be useful in reducing plastic in the environment,” Sutton says. The East Bay Regional Park District is planning a second “Sift the Sand” event in mid-October at Crown Beach in Alameda. —Serena Ingalls

Albany Landfill Dog Owners Group

Photo courtesy of Skip Kuebel

Sift the Sand

Heather Gilfillan

more. The six-month training includes land navigation, compass and GPS use, wilderness first aid, rope rescue, and search management. “Search and Rescue volunteers are super helpful to our officers,” Gilfillan says. “These volunteers know their parks.” Some of the most popular emissaries on the trail have four legs. “We have the most liberal dog policy, and a lot of people [visiting] take advantage of that,” Gilfillan says. To diplomatically counteract that, 16 volunteers and their dogs take to the trails. It’s easier for people with dogs to accept a reminder of the rules if the reminder comes from someone who also has a leashed dog. These diplomat dogs are tested and certified before they can serve

The volunteers at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Tilden Park have cultivated a history they can be proud of, and one in keeping with Berkeley’s activist heritage. In the early 1960s, the general manager of the East Bay Regional Park District announced a grand vision: Move the garden from Tilden to a 200-acre site in Anthony Chabot Regional Park. But a group of plant-passionate volunteers resisted. The Regional Parks Botanic Garden had already established 20 years’ worth of roots, argued Save the Garden, an amalgam of members from at least three volunteer garden groups and committees. They also defended the importance of the current location. An august committee of conservationists assembled by Mills College professor of botany Howard McMinn chose this spot in the late 1930s as an ecotone between inland heat and coastal influences and the northern and southern Coast Ranges. Wildcat Creek wends through the 10-acre garden like a promise. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration built the hardscape for the garden, which founding director James Roof had organized by biogeographic regions to represent 160,000 square miles of California. The volunteers who fought the relocation won. Leonora H. Strohmaier, a founding member of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), said in an oral history that the fight generated so much interest in pre-

Chris McCarron Instagram: @mccarron.com

Wind poppies (Papaver heterophylla) in full bloom at the Botanic Garden.

More East Bay Gardens The Regional Parks Botanic Garden isn’t the only venue for plant-loving volunteers. If tending to Victorian gardens or historic apple orchards are your thing, you can help at Ardenwood Historic Farm in Fremont or Garin Regional Park in Hayward. Other garden spot opportunities are at Coyote Hills in Fremont, Dry Creek Pioneer Regional Park in Hayward, and Quarry Lakes in Fremont.

serving California’s unique native flora that the Save the Garden group evolved into CNPS. Volunteers continue to make the garden bloom. “This is a highly managed environment, and volunteers and staff work hard to make it look easy and low care,” says Bart O’Brien, the garden’s manager. About 1,700 garden volunteers help staff with weeding, raking, and nursery work. Within that group are those who propagate plants and collect seeds for the annual spring and fall plant sales run by volunteers. The garden accepts new volunteers on an ongoing basis with no specialized training required other than signing up and showing up, O’Brien says. The docents are a more specialized group. About 200 docents lead garden tours for schools, community groups, and the public. Training for new docents is a six-month commitment and starts in January. They learn about California plants, California natural history, history of the Botanic Garden, birds, insects, wildlife, and how to lead tours and provide interpretation. In 1997, a group of docents from botanist Glenn Keator’s training class formed a new Friends of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden to support the garden. Friends pay for membership and provide financial support, outreach, and education. “Our volunteers are the public face of the garden and

Volunteers and staff plant a bulb bed at the Botanic Garden.

Stephen W. Edwards

In Bloom at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden

provide almost all of our education and outreach,” O’Brien says. Being a volunteer means different things to different people, he adds, but in general there are three main perks to volunteering in this sweet spot in the Berkeley Hills: You learn about the garden and California’s native plants; you are part of a thriving community; and you contribute to a visitor’s understanding of California’s native flora and fauna. “This state is so unique in its flora,” botanist Strohmaier said in the oral history. “We have all these different kinds of climates and altitudes. We have a high percentage of endemism, if you know what that means. It means that a plant grows only in a very limited area: this is an endemic plant. I think 40 percent endemism is what California has.” Each year, as many as 90,000 people visit the garden and browse a living col-

lection of over 3,000 different kinds of California native plants, more than 100 of which are state and/or federally listed as rare, threatened, or endangered plant taxa. “You can see a lot of California here,” O’Brien says. There’s nearly always something in bloom at the Botanic Garden, including the enthusiasm of the volunteers. To volunteer at the Botanic Garden, contact bgarden@ebparks.org or call (510) 544-3169. To learn more about the Botanic Garden, classes, or events, please visit Friends of the Regional Botanic Garden website at nativeplants.org. —Aleta George To find more information about public volunteer events with the EBRPD, please visit ebparks.org/about/getinvolved/volunteer/ events.htm.

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mcapin tree

Mike Shoys, Save the Redwoods League

Discovering the oldest living redwood south of Mendocino County marks a new era.

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eep within a coast redwood grove, we’re slowly approaching the McApin Tree. With countless decades of accumulated duff underfoot and no established trails or footpaths to follow, we proceed carefully to sidestep delicate trilliums and the leafy sword and bracken ferns. I’m watching my step and admiring the scattered light around my feet when I look up and see it towering before me. From its buttressed, knotty base, the heavily grooved McApin Tree rises into the canopy far beyond our range of sight. Its lowest limbs, draped with hanging mosses, are easily more than 70 feet above my head. The tree spreads and soars into the forest canopy, and I’m told that at nearly 20 feet across and 239 feet tall it rivals the famed ancient redwoods farther north in California. But we’re a long way south of those giants, hiking through northwestern Sonoma County, where the McApin Tree is the oldest known living redwood south of Mendocino County. Few have seen the tree, which has been shrouded in forest on private property for more than a century. There were rumors about the trees here, of course. But it wasn’t until this year that Save the Redwoods League scientists took five core samples from the McApin Tree and determined that it’s 1,640 years old. The behemoth balances on a slight slope, with bay laurels and Douglas firs growing in its shade. Needles and leaves layer the ground, and I crunch cautiously, unsure of the firmness and grade, as I make my way around the tree’s stately trunk. In places, cobwebs fill what seems like every groove in the spongy bark. A few chunky burls packed with dormant buds pad the base, ready to sprout a lineage. The mammoth tree is not only the venerable elder in this grove. It’s thought the McApin Tree holds within its fire-charred rings the surrounding forest’s formative secrets.

Stewarts Point

Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve Private Lands Protected Lands

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and squirrels, salamanders and banana slugs, and dozens of bird species. The occasional California grizzly bear still roamed the region. Creeks and rivers laced the land and swelled with salmon during their annual runs. Much of the area, including eight miles of coastline, eventually became Richardson’s property. At one point, he even owned the entire small town of Stewarts Point. Harold Richardson Redwoods At the same time Richardson Reserve, Sonoma County was buying land, San Francisco’s population was ballooning in the wake of the Gold Rush, and most of the city’s construction relied on redwood mills from the northernmost parts of the state. Coast redKashia Coastal Reserve wood forests covered some 2.2 million acres, stretching from southernmost Oregon to Big Sur, and the mills were processing redwoods and Salt Point their inland giant sequoia cousins State Park at breakneck speed. But a swath of trees near the North Pacific Coast Railroad terminus in Cazadero— Kruse Rhododendron State Reserve despite the boom times and taxes

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Courtesy of Save the Redwoods League

n the 1870s, Herbert Archer “H.A.” Richardson came to California from New Hampshire and began acquiring what would eventually total 50,000 acres of forestland in western Sonoma County. Much of it supported centuries-old redwood trees that crowded valleys and gave shelter to mountain lions and deer, voles

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agencies to help establish California’s state park system in 1927. In the 100 years since its own founding, the League has contributed to protecting 214,000 acres of redwoods in California and helped to create 66 redwood parks and reserves for the public. All the while, the trees near Cazadero continued to grow taller, including the matriarchal McApin Tree.

on owners who left tall trees standing—went largely untouched. The statewide destruction of forests led to a heady era for redwoods conservationists. During the mid- to late 1800s, a few park preservation acts set aside what would become Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. In 1905, California passed a Forest Protection Act; Big Basin Redwoods State Park and Muir Woods National Monument followed as cornerstones in California’s state park system and the national park system. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act, thereby creating the National Park Service. In 1917 influential lawyer Madison Grant, American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn, and UC Berkeley paleontology professor John C. Merriam took a road trip north to Humboldt and Del Norte counties to see the giant trees building the cities. Awed by the groves of colossal trees, they found what local leaders, particularly the Humboldt County Federation of Women’s Clubs, had been saying for years: The redwoods are a California treasure and are falling too fast. Save the Redwoods League was formed to try and prevent further loss. Within its first years, the League partnered with burgeoning federal and state

Courtesy of the Richardson family

Mike Shoys, Save the Redwoods League

he small group assembled next to a rural two-lane road was keen to get into the lush forest. But before loading into all-terrain buggies and heading to the storied trees, we heard from Dan Falk, a fifth-generation member of the Richardson family. Falk is the grandnephew of the late Harold Richardson, grandson of H.A. Richardson. Falk runs a regional timber business— one mill is visible from where we stand—and is excited to tell us about the 730-acre The McApin Tree (previous page) and property the family has the surrounding 730 acres of oldowned since the 1920s that growth coast redwood forest were the holds the McApin Tree. pride of Harold Richardson (below) For the better part of whose family has owned property in a century, he explains, few the region since the 1870s. had even seen photos of the Richardsons’ redwood forest. The family took the highest degree of care to conserve this plot of land for the simple reason that they enjoyed going there for picnics and get-togethers. That tendency toward conservation led to a partnership with Save the Redwoods League, which was eager to help the family protect but also share this ancient forest. “The Richardsons didn’t shout ‘Look what good stewards we’re being,’” notes Sam Hodder, League president and CEO . “They cared for this place because it is special. It’s the very best of what’s left of the old-growth forests.” The Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve protects the most old-growth coast redwood forest standing on private land anywhere today, and it looks much as it did in the 1870s. Many of the trees reach higher than 250 feet—the tallest is 322 feet—and they make up part of the remaining 5 percent of j u ly – s e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 8

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s part of the League’s purchase of Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve, the organization and the Richardson family

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Save the Redwoods League

will exchange an 870-acre protected coastal property at nearby Stewarts Point. The League purchased the Stewarts Point property from another branch of the Richardson family back in 2010 and has negotiated three easements that will conserve the property and its uses in perpetuity. The conservation easement, which includes protection of 175 acres of young and old-growth coast redwoods along the Gualala River as a restoration reserve, is held by the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District and was funded by the district, the Wildlife Conservation Board, and the California State Coastal Conservancy. Another 525 acres can be used for sustainable logging of second-growth redwoods, Douglas fir, and bishop pine guided by the conservation easement’s requirements for additional ecological protection. A trail easement along the property’s coastal bluff allows for the expansion of the California Coastal Trail, which Sonoma County Regional Parks will build and manage by the end of 2019. And a cultural access easement will enable the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians to access their ancestral home. It’s a unique partnership at a unique time. The land trade is a creative solution to match fundraising efforts to purchase the reserve. It comes as the organization celebrates its centennial with one eye on the past and one toward the future. Since the organization was founded in 1918, the League’s original mission—to protect the ancient redwood forest through land acquisition and support the parks system that stewards them—remains largely unchanged. But now that the state’s remaining old-growth redwoods are, for the most part, either harvested or protected, the League’s vision is expanding toward purchasing and restoring second-growth redwoods, so that they might become the old-growth forests of the future. “We have a reputation as an organization that focuses on oldgrowth forests, and indeed, that has been a big part of our work during our first century,” Hodder says. “What is not as well known and understood is our work with younger forests.” Save the Redwoods League

Rikke Reese Naesborg

ancient coast redwood forests in the world. By definition, oldgrowth forests are relatively untouched by humans, with layers of canopy and many downed trees that provide habitat over centuries; the tannin within the wood prevents decay. The forest floor is a deep web of fallen logs partially or entirely buried beneath a surface of duff, new soil, and the roots of the next generation of giants. They provide refuge to species of concern like Townsend’s big-eared bats as well as threatened species like northern spotted owls and marbled murrelets. Today, coast redwoods occupy parts of a slim 35-mile-wide, 450-mile-long stretch just inland from the Pacific Ocean, or about 113,000 acres in the entire state. In June, after decades of building a relationship and several years of quiet discussions, the League finalized its purchase of the property from the Richardson family. The League named it the Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve after the late family patriarch who did in fact steward this impressive forest. For a few years the League will provide docent-led tours of the reserve and then will open the reserve to the general public. When that happens, it will be the first new oldClockwise from above: A new species of pin growth redwood park lichen (Calicium sequoiae) has been found opened to the public in living only on Northern California old coast California in a very long redwoods, including in Sonoma’s Armstrong time, offering “tremen- Redwoods State Natural Reserve. It’s one of dous opportunity for hundreds of epiphyte species that live in the redwood canopy. Others, like the western the redwood forest to sword fern, also live on the ground and are continue on its trajecto- monitored by Emily Burns, director of science ry to inspire the world,” with Save the Redwoods League. Hodder says. The League will also manage the reserve, a significant change for an organization that has historically purchased land and transferred it for care to government agencies such as California state parks. But as publicly funded entities are increasingly unable to take on new properties due to lack of funding and political support, the League has decided to also undertake management. Slowly the League has learned to augment the work of other agencies, Hodder says. “We’re managing and restoring, we’re placing culverts, building trails, and getting ready for the public,” he enthuses.

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250+'

Mike Shoys, Save the Redwoods League

rotecting Harold Richardson RedHeight and age of several trees in the woods Reserve helps ensure that Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve: • 239 ft – 1,640 yrs (McApin Tree) generations of families and visitors will • 268 ft – 680 yrs enjoy the unspoiled land, and it’s clear as I • 295 ft – 820 yrs circle the wide base of its oldest tree that • 308 ft – 540 yrs this parcel is a thriving, manifold ecosys• 322 ft – 650 yrs (tallest tree on property) tem that has benefited from being largely untouched. From near the McApin Tree’s bumpy trunk, Catherine Elliott, the League’s senior manager of land protection, scoops up an owl pellet the size of a toddler’s fist and explains that it is likely from a great horned owl that lives in one of the tree’s many deep crevices. “Last time I was here, it flew right out at us when we approached,” she says to us, hoping we’ll catch another glimpse of the evasive bird of prey. (No such luck.) League scientists maintain that the McApin Tree holds this land’s oldest stories within its dense rings, which seem to have withstood numerous blazes that took down nearly every other tree in the area. The rest of its redwoods are much younger, dating back between 500 and 800 years. “From a forest ecology standpoint, something happened on this property that we’re really excited to learn about,” Hodder says. “There was some sort of event that made the forest start from scratch again, leaving these monarchs of a new generation.” Collecting and studying tree ring data and core samples—work already well under way—could help tree ecologists determine what mysterious event felled most of the forest, perhaps something related to the nearby San Andreas Fault. Hodder adds that what is revealed of this history will likely inform the League’s stewardship of the reserve. Stories about the oldest redwood forests have always had a mythic quality. Redwoods researchers funded by the League once discovered a species of salamander that may live its entire life in the canopy. Another time, a team found a mature Douglas fir growing high off the ground in the redwood forest canopy. There’s still much to discover. Just in the realm of epiphytes— which includes lichen, mosses, and ferns—new species have been identified among the hundreds of species living in redwood canopies, a complex area of research the League has funded. A recent examination of canopies in Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, slightly east of Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve, found 217 species of epiphytes, including a new lichen dubbed Xylopsora canopeorum; the Greek and Latin translate to “wood carpet of the canopy.” Researchers also documented a greater diversity of lichen species in redwood canopies within the tree’s southern range, such as the Bay Area, than in the northern range, perhaps due to the lower moisture levels. Too, the older the redwood, the more diverse the epiphyte community it hosts. To continue restoring second-growth forests and cultivating their healthiest aspects, League scientists need to understand the role of epiphytes in redwood forest ecology. For example, the tannins in redwoods prevent most creatures, be they burrowing insects or browsing deer, from eating any part of the tree. As a result, redwood forest dwellers may depend on epiphytes as food. The ferns that live on and near redwoods are also powerful

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barometers of forest health. Since 2012, Dr. Emily Burns, the League’s director of science, has been leading the crowd-sourced Fern Watch, a project that relies in part on photographs of ferns uploaded to the iNaturalist app by citizen scientists, covering a range of 120 plots from Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park near Crescent City to Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve near Big Sur. With so much ground to cover, Burns and her team rely on these field reports to best plan future health checks, and if needed, to gather additional data. Monitoring fern health during drought years, when ferns shrink and have fewer and shorter fronds, has been especially vital work. Ferns’ shallow roots are highly sensitive to the signals of drought. By measuring the size of the fronds, experts can detect whether enough water has come into the forest to support vigorous growth. Ferns with small fronds conserve more water. Ferns that can survive these temporary setbacks offer insight into how hardy redwood forests adapt to and rebound from extreme drought conditions. In 2012 and 2013, Burns’ team noticed that Western sword ferns endured the drought by reducing their leaf area by about one third.

The bigger the fern, the more water it loses. For scientists, that simple relationship is an approachable way to introduce practically anyone to indicators of forest health and help the public get more involved with efforts to track resiliency. “With the rains returning last year and this year, we’re hoping we’ll see ferns literally expand again and have larger populations,” Burns adds. Western sword ferns are but one species League scientists are eager to study at Harold Richardson Redwoods Reserve. Foresters have also found evidence here of the presence of red tree voles. These tiny, nocturnal rodents are no more than eight inches long and weigh a mere two ounces (at most) with their long, fur-covered tails accounting for more than half their body length. Being among the few animals that can thrive on a primary diet of conifer needles, they often live in and subsist on the needles of a single Douglas fir their entire lives. Though elusive, they leave easily identifiable signs: discarded resin ducts from the needles they gnaw often pile up at the base of the firs they inhabit. This remarkable complexity of redwood forest ecology exists for a decidedly unexciting reason: Redwood forests are an incredibly stable habitat. Redwood trees are enormous carbon sinks, and their forests are able to store more than three times as much carbon per acre than any other type of forest in the world, including the Amazon rainforest. Individual redwoods can add more than 2,000 pounds of wood annually. The older and larger the tree, the more wood it puts on each year. This stability also means that coast redwoods are a refuge of resilience and forest health as climate change continues. An old-growth forest’s adaptation to extreme weather events, such as redwood trees retaining enough water to withstand drought over many years, is reason for optimism, Hodder maintains. “During our generation’s tenure as stewards of these forests, we have learned of both the critical challenge of climate change and the critical role of the redwoods in the fight against it. We have in these forests an extraordinary opportunity to restore resilience into the ecosystem, if we are willing to make different choices in how we steward them,” he says.

Coast redwood range past and present

Courtesy of Save the Redwoods League

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s the League looks ahead, stewardship and climate change are at the forefront of the organization’s vision. In its next 100 years, the League wants to double the acreage of forests in reserves and protect existing old-growth redwood forests from any further development. It will also increasingly focus on second-growth redwoods and restoring their health. This is a significant change for the organization. “Forest stewardship is as critical as protecting the land,” Burns explains, “and I hope we continue to inspire people to invest in scientific projects.” Among those projects is the League’s Redwood Genome Project, a five-year undertaking begun in 2017. Other conifer genomes, including the Douglas fir and sugar pine, have recently been sequenced. But the massive size of the coast redwood genome, which is 10 times larger than the human genome, has posed particular challenges. In addition, coast redwoods have six sets of large chromosomes (humans have only two). In the last decade, the technology has improved and the price has plummeted enough to tackle such a computationally difficult sequencing project. Burns oversees

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old-growth redwoods without the crowds:

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A sanctuary just steps from the road, Roy’s Redwoods Preserve is a study in Northern Trails: From 0.75 of a mile to about 3 miles. California habitats including an old-growth Park size: 293 acres. The draw: The lesscoast redwood grove, framed by an active creek visited and more secluded Muir Woods, a half hour from the Golden Gate Bridge. Access: that passes through madrone, manzanita, and Horses, dogs on leash, mountain bikes; hikersbay and Douglas fir forests, and grassy hillsides only on some trails. Nearby: Maurice Thorner replete with coyote brush. Here you can stand in Memorial Open Space Preserve, French Ranch Open Space Preserve. Cost: Free the shadow of some of the largest redwoods in Marin with free parking and infrequent crowds. The 293-acre preserve includes overlooks of San Geronimo Valley and offers a mix of shaded paths and sweeping views, an ideal day-hike or picnic spot for families with small children. From the main trailhead off Nicasio Valley Road, follow the Meadow Trail straight ahead and watch for sapsuckers whose tiny drill holes dot the bay trees along the path. Continue walking and you’ll reach a “fairy ring” of 500-year-old redwoods, the interconnected trunks of which have become a favorite spot for small groups to gather or the lone hiker to sprawl out and admire the forest canopy 200 feet above. —Becca Fanning

quiet, cool redwoods and creeks:

resilience in an urban setting:

A quiet, well-shaded state the details: park that is home to two Trails: 18 miles altogether. creeks, two waterfalls, and Park size: 2,800 acres. The a rich, expansive redwood draw: A shady, peaceful escape an hour west of San Jose. forest. Hiking trails range Access: No bikes, dogs, or from the 0.75-mile Sequoia horses allowed on hiking trails. Nature Trail, where numbered Swimming. Camping. Nearby: Peters Creek; Pescadero Creek signposts explain the County Park. Cost: $10 vehicle redwood forest ecology, to day-use fee a strenuous 12-mile loop to Peters Creek—a forest owned by Save the Redwoods League that protects two of the region’s very oldest redwood trees. Beneath the redwoods grow dense huckleberry bushes, fern groves, and tall tanoak. This forest’s bird population includes Oregon juncos, acorn woodpeckers, and chestnut-backed chickadees. If you listen carefully, you might hear the keer-keer call of the elusive marbled murrelet. —Brittany Shoot

City parks, bus routes, and easy access. If these words don’t call Trails: Sinawik Loop (about 1 to mind hundred-year-old redmile) and Big Trees Trail (about 2 miles) for redwoods. Park size: wood trees, dense forests and 500 acres. The draw: Redwood rare wildflowers, then you’ve groves, rare plants, and wanever visited Oakland’s Joaquin terfalls within Oakland’s city limits. Access: Dogs on leash, Miller Park. This city-run park is mountain bikes, horses. Nearby: a study in resilience and a tesRedwood Regional Park. Cost: tament to the staying power of Free. Transit: Take the 339 AC the endangered coast redwood. bus line from the Fruitvale BART station to the Chabot Space and To visit this thriving coast Science Center (10000 Skyline redwood grove just a mile Blvd., Oakland) from the freeway, begin at the ranger station, where a small museum offers a native bug display and details about the park’s flora, fauna, and geography. Wander through the serpentine meadow, where purple needlegrass and the California golden poppy thrive in their home soil, and catch a glimpse of your first redwood before continuing to the Palos Colorados Trail and then the Big Trees Trail, which deposits you in an ivycovered grove of second- and third-growth coast redwoods. As you hike, look out for kiosks, a collaboration between Save the Redwoods League and the City of Oakland, which give information on the secrets contained in tree rings, the history of the League, and the importance of protecting these native giants. —Becca Fanning

Joaquin miller park www2.oaklandnet.com. the details:

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the project partnership, which also includes researchers from the University of California, Davis, and Johns Hopkins University; scientists anticipate the coast redwood genome sequence will be completed later this year. The genome will ultimately allow identification of the most genetically diverse coast redwood forests to help ensure they’re protected. It can also help scientists ascertain if a second-growth forest has low genetic diversity and strive to prevent any further loss. Burns describes genetic diversity of the entire coast redwood population as “the raw material that will help this species adapt to environmental changes.” That’s the idea, but at this early stage researchers will genotype individual trees to answer specific management questions. For instance, it’s common practice in some parts of the redwoods range to plant clones from a handful of genotypes, and it’s not yet clear whether the monocultures created by this type of planting are unhealthy. Burns notes that the ability to identify trees that are specifically well adapted to particular regions can offer a guidepost for future forest management. “This could also inform where to conserve lands, to ensure that forests with unique genotypes are protected,” she says.

eports on the history of coast redwoods invariably—and with good reason—include how much acreage has been lost in the past century. In 2013, the coast redwood was named as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. But to hike in the presence of the Bay Area’s biggest trees, some over 300 feet tall, is to feel like we have a lot to gain. Standing next to the McApin Tree, struggling to imagine 16 centuries of existence, I reflect on how lucky we are to have the coast redwood forests grow among us. Unlike glacial and tropical

Courtesy of the Humboldt County Historical Society

Save the Redwoods League as Organized by the Women of Humboldt County helped lead the grassroots movement to protect the state’s northern redwoods groves. Taken in 1919.

ecosystems that are crucial to protect for planetary health but seem very far away, coast redwoods are part of our community. They literally house millions of people in California. They grow along our sidewalks and populate neighborhood parks. They’re where we take our out-of-town visitors and the place we get away to for a weekend of camping. We can lay our hands on these species that need saving. And it’s worth noting we already have preserved a lot, thanks to the enthusiastic support of the public and land stewards like the Richardson family. Hodder says that redwood restoration continues to be a story of hope. “So much of the conservation conversation is about anxiety, degradation, and losing momentum,” he says. “But for all the hand-wringing about the old growth we have lost, it is incredible to realize so much of what we have preserved and continue to cultivate is still redwood forest. Some of it just happens to be young!” Imagine what it’ll be in a redwood-quick century.

Brittany Shoot is a San Francisco–based writer covering everything from culture and travel to the environment. “The McApin Tree” was produced by Bay Nature magazine with the generous support of Save the Redwoods League for publication in the July-September 2018 issue of the magazine. Additional copies of this publication can be obtained by contacting Bay Nature Institute or Save the Redwoods League. Save the Redwoods League is a 100-year-old nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect and restore redwood forests and connect people to their peace and beauty so these wonders of the natural world flourish. The League protects both coast redwood and giant sequoia—the tallest, largest, and among the oldest trees on earth—by purchasing the forests and the surrounding land needed to nurture them. The League restores redwood forests by innovating science and technology that can improve stewardship and accelerate forest regeneration. Its work is grounded in the principles of conservation biology, research, and improving our collective understanding and appreciation of the redwoods. SaveTheRedwoods.org Bay Nature magazine is a quarterly publication of the Bay Nature Institute, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to connecting the people of the San Francisco Bay Area to our natural world and motivating people to solve problems with nature in mind. For more information, or to subscribe to the magazine, visit baynature.org or email baynature@baynature.org. b ay n at u r e

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get built. “It’s going to take an inordinate amount of resources, money, public will, adaptability, flexibility, creativity to solve the challenge of redesigning the shoreline,” he says. “We don’t have all that assembled yet. So I think, [regarding] Resilient by Design, it’s not fair to ask them to solve that whole problem.” Instead, he suggests, judge the contest by the usefulness of its ideas. It’s easy to imagine how we wind up further cut off from the Bay, living in accidental New Orleans, surrounded by water but separate from it, hostage to it. The task of Resilient by Design, in a sense, is just to imagine how we don’t. The members of the Home Team, at least, seem earnest about the solutions they are proposing. A week after my visit to the North Richmond community meeting, I join Mithun’s Debra Guenther and Tim Mollette-Parks at the company’s offices in San Francisco’s Financial District. They discuss small tweaks to their plans, incorporating suggestions from community members. They talk about steelhead-spawning habitat and traffic dynamics at crosswalks, county zoning and native trees, eelgrass and potential sources of sediment for marsh construction, along with the video that they’ll use to present their projects to the Resilient by Design contest judges. Sea level rise, it’s worth pointing out again, is tremendously complicated. As the meeting is wrapping up, Sandy Mendler, a principal at Mithun, comes into the room to tell me about the firm’s plans for creating affordable housing in North Richmond. By subdividing plots to create denser housing, taking advantage of (RISE continued from page 34)

the area’s wealth of abandoned buildings, and using local labor, she explains, the community would boost local ownership, begin a “cycle of reinvestment,” and hopefully prevent the gentrification and displacement that often accompanies redevelopment. Communityowned housing isn’t a new idea, exactly, but she explains it with an intensity and depth of detail that defies skepticism. But again, there is the problem of funding. This is less certain. Some of the money might come from federal housing grants, Mendler says, or be lent by banks. There are local housing programs, too, that might help pay for some of the work. Earlier, when I asked Amanda Brown-Stevens, the Resilient by Design managing director, about where the contest’s projects might find funding, she mentioned Caltrans climate adaptation grants and Measure AA. The measure, which Bay Area voters passed in 2016, uses a $12 parcel tax to raise $500 million over the next two decades for shoreline projects around the Bay. “The region was willing to tax itself for restoration and climate efforts,” she says. “That really showed the potential to actually implement projects without relying on disaster relief funding.” Larry Goldzband, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), says members of the commission plan to meet with Resilient by Design teams, to help advise them on how to carry their projects forward. “We want them to graduate from the project and have somewhere to go,” he says. Compared to the entries in Rising Tides, a design contest that BCDC put on a decade ago, Resilient by Design’s (continued on page 52)

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projects seem both useful and feasible, he adds. (One of the entries in the earlier competition was an inflatable bladder that would seal off the entry to San Francisco Bay.) Still, even with widespread support, funding will likely be a challenge. “This is an enormous problem that will come with an enormous cost,” says John Gioia, a Contra Costa County supervisor whose district includes North Richmond; the Resilient by Design contestants aren’t the only ones who may struggle to find funding. But Gioia wouldn’t rule out some of the projects actually getting built. “We can’t get the money if we haven’t fully planned what we want to do,” he notes. “So you know, we start one step at a time.” In early May, I make another trip to Richmond, this time to Point Pinole. At the urging of Paul Detjens, a senior civil engineer at the Contra Costa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, I walk from the parking lot, across a bridge over the railroad tracks, and out along the Bay Trail to the Dotson Family Marsh. The marsh, long the target of developers, was acquired by the East Bay Regional Park District in 2008 and reopened in the spring of 2017, after a $14 million restoration. As part of the restoration, workers graded the marsh so that its floral inhabitants could slowly migrate uphill, like in the horizontal levee that the Home Team is proposing for the area north of San Pablo Creek. As the sea level rises, the plants will push inland toward the railroad tracks, but won’t disappear, at least not in the next 80 years. “It’s a park that’s going to be resilient for generations to come,” Detjens says. “They put a (continued on page 54) lot of thought into that.” (RISE continued from page 50)

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Today, the elevated concrete walk that runs across the inland edge of the marsh, parallel to the railroad tracks, is nearly empty. Back across the tracks, I can see the rooftops of low-lying Parchester Village. To the south, I can see the spires of the Chevron refinery. The marsh itself, at present four or five feet below the walk, looks natural, in the normal scrubby-marshy way; if Detjens hadn’t told me it was also a carefully sculpted park, I wouldn’t have figured it out on my own. Little alluvial channels run toward the Bay, a couple feet deep, showing the distance to sea level. I look out across the water, at the point of Mount Tamalpais, then down at the edge of the Bay, now 400 miles long but getting longer. The Resilient by Design teams unveiled their projects on May 17th in San Francisco. They proposed upgraded schools and paths, expanded parks and elevated roadways, and, of course, a hyper-creek. Some of the projects might be built as proposed. Some might be used as inspiration for other, later projects. Some might even be replicated around the Bay, as the marsh/horizontal levee behind me will likely be. Others will probably be just a pretty design. I climb over the pieces of asphalt, descending a final few feet. I’d hoped to reach the Bay itself, to stand at the place where the sea meets the land, but the tide is out and there’s just mud. The water is still far away. (RISE continued from page 52)

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Zach St. George is a reporter in Oakland. He writes about science and the environment and is currently working on a book about the future of forests.

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William Keene Ek Ong Kar Khalsa Shani Kleinhaus Dave & Sharon Koehler David & Jennifer Kuszmar Dave Kwinter Rue Mapp Lisa Micheli Vicki Moore Liam O’Brien Paul Ringgold Tom Robinson Dionasio Rosario Sue Rosenthal Stephen Rosenthal Alice & Terry Rossow Kevin Smart Calvin Strobel Noelle Thurlow Daniel & May Tjoa Ivan Veraja & Alison Young Alex Von Feldt Cynthia & Robert Wantland Arlin Weinberger Maggie & Michael Williams $50–$99 Anonymous (2) Elizabeth Agnello Lee Ballance & Mary Selkirk Leslie Barclay Sandy Biagi & David Ogden Avis Boutell & Alice Miller Barbara Callison Elizabeth Carlin Sarah Connick Joanne Drabek & Thor Start Daniel Drake Mark English Phyllis Faber Charles Garfield & Cindy Spring Valerie Glass Sue Haffner Frederick & Leelane Hines Marc Holmes Vicki Knirck Stuart Koretz Katharine & William Loughman Doug McGlashan

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Members of the Redwood Circle generously donate each month to provide consistent support for Bay Nature. 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 Executive Director/Publisher Regina Starr Ridley at (510)528-8550 x101 / regina@baynature.org. You can also donate directly online at baynature. org/donate. Thank you for your continued interest and support.

Russell Miller & Kirk Pessner Arlee & Dragana Monson Carol Moholt Roberta O’Grady Katherine Ogburn & Grant Thompson Laura Owens Richard Rowland Sue Schoening Ellen & Myron Turbow Dorothy Wachter Arlin Weinberger Kristen Wick Barbara & Tom Wysham $25–$49 Anonymous (3) Erin Diehm Glynis Evans Susan Floore Margaret Goodale Alane Gray Zelda Holland Carl Koos Joan Lamphier Susan Little Lynn Lozier & Larry Serpa Heather Richman Lana Roderick Alan Tabor Nancy Thomsen Yuri Tsuchitani Damon Uyeda Carol Wilson Kathleen Wood Publisher’s Circle Anonymous (4) Tania Amochaev Elizabeth & Paul Archambeault Marice Ashe & Larry Orman Brian Ashe & Cynthia Rigatti Carol Baird & Alan Harper Brenda Baker Valerie Barth & Peter Wiley Graham Chisholm & Tania Balazs Jacard Barbara L. Bessey Douglas Booth & Margaret Simpson

Richard Boswell & Karen Musalo Stewart Brand & Ryan Phelan Kathleen & Daniel Brenzel Phyllis Browning Mary Burns Kathleen Cahill & Anthony Chorosevic Kim & Robert Carroll Prasad Chakka Roseanne Chambers Hortensia Chang & John Nelson George & Sheri Clyde Meg Conkey & Les Rowntree Cynthia Daniel & Doug Lipton Christopher & Kathryn Dann Thomas Debley Nona Dennis Carol Donohoe Herbert & Jane Dwight Ed Ehmke & Mary Jane Parrine Sue Estey Carol Evkhanian Jerome & Nancy Falk Jonathan Faustine & Regina Starr Ridley Elizabeth Fishel & Bob Houghteling Anne & Mason Flemming Catherine Fox* David Frane & Charla Gabert Harald & Sabine Frey Ilona Frieden & Mark Jacobson Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber Janice Gonsalves Janet & Wylie Greig Tracy Grubbs* & Richard Taylor Kathleen Hall & Leslie Murdock Margaret Hand & John Hartog Gabrielle Harbert

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Anne Scheer & Jeffrey Wilson Bob* & Brenda Schildgen Sam Schuchat Susan Schwartz Kathleen Shaffer Madeleine Shearer Jake Sigg Nancy Smith Carla Soracco Mark Tauber Aleks Totic Margaret Ward John Waterbury Bart & Nancy* Westcott Jumbo & Trevlyn Williams David Wimpfheimer Redwood Circle Monthly Donors Leslie Barclay Avis Boutell & Alice Miller Mark English Valerie Glass John Igoe Elizabeth Littell Russell Miller & Kirk Pessner Dragana & Arlee Monson Debra Muro Betty Nelson John & Penny Pollock Mary & Matt Powell Daniel & Lynne Russell Derek & Janice Ransley Sue Schoening Funders The Alms for the Arts Fund Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Charitable Foundation Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation * Bay Nature Board Member

Put the San Francisco Bay Trail in your pocket… With this boxed set of 25 map cards

With over 355 miles of trail ringing the San Francisco Bay, there’s a ride or a stroll for everyone, from the long-time local to the first-time tourist. Available for $14.95 at baytrail.org, and at The Hub at 375 Beale Street, San Francisco, and at The Oakland Museum of California. Brought to you by the association of bay area governments & metropolitan transportation commission

Medicinal Plants Walk Markleeville “Death Ride” Lake Tahoe Paint & Sip Workshop

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ask the naturalist

q: “I appear to have a poison hemlock plant growing

at the edge of my yard. What do I need to know to stay safe around this plant and how do I remove it?”—Michael, Oakland a: Well, there is definitely a reason this

plant has the word “poison” in its common name. According to Medical Botany by Lewis and Lewis, all parts of the plant are toxic and contain a mix of poisonous alkaloids, including coniine. One hundred milligrams will kill an adult, and there is no known antidote. Children sometimes become ill simply from making peashooters (and putting them to their mouths) out of the hollow stems. The symptoms include difficulty moving, pupil dilation, vomiting, violent stomach pain, numbness, slow heartbeat, and increasing muscular weakness with respiratory failure and then, often, death. Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) occurs throughout California (excluding deserts). It’s common in roadside ditches, disturbed fields, and urban lots below 5,000 feet. It was brought from the Mediterranean area to the New World in cattle feed, in garden seeds, and even as an ornamental “winter fern.” These biennial plants grow a large rosette of leaves over two feet in diameter during their first year. The following year they flower and can tower over a person. Some say the leaves smell like mice. They do have a very strong and distinct odor. When fog moistens the plant, it smells like tortilla chips to me. On more than one occasion I’ve been hiking with kids when one of them shouts, “I smell Fritos! Hey man, who’s eating their lunch already?” The stems are hollow and almost always covered with purple spots, sometimes referred to as “the blood of Socrates” (more to come on that). The tiny white flowers are clustered in an umbel (looks like an umbrella). The alternate leaves are finely dissected and closely resemble carrot leaves. In fact, this plant is a member of the carrot family and even has a long taproot. The similarity can get some people in trouble. Years ago, a couple from Bolinas

e l l i s thought they were gathering wild carrots. After munching on a few they decided they better seek help and went to the fire station for medical attention. They survived; others have not been so fortunate, like Socrates the Greek philosopher and teacher. He encouraged his mostly young students to criticize the Athenian democracy and its authorities. The “establishment” could finally take it no longer and as an old man Socrates was indicted for impiety and “corruption of the youth.” It was a pretty

fuzzy charge; his real sin was being outspoken and critical of the power brokers. Socrates refused to go into exile, the usual sentence for dissidents. In fact, Socrates rejected all compromises and the judges were forced to condemn him to death. By drinking a cup of poison hemlock tea, he immortalized himself and the plant in one swallow. Best to pull up the plant by that long taproot, and then keep an eye out for seedlings for at least another three years. For more information on best practices for removal visit cal-ipc.org and search for “poison hemlock”.

Library of Congress Matson Collection, Wikimedia Common

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Poison hemlock looks similar to some other carrot family species, especially Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota). You can often identify hemlock by the purple blotching on its hairless stem.

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CELEBRATING THE CENTENNIAL OF SAVE THE REDWOODS LEAGUE The Once and Future Forest: California’s Iconic Redwoods With hundreds of photos and featuring new essays by Gary Ferguson, David Harris, Meg Lowman, Greg Sarris, and David Raines Wallace, The Once and Future Forest showcases both the grandeur of the redwood ecosystems that sustain California and the deep love they have engendered in scientists, writers, artists, and the general public.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE FOREST ISBN: 978-1-59714-444-5 Deluxe, slipcased limited edition 11” x 14.5” / 240 pages $100.00 October 2018 Co-published by Heyday and Save the Redwoods League Available for pre-order now at heydaybooks.com

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

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

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

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

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

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