Bay Nature Summer 2024

BLACK BEARS | SAILING CARQUINEZ STRAIT | MUIR WOODS

Summer 2024 LOOK INTO NATURE AND UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING BETTER LOOK INTO NATURE AND UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING BETTER

Resto R ation

In the Name of Eelgrass

Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve (Alia Mousavi)

Photo by Penny Palmer

features

WILDLIFE

Black Bears by the Bay Black bears are living in North Bay counties—Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Solano— which may come as news to some. The bears have slowly moved in over two decades, spreading seeds and inhibiting deer populations, taking up the role grizzlies once filled. How does the Bay Area learn to live with them?

By Kim Todd

COMMUNITY

24

Eelgrass vs. Anchor-Outs

Eelgrass beds are home to young fish and tiny mollusks, an essential nursery for Bay life. The water above is home to a community of Marin County’s poor, some who have lived there for five decades. Could a healthy eelgrass ecosystem and anchor-outs coexist in Richardson Bay?

By Anushuya Thapa

PUBLIC FUNDS

32

Restoring the Peninsula (Sponsored)

A new preserve. Creek restoration. An 80-mile stretch of connected Bay Trail. All are examples of Measure AA funds at work on Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District lands thanks to voters who approved a $300 million bond in 2014 to be spent over 30 years.

By Austin Price, Katherine Irving, and Janet Byron

A pair of black bears (Ursus americanus) living in Canada.

36 Bay a rea

Overlooked for their ubiquity and present because we domesticated them, rock pigeons epitomize the remarkable urban nature we forget to wonder about.

By Lia Keener

39 San f ranci S co

A new beach, you say? Yes, sort of, China Basin Park includes a sprinkle of sand and expansive views of the Bay from China Basin.

By Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright

40 e a S t Bay

Just a half-mile-wide at its narrowest, a stretch of water, called the Carquinez Strait, connects the mighty Delta and San Francisco Bay. See it through the eyes of a sailor.

By Kate Golden

44 n orth Bay

A turtle’s odyssey along the recently restored Redwood Creek, which flows through Muir Woods National Monument down to Muir Beach, signals success.

By Maya Akkaraju

Clockwise from top left: Greg Clark; Kate Golden; Jane Kim

®

We host over 100 birdhouses in our vineyards to encourage biodiversity and provide a safe haven for wildlife.

p. 24 Anushuya Thapa joined Bay Nature in 2023 as a journalism fellow focused on Wild Billions reporting, Bay Nature’s project tracking federal money for nature in the Bay Area. A Kathmandu native, she sacrificed interesting topography for a four-year degree from Northwestern University, where she’d make escapes to Lake Michigan to stay connected to the natural world. Her work has been published on InvestigateWest and Crosscut. Outside the newsroom, she can be found dancing salsa decently well or playing chess very poorly.

p. 18 Kim Todd is the author of four books about science and history, including Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis and Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters.” For Bay Nature, she has written about city coyotes, white-crowned sparrow dialects, and urban osprey. Her work has also appeared in Orion, Sierra magazine, Smithsonian, and several Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. KimTodd.net.

p. 17 Gregory Clarke is a Los Angeles area illustrator and graphic designer, with a bachelor’s degree in fine art from UCLA. His work has appeared in the pages of the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. He is coauthor and illustrator of the recent book A Sidecar Named Desire: GreatWriters and the Booze That Stirred Them (HarperCollins).

p. 24 Jacob Saffarian, born and raised in the East Bay, works as a science communicator. During his time as a marine researcher with UC Berkeley, he picked up his dad’s camera to help advocate for and share the amazing phenomena found in nature. From tropical marine biology to deep space observation, he pairs photography with science to bring attention to pressing issues and amazing wonders. Currently he assists at Wonderlab, a science communication studio in Berkeley.

p. 40 Kate Golden, Bay Nature’s digital editor, often reports on water—usually when it is scarce or polluted. But she is also a keen swimmer, angler, artist, and sailor who for three years lived on a small boat (a Nicholson 32) in the South Pacific. Previously, she produced award-winning data-driven investigations with the nonprofit Wisconsin Watch. Her reporting has been published in Sierra, the Washington Post, Atlantic online, and Hakai

p. 16 Matthew Harrison Tedford is an arts writer focused on ecology, history, and politics. He is interested in how art can inspire us to rethink our relationships with the natural world. Based in San Francisco, he has had work featured on KQED, Hyperallergic, in SF Weekly, and elsewhere. He is currently a doctoral student in the Visual Studies program at the UC Santa Cruz. MHTedford.com

Other contributors: Jane Kim (p. 12), Alison S. Pollack (p. 14), Endria Richardson (p. 15), Sadie Rose du Vigneaud (p. 15), H.R. Smith (p. 17), Austin Price (p. 32), Katherine Irving (p. 34), Janet Byron (p. 34), Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright (p. 38), Maya Akkaraju (p. 44), and John Muir Laws (p. 46). Front Cover: An oppalescent nudibranch cruises a blade of eelgrass in Monterey Bay. By Sage Ono

masthead, vol 24, no 3

summer 2024

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a rt Director

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A CliC k A ble Fe A st

Voracious readers, satisfy your cravings with new stories each week at BayNature.org. Get great reads, events, and places to explore in our weekly newsletter: TinyURL.com/BayNatureNews

» Grants Delayed for Forest Communities

A “game-changer” of a new U.S. Forest Service program to help disadvantaged communities reduce their wildfire risks has been plagued by long delays—in part because the agency is so understaffed, Anushuya Thapa finds.

» Predator of the Pools

Reader Dan Osipov got some rare closeups of the gorgeous Delta green ground beetle, which is a bit of a mystery, even to experts, Kate Golden writes.

» Snake Fungal Disease Is Spreading

This emerging infectious disease has popped up in way more California species and places than expected—but surveillance funding is running out. Anton Sorokin writes about how you can be a friend to snakes.

California State University East Bay’s Concord campus is growing a garden for Indigenous stewardship and storytelling, in an EPA-funded collaboration with Berkeley’s Cafe Ohlone. From Anushuya Thapa. Our reporting project exploring the impacts of big federal money

» An Indigenous Garden Takes Root

» Something Borrowed, Something Blue

The Xerces blue, long gone from San Francisco, became a symbol of the fight against extinctions. Now scientists are sending in a replacement, the silvery blue, to the Presidio dunes. Will it take?

H.R. Smith goes butterfly road-tripping.

» The Ginger Badger of Point Reyes

Young wildlife photographer Vishal Subramanyan writes about his quest to find an unusual badger.

Costs of Conservation

A ye A r A go, Bay Nature launched a reporting project that we’ve dubbed “Wild Billions” to follow federal money flowing into the greater Bay Area for nature-based projects. No doubt you’ve noticed our flashy project logo. As of May 2024, roughly $1.2 billion has been allocated through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to the slice of projects we’re following. And with Bay Nature ’s summer issue, we will have reported about the money in 19 stories, all of which can be read online.

When Bay Nature’s digital editor, Kate Golden, and I reported last year on the challenges of spending the rush of federal funds, we spoke with Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, who is deeply involved in Bay conservation and is vice chair of the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture. She made a point that stuck with us. “A lot of our conservation projects are intertwined with other social issues like housing affordability. The funds that are there for strictly conservation can’t be used to deal with the other social issues that are standing in the way of implementing conservation.”

Based on that conversation, we began reporting on a $2.8 million grant from the EPA, made possible through BIL, for eelgrass restoration where an impoverished anchor-out community lives in Marin County’s Richardson Bay. Schwartz Lesberg’s company is the recipient of the EPA money, and it made possible a matching state grant of $3 million for housing roughly three dozen of the anchor-outs. We didn’t know where the reporting would lead us, but as Bay Nature reporter Anushuya Thapa asked basic questions, the complexity of the story grew.

The result is an in-depth and nuanced exploration of eelgrass ecology and conservation, living in poverty on the water, and, importantly, how environmental groups and the cities surrounding Richardson Bay achieved their goals.

This was a difficult story to report and to publish. But we dug in because other media outlets haven’t. And while Bazy Nature is first and foremost an environmental science magazine, we know many of our readers care deeply about inequality in the region and housing affordability. A community that champions and identifies itself with the environment deserves a full picture of how conservation and homelessness can clash in the Bay Area.

—Victoria Schlesinger Editor in Chief

Clockwise from top left: Barbara Butkus; Ross Macdonald; © angelmoo963, some rights

(CC-BY-NC)

Wild Billions articles

p. 24

Eelgrass p. 18

Black bears

Vegetable Blend, Nursery Mix, Potting Mix, Essential Soil Landscape Mix, Green Roof Mixes, Bioretention Soil Mixes, Diestel Structured Compost OMRI, Garden Compost OMRI, Biodynamic Compost CDFA, Organic Aged Humus CDFA, Premium Arbor Mulch, Fir Bark, Mocha Chip, Mahogany Mulch, Ground Redwood Bark, Actively Aerated Compost Tea, Mycorrhizal Fungi,

Life in Summer

… is full of some happenings that are enigmatic or unnoticed, and some that can’t be unseen.

f laming du S t

The Ohlone and Pomo believed that mete ors were objects of fire, dropping from heaven, according to notes by ethnologist J.P. Harrington. When you strip away all that humans have learned in the last cen tury about meteors, fire dropping from heaven is still a pretty good summation of a meteor shower. And one of the year’s finest happens in summer. When Earth swings around through a trail of floating debris left by the chunky, 16-mile-wide comet Swift-Tuttle, we watch the Perseid meteor shower pour from the dark night. These abandoned bits of dust fly through our atmosphere at 133,000 mph, heat up to 3,000 degrees, and vaporize. What we see is the light from that heat, some 50 to 100 times per hour.

This Year's Spotlight: the Night Sky

The show of fiery meteors peaks on August 12 and 13 and will be most visible after the waxing moon sets, between midnight and dawn.

It’s hard for a puppy-eyed Pacific harbor seal (Phoca vitulina richardii) to be anything other than adorable. Except maybe when it is molting. June and July are the peak months for harbor seals along Bay Area shores to shed large strips of fur to reveal a sleek new coat underneath. The process can look a little troubling—ragged patches of sometimes bronzy-colored fur overlaying silvery gray. But the seals are all good. They just ask for extra privacy and distance while they make the annual, energy-intensive wardrobe change.

A paragon of patience, that’s what the Western wood-pewee (Contopus sordidulus) is. Perched on a high and open branch, this small flycatcher waits and waits until its prey—perhaps a crane fly, beetle, or moth—sails by. Then the bird darts out, snags a meal, and usually returns to the same spot to eat. The behavior is recognizable, so if you too are the patient type, look for wood-pewees in Bay Area forests this summer. They’ll be here raising their chicks before heading to South America in the fall, exactly where no one knows.

Western wood-pewee

Pacific harbor seal

Angular-winged katydid

o ver S ized S unnie S

We don’t body-shame at Bay Nature, but it’s hard to write about an ocean sunfish ( Mola mola) without noting that it appears to lack a body, which is really alarming the first time you see this ocean colossus. Measuring up to 10 feet and weighing up to 5,000 pounds, this all-head creature is arguably one of the heaviest bony fish in the sea, and it can be found off Bay Area shores and beyond year-round. In summer, these fish bask and warm themselves at the water’s surface in Monterey Bay, or hang out around floating kelp paddies.

t ree fog

While sitting in the shade of a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) during summer, consider this fascinating plant process: The redwood is emitting terpenes, compounds that contain the odor of the redwood. When the terpenes react with the air, they form tiny particles that can become the condensation nuclei, or seed, for fog, according to chemist and environmental scientist Allen Goldstein, a professor at UC Berkeley. Most of the fog in redwood forests exists thanks to the temperature difference between the ocean and the land, but the redwoods can contribute a little bit too.

Summer roman C e

On a warm, late-summer evening in the Bay Area, listen for a metronomic tsip, tsip, tsip and a more rapid tick-tick-tick, like two pebbles tapped together. Made by the male angular-winged katydid (Microcentrum rhombifolium), the first sound may be a warning to ward off other males; the second, his serenade. A female will call back with a lower-intensity ticking, and eventually they’ll meet amid the tree canopy. All this so that he can present a nuptial gift—a package of sperm, along with a blob of nutrient-rich, gelatinous food, which she’ll eat instead of his sperm packet. So many ways to love.

Coast redwood

Ocean sunfish

Elder Statesberry

We don’t have a California state shrub yet, but the blue elderberry (Sambucus mexicana … usually) ought to be a top contender for the honor—for its beauty, versatility, and importance to California’s natural and cultural history. It’s an overachiever.

Of the three species of elderberries (sometimes called elders) that grow in California, the blue elderberry is the most widespread and prevalent, gracing hillsides and stream banks all over the state. Anywhere water flows nearby, really.

Blue elderberry may be a small shrub— or grow as tall as 30 feet. A student once asked me about the difference between a tree and a shrub, sending me into a deep philosophical spiral, until I learned trees generally have a single thick trunk, while shrubs tend to have many thin stems— which aptly describes the elderberry’s numerous straight stems. Blue elderberry has serrated, skinny leaves, usually a shiny dark-green, that form a symmetrical pattern. But in summertime the go-to identifiers are the clumps of cloudy blue berries weighing down its branches in heavy skeins. (Also fruiting then is red elderberry, Sambucus racemosa, which has shock-red berries.)

Berries are preceded by lacy bunches of white flowers in spring that release a rich aroma, a bit like a subdued jasmine. At least 23 species of butterflies and moths likely feast on the nectar and pollen. Other insects known to frequent elderberries include tiny, slender winged insects called thrips—the thought of which may make gardeners shiver, as some hungry species leave silvery scars and curling leaves in their wake on other plants. Fear not: thrips have been documented not only pollinating elderberries but increasing their fruit output. If you find yourself in the Central Valley, look for small holes in elderberry stems—signs of the endangered valley elderberry longhorn beetle, which lives its whole life on the plant.

Many birds are huge elderberry fans. After passing through

a scrub-jay, flicker, or bluebird, a seed’s adventure is just beginning. It’s a patient but particular seed, waiting under the protection of a hard coating for the right conditions. It may remain viable for over a decade.

Native people throughout California have long known about the plant’s exacting germination needs and used fire to stimulate its growth. Gentle fire cracks that hard outer seed coat. Once conditions are just right, the plant takes off. It can reach full size in as little as three years!

The Sambucus genus is likely named for the sambuca, an ancient musical instrument from Asia; elderberry stems are still made into clapper sticks, flutes, and whistles.

The array of Indigenous uses for elderberry, throughout California, is as impressive as the plant’s growth rate. The berries dye baskets, and the branches can make clapper sticks (one Pomo elder told me that elderberry is where the music is stored). Historically, Pomo people along the coast used the plant’s flowering and fruiting to time shellfish gathering. Sage LaPena, a Tunai Wintu and Nomtipom ethnobotanist,

says, “Elderberry is one of our most important traditional medicines, and we’ve never stopped using it.” Many Indigenous groups use elderflowers in a fever-reducing tea or in baths to induce sweating.

The next time you’re in the cold and flu aisle of a pharmacy, look at the ingredients of natural cold medicines, and you’re certain to find many that include Sambucus. The plant can be an effective antiviral, antibacterial, antidiabetic, immune-booster, and anti-inflammatory and a powerful antioxidant, according to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s integrative medicine website.

At Berkeley’s Cafe Ohlone, the Indigenous chefs Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino have used elderberry sauce to balance out a meatball stew as a fine cooking wine would do, soaked quail eggs in elderberry tea, and paired elderberry jam with chia pudding. Recipes for elderberry syrups, jellies, and more are easy to come by online, along with elderflower cordials and liqueurs.

But don’t devour those berries raw. They can cause severe gastrointestinal distress, due to cyanide-containing chemicals that can be destroyed with heat. And if you plan to harvest, please do so responsibly. Don’t take more than you can use, and gather no more than about 10 percent of material from an individual plant, as a rule of thumb.

The elderberry genus provides endless intrigue for armchair taxonomists. Blue elderberry has three scientific names—Sambucus mexicana, Sambucus caerulea, and Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea. Recently, elderberries have been shifted from one family (honeysuckles) to another (Viburnaceae). Some say the genus has been oversplit into more species names than there are species—maybe because it’s so variable in its growth forms, patterns, colors, sizes, and geographic range. You might say the elderberry is too iconic to be contained by categories—though science will keep trying its best. ◆

Alison S. Pollack

Alexander S. Kunz

Under the Skin

It is early summer in Oakland, which means that soon I will be able to get my hands on as many tomatoes as I want. I will eat them with olive oil and salt. On salads. As sauce. The farmers market is only a few blocks away, and I will walk there with a two-gallon tote. This, even though I know what comes of tomatoes in my orbit. Most of my tomatoes will go, I admit, guiltily, uneaten to the back of the fridge. Eventually, eating them will become a kind of punishment for excess. A daily confrontation with sweet, exuberant abundance and its other side—greed, waste—and my complicity in it all. How can I not sink myself, elbows deep, into the luscious tomato in its season?

It is not that I take tomatoes for granted. I was visiting my East Coast family during winter break, and was making salad for dinner. My sister had a pint of cherry tomatoes. I bit into one of the small, hard, pale things. I spat it out. It was sour and watery, with a faint chemical aftertaste. “Your tomatoes have all gone bad,” I told her. “There is something terribly wrong with your tomatoes.”

She ate one. “This is what tomatoes taste like. You have been on the West Coast too long.”

My first summer in Oakland, years ago, a new neighbor offered to help me plant some tomatoes. I had just finished law school and begun a fellowship with an advocacy organization led by formerly incarcerated people. We were co-counsel in a lawsuit, Ashker v. Brown, part of a larger protest movement against solitary confinement that began in 2011 with a series of hunger strikes. A movement to remind us on the outside about food and resistance, food and freedom. I wanted to connect with food in this new home of mine—a place of wealth and abundance, protest and prisons—and I thought growing a garden could be a way to do that.

We planted a handful of seeds in my backyard, between the angel’s-trumpet and the tree collards. Not everything that we planted survived. But some weeks later, I saw pale green buds with yellow flowers. Then hard green globes. Red and orange fruit! Anyone who has grown their first edible plant knows that no tomato will ever be as delicious as those tomatoes. Food and resistance, I thought, might be as simple and sweet as growing your own tomato plant.

But there is growing a handful of tomatoes, and then there is growing tomatoes. I worked for a few seasons as a market hand for Riverdog Farm. In late July, after dozens of farmworkers planted and harvested, then packed produce onto the truck, we would need extra helpers just to unload tomatoes: Early Girls, Sungolds, Gold Nuggets, Brandywines, Marvel Stripes, and Green Zebras. At the end of the night, the lot was slippery with squashed tomatoes, and the farmer would rumble home, to begin again at dawn.

These luscious tomatoes are the descendants of blueberry-size wild tomatoes from South America. They were domesticated likely in Mexico before being brought, probably by Spanish merchants and colonists, to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and to North America by the 18th century. By the 1970s, California farms were producing 80 percent of tomatoes grown in the United States. Today, those farms are still worked for low wages, under harsh conditions, by people who have migrated north from Mexico and Central America.

These inbred domestic tomatoes, even our beloved local heirlooms, have lost many of the genes belonging to their wild cousins. As a result, they can be more vulnerable to disease, drought, pests, and other climate change impacts. This makes farmers’ work ever more difficult and tenuous. Tomatoes are sweet, yes. But the tomato industry is relentless.

This is all to explain, to excuse, to justify myself each summer when I yearn for bucketfuls of tomatoes that I could not possibly eat. It is that I yearn to hold large unwieldy systems, within a space small enough to feel them.

Tomatoes are the works of days and hands and places I can never fully touch. But I can touch the lone tomato. Better, I can touch tons of tomatoes. I can hold them in my arms, I can tuck them into my mouth. I can try to turn them into something else again—a body, life, reckless abundance. ◆

Look Here

A farewell from our arts columnist.

“H

umans are too big,” Mill Valley–based artist Sarah Bird told me, paraphrasing the philosopher Donna Haraway, in a 2019 interview for this column.

“We’ve consumed too many of the resources of the rest of our web of being.” Bird hoped to comment on human overconsumption by projecting a photograph of a redwood tree somewhere in the urban environment—at full scale.

One night this April, Bird achieved it. A glimmering visage of one of these giants appeared, for 90 minutes, on the San Francisco Ferry Building’s 245-foot-tall clock tower. Temporarily, Bird brought together the architectural and the arboreal. Bird isn’t trying to replace our experiences in the forest. Rather, she seeks to give us an additional perspective; it is difficult to experience the whole of a redwood from the forest floor. But Bird lets us glimpse the tree’s immensity. Perhaps humility or awe follows.

Bird’s drive to shift her viewers’ perspective has been a recurring theme in the dozens of conversations I’ve had with visual artists, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, and architects since this column launched in 2018. Through their work, I saw how art can transform our understanding of the natural world, or our relationship with it. In this final installment of the column, I look back at some of the art that stayed with me.

Many of these artists compel us to reexamine the present more carefully. One of my first interviews was with artist Tanja Geis, who also holds a master’s in marine and coastal management and makes place-based video art, drawings, and sculptures, often focused on marine environments. Geis argued that while scientific data often doesn’t result in changed behaviors, art can help us pay attention to the world, thereby transforming our perspective or helping us empathize. Musician Cheryl E. Leonard, who plays rocks and shells as instruments and records the sound of thawing lakes, hopes that her music encourages listeners to slow down and attend to nature’s music around us. In these examples, art is a beacon or a magnifying glass— choose your metaphor—that highlights the treasures around us.

This kind of attentiveness takes

time to bear fruit. Musician Ellen Reid worked with Kronos Quartet and other musicians to create Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled app (available through June 2024) that plays location-specific music as one walks around Golden Gate Park. The result is a unique soundtrack tailored to one’s own walk through the park. Thinking of Golden Gate Park as a work of art, Reid says the app can help people slow down so that they can “see more of the details of the existing work of art.”

Others make art and architecture that look toward the future. Researchers at California College of the Arts and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories created the Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab, an experimental vessel tasked with addressing sea level rise. The undulating vessel, about the size of a small car, gives researchers insights into how underwater fouling communities—invertebrate hangers-on that attach themselves to the lab—can help absorb and dissipate energy from waves during storms. The Float Lab seeks a vision for adaptation driven by creative design. These researchers ask how design can make coastal communities safe in the future.

In her 2022 exhibition at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, Elisheva Biernoff demonstrates how art can aspire to the utopian. Her interactive exhibition gave visitors the opportunity to imagine their own vision for a local wetlands restoration project—letting them move magnets of local flora and fauna, or agricultural and architectural elements, around on the landscape. By providing the elements of a potential environment, Biernoff makes a case for democratic participation in restoration and land use.

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These artists recognize that art alone is not enough to heal our planet and communities. Art is nonetheless limitless in its power to reorient and inspire. In her bold abstract landscape paintings, African American painter Shara Mays honors, and reimagines, her ancestors’ relationship with the land. In her work, art and nature come together to envision the conditions for a better world. She told me that “by painting landscapes, I was paying homage to the people in my life who deserve transcendence, beyond the limitations of racism that they faced when they were alive.” Mays described painting as an act of freedom in itself. “I have no restrictions in my practice, and that’s because this is my space.” ◆

Matthew Harrison Tedford

Sarah Bird

Branch Manager

Tree-trimming is art, done with chainsaws.

Left to its own devices, a tree will prune itself. It will ruthlessly drop lower branches in the quest to harvest maximal sunlight and will deaccession large chunks of personal real estate during times of botanical crisis. In cities, which teem with soft humans and their crushable objects, tree pruners (who focus on tree health) and trimmers (who also serve the gods of aesthetics) mediate between a tree’s goals and the community at large.

The best part of pruning is the trees, says Joe Lamb, who has been doing it ever since he was a film student at San Francisco State in the 1980s. Back then, the work was “a temporary thing, just to stay alive.” But the architecture of trees proved endlessly fascinating, as was the problem of how to edit them. Up in a tree, you can often only see the branches right in front of you. The ability to extrapolate from those branches to the whole of an entire tree is both a skill and something that can’t entirely be taught. Another best part: the coworkers. In some countries, becoming a professional tree trimmer is preceded by years of training in arboriculture. In the U.S., for better or worse, it may be preceded by someone asking you if you think you could prune that tree. This low barrier to entry and a not-awful hourly wage attracts people across lines of race, class, culture, and language (fluency in Spanish is helpful). Coworkers may be arborists, college kids, or people sans formal schooling. Some trimmers migrate on to more lucrative, less physically demanding jobs in urban forestry. Others, like Lamb, stay for decades.

It’s dangerous work , shimmying up a tree and spending hours up there with nothing but a chainsaw for company. The loosey-goosey safety practices of Lamb’s youth were supplanted years ago by more rigorous protocols, but Lamb has hearing aids in both ears due to youthful inattentiveness to ear protection. People who stick with the job are the kind who look out for others—if you’re the one up in the tree with

the saw, you’re also the one who gets your lunch hoisted up so you can eat your sandwich with the birds and squirrels.

The worst part of trimming is the people who fight over trees. Lamb is occasionally brought in to trim when one neighbor sues another whose tree is blocking a view of something said neighbor would like to look at. Feelings ride high when parties might be spending six figures in legal fees. Lamb likes his clients to be happy. But, he says, “at the end of a view pruning, usually you’re successful if both people are unhappy, because you’ve had a meeting between their extreme desires.”

To be a tree pruner, says Lamb, start pruning trees. Look for entry-level jobs like “groundskeeper.” Jobs are plentiful, and likely to increase with the $42 million worth of tree cover coming to the Bay Area

via the Inflation Reduction Act . Much of that money is aimed at low-income areas where trees have been on the decline , despite their proven ability to improve local air quality and keep temperatures down. “As everything starts heating up, it’s going to be critically important to keep our urban forests healthy,” says Lamb. “It’s a beautiful profession I think people should consider.”

—H.R. Smith

GETTING STARTED

Pay is $20–$40 per hour depending on skill, perhaps more if you own the business. Work requires comfort with heights, power tools, and physical labor; diplomacy is a plus. Courses in arboriculture, like at City College, Merritt College, or Foothill, can be a good way in.

A black bear (Ursus americanus) in Kings Canyon National Park, California.

by the

BearsBlack Bay

For the first time in history, black bears are living in North Bay counties, occupying an ecological niche once filled by grizzlies.

by kim todd

On a gray early March morning in Sonoma County, everything is dripping. Somewhere, out of sight, in hollow trees and rocky caves, tiny American black bear cubs nurse in the dark. Born at less than a pound only a few weeks before, they won’t emerge until spring. But adults—ones that haven’t given birth this year— might be out and about, turning over logs, poking at anthills. In this temperate climate, coastal bears don’t hibernate like their high-country cousins. Food is plentiful all year round; there’s no need to sleep away the thin months.

So even in early spring, snow still deep in the Sierra, we are hoping to see one.

The road up the mountain at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park is washed out. Meghan Walla-Murphy, an ecologist and expert tracker, hops out of the ATV where the pavement ends and starts looking for evidence indecipherable to a novice. Signs might include bear scat laced with grass, saplings with the tops snapped off, trunks that have been used as back scratchers. They are hard to see: camera traps have captured hundreds of images, but park manager John Roney says there have only been five in-person sightings. Walla-Murphy inspects the post of a barbed wire fence. Nothing.

A little farther, a power pole tilts at a steep angle. Here, the wood is battered, marked by deep, horizontal gouges. “All of this is bear scratch marks, bear claws,” Walla-Murphy points out to me. Bites, too, she thinks. Brown hairs are stuck in the splinters.

A decade ago, bears were a rare sighting in the North Bay. When a wildlife camera, newly installed near staff housing in the park, recorded one ambling by, it was thought to be a wide-ranging individual just passing through. Then, one August night in 2016, the camera caught not one, but three pairs of glowing eyes. Animals took shape—round ears; long, low back. Clearly, Ursus americanus. The mother bear neared, then veered off camera, closely followed by a second, much smaller, while the third, a lollygagger, stopped to inhale some scent in the dirt. The family indicated

bears were not visiting but living in the park.

In response, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), state parks, winegrowers, ranchers, the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center, the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, and others formed the North Bay Bear Collaborative to learn more about the newcomers and plan for their arrival. Walla-Murphy is the lead scientist.

Throughout the Bay Area, black bear sightings are increasing.

Last summer, a black bear stopped in the front yard of a San Rafael home, sniffing a garbage bag, raiding the strawberries. Another wandered a sidewalk in Larkspur. Three years ago, a black bear climbed an oak in San Anselmo, licking its paws and drawing a crowd in midday.

It’s part of a trend all over the country: bears venturing into small towns and suburbs. They are hibernating under Connecticut decks and swimming in backyard pools in New Jersey. In one surreal occurrence, last year a black bear climbed a tree in Frontierland in Florida’s Disney World, a real wild animal exploring a fake version of the “Wild West.”

In January, one found its way into Sallie Miller’s yard, tucked between the road to Sugarloaf Ridge and roaring Sonoma Creek, forested hills rising on either side. Returning home, Miller found her beehives smashed, wood frames scattered on the pavement. She’d seen scat on the lawn, but this raid was a different level of interaction.

“There were live bees everywhere,” she remembers. She and her husband cleaned up and went out, only to come back to find the bear had been back, making even more of a mess this time. “It was probably just hanging out on the hill, watching us,” she says.

Finally, they moved the remaining hives right by the house, thinking the bear wouldn’t venture so close. But they woke at 1:30 a.m. to find a bear in the carport. Banging pots and yelling got it to flee, and not long after, rains swelled the creek. “It hasn’t been back,” Miller says. But the trees on the other side of the water connect to 12,000 acres of public lands and large estates with few people: good bear country.

Much remains a mystery. What led to increased numbers? Maybe the bears are spreading from bear-rich counties like Mendocino as the overall bear population in California grows, up from between 10,000 and 15,000 in the early 1980s to roughly 65,400 today (though it is hard to compare precisely, as counting methods have changed). Maybe it’s a response to humans building deeper into wildlife habitat in the North Bay. Or it could be the recent catastrophic wildfires. Climate change alters the availability of food, from seeds to ants to trout, possibly pushing bears closer into the suburbs.

Whatever the cause, how will this influx of large omnivores affect the ecosystem of the North Bay?

A black bear (Ursus americanus) in Kings Canyon National Park. In one surreal occurrence, last year a black bear climbed a tree in Frontierland in Florida’s Disney World, a real wild animal exploring a fake version of the “Wild West.”

“Black bears are common and well-studied everywhere and we still know so little about them,” says John Roney, park manager at Sugarloaf Ridge.

In an effort to answer some of these questions, starting this summer CDFW will satellite-collar bears in Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Solano counties, aiming for eight males and eight females. Biologists will document where the bears are roaming, where they are crossing roads that might put them in danger, the location of den sites. Then, by placing cameras on dens, they will estimate numbers of cubs.

“It just seems like it’s a good time to study this species,” says Stacy Martinelli, the environmental scientist for CDFW running the satellite collar study. “It’s such

a big, charismatic, wonderful animal.” As they move south, though, toward the San Francisco Bay, the bears will eventually run out of forest and, increasingly, into people. “The more that we’re in their space, there’s an increased likelihood that we’re going to encounter them,” Martinelli says. More knowledge may keep trouble at bay; if the state knows the bears’ travel routes, for instance, it can work with landowners and Caltrans to develop wildlife corridors.

In addition, ongoing DNA studies by the North Bay Bear Collaborative, where volunteers collect scat and send it to a lab at UC Davis for analysis, will suggest numbers of individual bears, genetic relationships between them, and where they are coming from. Estimates based on these studies put about 70 individual black bears in Napa and Sonoma counties, with two or three in Sugarloaf Ridge State Park. Marin County results will be available later this summer.

One clue to how the black bear might fare in the region comes from the past. The Bay Area used to be teeming with bears, but most weren’t black bears. They were California grizzlies. Reports have them running down a hill on the Peninsula, pacing near Strawberry Creek in what would become Berkeley, leaving tracks at Mount Diablo. Nineteenth-century zoologist C. Hart Merriam divided the California Grizzly into seven subspecies, three of which met at San Francisco Bay: the California Coast Grizzly, the Tejon Grizzly, the Klamath Grizzly. (Now all grizzlies are thought to be the same subspecies of brown bear: Ursus arctos horribilis.) The final wild California grizzly was seen 100 years ago, in 1924, by a cattle rancher near Sequoia National Park. “It was the biggest thing I ever saw— bigger than any cow, and looked as though sprinkled all over with snow,” claimed Alfred Hengst. Black bears, who never lived in this area historically in any abundance, are just walking in their mighty footsteps.

While grizzlies still roamed the state, most black bears near San Francisco were likely captives. An ad in the San Francisco Examiner in 1888 read, “Wanted—A BLACK BEAR CUB, NOT more than one year old; must have fine coat and be gentle.” An Oakland Post Enquirer article from 1928 announced

“Rampaging Bear Gets New Owner” and told the story of 5-month-old Betty, “probably the only bear in Berkeley that is not a football player,” who escaped. She knocked over a bunch of trash cans and was then adopted by the police officer who tracked her down.

Black bears are smaller and shyer than grizzlies. They love the forest while grizzlies prefer open meadows and chaparral but, in ways, they play a similar ecological role.

Omnivores, black bears eat voraciously and expansively, everything from cow parsnip roots to yellow jackets to clover. In Florida, bold ones go after alligator eggs. In California vineyards, refined ones graze on pricey grapes. Though they don’t often hunt large animals, they will take available meat. One wildlife camera at Sugarloaf, trained on a dead deer, caught a bear swiping it like it was shoplifting jeans at the Gap and then disappearing into the woods. And, if they can find them, they dine on half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches, granola bar crumbs, cold French fries.

In this, they are like the grizzly, of whom

and sign: A good example of a black bear’s right front paw track; black bears claw at tree trunks, sometimes scraping away the bark; piles of their sometimes-tubular shaped scat changes in appearance with the bear’s recent meal; black bear fur can range in color from white to cinnamon to black and most shades in between.

John Muir commented, “To him, almost everything is food except granite.”

Bears are fierce and curious, clumsy yet graceful. (Some words just seem made for bear movement—”amble,” “lumber.”) With a roughly human shape and larger-than human size, they inspire affection and fear. As a result, bears are embraced symbolically (see: teddy bears) but often are not tolerated in actuality (see: the extinction of the California grizzly). Grizzly Peak Boulevard, Bear Valley in Marin, Grizzly Island in Suisun Bay—bears’ power lingers in names and pictures even when the animals are absent. Nowhere is this clearer than on the UC Berkeley campus. Here bears are everywhere: bear statues, bears on T-shirts, bears on notebooks. The California state flag, with its big grizzly, flies over it all.

The Bay Area has seen a wave of new and returning species in addition to bear in recent years: osprey, peregrine falcons, gray fox, coyotes. Though we might not know the exact reasons, the influx is no mystery at all, according to Christopher Schell, a UC Berke-

ley ecologist who studies urban carnivores.

“Most cities, like this one, are situated on purpose on top of biodiversity hotspots,” Schell says. As if to underscore his point, a hummingbird darts outside the second-story window of his office, between a eucalyptus grove and redwoods along the creek. Animals of all kinds are attracted to spots with plentiful water, fertile soil. “We need the same types of resources that many of these other species need.”

And when carnivores come in, they change the landscape around them. This effect is called the “landscape of fear.”

“Having bears or pumas or wolves on the landscape dictates where deer go,” Schell says. For example, one study showed that west of the Sierra Crest, where large populations of black bear prey on mule deer fawns, fewer deer migrate to that bear-dense summer range. Deterred from the west side, many feed on the east side instead. Changes in deer behavior like this have far-reaching results. “They’re not going to overgraze on native plants and vegetation. And if they

Track

don’t do that, then the native plants and vegetation can sustain a greater diversity of birds, which can then eat and sustain a greater diversity of invertebrates.”

A broad diet and wandering ways make black bears and grizzlies important seed dispersers, often in cooperation with other species. One study in the Carson Range of Nevada showed that deer mice nabbed chokecherry, Sierra coffeeberry, and red osier dogwood seeds from black bear scat and buried them. The ones they forgot to retrieve, germinated. Bears also enrich the soil; both species haul migrating salmon out of the rivers and drag them into the woods or eat them on the bank, then ramble away to defecate, spreading marine nutrients and fertilizer into the forest.

Carnivores change the spaces where they live and, in turn, these spaces alter carnivores, particularly those lured by garbage. “Eating more anthropogenic foods changes stress physiology, gut microbiome, how bold the animal is,” Schell says. Black bears with easy access to trash grow bigger and have more cubs. Paradoxically, though, these garbage-filled areas can be “sinks.” They draw bears with the temptation of easy calories, but car crashes and conflict with humans (which can result in removal or killing) keep numbers low.

Humans are part of the ecosystem incoming black bears will have to navigate. And perhaps our most dramatic effect on animal lives comes through the stories we tell. Newspaper accounts and memoirs portrayed California grizzlies as ferocious man-eaters and sheep stealers, but a recent study by UC Santa Barbara professor Peter Alagona analyzed teeth and bones to show that, like black bears, grizzlies ate mostly plants. The arrival of the Spanish and their livestock in 1542 prompted a change in diet, though only from 10 percent meat to up to 26 percent. But the lore of huge, bloodthirsty predators and the glory of besting such a monstrous creature provided fuel for killing them off.

An actual bear roaming the Berkeley campus, sizing up the statuary, seems a long way from likely. The East Bay and South Bay don’t have breeding populations, according to John Krause, senior environmental scien-

tist supervisor with CDFW, though the most recent draft of the state’s Black Bear Conservation Plan shows suitable bear habitat in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range. But even bears several valleys over pose interesting questions about the nature of nature, Schell says. “It would restart this conversation around why we think we’re separate from it when we live in the city.”

One of the most important goals of the North Bay Bear Collaborative, according to Walla-Murphy, is rebuilding a “bear culture,” reframing our stories and expectations: “We don’t remember how to live with these critters anymore.” Rectifying this involves learning from local tribes and other communities that have coexisted with bears for a long time, she says.

Over the past three years, as part of an effort to pass on knowledge about black bears to its youth, the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians has conducted a monitoring program on the Kashia Coastal Reserve and the Stewarts Point Rancheria. Interns complete vegetation transects, install wildlife cameras, and collect seeds for habitat restoration projects. In addition, according to Nina Hapner, director of environmental planning for the Kashia Band, they learn about black bear habits and habitat, needs, and importance in the system. The interns also interview family members or other tribal members about the tribe’s bear history and understanding.

The interns didn’t glimpse a bear until the third year, recalls Hapner, but when they did, it made an impression: “Everybody knew that we have bears up on the Kashia Coastal Reserve…but we just hadn’t seen one. And then we see this guy lumbering along, and it was like: Yes!”

Observations like these mean they are not only learning about bears but from them. “Basically, what a bear eats, we can eat,” Hapner said. “Fish, berries, some plants when they’re young. They teach us things if you watch, if you pay attention.”

She adds, “Just opening your eyes and being open to that instead of being fearful…That’s really important.”

After the bear ransacked Miller’s beehives, Walla-Murphy and Roney stopped by and advised her on how to avoid another

visit. Electric fencing would keep the hives safe, as would, possibly, planting species bears love, like manzanita, on the far side of the creek. If bears show up again, banging pots and pans should scare them away. Roney sent her an air horn. In general, those living in bear country should protect their trash and compost, bring in bird feeders, keep pets inside, pick up windfall from fruit trees. Anything smelly should be secured. The most important thing is to establish a boundary and defend it, says Walla-Murphy: “The bears will respect the boundaries if we have the boundaries, but if we don’t, they’re going to push back.”

Back at Sugarloaf Ridge, we begin to walk toward the old ranch where the first bear was caught on camera. Walla-Murphy strides through the grass, eyes to the ground, pointing out the swirl of a bear track, clipped stalks where a bear could have grazed. She scrambles up a hillside to see whether a bear might have taken this route to the abandoned orchard. Wildfires in 2017 and 2020 burned much of the park and all the old ranch buildings used as staff housing. This left a fence that no longer fences anything in or out. A power line without electricity. A mailbox on a pole that gets no letters.  With a few trees left in the orchard—apple, pear, persimmon—it’s a wildlife playground now.

In a clearing where the buildings used to be, bright yellow daffodils mark gardens of previous inhabitants. A huge live oak stands, half burned and flourishing. We continue up the trail, ducking under and scrambling over trees downed in the recent atmospheric river that swept up the coast. Finally, Walla-Murphy comes upon a bear bed, a divot under a scorched conifer. Bears love the bases of big trees like this, the options of advancing down the hill, of retreating up the trunk. She’s never seen a bear in this park, but evidence is all around. And this morning, filled with reedy birdsong and the rushing water of Bear Creek, after an absence of a century, bears are once again possible. ◆

Support for this article was provided by the March Conservation Fund.

In the Name of Eelgrass

To protect the eelgrass meadows in Richardson Bay, the anchor-out era near Sausalito is coming to a close. by anushuya thapa

From a single blade of eelgrass, life overflows. Amphipods build tiny hollow tube-homes on it, while marine snails eat it, and nudibranchs travel its length in search of prey. Small eelgrass sea hares graze epiphytes attached to the blades and lay their yellow eggs inside transparent jelly-like blobs on the thick green of the grass. Amid the meadows, pipefish hide and graceful rock crabs scavenge, and in the fall and spring, giant schools of silvery Pacific herring enter the San Francisco Bay, the end point of their weekslong annual migration. On the eelgrass, they deposit clumpy beads of yellow roe on the order of hundreds of millions, like underwater honey drops. Or the eggs must taste that way to the thousands of birds that join the melee of feasting. Cormorants and loons dive after flashes of fish. Gulls circle above. Rafts of scaups, buffleheads, and more stretch across the water feeding on roe. During a spawn event, which can last for a few hours or several days, herring milt turns Bay waters a lighter hue.

Even when the herring aren’t running, the eelgrass beds teem with food. Paige Fernandez remembers kayaking just off the shore of Sausalito. She was paddling over an eelgrass bed, likely brimming with slugs and tiny crustaceans—which were, from the surface, invisible to her. But she could see the harbor seals. And one in particular kept bobbing its head up over the waves, closer and closer. Now a program manager at Richardson Bay Audubon Center, Fernandez says it was “definitely one of the coolest encounters I’ve had in the Bay.” The surfacing seal’s forwardness surprised her, but in retrospect it made sense: she was above a bed of eelgrass. “That’s where they can find little snacks to munch

on.” They go where the eelgrass goes—and so does a host of other marine life.

Anchor-out vessels on Richardson Bay float above meadows of eelgrass (Zostera marina) that are home to bay pipefish (Syngnathus leptorhynchus) and graceful rock crabs (Cancer gracilis).

To give shelter and food to the species that rely on it, eelgrass needs to thrive. And in Richardson Bay, which lies between Sausalito and Tiburon in Marin County, dozens of acres of eelgrass are tangled in with the anchor chains of dozens of boats that often float just five feet above the meadows. When tides shift, the ground tackle—that is, any equipment used to anchor the boat, usually a long and heavy chain—is yanked by the pull of the vessel. In circular, sweeping motions, the chain slices the eelgrass rhizomes, the lateral tubes from which the shoots and roots grow. The chains and ground tackle erode the sediment, creating a depression in the substrate. After years of scraping, a dead zone forms, cleared of eelgrass, where shoots don’t take root. From above, boats hover over what look like ghostly crop circles, some half an acre in size, called mooring scars. There are almost 80 acres of scarring in Richardson Bay.

In the spring and early summer of 2024, researchers from San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center, restoration workers with environmental consulting firm Merkel & Associates, and Audubon volunteers and staff—including Fernandez—began replanting eelgrass in the Richardson Bay mooring scars thanks to a $2.8 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency; the grant is part of an EPA program funded by the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Over the course of four

years, the project aims to restore 15 acres of eelgrass, each acre allowing more life to bloom. But for workers to restore eelgrass in these scars, the anchors causing them must also be removed. “It is well demonstrated that eelgrass and anchoring are incompatible throughout the world,” says Rebecca Schwartz Lesberg, president of Coastal Policy Solutions, who was awarded the EPA grant. “Richardson Bay was really behind the times in terms of how to manage this natural resource conflict.”

In Richardson Bay, these long, heavy anchor chains are often attached to boats with people living on them— the so-called “anchor-outs,” people who have spent decades building their lives on the water, on their boats, and on the premise of free anchorage. Born of the ‘60s counterculture, the community began with artists

Bay Nature’s reporting project exploring the impacts of big federal money on our area.

and young people who were drawn to the scrap left by World War II’s Marinship shipyard, material they salvaged for boats and homes. It quickly grew into an on-the-shoreline, and on the margins, way of life that has included famous artists, like Shel Silverstein and Allen Ginsberg, but mostly those who are unknown, like Lisa McCracken, once a silk-mache artist, and her friend Peter, who she says snaps daily portraits of the Bay fog and cloudscape.

The lifestyle has been called many names: anchoring out, being a live-aboard, or, in McCracken’s younger days, living “on hook.” It comes with a degree of precarity, where a single storm or a faulty anchor might sink a vessel. Many anchor-outs drown, or their boats come loose and crash into shore or other boats. McCracken says about her life on the Bay for 30-plus years, surrounded by water, marine creatures, and in community with artists, “It’s a privilege and a blessing.” And for many who took to the Bay’s waters, then and now, the alternative to life on their boats is homelessness.

But after six decades, the anchor-out era is coming to an end, in part to protect eelgrass habitat from mooring scars. The number of anchor-out vessels in Richardson Bay has dropped from over 200 in 2018 to about 32 today. The authorities that regulate Richardson Bay and the entirety of the San Francisco Bay began in 2019 to focus on upholding ordinances that have long been on the books but were rarely enforced. As a result, anchor-outs have been evicted and left homeless and unoccupied boats crushed. The last of them have been ordered to leave the zone where eelgrass grows by this October and the water entirely by 2026. Authorities are offering housing to some as an incentive to meet the deadline.

Richardson Bay eelgrass beds naturally change over time. Notice the circles of anchor damage.

Restoring eelgrass

To McCracken, and other anchor-outs, eelgrass restoration is the latest excuse employed by authorities in their long-standing campaign to rid the water of her community. And her opinion is partly well-founded. There are examples and studies of eelgrass thriving when the mooring scar-causing chains are replaced with “conservation moorings.” These moorings, used around the world, are affixed to the seafloor, eliminating the dragging chain that creates mooring scars. Despite a 2019 feasibility study recommending eelgrass-friendly moorings in Richardson Bay, environmental groups, regulatory agencies, and cities pursued a more stringent option: remove all anchored-out vehicles from Richardson Bay eelgrass beds, in perpetuity.

But during public meetings in the years following the feasibility study, local residents voiced concerns—they felt environmental restoration was clashing with the needs of the region’s most vulnerable. “This will have huge effects,” reads a public comment by “Elias” in 2020. “What about the young children who will learn of this and not feel comfortable working with nature organizations because of their relationship with poor people?” He equated it with “forced migration perpetuated by environmentalism.” David Schonbrunn, a Sausalito resident, commented in a 2021 meeting that opting to remove anchoring instead of choosing mooring systems that would let the anchor-out community and eelgrass coexist was “a question of policy, not science.”

It’s a bright windy day in March, and Jordan Volker is steering a motorboat into Richardson Bay. He’s a field operations manager for Merkel & Associates, which has published articles and field reports on eelgrass for 30 years and run eelgrass surveys in the area for decades. The company’s 2014 survey found a massive die-off in Bay eelgrass caused by a marine heat wave. To repair the loss, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded a 75-acre eelgrass restoration project that’s ongoing and aligns with the Bay Area’s Subtidal Habitat Goals. The 2010 goals, in an ambitious 208page document, lay out a vision to study, protect, and restore an

From left: An anchor-out boat; aerial image of eelgrass in Richardson Bay showing anchor damage in 2017; researcher Jordon Volker monitors eelgrass in the Bay.

array of subtidal habitats, including eelgrass and oyster reefs. The regional effort brought together the California State Coastal Conservancy, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), San Francisco Estuary Partnership, the California Ocean Protection Council, and NOAA, giving them a common framework to achieve a healthier Bay.

Collectively, the agencies set a goal of restoring up to 8,000 acres of eelgrass by 2060—latest counts say there’s a maximum of 5,000 acres in the Bay. Any added acres would mean more habitat for herring and birds, at a time when waterbird data has grown grim. Scoters, for one, saw a 50 percent decline around the second half of the 20th century, according to a Sea Duck Joint Venture report. And that’s for their populations across the whole Pacific Flyway—local numbers are worse. Both greater and lesser scaup have declined by a similar amount, and horned grebes and buffleheads, two beloved Bay Area visitors, have also suffered. “It’s all part of one big food web,” says Casey Skinner, program director at Richardson Bay Audubon. “And if we lose eelgrass, we lose everything.”

Eelgrass’s benefits go beyond ecology. The beds act as sentinels of the Bay, trapping sediment, storing greenhouse gases, and protecting against wave action. Threats to eelgrass, too, are multifold. In 2005, for example, sediment that broke loose smothered nearby eelgrass beds, causing a die-off in subsequent years. Built-out marinas, ports, and wharves are potential stressors, too. They can shade out the eelgrass underneath, preventing meadows from growing. And, in addition to mooring scars, anchor-out vessels can damage the water quality if occupants mismanage waste—although 2018 reports show water quality has been improving overall in Richardson Bay. “Submerged habitats truly need ongoing championing because it is so easy to ignore. They’re out of sight out of mind,” says Marilyn Latta, a project manager at the California State Coastal Conservancy, who helped develop the goals for eelgrass restoration.

Keith Merkel, the principal consultant of Merkel & Associates, has been (often literally) knee-deep in eelgrass since restoration efforts began in the Bay Area, conducting Bay-wide surveys of eelgrass on three separate occasions. And the one thing he’s learned?

Richardson Bay is vital for eelgrass. It contains the second-largest eelgrass bed in San Francisco Bay and is the single most important spawning area for Pacific herring in the estuary. “Richardson Bay is protected against many of the things that fluctuate quite a bit,” Merkel says.

In the South Bay and Oakland, that factor is turbidity—too-dark waters, without enough sunlight. In the North Bay, too much fresh water discharges from the Delta. And around the Pacific Coast, the wind blows east, so eelgrass seeds fail to disperse. Yet Richardson Bay has “so much eelgrass that we never lose 100 percent of the eelgrass in [it],” he adds. The “core eelgrass bed”—areas that lie at the ideal depths for the plant to thrive and should support close to 100 percent eelgrass cover—include the mooring scars. If restored, Merkel says, this area will consistently flourish. It’s the kind of priority restoration area that the Subtidal Habitat Goals have highlighted. It took research to prove restoration in the anchor scars was even possible. NOAA funded the first small-scale project to test the potential in 2021. Even this 2.5-acre effort, Merkel says, got off the ground only after many anchored-out vessels had been removed. NOAA won’t fund more restoration, he says, unless authorities can demonstrate there’s little risk of anchors being dropped again.

Back inside the motorboat’s cabin, where Jordan Volker works, things are dark, and he has both hands on the wheel to navigate the churning, unruly water. On the monitors above, he shoots glances at two screens that give readings from the Bay underneath. The boat pumps a sonic signal into the waves below—and returns a spiky, pulsing graph. Because eelgrass blades store oxygen in their cells, they are less dense than the surrounding water, so they return a telltale “bump” to Volker’s machine, locating the meadows.

Volker has been restoring eelgrass in Richardson Bay for Merkel for so long that he can recognize some of the beds he’s planted just from the dots on the graph. “It always brings a big smile on my face when I drive over and go, ‘Ho! Look at all that grass.’” Now he is dropping markers on a digital map, locating anchored-out boats and mooring scars, data that will inform where to plant next.

Once they choose a spot, Volker and others plant during low

tides—restoration crews up to their hips in Bay water, the boats of the anchor-outs looming behind. Volker says folks on the water and those from the land used to meet at some kind of a shore-y middle ground. An anchor-out near a cluster of volunteers might say hello from their deck and play music. “While we’re planting a mooring scar, people that are nearby say, ‘What radio station do you want to listen to?’ and [start] cranking their radio up,” he says. Often, they’d be smiling, waving, and curious about the restoration effort going on in their backyard waters. “Some of the anchor-outs understand, ‘oh yeah, eelgrass is an important thing. I don’t want to harm eelgrass. I just want to live,’” Volker says.

Lisa McCracken has called Richardson Bay home for three decades. She lives aboard Evolution and spends her time helping other anchor-outs.

But things are different now that people know their lifestyle is under threat. There are fewer friendly faces when he cruises the water. “Some of the anchorouts, I think, see a survey vessel, or see a bunch of college kids coming in with grass in their hands, as a threat.” As if on cue, our tiny survey vehicle weaves in close to an anchored-out boat, with a gray-haired man on his deck. Outside, Scott Borsum, Volker’s assistant for the day, greets the stranger. He returns our “hi” with a “hello,” but, when asked for a picture, tosses his hands to the air, turns away, and shakes his head no.

Borsum’s new to restoration work—this project is his first field job since getting his PhD. Already, though, he feels like he’s watching a “microcosm” of the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area unfold, wherein people are pushed out into alternate lifestyles by the cost of living or decades’ worth of other factors, then become the object of long and drawn-out political debate over who can use public spaces and for what. “It becomes a user-rights issue,” he says. “Who gets the right to the Bay?”

Volker says he’s glad he’s not the one deciding. Unlike the “policy side of things,” he says, the eelgrass restoration is a peaceful, straightforward task. And the housing and what comes after is for other, more policy-savvy folks to decide. “It’s the side of the issue that I would not want to deal with,” Volker says. Borsum agrees: “Our job doesn’t constitute us solving that problem. It just constitutes us understanding the grass.”

Similar sentiments are echoed by project managers at Audubon, another of the EPA grant beneficiaries, who say their “area of expertise” is the eelgrass, though noting that they favor fair housing. The researchers at SFSU involved in the long-term monitoring of the grass also declined to comment on the anchor-outs. On the water, the restoration crew’s survey boat and the anchor-outs are two ships that, both metaphorically and practically, pass each other by—leaving an uneasy silence rippling in their wake.

Living on the water

It’s an unusually calm day—no wind, great sun—when we set out in a kayak. We paddle across a boating channel, the thick on-the-water “highway” used by cargo vessels and traveling houseboats alike, to the waters where the last anchor-outs hold on.

We weave in between vessels, passing signs of life everywhere: on one boat, scuba gear hangs out to dry on a clothesline on deck; on another, smoke escapes a moka pot visible through a cabin window. Names like Irish Misty and Levity are hand-painted on the sides of boats big and small. Some are 15-foot sailboats with little to nothing in the way of rain shelter for their occupants. Others, like the mighty Evolution, a 50-foot powerboat, tower above our kayak. But the captain on its deck is Lisa McCracken, who is anything but forbidding. Her sand-brown hair is turning white against the sun, and she wears mismatched work gloves and a friendly, if squinting, smile. She greets us, but is too busy to chat long—there are always chores to be done on the anchorage, whether it’s changing oil in a generator or fixing a solar panel. When we come back another day, it’s 4 p.m. and McCracken’s still working—her friends are visiting, their presence evident by the skiffs tied to the back of her own. They’re trying to get a motor up and running, when she welcomes us aboard. A flimsy white ladder is the only way up. And landing zones are scarce in between the piles of decommissioned engines, old anchors, empty diesel cans, dusty life vests, tubes and piping, et cetera. McCracken, though, steps on and over them with ease—at times nimbly jumping up and sitting on railings to let us pass. “I tend to this place,” she says. Many of the objects aren’t hers—they’re things she’s rescued from the Bay. She points to an anchor, coiled up in its own chain, that sits in a corner. “That tends to disturb the bottom—these are anchors. These we have pulled up.”

McCracken, now 61, says she’d want to learn more about the eelgrass, if she could, and had a mind to send in samples to someone. “If you notice it, it’s getting gray,” she explains. “I want to understand the characteristics of it, the features.” She says she sees, studies, and notices things—like the pigeons and gulls that have made a nest on the boat’s roof. Or, occasionally, a dying bird adrift, which she’ll try to call in to local authorities. She doesn’t believe her boat does harm to eelgrass (and, given that it’s on a six-point mooring and not a blockand-chain anchor, it likely does less damage than others), or that the

harm she does is any greater than the waste generated by the city or the propellants of high-speed yachts and other boats that dock in Sausalito Yacht Harbor or any of the dozens of other harbors nearby. “To say that we are a problem, then every boat here is a problem.”

As we talk, the boat turns gently with the wind, a planet spinning, the sun hitting the inside from each angle in turn. Maybe, McCracken admits, she’s selfish for not wanting to give it up—a panoramic view of the Bay, who would? But more than the view, it’s the community she can’t bear to part with. It was fellow anchorouts who taught her how to live on the water. She recalls, laughing, when her first boat lost footing and slammed into a barge, and how the owner taught her the ropes of being a mariner. By now, she’s more than returned the favor: jumping in to help friends pull someone who was having health problems out of a boat. Or standing by the hospital bed of Craig, a longtime friend who, in gratitude and in passing, gifted her and her friend Steve Evolution.

These days, she wakes up and takes off in her skiff—looking for others on the anchorage who might need a hand, or a battery, or something she can offer. “I’ve held fast to anchor. I can’t even imagine being condemned to a room,” she says. “I don’t know what I would make of my day.” Besides, she doesn’t qualify for the housing and cash deal offered by local authorities, since she doesn’t own Evolution. Steve owns it, and according to reporting by the Pacific Sun, the program provides one housing voucher per boat.

“I don’t want the money,” she says, of the cash offer: $150 per foot of the boat. “I want to be left alone—you can build your paradise around me, okay?” Her voice rises as she speaks. “I’ll figure out some way to put a mirror up, so you don’t have to look at me if you don’t want to.”

In five months, however, she’ll have to leave the anchorage. Evolution doesn’t qualify for the Safe and Seaworthy program that would have allowed the boat to stay two years longer. McCracken says a caseworker is advocating for both her and Steve to be housed, but she isn’t sure where she’ll be five months from now, or if she’ll even want to go.

The policy fight

In the years leading up to 1985, no single agency existed to guide the use and conservation of Richardson Bay’s waters, so cities on its shores created and adopted a “special area plan” that stated, among many things, that “all anchor-outs should be removed from Richardson Bay.” Even then, nearby authorities felt the number of boats anchored offshore was growing.

To execute the plan, the Richardson Bay Regional Agency (RBRA) was formed, via a Joint Powers Agreement among Marin County and the cities of Mill Valley, Tiburon, Belvedere—and, formerly, Sausalito. The agency quickly passed an ordinance allowing transient vessels, such as cruisers from outside the Bay, to drop their anchors in designated areas for less than 72 hours. One section hugged the Sausalito shoreline; the other spanned the anchor-out area. It also states that permanently “living aboard” any vessel in the water is illegal—permits could be granted for 30 days, and potentially longer, if the harbor-

master “determined that no permanent residential use is intended.”

But enforcement proved difficult. The harbormaster at the time, Bill Price, spent 24 years trying to manage the growing number of anchor-out boats, says Tim Henry, a longtime sailor and Sausalito local. “He had no budget. He had to use volunteers. He had to fill out all the grants. They just never wanted to spend the money to deal with it.”

And then, in the wake of 2008’s Great Recession, things changed. The number of transient boats dropping anchor and largely staying put swelled to about 230 boats by 2015. In an interview with the Sausalito Historical Society, Price said he wondered if Richardson Bay’s free anchorage, which he loved, would have to shut down due to the sheer density of boats. Soon after, the City of Sausalito, fed up with the lack of enforcement, left the Richardson Bay Regional Agency.

Finally, in 2019, the State of California audited the SF Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), and its “failure to perform key responsibilities” was laid bare. Mooring scars in Richardson Bay were a central issue, according to the audit, which referenced details from an Audubon report. The state, concerned with how “violators,” like anchorouts, were damaging the Bay, ordered BCDC to fix the problem. The audit discussed possible amnesty for those violators and ways to better enforce the law to prevent new damages.

The boat turns gently with the wind, a planet spinning, the sun hitting the inside at each angle. McCracken wonders if she’s selfish for not wanting to give it up.

BCDC, in turn, put pressure on RBRA, triggering a flurry of actions: the agency commissioned Merkel & Associates to conduct the mooring feasibility study; commissioned Coastal Policy Solutions, Rebecca Shwartz Lesberg’s restoration company, to draft an eelgrass protection plan; and started negotiating an agreement to satisfy the enforcement needs of the BCDC.

But the RBRA had already been pursuing stricter enforcement. Before the audit, it had hired a new harbormaster, Curtis Havel. He reduced the total number of boats to about 71 in just two months. “It was terrorist tactics to start with,” says Drew Warner, an ex-anchor-out of 23 years, about Havel. Authorities would find an unoccupied boat, board it, tug it, and deliver it to the shipyard to be crushed. The harbormaster or the sheriff’s department would wait patiently for anchor-outs to leave their homes, Warner says, so that going ashore on grocery runs or for medicine might mean the destruction of an anchor-out’s property. The anchor-outs fought back, sometimes by filing restraining orders, sometimes throwing eggs at officers who got too close. “I was notorious for doing that,” Warner says.

At the same time, a homeless encampment formed on the waterfront in Sausalito; called Camp Cormorant, it became a rallying point for the anchor-out community and their supporters. McCracken’s friends sought shelter on Evolution after their boats

were seized, and the belongings of evicted anchor-outs, like generators and power tools, began to pile up on the vessel. Hostilities increased on the water. And while people’s boats were being seized and crushed at a nearby Army Corp yard—frequent spectacles that sometimes came down to clashes between police and anchor-outs—RBRA bimonthly meetings went on. In virtual Zoom rooms, amid a growing pandemic, RBRA board members, concerned citizens, and environmental activists deliberated over what to do next.

Initially, RBRA suggested removing anchor-outs over a span of 10 or 20 years, but Audubon California, Marin Audubon Society, and BCDC pushed back. They wanted the anchor-outs gone by a set deadline—Marin Audubon, in particular, argued for five years.

Marin Audubon solicited a study to survey the proposed mooring areas for birds and claimed that “the recommendation of Point Blue is that mooring not occur in any of the survey areas.” But Point Blue made no such recommendation.

Merkel & Associates’ 2019 mooring feasibility study greenlit the idea that conservation moorings, in clusters called mooring fields, could coexist with eelgrass. Because they are drilled into the seafloor and have a buoy attached to a floating cord, thus reducing their damage to marine life, conservation moorings (sometimes called eco-moorings) have been deployed worldwide, in waters from Tasmania to Massachusetts, with the aim of protecting marine habitat. In Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, such moorings were installed in areas with scars just like Richardson Bay’s. Though it was in a smaller restoration project, eelgrass was successfully replanted on 0.2 acres. In Moreton Bay, Australia, 16 acres were restored. Merkel & Associates suggested several locations—away from thicker eelgrass beds and with shelter from storms—for conservation moorings, one boat per mooring.

and wildlife by occupying space on the Bay, much the way development that extends the shoreline into the Bay is often considered fill.

For Marin Audubon, the safety of diving birds was paramount. Birds would contend with boats while foraging, risking injury and losing access to food, Audubon said. The Merkel study pointed to anecdotal videos of herring runs, showing birds foraging successfully in between the boats. The study conceded, however, that bird behavior with regard to moorings and boats was complicated: it would all depend on the size of herring spawns, the species at hand, the wave patterns, wind conditions, and more. Still, the survey authors believed the effects on birds would be minimal— after all, the report noted, Audubon’s sanctuary waters, a section of Richardson Bay closed to all boats during migration season, were right next to the proposed moorings.

It wasn’t enough. Marin Audubon solicited a study by Point Blue, a conservation science organization based in Marin, to survey the proposed mooring areas for birds, and claimed in a public letter presented at an April meeting that “the recommendation of Point Blue is that mooring not occur in any of the survey areas.” While Point Blue researchers documented 23 different species in the waters, the study did not investigate the potential impact of boats on the birds’ ability to forage. “We purposefully didn’t weigh in on the policy,” says Julian Wood, the lead researcher. “Supporting one policy or scenario over another was beyond the scope of that study.”

At the same time, Schwartz Lesberg was developing an eelgrass protection and management plan that eventually proposed a “protection zone” that would encompass 90 percent of all eelgrass beds and not allow moorings. This reduced the potential mooring space to just one-third of Richardson Bay’s historic anchorage acreage.

At public meetings, Marin Audubon Society opposed the idea, rejecting any mooring field, temporary or permanent, and regardless of the type of moorings. It also objected to any boat occupying space for too long. “It is obvious that anchor-outs are covering open water habitat,” reads a letter written by Barbara Salzman, then co-chair of the conservation committee of Marin Audubon. “Such use is considered fill by BCDC”—meaning boats confer an adverse impact on the public

Harbor seals regularly hunt for food in eelgrass meadows in Richardson Bay, as do birds, like cormorants, which dive for their food.

Finally, in August 2021, the BCDC and RBRA arrived at an agreement: all anchor-outs would be removed from Richardson Bay by 2026, an ambitious, five-year goal. Those with “safe and seaworthy vessel” status—boats that were up to code—could stay until then, but others, like Evolution, would need to leave earlier, by October 2024. BCDC still wanted a mooring field, as long as it was temporary and for moving boats away from the eelgrass sooner.

But when Sausalito residents concluded the hypothetical mooring field put boats too close to their businesses, they argued to nix the entire idea in the interest of public safety. “The attitude from the start was always just to kick the can down the road,” says Henry. No one wanted to deal with the problem, he says. It would

Henry’s also a longtime staff writer at Latitude 38, a Bay Area publication by and for sailors. The magazine’s founders dreamed of a 100-boat mooring field in Richardson Bay. “They looked at other places in California and they said, ‘Well, they have mooring fields. Why can’t we have one?’” The idea has circulated for the past 40 years, but never went anywhere. It was always difficult to answer the questions: who would fund it, who would oversee it, who would be liable.

After three years of discussion, on July 27, 2022, RBRA formally requested that BCDC drop the mooring field requirement—the cost, about $30,000 per mooring, was cited as a main reason, along with the claim that only a few of the anchor-outs boats had the required equipment to moor on such facilities in the first place. BCDC granted the request, and money meant for moorings went to pay anchorouts to give up their vessels, among other goals.

A bit before then, harbormaster Curtis Havel retired. In 2022, the City of Sausalito paid a $540,000 settlement to 30 homeless people in the anchor-outs’ waterfront camp—about $18,000 each—to get them to disperse.

After the mooring plan was dropped, and years of boat seizures, RBRA introduced its housing voucher program for the several dozen remaining anchor-outs in 2023. To date they’ve housed 11 people, with several more in the pipeline.

The housing deal

The housing offer is generous. RBRA received $3 million in state funds, secured by state senator Mike McGuire, whose district includes Marin County. For anchor-outs who own and give up their vessels, RBRA will “buy back” their boats at $150 per foot and help them navigate a housing process that grants them one year of housing on land. Eventually, the goal is to transition them to Section 8, a federal housing voucher program.

But it’s hard to pin down who qualifies. A service agreement between RBRA and Marin County states that only anchor-outs who were counted during a June 2022 survey (and an April 2023 fol-

low-up) will get housing. The Pacific Sun reported that only the owner of the boat gets a voucher, and co-occupants need to be married to receive joint housing, leaving some, like McCracken, to fall through the cracks.

Brad Gross, the executive director of RBRA, sees the removal of anchor-outs as inevitable: it’s up to either him or BCDC. The anchor-outs who participate in the housing program now, he says, will “get out with some dignity”—but if the RBRA’s offered deal doesn’t clear the Bay, the state will likely step in to finish the job. “And the state’s got much bigger pockets, [a] much bigger group of attorneys,” Gross says. “And they’re up in Sacramento—they’re not going to have the same concerns and the same compassion and consideration.”

Drew Warner took Gross up on the deal, becoming one of the first anchor-outs to be housed. He remembers contacting the RBRA month after month and going through yearlong paperwork, finally deciding—“It’s time to get off the water, man,” Warner says. The anchor-out era, for him, was over. Winter storms were getting worse, and he wanted to be safe.

For Schwartz Lesberg, the combination of housing and restoration is a historic feat, especially for a small agency like RBRA. “This is a really thoughtful approach. And it looks like it’s working—people are getting housed and the environment is improving. And nobody else has done this.” The EPA grant application requests applicants provide matching funds. In RBRA’s application for eelgrass restoration money, the lion’s share of its match came from the state for housing and vessel removal.

Now, Warner lives in the Marin Headlands, in a loft-style one-bedroom apartment, with tons of natural light and in-unit washing and drying. “I sat on the stairwell for three days,” he says. “In just awe, with my cat.” When he tries to show me photos of his new place, though, his callused hands make swiping on the screen of the smartphone difficult. Thick white layers pile over his knuckles and fingertips, scars from the lifestyle he left behind—his hands remind me of McCracken’s. His convictions, though, differ: he believes he made the right choice. He’s even been encouraging his friends on the anchorage to take the deal.

McCracken, who doesn’t qualify, mourns the slow loss of the anchor-outs. “We were a community,” she says. “And now I notice the stress of being forced to go somewhere else, to break those bonds.”

Sitting in front of the visitor center in Sausalito and staring out at the anchorage that used to be his home, even Warner feels bittersweet. Eelgrass is far from his mind. Instead, he’s focused on what’s above the water: a wooden marker poking its head above the waves. “I stayed just beyond that,” he says. “For 23 years.” There are two boats to either side—the unused space in the middle now looks like a picture of an empty lot where an old house used to be. Soon enough, blades of eelgrass and life—the kind we have allowed there—will blossom underneath. ◆

Lisa McCracken reviews decadesold plans for a mooring field.

GETTING IT DONE

It’s been a decade since Measure AA asked voters to consider a bond funding the work of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. By Election Day, Midpen had already spent almost two years gathering community input on what exactly that work should be. The resulting Vision Plan detailed 54 project areas, or portfolios, to guide Midpen’s next 40 years of operation.

Looking to voters to help realize that vision was a logical next step for an agen-

New Preserve

Overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway across from Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadero, the one-mile walk out to Wilbur’s Watch is currently the only publicly accessible trail at Cloverdale Ranch Open Space Preserve. But thanks to the voters who approved Measure AA, the stage is set for that to change.

At about 6,700 acres, the Cloverdale Ranch property stretches from the ocean to the edge of the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, providing crucial habitat and connectivity for wildlife. Wil-

10 Years of Measure AA

cy born at the ballot box: the district was established in 1972 by Measure R, the result of a grassroots effort to protect green space as the region’s population grew. Voted on in portions of San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz counties, Measure AA passed with a 68 percent majority—showing that enthusiasm for conservation in the Bay Area hadn’t waned.

“Voters’ support of Measure AA was a game-changer for Midpen,” says its gener-

lows and white alders shade the creeks, home to coho salmon, steelhead, and California red-legged frogs. Endangered seabirds called marbled murrelets fly overhead en route to their inland nesting sites, high up in old-growth trees. Mountain lions and badgers pass through as well.

In spite of the location’s importance to wildlife, in the late ’90s it was slated for luxury homes. To protect it from development, the nonprofit Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) purchased the site. For more than two decades, POST stewarded the property, leasing portions out to farmers and ranchers—but always planned to transfer Cloverdale to public ownership once funding became available. After years of waiting, Measure AA made this possible.

In a $14.7 million deal in June 2023, Midpen officially acquired 5,100 acres of Cloverdale Ranch—and an option to purchase an additional 1,200 acres by 2026.

al manager, Ana María Ruiz. “It’s allowing us to implement the projects our community prioritized as most important. What may be less obvious is how those Measure AA funds help us build partnerships and access additional money—more than $23 million in grants so far—making taxpayer dollars go so much further toward improving quality of life and resilience to climate change in our region.”

With about a third of the $300 million

(POST will retain 400 acres of prime agricultural land to continue leasing to farmers.) Measure AA provided $4.8 million of the purchase price, unlocking access to additional grant funding.

The transfer to Midpen is the first step in fully opening a new public open space. It’s a rare occurrence today, in the densely developed Bay Area, for Midpen to acquire a piece of land large enough to become an entirely new preserve. The process will take careful preparation, including gathering input from residents of nearby Pescadero and neighboring ranchers and farmers. Eventually, Midpen trail crews will build more trails for public access, designing the network to serve visitors while protecting sensitive natural resources.

In the meantime, those eager for a glimpse of Cloverdale Ranch can join docent naturalist-led guided hikes—or enjoy the trail to Wilbur’s Watch. It’s quintessential

Courtesy of Midpen, by Kyrod Myatt (above); by Teddy Miller (right)

bond spent, Midpen has preserved more than 9,000 additional acres of land, debuted more than 30 miles of new trail, and opened five new areas to the public. Other work is just getting started, or is moving through the middle stages of design and construction. In all, Midpen’s Measure AA strategy includes projects ranging from land acquisition and habitat restoration to new trailheads and parking areas—all in various stages of completion. Here are just a few.

California coastal scrub and grassland, where purple needlegrass grows between patches of coyote brush, coffeeberry, and the occasional Douglas fir. Wildlife that makes this corner of Cloverdale Ranch home includes grasshopper sparrows, burrowing owls, and northern harrier hawks.

Elsewhere on the property, cattle owned by local ranchers graze two areas under the guidance of Midpden’s rangeland ecologist staff. Long before the Spanish arrived here in the 18th century, the Quiroste Ohlone tended the grasslands with prescribed fire and hunted deer and elk that grazed the

area. Today, cows serve as a proxy for the interplay of fire and grazing, helping to maintain habitat for species that depend on grassland habitat—like the endangered San Francisco garter snake—by keeping brush in check.

The long-term work of restoring habitat at Cloverdale Ranch began under POST, whose projects included a collaboration with the San Mateo Resource Conservation District to restore fish habitat at Butano Creek. Man-made stock ponds and reservoirs have also become key riparian habitat. Midpen will continue that stewardship at Cloverdale Ranch.

“Now that we manage the land, we need to look at the whole preserve and balance trails, conservation grazing, agriculture, and protected species,” says Midpen spokesperson Leigh Ann Gessner. “We need to make a plan where it all fits together in concert.”—Austin Price

Cloverdale Ranch includes rich agricultural land—and also provides valuable habitat to wildlife.

Standing thigh-deep in the cool depths of San Gregorio Creek, Amy Kaeser can catch a glimpse of a grown steelhead trout once or twice a year—plus a few babies, called fry, when they hatch in the spring. Kaeser is the habitat enhancement program manager for the San Mateo Resource Conservation District (RCD), but even to her trained eye, fish sightings here aren’t common.

It hasn’t always been this way. “There are old-timers who will tell you of the time when there were salmon all across the creek coming in to spawn,” Kaeser says. San Gregorio Creek is one of sever -

al that run through Midpen’s La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve, located in San Mateo County. These creeks are home to a number of threatened and endangered native species, including the coho salmon and steelhead trout that journey here upstream from the ocean to spawn.

But the area has a long history of logging, and it still shows the scars. Because felled trees were often dragged through creek beds to get them to their final destination, waterways started to look the same: straight and flat at the bottom— or “channelized”—and largely devoid of debris. None of that was good for California fisheries, which continue to struggle: for the second year in a row, the state has opted not to open the salmon fishing season.

“Healthy creeks are messy,” Kaeser explains. Over time, debris helps create deeper, shaded pools that allow fish to hide from predators, while the shallower areas provide resting places. Bends in the

bay trail connection done in progress habitat restoration

creek help slow down the water and create more of this variability in depth. Debris also helps alter the flow of water so that gravel can settle to the stream bottom, creating ideal sites for fish to lay their eggs.

Restoring San Gregorio Creek to health and function is the ambition behind the RCD’s partnership with Midpen. By placing arrangements of logs, rocks, and branches strategically along the creek, they can re-create the variability the fish need to thrive.

“The completed structures look very simple, but they’re actually very engineered,” Kaeser says. Each calls for the expertise of fish biologists, engineers, and construction contractors and can take years to design, permit, budget, and build. However, using funding made available by Measure AA, NOAA, PG&E, and other sources, Midpen and the RCD have been able to finance more than a dozen of these woody debris installations—with more in the works for this summer.

Now and then during construction of the new Bay Trail segment that runs through Midpen’s Ravenswood Open Space Preserve, a Ridgway’s rail waded over to inspect the work. Because regulations mandated a pause in construction whenever the endangered species was spotted on the jobsite, a visit from the bird meant workers got a surprise break. They’d set down their tools, switch to standby projects for the prescribed half hour, and pick back up when the rail was gone.

The usually elusive rail “was oblivious to what was going on,” says Scott Reeves, then Midpen’s senior capital project manager for construction. “It was totally unfazed and very curious.”

Dario Taraborelli,

Ravenswood Open Space Preserve is home to the endangered Ridgway’s rail.

Since completing the first installations in 2016, the team has witnessed the benefits firsthand. Wading through a stretch of the upper San Gregorio Creek, Midpen water resources specialist David Liefert points out three large tree trunks marked by the project’s rebar. Underneath these trunks swirls a deep pool partially shaded by trees. Across the creek, a much shallower bank has developed.

Farther down the creek, a storm has downed several alders, and branches have accumulated against one of the log structures installed with help from Measure AA. That’s just as planned: the tangled foliage forms a cover where young fish can hide from predators.

Liefert and Kaeser agree that seeing the creek change like this over time—and watching fish return, little by little—is one of the most rewarding parts of the project.

“Once you set the stage for these things to happen,” Liefert says, “nature does the rest.” —Katherine Irving

The bird couldn’t know it, but much of the work underway was designed with its needs in mind. As protection against rising sea levels, the Ravenswood project called for elevating and paving a levee trail, creating “refuge islands” of high ground where marsh birds and animals can shelter at high tide. Revegetating land alongside the levee and nearby residences’ backyards created valuable habitat, too.

The unknowing bird even set the construction schedule. To avoid interfering with its breeding season, Midpen completed the trail-building work during a tight window between September 2019 and January 2020.

It was a sprint following a marathon: 15 years from conception to the ribbon-cutting in August 2020. The project ran the gauntlet of permits, regulations, neighbors’ concerns, and jurisdictional obstacles—including unused rail lines and a water pipeline right-of-way. In addition to Measure AA regional bonds, funding came from other public agencies and a donation from Facebook, whose campus lies across

the highway.

“You’re basically threading a needle,” says Reeves. “At every step of the way, there were issues and roadblocks that could have derailed us—but they didn’t.”

Though the project is completed, work goes on. Environmental consultants monitor revegetated areas to ensure that native marsh plants like spartina and gumplant are colonizing well. Crews from the nonprofit Grassroots Ecology visit frequently to help steward the wetlands habitat.

On a spring morning, their volunteers are pruning and weeding along a trail spur leading to East Palo Alto’s Cooley Landing Park and Education Center. The tide is out, and hundreds of shorebirds probe the mudflats as walkers and bike commuters cruise by.

The new Bay Trail segment—which includes 1,000 feet of boardwalk elevated over Ravenswood’s sensitive tidal wetlands—closes a critical gap in what is now an 80-mile stretch of trail running from Sunnyvale to Menlo Park and across the Dumbarton Bridge to the East Bay. It’s a boon for bike commuters like Emily Tutuska and her hus-

band, Ryne, who ride through Ravenswood three to five days a week.

“Dodging cars through East Palo Alto used to be the most dangerous part of our bike commute, and taking the Bay Trail through Ravenswood is much safer and more beautiful,” Emily Tutuska says. “It’s a great place to watch the sun rising over the East Bay hills.”

The Midpen Board of Directors recently approved plans to improve public access to the Bay Trail further, by creating a new trailhead in the East Palo Alto neighborhood adjacent to Ravenswood. For Midpen General Manager Ana María Ruiz, it’s just one example of how Measure AA is shaping the Baylands. “This short but mighty trail segment is connecting multiple communities and cities to open space,” she says, “while also enhancing the tidal marsh habitat to further protect our local endangered Baylands wildlife.”—Janet Byron

This article was paid for and reviewed by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.

In San Gregorio Creek, woody debris creates hiding places where fish can shelter from predators.

Rock Pigeons

The remarkable urban nature we forget to wonder about

By Lia Keener

The debate over rock pigeon navigation—how Columba livia reliably find their way home—has carried on for decades among those who study pigeons. Their homing ability, which these birds that fill our cities and daily lives are famous for, isn’t fully understood, despite being by our sides for 5,000 to 10,000 years, ever since we began to eat and domesticate them. Pigeons can navigate across 1,000 miles or more to find home, and humans have used them to deliver messages and to entertain, even arranging pigeon races for sport. Yet there is no agreement on how these birds sense, smell, or hear their route home.

“It’s an old argument,” says Verner Bingman, a Bowling Green State University professor and animal navigation researcher. Noting that many researchers invested in the debate are in their 70s or 80s, he speculates it’s a “controversy [that] is going to die as these people transition into reti rement.”

One group of researchers argues pigeons use magnetically sensitive portions of their eyes and beak to navigate in relation to Earth’s magnetic poles. Others champion the infrasound hypothesis, which theorizes that rock pigeons tune in to low-frequency sounds produced by Earth to find their way home. That idea is “the one that is least seriously taken” due to lack of evidence, Bingman says, although, he adds, “I’m uncomfortable with the term ‘disproven.’”

Anna Gagliardo, a researcher with the University of Pisa, published research that supports an olfactory map hypothesis, in which pigeons use airborne odor signatures to map their way, clueing in to wind currents and following the smells of home. Asked whether researchers now agree on any theory, she writes, “No consensus is reached. I guess some people find [it] difficult to admit they were wrong. As science is [a] matter of data and not opinion, let’s [let] the data speak.” One exam-

Highly Reproductive In densely urban areas, where pigeons are surrounded by a landscape flooded with food scraps, they can lay six or more clutches of eggs in a year, two eggs per clutch, creating more than a dozen young per year, a veritable army of baby pigeons.

A rock pigeon with bands around its leg, like this one, is likely a domestic pigeon, reared in captivity and raised by humans, that has escaped.

ple: research published in 1970 by Hans G. Wallraff, a behavioral physiologist with the Max Planck Institute, found that pigeons raised in aviaries surrounded by glass, a barrier to atmospheric wind currents, were unable to navigate home when relocated to an unfamiliar place, whereas pigeons raised in fence-lined aviaries, exposed to wind, were successful. “The evidence for an olfactory map is overwhelming,” Bingman concedes.

But he notes that “these are popular attempts to synthesize what is really a complex literature… no one is saying that this is any single, one sensory mechanism that potentially these birds can use as a map.” And even as the current debate continues, Bingman says, “maybe I’m just romantic, but I would like to leave open the possibility that there are still surprises.”

As it turns out, there are a whole lot more surprises in the world of rock pigeons.

» Pigeon Parentage

The pigeons we most often see, so well-suited to life in cities worldwide, are the feral descendants of domestic pigeon escapees,

Bird Milk All members of the Columbidae bird family produce crop milk, a curdlike substance created by specialized cells within a pigeons’ crop, the birds’ food storage pouch between their throat and stomach, which swells and become filled for feeding. Pigeon chicks reach their heads into their parents’ mouths, using their beaks to slurp up the oozing sustinance. As long as the parents are fed, the chicks will be too.

tion. Domesticated pigeons are themselves the descendants of wild pigeons native to Northern Africa as well as parts of Europe and southwestern Asia. Just as domesticated dogs are closely related to their wild, wolfy ancestors, domesticated pigeons are similarly related to their wild rock pigeon kin. Domesticated pigeons are the subspecies Columba livia domestica.

» Brainiac Birdies

Rock pigeons are brainy birds. Their intelligence and ability to learn have landed them in U.S. Coast Guard helicopters to help with search and rescue missions, in research labs to visually detect breast cancer in mammogram images, and in long-distance messenger jobs during World War I, when they were trained by people called “pigeoneers.” In World War II, B.F. Skinner trained pigeons to guide missiles, though the project, coined “Project Pigeon,” was ultimately abandoned.

» A Natural Solution

James Yu, one of three falconers hired by BART, watches Jeckyll, his Harris’s hawk, soar through the station. Since 2022, transit officials have been leveraging pigeons’ fear of predators against their powerful homing instinct. Fear of the hawk keeps the pigeons from returning to familiar roosts, in this case their nests lining station surfaces. “I don’t per-

wild rock pigeons are currently in decline in their native range, the cliffs of the British and Irish islands, in contrast with their explosively abundant, urban-dwelling counterparts, though urban pigeon populations too declined by more than 40 percent between 1966 and 2015, for unknown reasons.

sonally think pigeons are a nuisance, but I can understand why some might think so,” Yu says. “Pigeons have their place.”

»

Transit Pigeons and Their Poop

The fence inside the BART station wears a coat of feathers, gray and fuzzy, shed from nests overhead and held in place thanks to a mixture of static and poop. Under the roar of public transit is a softer noise—the flutter of wings. Pigeons, by the hundreds. They have lived by the tens of thousands across BART’s 34 aboveground stations since the Bay Area Rapid Transit system opened in 1972. Over time, their poop, chock-full of uric acid, corrodes cement, causing it to flake and crumble. “BART recognizes that pigeons are part of the landscape that we operate in,” says James Allison, BART media relations manager. “But we can’t allow them in our stations unmitigated.”

Pigeons in B.F. Skinner’s lab.

» The Perils of Pigeonhood

Swerving vehicles. Urban-dwelling raptors. Outdoor cats and dogs. More than half of baby birds of most species don’t make it past their first year of life, and pigeons are likely no exception. WildCare’s wildlife hospital in San Rafael is one of the few wildlife rehab centers in the Bay Area that accepts rock pigeons as patients. “Yes, they’re technically an introduced species … but they’re naturalized citizens at this point,” says Melanie Piazza, WildCare’s director of animal care. Of WildCare’s nearly 2,400 bird patients in 2023, roughly 500 were rock pigeons, adults and chicks brought in because of a car strike, being forced out of nests, or “stringfoot,” when human hair or other material wraps around and constricts their toes, often

Help Destring Pigeons Near You

Join Direct Action Everywhere to destring San Francisco urban pigeons whose feet are wrapped in string or human hair. Volunteers meet at UN Plaza and learn how to safely treat and destring the birds. This is a regularly recurring event held the second Sunday of each month; for more details, see the Direct Action Everywhere – SF Bay Facebook page.

requiring amputation. For a lot of people, when it comes to pigeons, “familiarity breeds contempt,” Piazza adds. “You see them all the time, and you just take them for granted.”

Band-tailed Pigeon The band-tailed pigeon (Patagioenas fasciata), cousin to the rock pigeon, is California’s only native pigeon species. It’s a nomadic, oak-woodland-dwelling bird, known to usually lay just one egg per year. This low reproductive rate, combined with a parasitic diseases estimated to kill up to thousands of birds a year, is contributing to a steady decline for this shy species, CDFW avian disease specialist Krysta Rogers says.

»

The

Roles Pigeons Play

High atop UC Berkeley’s campus, the famous peregrine falcon Annie and her family gobble down bits of pigeon. Though an introduced species in North America, pigeons provide abundant food for urban raptors, including the peregrines, redtailed hawks, and Cooper’s hawks that fly through our Bay Area cityscapes. In London during COVID lockdown, when human activity lulled, researchers found that peregrine falcons’ diets changed. They shifted away from pigeons, being forced to turn to alternate food sources, likely because pigeon numbers dropped, reflecting the changes in human behavior.

»

What We Can Learn From Pigeons

Exposed to the urban environment, pigeons “are these bioindicators—they’re tied to the environment,” says Elizabeth Carlen, a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in Saint Louis who has studied pigeons. “You should never eat a city pigeon … Many city pigeons have lead poisoning and have toxins that you don’t want to consume.” Indeed, when researchers Fayme Cai and Rebecca Calisi tested more than 800 pigeons’ blood lead levels over five years, they found that “neighborhood pigeon blood lead levels recapitulated in children,” showing the association between pigeon and human lead exposure. And yet, despite the potential for human health insights, “there’s this thing we’ve been living alongside for five to ten thousand years, and we’re not studying them,” says Carlen. “That’s wild.” ◆

Carla Cabral; Becky Matsubara via Flickr, CC BY

2.0

DEED; map, Anushuya

Thapa

• Band-tailed pigeon

• Rock pigeon

» China Basin Park in Mission Bay

A new park in San Francisco

Below looming high-rises, the new five-acre China Basin Park provides urban green space and views of San Francisco Bay in the rapidly developing Mission Bay neighborhood. A new snippet of Bay Trail wraps around the park’s edge, contributing to the vision of a greenway along San Francisco’s southeastern waterfront.

Open as of April 2024, the park was created by the Mission Rock Partners development team, a collaboration between the Tishman Speyer real estate development company, the San Francisco Giants, and the Port of San Francisco, which owns the property. The park is part of the greater Mission Rock development project, 14 years in the making, which includes two commercial buildings and two residential towers on what was previously a parking lot.

“This park was conceived to not only serve the project, and the office workers and residents that will live on the project, but also the surrounding neighborhood,” says Phil Williamson, senior project manager for the Port of San Francisco’s real estate and development division.

The Mission Bay neighborhood was once just that—a bay within the Bay. Before European settlement, the 150-acre expanse between Mission Creek and Potrero Point was a tidal marsh teeming with oysters, clams, and birds. Back then, what is now the Chase Center basketball arena, UCSF’s Medical Center campus, and the foundations of Highway 280 as it merges into the Bay Bridge would have all been underwater.

The new development’s namesake, Mission Rock, was previ-

ously an outcropping of serpentine at the mouth of the former Mission Bay. The rock was built upon and eventually engulfed by the construction of Pier 50 and is no longer visible today.

From the 1860s to the 1910s, the city of San Francisco filled in Mission Bay with millions of cubic yards of earthquake debris, garbage, and sand from the hills graded down to flatten what would become Market Street. Mission Bay became an industrial zone, home to sprawling shipyards, railroads, garbage dumps, and warehouses.

The Details

»The draw: Views of San Francisco Bay from a grassy slope ideal for picnicking and a stormwater garden with native plants.

»The trail: The Bay Trail bike path connects China Basin Park to a 350-mile network of trails along the Bay shoreline.

»Facilities: Public restrooms and water fountains; sandy play area and small dog park.

»Getting there: The park is at 1 China Basin Park, San Francisco, CA 94107.

Now, China Basin Park’s landscaping brings green space into the area, including some California native species, such as coast live oaks, island oaks, Monterey cypress, and coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis). On the park’s southern edge, a boardwalk zigzags over a stormwater garden planted with shrubs, including feltleaf ceanothus (Ceanothus arboreus), fernleaf Catalina ironwood (Lyonothamnus floribundus ssp. asplenifolius), and toyon berry (Heteromeles arbutifolia).

“I feel like a park is never done, because it’s always growing,” says John Rabago, landscape architect at SCAPE, an urban design firm that collaborated on China Basin Park’s design and landscaping. “It’s a living, breathing thing, and it changes with the city.”— Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright ◆

The new park, at left, flanks the mouth of Mission Creek.

The “sand zone” overlooks the Bay.

Sailing the Salt l ine

Carquinez Strait is where Sierra snow meets the San Francisco Bay, but the line of engagement between fresh and salt water is always moving.

By Kate g olden

Twice a week, from the train that runs between Sacramento and Berkeley, I see the force of the Carquinez Strait’s water flowing and eddying under the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, and it is the best part of my commute. On every tide, billions of gallons of water rush from San Pablo Bay into Suisun Bay and back again through this mile-tohalf-mile-wide, at points 120-foot-deep, eight-mile-long bottleneck. The tidal current can exceed three knots, walking speed on land but formidable in a small boat. Today, at last, I will see the strait from the water—but I am a little wary.

My partner Wes and I put in at Benicia’s West Ninth Street boat launch a little before a noon high tide. Our sailboat is a 16-foot Wayfarer, a fiberglass dinghy from 1971 that has been mostly languishing in the driveway since we bought it; we haven’t even named it. A while back, Wes and I lived on a small sailboat. Some parts of that life were hard to give up, while others were easy to, and sailing now can bring both to mind. But today we are in a mood to explore new waters. An eight-knot westerly blows through the strait, funneled by the steep hills toward the Delta: enough to get places, but not too frisky. Characteristically, I have forgotten my gloves but remembered the sandwiches. We tighten down the last few lines and shove off.

A strait is a place of motion. Change is a constant in our universe, a fact we humans often struggle with, but certain places are especially good at reminding us of it. The Carquinez Strait itself was only just born, some 560,000 years ago—explosively, according to one theory—when a giant inland lake forced a path to the ocean. This created the unusual inverted river delta (with the fan pointing inland, instead of spreading out onto the coast) that is the San Francisco Bay.

Today, Carquinez Strait is where the coast meets the valley, but the line of engagement between fresh and salt water is always mov-

Kate Golden (2x)

Birds and humans alike may poke around on the rocks near Benicia’s boat launch. Above: Sailing toward the strait’s wild south side, we meet some fellow travelers.

water column. Bigger freshwater outflows push the salt line westward; humans regulate these flows from Janu ary to June. X2, as scientists call the salt line’s daily (and vertical) average, is defined as a distance from the Golden Gate Bridge. Its location is a subject of intense political interest, because it is influenced by the amount of water we Californians use. That’s been true ever since we started damming the rivers and plowing the Delta. The salt line travels around 12 miles on each tidal round trip, and depending on the season and year, X2 ranges within Crockett and some 40 miles upstream to Rio Vista, near the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

line, and scads of young longfin smelt are swimming around in the strait. Researchers speculate the fish may tend to stay in the fresher side of the salt line to avoid getting eaten by anchovies. In the summer, when the strait is saltier, sailors have occasionally seen porpoises and saltwater jellies.

The C&H Sugar refinery, which opened at Crockett in 1906, produced some early data on the salt line, tracking how far upstream its barges had to go to find fresh water for sugar-making. Nowadays, in a wet spring, fresh water can flow all the way down to

What happens when a body of salty water meets another, fresher body, coming through the strait? Something has to give: they may mix, or dance in an eddy. Or, in high flows, on an ebb tide, they may go their separate ways. The fresh water is heading downhill to the sea, while the seawater is nosing inland. The denser salt water dives under the fresh water, and any biologists sampling the depths have to take care to tow their net the same direction as the lower layer, lest it crawl beneath the boat.

I dip two fingers into the olive-green water and sample it: mildly salty.

Strait Regional Shoreline stretches across grasslands and oak and riparian woodlands. Here, a lacy black grove of eucalyptus trees, killed in a fire; there, hidden in the hills, the town of Port Costa, population 190. A Benicia Yacht Club racer told me how to anchor safely and clamber over the railroad tracks, arriving at dinner like a pirate. But we tack conservatively. The strait’s rocky south side is dotted with rows of worn pilings, the ghosts of old docks. Once these pilings held up Industry. Now they’re perches for pelagic or double-crested cormorants, drying their wings after swimming for their dinners. I’ve seen kayak fishermen wending through here, but for sailors, land is the opposite of safety. A train rumbles through blowing its horn, underscoring the point.

If you can get out on the water, you will see the strait differently. Not as negative space dividing the hills, but as a place in itself. Once floating, you are severed from the world of land people and their land hus-

tles. Even if you see other boats—and there are very few out here, for reasons I cannot fathom—they are unlikely to be helpful when trouble arises. Here, your vessel is your whole world. The air is a force, working with or against you. Your mind fills with the concerns of wind and waves: how they are shifting each moment, the subtle reactions of the boat, whether it is time to tack. Here, nature is in charge. And, fundamentally, on the water, you are alone.

Explore the Carquinez Strait

Putting in: Public boat launches are at West Ninth Street in Benicia and Martinez Marina; check the Bay Water Trail map for more options.

Birding: “Birding the Carquinez Strait,” by Alvaro Jaramillo, is a wonderful free guide: tinyurl.com/straitbirding. Learn more about ospreys and see them on webcams: SFBayOspreys.org.

Be aware: Strong tidal currents and fast-changing conditions here are not ideal for beginners. Shallow Southampton Bay is excellent for paddlers, less so for sailboats (especially at low tide). Wrecks are marked with white PVC pipes. Get free NOAA maps online, and learn the hazards and rightof-way rules.

Learn to sail: Schools include Alameda Community Sailing Center, Cal Sailing Club in Berkeley, and Tradewinds Sailing School in Richmond, or check for lessons with area yacht clubs, which vary greatly in price point and vibe. At many clubs, you can show up on the dock before keelboat races and join as crew, even with no experience. Or use the find-a-crew service run by Latitude 38, our local sailing magazine.

By land: By foot or bicycle, explore the 24-mile-loop part of the Carquinez Strait Scenic Loop Trail that rings the strait from bridge to bridge, with fine vistas and some 1,500 feet of elevation change in rolling hills.

We sail toward two Canada geese that clearly share this view, expecting us to move rather than the reverse.

“What are they doing?” I say, ducking the dinghy to accommodate them. And then I see: a spring ritual, one atop the other. Lots of splashing. “Oh.”

Ducking under the Carquinez Bridge, toward the sugar refinery. Thanks, tailwind.

I’m on a quest: finding one of the 13 or so osprey nests around Mare Island that I saw on a map by Tony Brake, an expert and volunteer with S.F. Bay Ospreys. Ospreys often nest in industrial areas—if it’s a tall thing near water, an osprey will pile sticks on it. They have been taking over the Bay ever since a single nest was spotted at Mare Island in 1990; a 2023 area census found 59 hatchlings in 28 nests. To find them, we zigzag upwind toward San Pablo Bay: first toward the poppy-smeared hills of Dillon Point, then over to the puffing sugar refinery, where we are dwarfed by a bulk carrier’s stern blue cliff of a hull. Now we approach Interstate 80’s twin bridges, on the strait’s west end. Cars and trucks rush overhead— land people, land concerns—while we sail under in the gull-and-tugboat lane. (Western gulls breed on the bridge’s supports, noisily.) Wind does weird, ornery things at bridges; cursing is de rigueur. But here the wind holds, and the current is in our favor.

Wes helms as we approach Mare Island Strait, where the Napa River’s water empties into San Pablo Bay. He doesn’t like to mix binoculars and boating. Scanning, I spy a tall light pole with promising lumps atop it at Mare Island’s south end.

We sail by and confirm its magnificent osprey messiness, a nest overflowing with sticks at least four feet wide. In the spring, a male osprey performs a “sky dance” with dramatic swoops and sometimes a ceremonial fish. Later, he rustles up nest-building materials, while the female does the arranging. Then she lays some cream-to-cinnamon eggs. On the light pole, a white head pokes up. Hello, osprey! Just when I am wondering what they are eating, a fish jumps. “Big one!” Wes says. The big dogs

here are sturgeon. Too big for osprey— which around here have been seen in recent years eating jacksmelt, striped bass, salmonids, and a singing fish known as the plainfin midshipman. Ospreys dive feet first, unlike some other fish-eating birds, and carry off their prey using the grippy barbed pads on their curved talons.

Osprey craving satisfied, we run downwind back to Benicia. I am admiring the Cal Maritime Academy’s blue-and-gold training ship, the Golden Bear, when the Wayfarer lurches across the water like she has been tossed over a small hill. I look back and see a meaningful riffle. This must be where the waters of the Carquinez and Mare Island straits converge. These flows—with their different salinities, volumes, temperatures, and sediment loads—each affect the other and everything that lives in the Bay. We were in one strait, and now we are in another, and it feels very different. Fish often congregate at such convergence zones, says Wim Kimmerer, a San Francisco State University professor emeritus—though what they are up to is not well known. For us, it is a rude surprise to face the tidal current, now at its fastest, halfway between the tides. But the wind has our backs, literally.

Clouds overtake the sun. Water darkens, wind freshens, waves kick up and froth; mood becomes more serious. Sailing downwind requires less core strength but more concentration than beating upwind, as the boat is less stable. It would be hard kayaking, but the Wayfarer comes to life. We hunch down while watching the waves behind us, to stay on their good side. I needn’t have worried about being able to return. At my back is Mount Tam, ahead is Mount Diablo, and we are flying. I have a name for the boat: Osprey ◆

Kate Golden (2x)

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If Turtles Could

…then Turtle #9 would have stories to tell about Redwood Creek’s Restoration

By Maya a kkaraju

It was a gorgeous July day in Muir Woods National Monument when Turtle #9 began his rise to fame.

Sunlight, beaming down through the tree canopy and seeping into Redwood Creek, drew him out to bask on a logjam.

A park volunteer, Charlotte Johnston, on a rove through the old-growth coast redwoods, spotted him there. Johnston almost didn’t believe it at first—in her five years of volunteering, she had never seen a western pond turtle in Muir Woods. In fact, nobody had in about 30 years.

Western pond turtles are the only remaining native freshwater turtles in California, where they’re listed as a species of special concern. These omnivores will eat almost anything, as long as it’s in the water, and can live up to 50 years. And usually they stick within a small home range, but occasionally an intrepid traveler will travel miles and may even cross watersheds.

Turtle #9 was just such a fellow, wend-

Talk

ing five miles over two months on his twoinch legs up Redwood Creek. His excursion had begun downstream in the freshwater lagoon fed by the same creek where it empties into the Pacific at Muir Beach, a national park site. He was released there on August 22, 2017, an early explorer, in the first group of western pond turtles that were introduced to the lagoon through 2021 to reestablish the extirpated population. Turtle #9 was hatched from salvaged eggs after his mother was hit by a car in San Rafael. He was raised with other baby turtles for a couple years at the San Francisco Zoo before being released, in the hope that bigger and bulked-up hatchlings would more likely survive predators.

Our wayfarer apparently traveled alone, wandering from his clan for reasons unknown. He ambled up the creek into Muir Woods until about a half mile into the park, just upstream of pedestrian Bridge 3. There, he found an oasis: a jumbled mass of fallen trees, branches,

and debris, shoved together by Redwood Creek, spanning bank to bank. The creek plunges rapidly underneath the wood jam and exits silently from the other side. Over time, the creek has scoured out a five-foot deep pool in the midst of the masses of twigs and branches. Here the water moves slowly, beckoning juvenile coho salmon in need of shelter from predators and currents while they grow large enough to swim out to sea. Apparently, it also called to a traveling turtle on the hunt for crayfish and a pocket of sunshine.

And perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised to see him there.

The logjam at Bridge 3, its pool, the freshwater wetlands at Muir Beach, and the turtle release all resulted from the National Park Service’s major restorations of Redwood Creek that began in 2003 and concluded in 2023, all together costing upwards of $16 million, according to Carolyn Shoulders, the National Park Service (NPS) natural resources project manager for the restorations in Muir Beach and Woods. Driven largely by salmon habitat loss, the two decades of work wrapped up between July and November 2023. And Turtle #9 had arrived in a restored stretch of Redwood Creek just as the final phase in Muir Woods was about to begin.

The creek hasn’t always gotten this much love. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation

Courtesy of the National Park Service: Carolyn Shoulders; map, Maya Akkaraju

Turtle #9 paddles through a pool created by restoration work in Redwood Creek near Bridge 3.

Corps protected trails following the creek through Muir Woods by building boulders, called riprap, into the creek banks. Additionally, the NPS removed logs from the creek through most of the 20th century, resulting in a homogeneous, faster-moving channel with a flattened-out bed. It made for a clean-looking creek, but a hostile environment for many of its inhabitants.

Restoration started to address this misguided management history in 2019 upstream of Bridge 3 in Muir Woods, and the final phase was beginning imminently. Heavy equipment was rolling in about 1,000 feet downstream of where the NPS restoration team had spotted Turtle #9 just days earlier, and we were preparing to reroute the creek’s water through corrugated plastic pipes during the work.

The NPS aquatic ecologist wanted to refresh the radio tag attached to the turtle’s shell to keep track of him. As NPS aquatics and hydrology interns, Matt Millado and I, equipped with waders and canned sardines, set minnow traps around the Bridge 3 logjam to lure in Turtle #9. The aquatic ecologist tagged and sent him back into the pool—a decision quickly regretted.

Our problems began a week later when a colleague and I saw Turtle #9 sunning on a gravel bar where heavy equipment work was about to start. (We almost missed him; western pond turtles can look remarkably like cobbles.) With the discovery came a daunting realization—Turtle #9 was not only on the move, but he could circumnavigate the wire-mesh fences across the creek intended to stop wildlife from entering construction zones.

The restoration was picking up pace. Excavators coaxed boulders from the banks, unwieldy logs were placed in the creek with delicate precision, and NPS biomonitors rushed around measuring water quality and moving California giant salamanders out of harm’s way. Everyone on site juggled several responsibilities, and the prospect of a well-camouflaged special-status traveler was a stressful addition. Outfitted with telemetry gear, Millado scanned for Turtle #9’s radio signal up and down Redwood Creek, but our elusive reptile

remained at large. We kept our eyes peeled and prayed for a signal.

For a month, Millado didn’t detect Turtle #9, but in late August, a friend revealed himself downstream from the Bridge 3 logjam. Turtle #1, too, had been released, as a fourinch-long juvenile, at Muir Beach in summer 2017. The reintroduction had followed the NPS’s restoration at Muir Beach from 2009 to 2013 that brought back wetlands and the channel, planted native species like willows, and created areas of slow-moving water that turtles and juvenile fish like.

All 42 turtles released at Muir Beach have been tracked for six years via radio tags to help the NPS understand their survival, behaviors, and the locations they’re drawn to. But nobody had anticipated they would enjoy spending summer months in the well-shaded redwood groves of Muir Woods, or that they would even travel so far. Turtles #1 and #9 demonstrated their inclinations for exploration, but the decision to swim in the deep pool at Muir Woods made another statement: restoration at both the downstream and upstream ends of Redwood Creek were successfully expanding the aquatic community’s habitat.

This time, Turtle #1 was captured, retagged, and moved out of danger, back to his home turf at Muir Beach. The restoration within Muir Woods pushed forward, creating new pools and wood jams that better support juvenile coho salmon. The final buckets of cobble were laid in November, pipes and pumps removed and fences taken down. The search for Turtle #9 contin-

Redwood Creek

» On your next visit to Muir Woods National Monument, keep an eye out for signs of the recent restoration work. Look for several piles of woody debris in the stretch by the entrance and between Bridge 1 and Bridge 3 that were placed along Redwood Creek in 2023, and between Bridge 3 and Bridge 4 in 2019.

» You must reserve a parking spot to visit the Muir Woods National Monument, at GoMuirWoods.com.

ued, if only to refuse acknowledgement of our worst fears.

Finally, in a last-ditch effort in December, Millado again lugged out the antenna to search for the missing wanderer. After finding nothing in Muir Woods, he set up at a pullout on the road to Muir Beach and turned the dial to Turtle #9’s channel. After a few seconds of static, the radio signal came in, a barely audible blip, and the turtle tension in our shoulders released. Millado followed the signal along the road and down the creek bank, chasing the intermittent beep as it grew in volume and confidence.

Our itinerant turtle’s signal was strong in a stretch of Redwood Creek between Muir Woods and Muir Beach—against all odds, he had bypassed the construction zone’s many hurdles. If he or any of his community make the journey to Muir Woods again, they will be met with a more welcoming habitat. ◆

Excavators help create habitat in Redwood Creek that benefits juvenile coho salmon.

Field map of Redwood Creek restoration.

JOHN MUIR LAWS

Lincoln John Scandrett Williams 2004– 2024

The Bay Nature community is deeply saddened by the loss of Lincoln John Scandrett Williams, who passed away due to natural causes during the spring. He is the son of Bay Nature’s longtime art director, Susan Scandrett.

From age nine, Lincoln looked over his mom’s shoulder as she designed the pages of Bay Nature magazine, offering his opinion and reaction to this photo, that layout, and the early sketches of the illustrations that fill the publication’s pages each quarter. Susan has often called Lincoln her assistant designer.

Our hearts are with Lincoln’s family, friends, and Susan, who has brought so much beauty to Bay Nature

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