Bay Nature, October-December 2012

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

Into the Kingdom of Mushrooms

The Quest for Coho Purisima Possibilities A Sea Change for Seabirds 40 Years of Peninsula Open Space

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october–december 2012

Features 32

Carolyn Shaw

Susan Farrar, SPAWNusa.org

28

Stacy Boorn, AWEgallery.com

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P L A N E T FU N G I Jour n ey i nto t h e Ki ng do m of Mu s h ro o m s

RO O M TO BREATHE The Wild Hea rt of the San Francis co Penins ula

LONG MAY THE Y RUN A Quest for Coho fro m Sa nta Cruz to Mar in

With winter rains, Bay Area woodlands come alive with fungi in a surprising variety of shapes and colors. These bizarre organisms aren’t just for show: They’re the aboveground manifestation of a remarkable underground network that’s responsible for feeding the trees and sustaining our forests. Take a closer look at the miracle of mushrooms.

by Joe Eaton

In 1972, Peninsula residents voted to establish the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. Forty years later, the district is the proud steward of more than 60,000 acres in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, from the Bay to Skyline to the sea. Images from a new book celebrate the beauty and accessibility of the district’s wild landscapes.

Veteran angler Michael Carl is more used to hooking fish than researching them.

But his curiosity about the coho salmon that once thrived in watersheds on the San Mateo Coast led him on a multiyear search for the species’ remaining Bay Area holdouts. Along the way, he found people dedicated to helping this iconic fish in its fight against extinction.

by Michael Carl

Departments 4 Bay View

On the Trail

Letter from the publisher

5 Letters from our Readers 6 Ear to the Ground News from the conservation community and the natural world

by Aleta George

8 Conservation in Action Volunteer fish monitors have been at it for over three decades at Suisun Marsh.

by Aleta George

10 Signs of the Season The call of the red-shouldered hawk pierces our urban woodlands in winter.

by Allen Fish

12 Purisima Possibilities Soon this Santa Cruz Mountains redwood preserve will expand westward and feature the Peninsula’s first “ridge-to-sea” trail.

by Lisa M. Krieger 16 Elsewhere . . . Sonoma Valley, Dry Creek Pioneer, Sanborn

18 Climate Change: Dispatches from the Home Front A Sea Change for Seabirds on the Farallones Long-term studies of nesting seabirds on Southeast Farallon give researchers a window onto some unprecedented changes in our ocean environment.

by Glen Martin

22 First Person Sailing with John Wade, a volunteer skipper who hauls supplies to researchers on the remote Farallon Islands Interview by Daniel McGlynn

52 Families Afield: Exploring Nature with Kids NEW: An Urbia shoreline adventure in Oakland

by Barbara Corff and Damien Raffa

53 Ask the Naturalist How does water get to the top of 300-foot-tall redwoods?

by Michael Ellis

54 Naturalist’s Notebook Stilt vs. avocet

by John Muir Laws

visit us online at www.BayNature.org

bay v iew letter from the publisher

I

n general, summer is my least favorite season for hiking in the Bay Area: It’s often too foggy at the coast and too hot inland; the wildflowers are done and the birds are quiet. So what’s a hikeaddicted guy to do? I’ve found that heading for the redwoods is a nice Goldilocks solution: not too hot, not too cold, thanks to the thick green canopy. So on a warm early July day a dozen years ago, I headed over to the Peninsula to a place I’d seen on maps but never visited, Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve (featured on page 12).

I expected a pleasant and vigorous hike up and down the western slope of the ridge, but not a lot of wildlife or color, given the time of year. Wrong! I hadn’t counted on the abundance and variety of berries making brilliant pointillist dots of color in the shade of the redwoods and tanbark oaks: shiny black huckleberries, bright red thimbleberries, ripe blackberries, vibrant orange fairy bells, and the deep blue fruit clusters of clintonia.

So a low-expectation hike became a day of discovery. And in this case, that discovery was possible thanks to the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, which is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary. We owe a debt to the people of the Peninsula, who voted in 1972 to tax themselves in order to keep sprawl development and mansions from taking over the wild landscapes of the Santa Cruz Mountains. contr ibuto rs Santa Rosa-based Michael Ellis (p. 53) leads nature trips with Footloose Forays (footlooseforays.com).

Barbara Corff and Damien Raffa (p. 52) are cofounders of Urbia (urbikids.com), a San Francisco-based group that produces nature quest guides for kids. For more than a decade, they’ve done educational work in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory since 1985,

b ay n at u r e

Elizabeth Hewson

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by david loeb

I’ve hit this note before, but given the approach of Election Day 2012, it bears pointing out, again, the benefits that flow to all of us from the public investment of tax dollars. True, not all tax dollars are spent wisely, but if we remain active and vigilant, we have the potential to influence and track where those dollars go. With corporate profits, not so much.

It’s hard, I know, because when you pay your taxes, you don’t get anything immediately tangible in return. But look up at the hills on the Peninsula or in the East Bay, or across the Golden Gate to the Marin Headlands, or down along the Bay Trail, or at the wildflowers and berries beside you on the trail, and there’s your reward.

Speaking of those berries: Why did it take me 27 years of hiking in the Bay Area to find my way to them and to Purisima?

Probably because I didn’t have access to Bay Nature’s online Trailfinder. But now I do, and so do you, and it was worth the wait. We’ve got more than 135 trails (and 425 parks) already mapped out and described, with more being added all the time. And I’m thoroughly enjoying my new role as a Trailblazer, which gives me a perfect excuse to return to some of my favorite places (I wonder what Purisima has to offer in the fall? I’m betting on mushrooms!) and visit others for the first time, all with a renewed sense of purpose, because I can share those moments of delight on the trail with you.

You can check out “my” trails and those of our other Trailblazers at baynature.org/trailfinder. And please send us ideas for new Bay Area trails to blaze in the months ahead, with or without berries.

Allen Fish (p. 10) leads GGRO’s Hawkwatch Program, as well as nesting studies in the Presidio and Berkeley.

Aleta George (pp. 6 & 8) has written for Smithsonian, High Country News, and the Los Angeles Times.

Daniel McGlynn (p. 22) is a Bay Area independent journalist who covers science and the environment.

John Muir Laws (p. 54) is the author of The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada and the new Laws Guide to Drawing Birds. Info: johnmuirlaws.com.

october–december 2012

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

Volume 12, Issue 4 october–december 2012 Publisher David Loeb Editorial Director Dan Rademacher Online Editor Alison Hawkes Development Officer Judith Katz Marketing & Outreach Director Beth Slatkin Office Manager Jenny Stampp Advertising Director Ellen Weis Design & Production David Bullen Contributing Editor Sue Rosenthal Copy Editors Cynthia Rubin, Marianne Dresser Board of Directors Larry Orman (President), Malcolm Margolin (Emeritus), Carol Baird, Catherine Fox, David Loeb, John Raeside, Bob Schildgen, Nancy Westcott Volunteers/Interns Lisa P. Allen, Harriette Atkins, Sophie Dresser, Paul Epstein, Alicia Freese, Allison Hughes, Ann Humphrey, Jackson Karlenzig, Heather Mack, Forrest Phillips, Courtney Quirin, Ann Sieck, Maureen Tanuwidjaja, David Wichner Bay Nature is published quarterly by the Bay Nature Institute, 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 Subscriptions: $53.95/three years; $39.95/two years; $21.95/one year; (888)422-9628, baynature.org P.O. Box 92408, Long Beach, CA 90809 Advertising: (510)528-8550 x202/advertising@baynature.org Editorial & Business Office: 1328 6th Street #2, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510)528-8550; (510)528-8117 (fax) baynature@baynature.org baynature.org issn 1531-5193 No part of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from Bay Nature and its contributors. © 2012 Bay Nature Printed by Commerce Printing (Sacramento, CA) using soy-based inks and alternative energy.

FPO UNION BUG

Front cover: Western jack-o-lanterns (Omphalotus olivascens) are poisonous mushrooms that grow in clusters at the base of stumps or tree trunks. The common name derives from this species’ ability to glow in the dark.

[Ron Wolf]

Photographer and writer Rob Lehman (p. 16) lives in San Jose. See his work at lehmanphotography.com.

Ann Sieck (p. 16), a retired teacher, has lived in Berkeley most of her life. Her website, wheelchairtrails.net, provides trail reviews focused on accessibility.

Photographer Ron Wolf (cover) lives in Palo Alto and says Portola Redwoods State Park is his go-to spot for finding cool mushrooms. Learn more at baynature.org/ mushroomcover.

violate provisions of their park lease on our public waters, and slander the Park Service.

The marketing claims of “locally and sustainably grown” and “environmentally friendly” do not match the facts: The company expanded its operations without permits or review into critical wildlife protection areas, leading to fines by the California Coastal Commission; it spread invasive species dangerous to native eelgrass habitat into the estuary; it grows exclusively nonnative shellfish; it illegally operated in off-limits areas of the estuary during the crucial harbor seal pupping and rearing season; and it continues to litter plastic “aqua trash” on the beaches at Point Reyes.

The company bought the business in 2005 knowing its operating permit was set to expire in 2012. dboc has tried to change the rules to profit from a public asset funded by taxpayers. It and other special interests are spending millions to try to change the lease and keep long-promised wilderness protections from taking effect BN_Gift_Ad_3rdPg_2012.pdf 8/21/12 (continued on page 41) at Drakes Estero.

le tter s To the Editor, Storing carbon in rangeland soils (“The Grass Really Is Greener,” April–June 2012) is a promising way to fight global warming. However, putting compost on exotic annual grasses is not the most effective way to sequester carbon. Replace the exotic annuals with native bunchgrasses for much deeper, longer-lasting carbon storage in the bunchgrasses’ extensive deep roots. This will also make an enormous contribution to restoring a vital California ecosystem.

David Raymond, Berkeley To the Editor, Nate Seltenrich’s article on Breuner Marsh (“Reclaiming the Richmond Shoreline,” April–June 2012) was excellent, seamlessly weaving the details of the area’s past, present, and future into a fine introduction for those who have never been there. It was inspiring to hear how the decades-long effort to save the marsh has finally come to fruition. But one phrase bumped for me: “unnatural noises.” The sooner we stop putting humans outside nature, the better. Language structures consciousness. We are part of nature too, even if we don’t like some parts (like our own noise).

Cindy Spring, Oakland Point taken, but the “unnatural noises” referred to were not “our own” human voices but the sound of guns being fired.

To the Editor, Your recent issue celebrating 50 years of Point Reyes National Seashore (July– September 2012) featured a slick inside cover ad by Drakes Bay Oyster Company (dboc), serving up half-truths about the oyster operation within intended wilderness at Point Reyes.

I understand the need for advertising revenue, but the irony and insult of paid propaganda leading off a Point Reyes celebration was not lost on those of us who have watched dboc seek to subvert and overturn the Point Reyes Wilderness Act,

5:10:42 PM

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october–december 2012

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e ar to t he g ro u nd n e w s f r o m t h e c o m m u n i t y a n d t h e n at u r a l w o r l d

W THE BAY NATURE TRAILFINDER Find great hikes and parks that match your interests.

Read reviews, check wildlife sightings, and print a map.

Then hit the trail!

130+ trails, more each week

hen Bob Berner drives away from Marin Agricultural Land Trust (malt) on his red bmw motorcycle, he will be able to say that he helped protect half of the farm- and ranchland in West Marin since he started as executive director 28 years ago. He’s already protected 44,100 acres, or nearly 45 percent of Marin’s farmland. This summer malt launched a campaign to raise $5 million for easements on three new properties that would put the trust at the 50 percent mark by the end of 2012.

In 1984, Berner answered an ad placed by botanist Phyllis Faber and dairy Paige Green Photography

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by aleta george

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ALSO ON BAYNATURE.ORG NATURE NEWS Stories, photos, and videos every week about everything from baby animals to sea level rise EVENTS CALENDAR The region’s most comprehensive nature events calendar with guided hikes, kids’ activities, and more MAGAZINE ARCHIVE More than a decade of Bay Nature magazine content, including special publications and topic pages LOCAL NATURE ORGANIZATIONS Listings of more than 400 local groups protecting habitat, educating kids, restoring creeks, and more!

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farmer Ellen Straus, who had founded a land trust to focus exclusively on protecting agricultural land, an unusual concept at the time. He had an mba, a law degree, five years’ financial experience at the Nature Conservancy, and real estate acumen from working for San Francisco Architectural Heritage, a nonprofit that protects unique buildings. At malt, he became a staff of one.

Ralph Grossi, past president of the American Farmland Trust and malt’s first board chair, explains what Berner was up against. “Easements had a negative connotation and ranchers were skeptical at first,” says Grossi. “Bob helped them see that easements were assets rather than liabilities.” At the same time, adds Grossi, Berner convinced private donors that land had agricultural, scenic, and wildlife value even when it didn’t have public access.

It took time and patience. The orga-

october–december 2012

nization had no membership, no constituency, no mechanism for growth, and no way to communicate to the public what it was doing and why, says Berner. “malt didn’t make farmland valuable,” he says.

“We helped people to see that it was valuable.”

Grossi, who is also a Marin rancher, believes that malt’s next challenge will be to support the economies of agriculture, which might include looking for creative ways to grow the next generation of farmers, nurture creative enterprises (such as the artisan cheese movement), and help connect farmers and ranchers to local buyers.

“I’m optimistic about the future of malt and the land conservation movement,” says Berner, who leaves the organization with a staff of 16. “There are challenges, but that’s life.” To help malt reach its goal of protecting half of Marin’s farmland, go to malt.org.

T

he first thing we heard was the exhalation of the animal,” says marine ecologist Kirsten Lindquist about the blue whale that surfaced close to R/V Fulmar during a research trip in late July. The trip was run by access, Applied California Current Ecosystem Studies, a collaborative research project of PRBO Conservation Science and two of the region’s three national marine sanctuaries, Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones. access researchers go out on surveys three to five times a year, providing data that can inform oil spill response and reduce the number of whales struck by ships.

“It was fun to have the captain say, ‘Let’s give this animal some space,’” says Lindquist as she recreates the moment when the steel-blue back of a 100-footlong whale emerged close to shore and inhaled with the “fluty deep breath of an organ.” While it isn’t unusual to see blue (continued on page 42) whales in July, it is

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

Volunteers Stick to it at Suisun Marsh On a 21-foot aluminum boat floating in Suisun Marsh, Amanda Schwabe heaves up the otter trawl as Cesar Morales coils the rope on deck. When Schwabe brings up the net, Captain Teejay O’Rear pours its contents into a shallow pan. In bibbed waders provided by UC Davis, O’Rear and three volunteers (myself included) reach into the murky water for Sacramento split tail, striped bass, white sturgeon, and prickly sculpins. We measure the fish on plate-sized rulers before putting them back into the slough, part of the largest wetland complex in the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary. Today’s data will be added to research done by hundreds of volunteers since prominent fisheries biologist Peter Moyle started the Suisun Marsh Fish Study 33 years ago.

In 1979, Moyle took monthly samples of tule perch in Suisun Marsh for one of his students’ dissertations. “I spent a year messing around — I guess would be a good way to put it — and that allowed me to figure out where to do regular sampling,” says Moyle, associate director of UC Davis’s Center for Watershed Sciences. The California Department of Water Resources (dwr) asked Moyle to continue monitoring fish and has funded the project ever since. “We’ve become one of the seven standard monitoring programs in the estuary,” says Moyle. “Our data is used by people way beyond the Suisun Marsh.”

This monthly sampling at 21 sites within the marsh couldn’t happen without volunteers, says Peter Moyle at work in Suisun Marsh, site of his long-running fishO’Rear, the project’s coordinator sampling project. since 2008 and a manager at Moyle’s lab. O’Rear draws from a pool sor he wanted to help with research when of volunteers that includes current and he retired. That led him to O’Rear. “I former students, employees at state water really like fish,” said Wigginton, “and I and wildlife agencies, and a few outliers might as well put myself to good use.” like Mike Wigginton, who is close to The data has indeed been useful, retiring from the Sacramento MetropoliMoyle says, showing an overall decline tan Fire District. Wigginton took a of native fish and an increase in nonmarine biology class a few years ago natives. But there are nuances within when he returned to school to complete the long-term trends: Native fish popuhis associates degree and told his profeslations, though dropping, don’t spike or b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

Amber Manfree

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by aleta george

fall as dramatically as those of nonnatives, likely because the natives are better adapted to California’s cyclical floods and droughts.

Another discovery came when O’Rear decided to look at the stomach contents of striped bass, a popular game fish introduced in 1879 but lately blamed by some for the precipitous decline of the endangered Delta smelt. After pumping the stomachs of more than 100 fish (a quick procedure that the fish survives), he didn’t find smelt or any other openwater fish the bass normally eat. Instead he found native three-spined stickleback and prickly sculpin. That led to another discovery. “Duck clubs have freshwater ponds and levy ditches filled with vegetation and small fish,” explains Moyle.

“When they drain the ponds, these little fish start pouring out. The striped bass — not being dumb — sit there with their mouths open.” In several individual fish they found hundreds of sticklebacks.

“It’s a good example of how water management can alter predator-prey relationships,” says O’Rear.

“Splity!” calls the mutton-chopped O’Rear as I measure another Sacramento split tail. Last year’s rain was good for split tails, large native minnows unique to the estuary. “Just like Delta smelt, they need the estuary to function, and Suisun Marsh is the best place for them,” says Moyle. “They move upstream to spawn in floodplains, and Suisun Marsh is just downstream of the biggest floodplain of all, the Yolo Bypass.”

After finishing the otter trawl, we took a 35-mile-per-hour zip up the main channel for some catch-and-release fishing. A white-tailed kite flew in front us, and six white pelicans sat on shore. In the ebb and flow of the largest contiguous marsh in the western United States, native and nonnative fish now live and breed in nearly equal numbers. In the larger struggle over water exports and habitat restoration, the data collected from this study will continue to play an important role in the debate over the San Francisco Bay-Delta’s future.

Contact Teejay O’Rear (taorear@ucdavis.edu) to volunteer.

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s ign s o f t h e se aso n

The Clarion Call of the Red-shouldered Hawk Bird nesting, anybody will tell you, is a spring and summer event. And it makes sense that many birds nest when grass grows, branches bud, and bugs emerge. But to mangle a notorious quote, the noisiest nesting season I ever heard was December in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And the noisiest creatures in my creekside San Anselmo neighborhood that December were not the songbirds but rather red-shouldered hawks.

Red-shouldered hawks are medium-sized raptors of California’s riparian and urban forests.

Adult redshoulders (both male and female) boast black-and-white wings and tail and a handsome rust-colored breast that melds into fine rust and whitish horizontal lines lower on the body. The juvenile redshoulder plumage is a softer version of its parents’ colors with no rust in the breast. One field mark sets the California redshoulders apart from all other raptors: a distinct white crescent near the tip of each wing.

Morphology and genetics put them in the genus Buteo with red-tailed, ferruginous, and Swainson’s hawks. However, a redshoulder’s habits and habitats are accipiter-like. For instance, a redshoulder flaps in series, then glides on set wings much like a Cooper’s hawk. It will often perch hunt, “not circle over open country as Redtails do,” to quote Ralph Hoffmann, author of the 1927 field guide Birds of the Pacific States.

Regarding the redshoulder song, Hoffmann called it “high and piercing.”

William Leon Dawson described it as “a ringing series that sets the woods agog, kee-a!, kee-a!, kee-a!” Early naturalists called the redshoulder “the Singing Hawk,” more in reference to the species’ incessant noisiness than to the sweetness of its sound. In their wonderfully descriptive book, Raptors of California, Hans and Pam Peeters put it bluntly: The red-shouldered hawk is perhaps “California’s noisiest raptor, often drawing attention to itself with its loud and repeated clarion calls.”

Regarding the first hypothesis, Dawson, in The Birds of California, notes that a particular nesting redshoulder “marks our distant approach and is ill-at-ease, fearing the gun.” It should be no surprise Phil Robertson

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by allen fish

A Rise in Redshoulders It appears that redshoulders in abundance is a fairly recent phenomenon in the Bay Area, either because the hawks were more tight-lipped in historical times or they just weren’t common here. b ay n at u r e

A red-shouldered hawk calling from its perch in a creekside park in a suburban area north of Sacramento.

october–december 2012

that any diurnal raptor pre-1960s was a chickenhawk first and a unique species second. My own dear Woodside grandmother had a stuffed Cooper’s hawk on the mantel, the result of her swift trigger and eagle eye.

Are red-shouldered hawks more common in the Bay Area now than half a century ago? In the Marin County Breeding Bird Atlas, David Shuford notes that the species was rare by mid-century in California, due to the pressures of human growth and expansion, but by the early 1990s they were starting to reoccupy “the Los Angeles basin where mature trees provided nesting habitat in certain residential areas, parks, and cemeteries.”

Not long after, that exact phrase could have been applied to the Bay Area as well. In 1994 and 1995, biologist Steve Rottenborn focused on the nesting redshoulders of the Santa Clara Valley and discovered that 52 of 85 nests were in nonnative trees, particularly eucalyptus.

And these nonnative nest trees launched, on average, a greater number of fledgling redshoulders than did their native counterparts.

A review of Christmas Bird Count (cbc) statistics, collected and compiled under the auspices of the National Audubon Society since 1960, backs up these more anecdotal observations.

For eight different Bay Area cbc circles, annual redshoulder counts increased starting in the 1960s or ’70s and peaked only in recent years. Three counts (Mount Diablo, Palo Alto, Santa Rosa) actually show populations still rising as of 2010.

This pattern holds as well for the red-shouldered hawk fall migration counts by the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (ggro) in the Marin Headlands. Although California redshoulders aren’t classically migratory — that is, all moving from north to south in autumn — they do disperse quite a bit, traveling dozens of miles in any direction in search of pockets of abundant prey. Twenty-five years of ggro autumn red-shouldered hawk counts, expressed as five-year averages (to soften annual swings due to weather, etc.), show an upward trend (see graph).

average annual sightings

400 300 200 100

1986 1991 1996 2001 to

to

to

to

2006 to

1990 1995 2000 2005 2011*

*2010 omitted due to road closures

Within this overall upward trend — now leveling out some — there are dramatic dips and rises from year to year.

The reasons for such year-to-year variations are probably not possible to ferret out. While the count of 248 sightings from 2011 is well below the average, it’s too early to say if it’s a dip or the beginning of a decline. In either case, the apparent leveling trend may indicate that redshoulders have reached capacity in the Bay Area. This hypothesis is supported by the Christmas Bird Counts, five of which hit a clear redshoulder peak in the years 2002–2008. Have redshoulders saturated their nesting opportunities? Or are they encountering some urban challenge such as tree removals or the overuse of rat poisons? The jury is still out.

hawks during an earlier nesting season.

Many of these hawk nests are in tall, open-canopy trees like eucalyptus, sycamore, cypress, and cottonwood, where large-winged raptors can fly through the canopy with little interference.

In the mid-2000s, biologist Kim Meyer conducted a two-year census of nesting raptors in the Presidio of San Francisco for the National Park Service, which had recently inherited the former military base. Meyer located 45 nesting pairs, a mix of Cooper’s, red-tailed, and red-shouldered hawks, and great horned owls. In both years combined, he counted 20 redshoulder nests, all of which were in nonnative trees, mostly eucalyptus.

Although the density of raptor territories was impressive (ten nests for every square mile in 2006!), what really got my attention from Meyer’s research on the Presidio raptor community was the early

and laying, that pair of redshoulders had to be nest building by February 1 and in full-on courtship for weeks before that, maybe even before the New Year. Similar calculations for the owls put them on eggs in early January, meaning courtship in December or even earlier.

For me, this is headline news: Bay Area raptors can start nesting in December. And for a nonmigratory homebody like the red-shouldered hawk, this makes sense. Because redshoulders take a huge range of prey, from crawdads to sticklebacks, from newts to shrews, and from pocket gophers to rock pigeons, they can find food here in the Bay Area any time of year and, ergo, stay put in a relatively small patch of forest from one nesting season to the next.

This red-shouldered-hawk system of land tenure works fine until December when a great horned owl or two, also Richard Pavek, Sausalito, CA

500

The Singing Hawk Revisited While the jury deliberates, let’s return to our earlier question: Why should Bay Area redshoulders be so noisy in midwinter? In these pre-breeding months, the obvious reasons would be to advertise an already-occupied nesting territory (“It’s my yard!”), or to court a potential mate (“Want to see my etchings?”), or perhaps both. Competition for urban and suburban creekside nest trees with prey nearby can be fierce. Although some of that competition may come from other redshoulders, a bigger problem (in every sense) may be great horned owls. This stems from the fact that the owls don’t build their own nests; they re-use the nests of others, preferably old hawk nests, such as the sturdy, thatched stick-bowls created by red-tailed or red-shouldered

fledging dates for great horned owls and red-shouldered hawks. The earliest redshoulder fledging took place on May 28.

Working back through the known numbers of days for brooding, incubation,

S e e i n g R e d S h o u l d e rs The trick to seeing red-shouldered hawks is not to focus so much on birds circling high over fields as to watch riparian or other thick vegetation—particularly at the edges—for a long-tailed, football-shaped hawk skulking at the edge of view. I keep my eyes peeled wher-

ever creeks cross roads, particularly in lower elevations. Redshoulders may also sit on poles, but more likely on the wire between them. They seem to especially prefer perching in a tree—a live oak, a sycamore, a canopy of Monterey pines or eucalyptus—where they will pick a regular spot somewhere below the apex.

This red-shouldered hawk, first spotted perched on a light pole along Highway 101 near Mill Valley, was hunting for prey flushed by high tides in Richardson Bay.

omnivorous and determined to powergrab last year’s hawk nest, show up, hooting like crazy. What’s a redshoulder to do? Be noisy back. Sing. Sing for territory defense. Sing to secure a mate and better defend the territory. And so, come December, when you hear that insistent kee-a! at its roughly one-per-second interval, “setting the woods agog,” remember it’s not easy being a redshouldered hawk in the urban Bay Area forests.

october–december 2012

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Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

on the trail

from t h e re dwood s to t he s ea on th e pe n in s ula

PURISIMA POSSIBILITIES

by Lisa M. Krieger

For over 130 years, Lobitos Ridge has been climbed only by cattle.

So when we push open a stiff gate and ascend a steep pasture, tall grasses snap at our ankles. We sidestep old fences and prickly thistle. In a gentle swale, we admire a muddy stock pond, rich with tadpoles.

It’s a sneak peek at the setting of a future ridge-to-coast trail, a 1,300-acre payoff for three decades of patient planning, purchase, and political compromise.

The long-awaited Purisima to the Sea trail will be the first recreational route on b ay n at u r e

the Peninsula that spans the entire distance from the Santa Cruz Mountains to Highway One. It also spans many decades of ranching, logging, and, lately, conservation.

The recent acquisition of four historic parcels finally completes a multimillion-dollar chain of protected property anchored by Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. At its peak are the redwood forests along Skyline Boulevard; at the base are fertile artichoke fields near the ocean. Gradually, over time, each prop-

october–december 2012

A yellow-eyed ensatina in Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. Ensatinas, small lungless salamanders, breathe entirely through their skin. Find out how this photo was taken at baynature.org/ensatinaPic.

erty has been secured by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (often called Midpen), now the largest owner of protected lands on the Peninsula. These new acquisitions are indeed just cause for celebration on the agency’s 40th anniversary.

“Use your imagination,” says Midpen docent Lynn Jackson, who is leading our hike along coastal Lobitos Ridge, in a pasture bracketed by two wild creeks.

“You can see how wonderful this will be.”

The entire route isn’t yet open to the public, although docent-led tours are offered. There’s no trail. No signs. No parking lot. No restrooms.

But its promise can be visualized now on a hike through Purisima Creek Redwood Open Space Preserve, a 3,360-acre

A docent from the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District leads a nature hike among redwoods along the Sally Rae Kimmel

Purisima Creek Trail.

© Brian Freiermuth, insituexsitu.com

dense thickets along the trail, curving over fallen logs.

At each wooden bridge crossing Purisima Creek, we stop to admire the furry moss that carpets the banks. This forest feels cool and primeval, with deep shade that is home to hazelnut, stream violet, trillium, and sorrel.

The name Purisima is Spanish for “most pure,” yet clues to a not-so-pure or peaceful past surround us. These redwoods are lush and tall, strong and hardy — but they’re mere youngsters, conceived in the late 1800s after logging denuded this landscape. This now-serene valley was once the center of a massive redwood harvesting operation, with loggers slicing the first-growth redwoods into shingles at steam-powered mills and hauling them out with pack animals.

The logging industry’s impact on this preserve’s landscape can still be glimpsed alongside some trails, in remnant ditches, clearings, and surviving trees still charred from slash fires set by loggers to burn bark and other debris. You can also see the remains of skid roads: heavy wooden crossbars laid across this path to keep the butt ends of logs from digging into the dirt as they were dragged out of the forest, according to University of California Santa Cruz historian Tonya Huff.

Today, the eight-mile-long Purisima Creek is mostly pure again, flowing down the ridge year-round through steep-sided gulches. But in the 1880s, its water was

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Even on a Saturday afternoon, Purisima has relatively few human visitors— but you’ll find multitudes of cigar-size banana slugs and tall trees beyond counting. We start our route atop the ridge at Skyline Boulevard (Highway 35) roughly six miles south of Highway 92, near the headwaters of the creek. An equally lovely access point for the Purisima Creek watershed is the preserve’s main entrance, about a mile and a half farther north.

A dense mix of redwoods, tanoak, and madrone creates a shaded canopy of broadly arching branches. As we walk, the warm, dry air turns cool and dewysweet; the trails are rich with needles, leaves, and those banana slugs. California polypody fern, giant chain fern, and sword fern form a lush understory, with

appropriated to drive the steam-powered saws and the “donkey engines” that hauled logs to the half-dozen mills then operating here.

We pause at wider spots in the already-wide trail, where lumber mills once stood. The Borden and Hatch families owned most of the mills in this area.

A Borden mill was located where Purisima Creek Trail intersects with steep Grabtown Gulch Trail — an evocatively named route that memorializes the (above) Ladybugs often gather on the branches of shrubs by the 1880s-era lumber camp residents thousands to overwinter in sheltered areas in the forest. who laid claim to land and anything (below) The berries of coast fairy bells are among many kinds of of value on it. The ridges were berries you might see in summer in the forest understory.

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showcase for the rugged diversity of the Santa Cruz Mountains’ western slope, with more than 20 miles of trails that weave from the crest at Skyline Boulevard, down through redwood and hardwood forests to the lush riparian habitat along Purisima Creek.

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Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

depleted and lumber prices fell, and all the mills were closed by the 1920s.

Big-leaf maples and western sycamore now flourish in clearings, along the creeks where mills once stood. By autumn, as the days shorten and evenings grow crisp, these deciduous trees turn from bright green to shades of brilliant yellow, subtle gold, and dark brown. Their fallen leaves mingle with redwood litter to form a thick duff that helps to absorb the water from the winter rains and keeps the trails from turning into mud. The returning rains will also recharge creek waters slowed by summer drought. The understory is rich with coffeeberry, thimbleberry, and gooseberry. Wintering ladybugs, numbering in the tens of thousands, gather on the branches of

october–december 2012

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ning the long and complex process of plotting and building the future trail through the four new jigsaw-puzzle pieces of forest, farm, and ranch land.

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Purisima to the Sea Trail Ben Pease, peasepress.com

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To reach the park’s highest point, the summit of Bald Knob, we take a narrow hiking-only trail with switchbacks that propel us quickly up 200 feet. This western flank of the preserve, obtained by Midpen only a decade ago, offers no through access to other parts of the preserve, so this is Purisima’s quietest corner.

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shrubs in spots of sunshine along the creek.

To continue our trek toward the sea, we climb out of the Purisima Creek watershed along an old logging road.

The wide and well-graded Borden Hatch Mill Trail climbs 1,000 feet over 2.5 miles and offers scattered views to the east. It’s a rewarding workout.

This is a hushed landscape, with few hints of birds or beasts. But it is precious habitat — home to the elusive and endangered marbled murrelet, a seagoing bird that makes its nest in old-growth trees.

Midpen staff found and saved a fledgling murrelet near this trail in 2002, the last time the area was surveyed for these rare birds.

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will eventually go beyond Bald Knob, down to the coast.

But here we see glimpses of the soft rolling hills farther west—the route of the future trail. Energized, we drop down the sun-drenched hill, along the wide and grassy Irish Ridge Trail, named after a series of Irish families that settled there early in the mid-19th century.

The open landscape comes alive with the stiffly accented Chi-ca-go calls of a covey of California quail, flushed and fleeing for cover. Western fence lizards scurry across the trail. From the scrubby brush comes the accelerating trill of a wrentit.

The exposed crest of Irish Ridge offers unparalleled views of land that will someday be open to hikers on the new ridge-to-sea route: the watersheds of Lobitos and Tunitas creeks, coastal ranches, and finally the ocean.

Taken together, this is a majestic landscape and remarkably free of development, given that Silicon Valley is just over on the eastern side of the ridge. The Lobitos watershed hosts the tallest tree that Midpen owns — more than 255 feet to the top, according to local historian

blossom ceanothus, and sticky monkeyflower. Bald Knob Trail edges 1.3 miles along an eroded ridge of chalky sedimentary layers, sand and mud deposited in an ancient sea and then uplifted.

Giant, wind-battered Douglas firs cling to thin soil and sandstone outcrops, their branches draped in lichen. Broken branches litter the ground.

With disappointment, we discover that this trail never ascends to the top of the 2,012-foot hill. This area was lumbered as recently as the early 1990s and still feels bruised and blemished.

Today, the Purisima to the Sea route ends in the southwestern corner of the preserve. The district is just now beginre e

from the shady depths of the redwood forest. A new trail

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Bald Knob, on the preserve’s west side, is a world away

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Julie Kitzenberger

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Ken Fisher. This same watershed also has the twistiest known redwood in the region — a 217-foot-tall tree with six full circular twists from root to crown. Near the intersection of Irish Ridge and Lobitos Creek trails is yet another anomaly — a large redwood with a major branch extended over the trail like an arm, elbow bent, forearm up.

The trail ends rather abruptly soon after the junction with the Lobitos Creek Trail, at the southern edge of the preserve. So we have to retrace our steps. At least

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Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

(above) Purisima Creek runs about eight miles from the redwood canyon near Skyline Ridge down to the ocean. (left) Western trillium grows in the understory. Also Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

known as western wake-robin, it blooms in late winter and early spring.

for now. But we can stop to imagine, for a moment, the completion of this Purisima to the Sea hiking corridor that has been a shared dream of so many Peninsula-based environmentalists since the 1980s.

The Bay Area has only one major ridgeto-ocean trail south of the Golden Gate: the 34-mile Skyline to the Sea Trail from Castle Rock State Park to Rancho del Oso in Santa Cruz County.

Until recently, the vast landscape along the coast was off-limits to the district, whose original charter was focused, for political reasons, from the Santa Cruz Mountains east to San Francisco Bay. But between 1999 and 2005, local environmentalists worked with agency officials on a deal to incorporate 220 square miles of the coast into Midpen’s jurisdiction. That cleared the way for the potential acquisition of thousands of

acres of forests, rolling ranchlands, and fertile fields — from Pacifica south past Half Moon Bay and Pescadero to the Santa Cruz County line.

With that expansion, the Purisima to the Sea trail went from dream to possibility, though no completion date has been set. The route will cross Lobitos Creek by bridge, then skirt the corner of 260-acre chaparral-studded Blue Brush Canyon property, purchased in 2009.

It will proceed west and climb out of Lobitos Creek canyon, ascending the grassy 340-acre Lobitos Ridge.

Cattle will continue to graze these hills and valleys because the district has decided to lease these parcels to local ranchers. This is a reversal in philosophy for the district, reflecting new evidence that cattle are one of a few effective ways to manage large grassland areas. “We’re using grazing as a tool,” says docent Jackson.

From Lobitos Ridge, the trail will descend through the upper pastures of the Richard J. Elkus Ranch, donated to the University of California Cooperative Extension Service by the family of the Silicon Valley chip innovator. Three years

ago, uc sold the unused 450-acre uplands portion to the district, retaining the educational barns, gardens, and conference center on the lower parcel.

The future trail will conclude at sea level, on the edge of Purisima Farms, a property sold to Midpen by the John Guisti family. This rich bottomland, used for row crops since the 1860s, was once one of the nation’s largest producers of artichokes and brussels sprouts.

Before the route is built and opened, there’s still a lot to do, from fixing fences to improving water troughs and installing spring-loaded gates. Invasive brush like poison hemlock will be eradicated, over time. And some stock ponds must be relined with clay to make them more reliable habitats for the threatened California red-legged frog.

But the hardest job is done. Over our heads, a red-tailed hawk sweeps a circle in the sky, as if doing a victory lap.

Lisa M. Krieger is a Palo Alto-based outdoorswoman and a journalist with the San Jose Mercury News, covering science and medicine. purisima redwoods ramble

Sunday, November 11, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Join us for a six-mile, docent-led interpretive hike along Purisima Creek and Grabtown Gulch.

Attendance limited; RSVP required. Details: baynature.org/inthefield, (510)528-8550 x205.

october–december 2012

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elsewhere . . . no rth bay

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Ann Sieck

Rob Lehman, lehmanphotography.com

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David Loeb

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Sonoma Valley Regional Park

Dry Creek Pioneer Regional Park

Sanborn County Park

This small, 162-acre Sonoma County park might not seem to be a destination if you don’t live nearby. But if you’re visiting vineyards in the Valley of the Moon and want to stretch your legs, clear your head, and delight your nongustatory senses, then come take a walk through this lovely oak woodland refuge in Glen Ellen. You can even bring a picnic to enjoy on one of the many benches and tables scattered throughout the park.

The main attraction here is the great variety and diversity of oak trees that cover most of the terrain, from the banks of Black Canyon Creek to the top of the 420-foot-high ridge that defines the boundary between the park and the Sonoma Development Center campus.

You’ll find blue, live, valley, black, and Oregon oak, as well as any number of hybrids produced by the notoriously promiscuous Quercus genus.

There are also impressive specimens of pendulous lace lichen (Ramalina) draped on many of the oaks in the valley.

In spring, the park’s grasslands and open woodland understory showcase a variety of wildflowers. The main trail is a fully accessible, paved (and mostly shaded) multiuse trail that travels 1.2 miles from the main entrance on Highway 12 west to the smaller Arnold Road entrance, mostly following the creek. But there are also less-traveled yet well-defined dirt trails inviting you off the paved road to explore the wooded ridges on either side.

Getting there: The main entrance is located at 13630 Sonoma Highway (Highway 12), on the west side of the road, nine miles north of Sonoma.

Parking $7. [David Loeb]

This park’s oxymoronic name applies in summer, when the terraced ridges are tawny and oak trees crowded along cracked clay streambeds are the only evidence of moisture. But after fall rains you’ll find lonely trails here crossing and recrossing active waterways edged with willows or climbing steeply to high green ridges with views all the way across Hayward to the Bay. Dry Creek Pioneer Park is accessible via Garin Regional Park to the north, but the May Road entrance is convenient to transit, invites you to picnic in an interesting garden, and has no entry fee.

Take Meyer’s Ranch Trail north for an easy one-mile stroll along “Dry” Creek to an oak-dotted meadow where rusting antique farm machinery marks the site of the old ranch. From there you can climb the High Ridge Loop Trail, a tough five-plus miles, or stay by the stream on a single-track path for a gentle mile to Jordan Pond and the attractions of Garin Park’s developed area.

You can also follow Dry Creek’s other fork south for a couple of miles, passing tall sycamores and a surprising cluster of young redwood trees. If you want a grand view and are willing to work for it, keep going — up — to loop around 935-foot Tolman Peak.

Other longer loops are possible, and you will likely meet more cattle than people.

Getting there: From Mission Blvd. at Whipple, go east a third-mile; enter just past Dry Creek Garden. Toilet provided; bikes, dogs OK on most trails. [Ann Sieck]

Sanborn County Park on the eastern slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains is a 3,688-acre shaded refuge from the heat and hustle of Silicon Valley. Just two miles west of Saratoga, this Santa Clara County park features oak-bay woodlands and forests of redwood, tanoak, big-leaf maple, and Douglas fir.

The park’s 15 miles of trails range from a fully accessible one-mile nature walk to the more rigorous Sanborn and San Andreas trails that begin near the entrance and climb 1,600 feet up the steep forested slope to Skyline Boulevard and the Skyline Trail, a Bay Area Ridge Trail segment that parallels the road for four miles (and then heads north to Saratoga Gap Open Space Preserve). This upper section of the park is just across Skyline Boulevard from Castle Rock State Park, and visitors to Sanborn will encounter large boulders of the same sandstone formation that characterizes that neighboring park.

If, after your hike, you just don’t feel like returning to “civilization,” you can plop yourself down in the campground, which features both 2 rv spaces and walk-in tent 3 sites (reservations suggested) and is open year-round. Or you can stay at the nearby American Youth Hostel facility in the historic Welch Hurst House, built in 1892 as a local judge’s family retreat and ranch.

Getting there: From Saratoga, head two miles west on Highway 9, and then left on Sanborn Road for one mile to the park entrance. [Rob Lehman]

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

october–december 2012

Give the Gift of Whales!

Help the Oceanic Society protect Farallon Islands whales with a gift to the nature lover in your life. We offer: - Whale watching gift certificates - Humpback & blue whale adoptions - Plus many more ways to get involved.

415-256-9604

www.oceanicsociety.org

Congratulations to Bay Nature for delivering the good news, in Climate Change: Dispatches from the Home Front.

Each installment “brings home” the impact of climate change on Bay Area landscapes, shorelines, and waterways—and highlights the nature-based actions addressing these challenges.

nature.org/california

© dospaz/Flickr via a Creative Commons license

Climate Chronicles: A Sea Change for Seabirds on the Farallones

by Glen Martin

View looking north from a study blind on Southeast Farallon Island, an important wildlife refuge 30 miles off the Golden Gate and the site of long-running research on the marine environment.

“Dispatches from the Home Front” is a series of articles highlighting groundbreaking work being done by Bay Area institutions, agencies, and nonprofit groups to comprehend, mitigate, and adapt to the impact of climate change on Bay Area ecosystems. The series is a partnership with the Bay Area Ecosystem Climate Change Consortium (baeccc.org). More at baynature.org/climate-change.

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ou’ll likely smell them before you see them: A rich ammoniac scent engulfs our boat, and then they loom out of the fog — spires of naked rock, eerily lunar in configuration. And as they emerge, there’s an aural accompaniment: the cackles and squawks of hundreds of thousands of seabirds, with the bellows of thousands of pinnipeds providing a bass counterpoint.

These, of course, are the Farallon Islands. About 30 miles west of the Golden Gate, this aggregation of granitic islets is a wildlife refuge of global significance. Thirteen species of marine birds breed here; the islands’ nesting colonies of west-

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ern gulls and ashy storm petrels are the largest in the world. Five pinniped species — California sea lion, Steller sea lion, northern fur seal, northern elephant seal, and harbor seal — maintain rookeries on these rocky and constricted shores.

But the Farallones are just the tip of the bio-berg, as it were, a small and visible manifestation of a great trove of pelagic life hidden under the surface of the ocean’s swells. Situated in the middle of the California Current, the islands and their surrounding waters are beneficiaries of upwelling, the wind-driven marine phenomenon that transports cold, nutrient-laden abyssal water close to the surface, establishing the basis for a food web that is one of the richest on the planet. Nourished by upwelling, zooplankton by the kiloton feed the krill and anchovies that in turn sustain the birds and pinnipeds of the Farallones, as well as great numbers of rockfish, salmon, and cetaceans in adjacent waters.

The location of this biological treasure trove just off the coast of the Bay Area — as replete with research institutions as any place on earth — has made the Farallones a living marine laboratory, a subject of study by scientists for decades, foremost

Annie Schmidt, farallonphoto.blogspot.com

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climate Change: Dispatches from the Home Front

(above, left) Researchers from PRBO measure and weigh the 2012 cohort of Cassin’s auklet chicks born in the nest boxes built by PRBO staff and interns. (below) A Cassin’s auklet adult sits inside one of the nest boxes; the egg is farther back in a corner of the nest, but at night the birds often sit nearer the entrance.

had nothing to feed the chicks; the krill population had collapsed.

The situation is similar for the island’s common murres, another species recovering from poor nesting results in 2005–2006. Unlike Cassin’s auklets, brooding murres primarily feed their chicks juvenile rockfish and other small schooling fish; but young rockfish also disappeared during this period. Researchers peg both declines to an anomalous cessation of the seasonal winds that drive upwelling. october–december 2012

b ay n at u r e

Annie Schmidt, farallonphoto.blogspot.com

Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

other Farallon birds tell a different story, one that is helping researchers trace the impact of climate change on both the islands and the ocean at large: Since the 1970s, observes Bradley, Cassin’s auklets have declined 80 percent here. “There may have been up to 100,000 breeding Cassin’s auklets here in the early 1970s,” says Bradley. “Now there are no more than 20,000.”

With a global population of about three million ranging from Alaska to Baja California, Cassin’s auklets are not in imminent peril of extinction. But their waxing and waning says a lot about marine productivity in general. And what it says now is that coastal ecosystems are in dangerous flux. Indeed, the auklets’ recent nesting success comes after the disastrous 2005–2006 seasons, when successful breeding was virtually nil. Adults abandoned their nests en masse after laying eggs, largely because they Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

among them researchers from Petaluma-based prbo Conservation Science. prbo’s daily logs reach back to 1968, allowing researchers to track both yearly variability and long-term trends in wildlife, fisheries, and oceanic conditions. These detailed datasets point to significant changes for the Farallones and the surrounding seas, changes driven by a shifting climate that threaten to disrupt the region’s biological productivity.

In the past, the Farallones were menaced by direct assaults: egg collection for San Francisco’s restaurants in the 1850s and ’60s; fishermen shooting sea lions; the military dumping barrels of radioactive waste in adjacent waters after World War II. These threats were straightforward, as was the solution: declaring the islands a national wildlife refuge managed and protected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Climate change, on the other hand, is neither localized nor easily addressed: The collapse of zooplankton from reduced upwelling due to a changing climate, for example, is both impossible to predict with accuracy and hellishly difficult to mitigate.

The impacts of climate change are already being felt, though this wasn’t immediately apparent on a recent visit to Southeast Farallon Island, the largest islet in the archipelago and the site of prbo’s research station. On a windy, fog-shrouded spring day, thousands of nesting western gulls crowded pathways on a flat expanse known as the Marine Terrace, vocalizing querulously and pecking at researchers’ ankles. Nearby at Sea Lion Cove, California and Steller sea lions jockeyed for territory with nesting colonies of Brandt’s cormorants and common murres. Small holes marking the nest burrows of Cassin’s and rhinoceros auklets were everywhere, as were fabricated nesting boxes constructed by prbo scientists. The boxes were constructed to both expand potential nesting sites for the auklets and provide easy access for study. As we watched, researchers moved among the boxes, carefully extracting and weighing soot-gray Cassin’s auklet chicks, then returning them to their nests. It was gratifying work because “hatching success has been very high this season and the chicks are gaining weight,” says Russell Bradley, senior scientist and manager of prbo’s Farallon program.

“Cassin’s auklets feed exclusively on krill, and krill are extremely abundant this year,” explains Bradley. “So things are looking really good for these guys. In the past two years many birds had double clutches — raising a second brood after a successful first one — and we’re beginning to see second broods this year. This is the first time in over 40 years we’ve seen such a high percentage of double broods. They’re going gangbusters.”

The future for the islands’ Cassin’s auklets might therefore seem bright. But prbo’s 44-year-long records for the auklets and

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Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

The increasing unpredictability of upwelling has been accompanied by an unexpected shift in the abundance of both forage species and their predators. For decades, strong upwelling was an indicator of uniform breeding success for all Farallones birds. But now forage species sometimes follow divergent paths, and upwelling no longer automatically assures their abundance.

Specific causes for the fluctuations are unclear, says Jahncke, but climate change appears to be the main driver.

“Cassin’s auklets have been doing great since 2008. The same with salmon; they were down drastically from 2006 to 2009, but have come back dramatically, and the link to upwelling and abundant krill is strong. So given past data, you’d also expect anchovy eaters like Brandt’s cormorants to be thriving. After all, Annie Schmidt, farallonphoto.blogspot.com

That particular dip in upwelling wasn’t necessarily directly attributable to climate change. The problem is that global warming computer models predict much greater variability in winds and upwelling, and that, says Jaime Jahncke, director of prbo’s California Current Group, is precisely what we’re seeing now.

“We’ve had very strong upwelling since 2008. In fact, 2010 was the best year ever in terms of zooplankton production. But this follows those terrible 2005–2006 seasons.”

This is a recent phenomenon, emphasizes Jahncke: “The variability in Cassin’s auklet productivity on the Farallon Islands in the new millennium has been extreme. Within four years, we went from the least productive years on record to the highest.

Auklet productivity in these years was associated with similar changes in seasonal onshore winds and upwelling. This contrasts with the very low variability in auklet productivity from the 1970s to the early 1980s. We believe that the Cassin’s auklets are telling us that the system has changed from one that was highly predictable to one that is almost chaotic.”

(above left) These common murres are among the species of seabirds that depend on krill in the waters around the Farallones to nest and breed successfully. (above) As sea level rises, sea lions on the Farallones are moving up to the terraces where sea birds, such as these Brandt’s cormorants, build their nests. (right) A nesting Brandt’s cormorant.

Barrie Rokeach, 2012, rokeachphoto.com

our coast—our future Most of the people in the world—and most of their infrastructure—can be found in jurisdictions bordering the coast or coastal watersheds. The Bay Area is no exception.

However, in this era of climate change, the benefits of living close to the shoreline are accompanied by the peril of rising sea levels and more frequent major storm events. Climate scientists project that sea levels will rise between 31 and 55 inches by the end of this century and that flooding now associated with 100-year storm events will become much more frequent.

How can coastal communities prepare for and respond to this threat? That was the challenge that several government agencies and nonprofit organizations decided to tackle when they formed Our Coast–Our Future (OCOF) in 2010. The primary goal was the development of an interactive online service that would combine the latest scientific knowledge of physical factors such as sea level rise, storm intensity, and coastal flooding with fine-scale mapping of the existing Bay Area shoreline, from the Pacific coast into San Francisco Bay. Now the achieve-

by David Loeb

ment of this goal is in sight: This winter OCOF will release its “Adaptive Planning Toolbox” for the outer coast, to be followed by a San Francisco Bay version in mid-2014.

The underpinning of the toolbox is a highresolution digital elevation model (DEM) produced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) based on the latest underwater and landbased elevation data at a resolution of two meters. From this foundation, USGS is modeling projected coastal erosion and flooding based on increments of sea level rise and a range of storm surge scenarios. PRBO Conservation Science is pairing that with a suite of physical and biological data layers that users can turn on or off, depending on their objectives and concerns. What existing infrastructure in the community is at risk? What neighborhoods might be subject to flooding?

Is there land that could be acquired to buffer existing communities? Does it make sense to restore a particular wetland?

According to OCOF coordinator Kelley Higgason of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, this will be the

Coastal erosion threatened this row of houses in Pacifica following El Niño storms in 1998.

first locally scaled model of its kind, putting state-of-the-science data into a user-friendly format for real-world application by planners and authorities in coastal communities.

The other partners in this effort are the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, NOAA Coastal Services Center, and the National Park Service. To find out more, go to prbo.org/ocof.

3

Sebastian Kennerknecht, pumapix.com

−3

Reproductive Success −2 −1 0 1 2

Bay Nature, from PRBO Conservation Science

with upwelling, there should be plenty of anchovies.”

But for reasons not yet understood, the anchovies have virtually disappeared off the Northern California coast, observes Bradley, and Brandt’s cormorants are in steep Cassin’s auklets decline as a result. “Before 2008, we had 20,000 Brandt’s cormorants nesting on the Farallones,” Bradley says.

“Now there’s maybe 2,000 to 4,000. There just isn’t the prey to sustain them.” Western gulls, another species that Brandt’s cormorants prefer to feed fish to their nestlings, are also having little breeding success on the Farallones this year.

Climate change is expected to exert other dramatic 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 effects on the Farallones. Marine acidification is a particThe reproductive success of Cassin’s auklets and Brandt’s cormorants on the Farallones once ular concern. As greenhouse gas levels climb, oceans act as moved mostly in tandem, as both depend on prey associated with coastal upwelling. In recent carbon sinks, absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. This years, this pattern has been disrupted by fluctuating ocean conditions, resulting in a marked ultimately lowers the pH of the seawater, interfering with divergence in the two populations’ success, beginning in 2005. the shell-making ability of marine organisms, including cove. Directly in front of the blind, common murres placidly pteropods, the free-floating, minute, snail-like creatures that incubate their eggs on the bare rock. Fifty yards downslope, constitute a significant component of the zooplanktonic biohowever, stressed Brandt’s cormorants hiss and peck at a Califormass. “The impact on them would certainly have profound connia sea lion that wanders obliviously among their nests. “It’s clear sequences,” says Jahncke. “Anything that affects zooplankton that sea level rise is going to result in a lot of species displacewill affect everything else along the food web.” ment,” says Warzybok. “The seabirds are probably going to lose Finally, global warming is already causing higher sea levels: out. They can’t compete against sea lions.”

The sea level at the Golden Gate, for example, has risen by seven So what can be done to preserve the stunning diversity of the inches over the past century, the result of thermal expansion of Farallones and surrounding waters? “There are mitigation strateseawater from rising temgies that could help somewhat,” observes Bradley. The nesting peratures. And the continboxes for Cassin’s auklets are one such mitigation, as are the ued elevation of sea level is tough regulations that keep casual visitors off the islands assured, due to both ongoand proscribe harming or harassing marine wildlife. Gerry ing thermal expansion and McChesney, manager of the refuge for the usfws, notes that the melting of the polar “a few species of invasive plants introduced mainly by past ice caps. The impact of island occupants are affecting habitat for seabirds and other these rising seas at the Farnative wildlife on the island. While we’ve been working to reduce allones is both clear and the cover of these species for several years, a more intensive effort ominous: less real estate is needed to restore the island’s native plant community.” for wildlife. According Ultimately, such mitigative measures are just that: attempts to to a recent study by the ameliorate local damages caused by trends that are planetary in National Academy of scope. The sober reality is that the threats facing the Farallones, Sciences, West Coast sea and our marine environment, can only be definitively addressed levels could rise three feet by coordinated international efforts. If nothing else, though, the by the end of the century. rich data yielded by the Farallones and their surrounding waters With even a “modest” are contributing to our understanding of the profound impacts rise of 1.6 feet, observes Bradley, Southeast Farallon would lose climate change is exerting on our oceans. And with any luck, about six acres of habitat, or five percent of the island’s surface that understanding will provide some impetus for comprehenarea. Much of the loss would consist of intertidal areas and sive action. the pocket beaches and gulches where pinnipeds haul out. This would force seals and sea lions onto the higher terraces where Glen Martin, former environmental reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, birds currently breed. Nesting habitat would thus be reduced; writes on natural resource issues for various publications. His latest book, Game especially hard hit would be burrowing species, most notably Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife, was published Cassin’s auklets.

by UC Press in March 2012.

This process already appears to be under way. “In the last two years California sea lions are hauling out much higher up Funding for “Dispatches From the Home Front” has been provided than usual,” says Peter Warzybok, a prbo Farallon program biolby the State Coastal Conservancy, The Nature Conservancy, and ogist. “They’re now intruding into the Brandt’s cormorant coloPacific Gas & Electric Company. nies.” This new behavior is apparent from a small blind at the october–december 2012

b ay n at u r e

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22

First Person Right On Course Interview with John Wade, Farallon Patrol Skipper, by Daniel McGlynn John Wade is one of about 20 skippers who make up the Farallon Patrol for PRBO Conservation Science.

Skippers offer their boats and volunteer their time to shuttle and resupply the scientists who live and work on Southeast Farallon Island, a critical seabird and marine mammal breeding site. The shuttle makes the run to the island — located 30 miles west of the Golden Gate — every two weeks or so. We caught up with Wade recently on his 40-foot sailboat, the Starbuck, at dock in the San Francisco Marina.

DM: How did you get involved with the Farallon Patrol?

JW: In 1984 the owner of this boat was Ralph Nobles, a Midwest farm boy turned physicist and environmentalist; a very bright guy. Anyway, we were involved in the fight with Mobil Oil over the development of Bair Island in Redwood City.

So we got to be friends, and he invited me to crew for him on one of his trips out to the Farallones. We did about two a year up until about 1995, when he sold me the boat. Now I do four or five trips a year.

DM: And what are you shuttling?

JW: On a typical run we’ve got 600 to 1,000 pounds of food and supplies: propane, gas cans — whatever they need to keep everything in stock for the next two weeks or more. And typically we’ll have two or three biologists going out to the island and two or three coming back and maybe two or three other volunteers from prbo who ride out and back. On the way back we bring all of the recycling, all of the compost, you name it. One time we brought back 40 boxes of scientific journals that they had out there on the island that were starting to decay; they’ve got most of that data online now.

DM: Is there such a thing as a routine trip to the Farallones?

JW: On about 50 percent of the trips, we motor out in calm conditions in the fog with kind of a long, gentle swell. And then

about five, 10 miles from the island the fog clears off and you’ve got a nice wind for the next 10 miles. Then we tie up at the buoy offshore there, and then they come out with a shore boat. Usually it’s kind of a very pleasant, easy, broad-reaching downwind run back to the Golden Gate and just a lovely, lovely ride.

The other 50 percent are much more varied: We’ve never been out in really stormy conditions. Maybe two or three trips were mildly stormy. But if the seas get over about eight or 10 feet the land-

Daniel McGlynn

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

ings wash out and even though my boat will get out there you can’t get the supplies and people ashore, so there’s no point.

DM: Have you ever had to abort a trip?

JW: There was one run where we were barely able to get everything off the boat and out of there; it was dicey enough where they just wanted to do one run in with the shore boat, so we just dumped all the food in their boat and they took off and we took off.

And there was one run where we were OK on the boat, but the landing conditions deteriorated in the course of an hour, so we ended up hauling two five gallon jugs of oil and six bags of concrete back to the mainland with us.

But those were the only two runs out of about 70 that we weren’t able to complete once we got under way.

Once in a while, you get this little run from heaven. The nicest run was on December 5, a very warm sunny day, east wind blowing out the Gate, and we ran dead downwind all the way to the island in this balmy 70-degree weather — in December! While we are unloading the wind backs from the east to the north so then we sail all the way back on a beam reach in the same beautiful warm sunny weather. It’s sort of like . . . it’s as close to heaven as you can get.

Then there was one run that was kind of interesting. We went out right at the edge of a mild storm front and as we headed out the wind [swung] back around from northwest down to the south. And about five to 10 miles from the island, it started raining, but the wind stayed pretty steady, so we just kept going. And when we got to the island — in the rain you don’t wait around for much, it’s pretty much “get it in the boat and let’s go.” And that was winter, so sunset was five o’clock. By the time we got done it was close to sunset, and we cast off and started

(opposite) John Wade at the helm of the Starbuck. (left) A Farallon Patrol sailboat approaches Southeast Farallon Island. (below) The islandbased Zodiac goes out to unload supplies Sara Acosta

from the Starbuck.

The crane is used to lift the raft into and out of the water.

PRBO file photo

heading back. By that time the wind had started picking up more from the south — probably another couple of hours and we couldn’t even have landed.

And then we just headed back in, and the wind picked up and picked up and we were kind of hunting through the rain to find the channel markers and then, just before I was about to heave-to for a little nav check, one of the guys — that’s a great thing about biologists, they’re very sharp observers — sees the buoys and great, we’re right on course.

Then right as we come in to Point Bonita the wind does a snap 180 degree shift from south to north and the boat does a full standing jibe, just bang, bang, and the boom flies over to the other side, the rain stops, and the sky just kind of opens up and there’s these big white puffy clouds and it’s a full moon coming up over Berkeley, so all of these clouds are backlit — they have this glowing white fringe around them — and it’s like you’ve gone through purgatory and now you’ve arrived in heaven. Here’s the Golden Gate Bridge with all its lights on and all of these big, puffy white clouds and a big full moon, and the wind is 15 knots from the north and we just have that last hour to go and it’s just heavenly. That was a good trip.

DM: What about interesting wildlife sightings?

JW: Some of the fun things: About five miles before the island, usually in the summer, there’s a pod of humpbacks that are out there, kind of sporting around. They’re not somebody you want to get too close to because they’re very frisky and they’re very big, but they’re nice to watch from a couple of hundred yards away. There’s a resident gray whale that’s there much of the year, just swimming circles around the island and feeding in the local area.

Then there was one run where I got to go ashore and we went up the hill to the lighthouse, and the guy on shark watch there said they had a hit about a mile south of the island and you could see this big pink stain in the water and a fin going around and thrashing going on, and then the animal bled out and the shark just went ahead and fed. The biologist went out very fast to film it and to

monitor what was going on — the feeding behaviors — but we had to go back to our boat.

DM: Have you sailed much in other places?

JW: I’ve been sailing up the Delta and inside the Bay since I was 12. And then in the Sea Scouts, we went down to Southern California. I’ve taken this boat down to Southern California, but I haven’t really structured my life in a way where I can take off for three or four weeks straight.

DM: So how does the stretch of water out to the Farallones compare to the Bay and Delta?

JW: It’s quite different.

You can get the same amount of wind that you get inside the Bay, but out there you get significantly larger waves.

And that’s really the main difference — the size of the waves.

DM: What do you do when you are not sailing?

JW: I’ve been working on protecting and maintaining the San Mateo coast my entire adult life, since ’74, and I expect I will be for a while to come. I worked for Peninsula Open Space Trust for 19 years, doing land acquisition — sort of doing land management and acquisition at the wholesale level. When I left there I went to work managing one or two specific pieces of land — a private estate down on the coast near Año Nuevo, and then I also manage Cascade Ranch historic farm, which is a fixer-upper project at this point, but eventually we’re going to make it into an organic farming community.

DM: And any plans for more sailing in your future?

JW: I’d love to someday take off and do some long distance sailing. Maybe I’ll get a chance to do that, and maybe not.

In the meantime the way I can guarantee to get some ocean time in and meet interesting people is to do the runs for prbo. Once I get them on my calendar they’re like sacred dates; nothing can get in their way.

october–december 2012

b ay n at u r e

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habitats of

the East Bay Regiona l Parks This story is part of a series exploring significant natural habitats and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), many of which are encountered in other parts of the Bay Area as well. The series is sponsored by EBRPD, which manages 65 parks, reserves, and trails covering more than 100,000 acres in Alameda and Contra Costa counties (ebparks.org).

P

lanet Fungi

Journey into the Kingdom of Mushrooms

(above) The poisonous Amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, appears in a variety of shapes. (left) Honey mushrooms along a wooded trail. These common parasitic mushrooms, in the genus Armillaria, have underground mycelia that can cover huge areas. One in Oregon spans 2,400 acres. (above center) The underside of a yellow cracking bolete mushroom.

Ron Wolf

John W. Wall

It may be safely said that there are two kinds of people: those who notice mushrooms and those who don’t. Likewise, there are two kinds of noticers: the appreciative and the appalled. Retired East Bay Regional Park District naturalist Ron Russo sums up years of visitor reaction: “For the most part there’s a general disdain. They have heard so many stories about poisonous mushrooms.” A few find their very existence offensive: Charles Darwin’s daughter Etty patrolled the grounds of her estate for suggestively shaped stinkhorns, burning them in her fireplace before her housemaids got a glimpse of them.

Such reactions are unfortunate. There’s much to value in a mushroom, even the homely “dead man’s foot.” Culinary uses aside, fungi have their own aesthetic appeal: the spectral elegance of the amanitas, the vivid reds and greens of the waxy caps.

“Mushrooms can be every bit as beautiful as birds, butterflies, shells, and flowers,” wrote David Arora in his classic Mushrooms Demystified. Beyond that, mushroom-forming fungi are part of intricate ecological networks incorporating plants, animals, and other fungi. Indeed, without them, our ecosystems as we know them would not exist.

A caveat up front: Collecting mushrooms (or plants or animals, for that matter) is not allowed in many public parks, including in the East Bay Regional Parks. You may have philosophical differences with that policy, but park employees, including the park police, don’t want to argue philosophy.

Just look, photograph, or sketch.

by Joe Eaton

Stacy Boorn, AWEgallery.com

With their mosaic of habitats, the East Bay Regional Parks have a generous endowment of these bizarre organisms. “Bizarre” is not too strong a word, and I’m not even talking about the folklore: the dancing fairies, the butter-churning witches, the belief that mushrooms were generated by thunder (or by shooting stars). It may or may not present a problem for vegans, but mushrooms aren’t plants. They’re their own kingdom, coequal to plants and animals — and in some ways more like animals than plants. The cell walls of fungi contain chitin, the same material that makes up the exoskeleton of a grasshopper or the shell of a lobster. But unlike plants and animals, which typically grow by adding cells, most mushrooms just expand by filling a fixed number of preexisting cells with water.

The part of a fungus that we generally see is the fruiting body.

Like a strawberry or an apple, it’s a device for sending new individuals out into the world, whether as fungus spores or the seeds of plants. Most fruiting bodies are ephemeral, decomposing after they’ve released their spores. Shaggy mane mushrooms (Coprinus comatus) digest themselves as they release their spores.

However, some species, notably the shelf or bracket fungi, have woody perennial fruiting bodies.

The rest of the fungus is below ground or under the bark of a tree: a tangle of filaments called hyphae that make up the mycelium. Sometimes, as with truffles, the fruiting body is also

concealed in the soil. Individual mycelial masses can be enormous. The current record-holder, an Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon, covers 2,400 acres (nine square kilometers) and may be 8,500 years old. Since all its parts are connected and genetically identical, it’s regarded as a single organism.

Mushroom growth may be simple, but fungal reproduction can be mind-bogglingly complex. Although some fungi are made up of only two sexes as plants and animals are, in other species, two distinct sets of genes determine gender, which can result in dozens or hundreds of “mating types” of mycelial filaments, each of which is compatible with another group of types. To us, they all look alike. In the ubiquitous splitgill (Schizophyllum commune), one set of genes has 350 known variations, the other 60, for a total of 21,000 possible combinations.

There’s a seasonal rhythm to mushroom growth. Debbie Viess, cofounder of the Bay Area Mycological Society, has watched the cycle in Huckleberry Regional Preserve for years: “After the fall rains begin, the first to come up are the boletes and amanitas,” she says. “It takes a couple of weeks. The mycelia are there, underground, all the time. They wait for the water source before they set their primordia, the incipient mushrooms, which are like those ‘magic sponges.’ They’re perfectly formed and just expand.” After those precursors comes a bloom of chanterelles, waxy caps, russulas, redwood rooters, and myriad others. october–december 2012

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Ron Wolf

26

“People have been putting different pieces of the puzzle together.” For instance, our local chanterelles have been recognized as a distinct species, Cantharellus californicus; so has the spring coccora (Amanita vernicoccora).

All that species variety is matched in the many ways fungi have to make a living. The button mushrooms you see at the grocery store are part of a group of fungi called saprobes, which extract nutrients from decaying organic material. You can think of them as the recycling crew, breaking down the cellulose in leaves and the lignin in wood; some colonize the droppings of ruminants and other herbivorous mammals. Beyond that, it all becomes much more complex.

By far the most important ecological relationships for fungi are their symbioses with vascular plants, in which fungal hyphae link up with plant roots to form mycorrhizal nodes. Through these junctions, fungi provide nutrients, water, and sometimes miner-

Christian F. Schwarz

Viess says spring rains are less productive in the East Bay (above) The bright orange fruiting bodies of the toxic jack-o-lantern hills, although the deadly destroying angel (Amanita ocreata) can have vernal flushes. But there are no hard and fast mushroom glow green on dark nights. (below) Turkey tails, tree rules: “Mushrooms aren’t necessarily limited by season. parasites, are a frequent sight on It’s a crapshoot. They don’t tell me what they’re going dead and decaying logs. to do.” Mushroomers, she advises, should “go out with very little expectation and be open to anything.” Longtime local fungophile John Sutake agrees: “Mushrooms tend to respond to both the calendar and the moisture level.

After a dry winter, you can find a lot of ‘fall’ mushrooms in spring if the moisture is appropriate.”

As a rule of thumb, some mushroom species prefer certain habitats and plant communities. Chanterelles, amanitas, russulas, and boletes occur under coast live oaks and also with other oak species in the wilder parks farther east. Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) can be found on streamside alders and big-leaf maples. In Redwood Regional Park, the redwood rooter (Caulorhiza umbonata), named for its long “taproot” (which is not really a root), is associated with the giant conifers, as are some agarics and waxy caps.

Even planted, nonnative Monterey pines and als to the plants, while plants provide sugars that feed the fungi.

Monterey cypresses have their fungal sidekicks: slippery jacks Such relationships can be incredibly specialized and many are (Suillus) with pines, blewits (Clitocybe nuda) with cypresses. Russo crucial to the growth and survival of the trees and shrubs that says there’s more variety on the east side of the Berkeley-Oakland define so many local habitats, from the oaks, buckeyes, and pines hills than on the west. Those are general patterns; there are of Sunol Regional Wilderness to the chaparral, bay laurel, manalways surprises. zanita, and redwoods of the Oakland hills. “Fungi and plants Adding to the challenge of mushroom identification, it’s likely have evolved together; the world as we know it would not exist that whatever mushroom reference guide you own is obsolete. without fungi,” says Viess.

Mycology, like every other branch of biology, has had its own One mycorrhizal group, which actually penetrates plants’ genetic revolution. “We’ve had data from dna sequencing for the last 15 years or so,” says R. Michael Davis of UC Davis, coauthor roots, dates to 600 million years ago, when plants first colonized of the new UC Press Field Guide to Mushrooms of Western North America. land. Another group evolved 130 million years ago and includes b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

worm, then colonize and digest it. Laccaria bicolor preys on the insect-like arthropods called springtails, passing nutrients from their bodies on to its mycorrhizal plant partners.

Stealing nutrients from a living host is another option. Two western species of the mushroom-forming genus Elaphocordyceps parasitize truffles. The related Cordyceps victimizes the immature stages of moths and butterflies or the nymphs of cicadas in our region. Spores infest a living larva; the fungus kills it when it begins to transform into a pupa. Club-shaped fruiting bodies grow out of the host’s corpse. Lobster mushrooms (Hypomyces) parasitize other mushrooms, forming a crust over the fruiting bodies of russulas and milk caps. Honey mushrooms and polypores are tree parasites.

“There is no ‘typical’ mushroom lifestyle,” says Viess. The much-prized morels are “the original opportunists.” Some form mycorrhizal associations; some don’t. The one safe generalization about morels is that mass fruitings follow forest fires in the mountains. “Morels occur anywhere they want: wood chips, flowerpots, between the mortar of bricks,” she adds. I believe her: I discovered a morel in the hardpan of my backyard in the Berkeley flatlands just after I moved in, 17 years ago. I haven’t seen one there since.

Mushrooms sustain a wide array of animals, some of which help out by dispersing spores. Snails and slugs are avid mushroom eaters. “There are a ton of insects that depend on woody shelf fungi and other mushrooms,” says Russo.

Several beetle families are mycophagous, including the oddly named pleasing fungus beetles. Even the unappetizing Annulohypoxylon, whose fruiting bodies on dead oak wood resemble miniature charcoal briquettes, is food for a certain species of moth. Russo says almost (continued on page 38) Ron Wolf

10,000 fungal species, many common mushrooms among them.

These surround the plant root with fungal tissue.

Some mycorrhizal fungi form partnerships specifically with manzanitas and madrones. Other species are found only with alders, or with Douglas fir. On the other hand, plants are less picky about their fungal partners. “A pine tree can have hundreds or thousands of [mycorrhizal] associates,” says Tom Bruns of UC Berkeley, whose lab focuses on these relationships. “Each host has many choices among the things that specialize on it.”

As Bruns explains it, mycorrhizal mushrooms have a sweet deal: “They’ve contracted out to find nutrients for these large woody hosts and are paid very well in sugars. They have the resources to make big mushrooms, the conspicuous boletes and russulas. Everything else has to fight for little pieces of decaying Charles Kennard wood. It’s a huge tax on the host, but it increases the host’s productivity.” Many mycorrhizal fungi provide nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, while some specialists dissolve rocks by secreting citric and oxalic acids and give their partners calcium and magnesium. Others protect their hosts from root pathogens.

Predation seems an unlikely life strategy for a mushroom, but at least two local species have gone this route. In addition to breaking down organic material, the widespread oyster mushroom’s mycelia consume tiny nematode worms that wander by. The fungal hyphae secrete a toxin that stuns the

(clockwise from left) The inedible Russula sanguinaria, known as bloody brittlegill, is a mycorrhizal fungus that grows in association with conifers. Known as lion’s mane or old man’s beard, Hericium erinaceus grows on scars on trees or logs. Banana slugs are especially fond of mushrooms, which are an important food source for creatures Christian F. Schwarz

big and small.

october–december 2012

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C e l e b r a t i n g

t h e

f o r t i e t h

A n n i v e r s a r y

o f

t h

R O O M TO

(clockwise from upper left) Deane Little, Family on Hawk Trail, Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve • Sheryl Ehrlich, Light Dusting, Long Ridge Open Space Preserve • Charles Tu, Sunset, Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve • Nina J. Hyatt, Windy Hill Oak Shadows, Windy Hill Open Space Preserve • Deane Little, Young Madrone in Fog, Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve

e

B R E AT H E M i d p e n i n s u l a

R e g i o n a l

O p e n

S p a c e

D i s t r i c t

The Wild Hear t of the San Francisco Peninsula Now, in 2012, it’s easy to think of it as inevitable: That we would be able to look up at the skyline of the Peninsula and see a nearly unbroken swathe of green hills from Belmont south to Los Gatos. And that, on any given day, we’d be able to travel into those hills and, for free, take a walk, ride a bike, watch birds, gaze at wildflowers . . . or simply be, on our own, in wild nature. This gift has come down to us from a group of visionaries who promoted the creation of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, approved by Peninsula voters in November 1972. At its 40th anniversary the district consists of 26 preserves encompassing 60,000 acres of protected public land, from baylands on the east to the western slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains. To mark this anniversary, the district and Heyday Books have collaborated on Room to Breathe, a book of photos, paintings, and poetry depicting the natural beauty and diversity of these landscapes. Here we present a small selection.

(clockwise from upper left) Karl Gohl, Open Space Ride, Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve • Kit Colman, Oaks in Fog, Thornewood Open Space Preserve • Deane Little, Spring Afternoon, Peters Creek, Long Ridge Open Space Preserve • Jacob Osborne, Voices on the Wind, Long Ridge Open Space Preserve • Carolyn Shaw, From Here to the Sea, Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve • Bonnie Welling, Dawn on Stevens Creek Shoreline, Stevens Creek Shoreline Nature Study Area

Room to Breathe will be available in November 2012. Order your copy from openspace.org (click on “Shop”) or from Heyday Books at heydaybooks.com/book/room-to-breathe.

J

“We may be reaching the end of that thread of experience, the end of the dream given by you, Coho, and all your kin.” spotting these fish turned out to be much harder than I expected.

The winter seasons of 2009 through 2011 passed without my seeing a single coho south of San Francisco, even though I walked and waded miles of Gazos, Waddell, and Scott creeks.

Were they there, and I just wasn’t seeing them? Or, a more depressing thought, were they not there to be seen? To find out, I decided to expand my creek hikes into the summer months, in search of juveniles. s

gazos, waddell, & scott creeks

teo ma

mar in lagunitas creek muir beach

Summer on Scott Creek

Adult coho spend their lives in the open ocean and, after three years at sea, return to their birth streams once the winter rains have begun. So outside of winter, you’ll find only juveniles in local streams. You make a trade-off when you look for juveniles in summer instead of adults in winter. The weather is, of course, much warmer and drier, but instead of looking for a

san ta cr big creek hatchery

Susan Farrar, SPAWNusa.org

uz

ules Evens wrote that line in “The Dream Given by You,” his feature in the October 2001 issue of Bay Nature.

Reading about his encounters with coho salmon on Lagunitas Creek got me thinking. Where I live on the San Mateo coast, a small number of coastal creeks have also supported runs of coho at the extreme southern end of their range, and I wondered if their runs still survived. Perhaps, with some luck, I could also spot coho in my “home waters.”

I’m not a fisheries biologist but a fly fisherman who’s Summer Scott Creek curious and concerned about what is happening toonthe coho. I knew their populations south of San Francisco were in big trouble, so if I wanted to see them near my home in Half Moon Bay, I had no time to waste. I picked up historical stream surveys, biological reports, and creek maps. I watched the weather and hoped for big December Seeking rains,Slow which trigger the Water (Muir Beach) run of adult salmon back to their natal streams.

I knew finding these fish would be difficult, even if they were there.

Coho return to spawn when stream flows run high and off-color due to high sediment loads. The fish prefer Betting on Brood Stock (Big Creek) the cover of darkness for moving upstream and typically build their nests, or redds, in the most remote stretches.

From the time my dad taught me to fish, I’ve spent countless hours in and around water — always looking for “holding” fish, those staying mostly still in the water, just dark shadows moving subtly over the streambed.

I knew from reading survey results that the numbers of spawning adults were dreadfully low. But I had questions beyond the numbers: Did these creeks have barriers to fish passage?

Had logging in these watersheds increased the sediment load for these creeks? Were the winter flows not strong enough to open the creek’s mouth to the ocean? Only by seeing these creeks firsthand could I learn about the real challenges confronting these fish.

I left my reel at home and packed my binoculars instead, but

an

32

Long May They

(right) View of San Geronimo Creek from inside a culvert. San Geronimo is a tributary of Lagunitas Creek, home to the region’s largest remaining run of coho salmon. Culverts and erosion due to runoff from roads and roofs are major issues for these fish. (above) A coho leaps up a rapid on Lagunitas Creek. Sights like this have become virtually nonexistent on the historic salmon streams south of the Golden Gate.

Todd Pickering, toddpickering.com

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

Run

A Quest for COH O from Santa C ru z to Ma ri n

by Michael Carl

hours spotting in the stream, I saw only juvenile trout and not a single coho.

That result is not such a surprise. In a 2008 survey conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, juvenile coho were found in extremely small numbers, and in only five of 11 watersheds. In two watersheds, Scott and Waddell creeks, survey teams tallied only four and 34 juvenile fish, respectively, in over eight miles of channel. And in 2010, for the first time in 19 years of monitoring, Jerry Smith of San Jose State University found no juvenile coho in Scott, Waddell, or Gazos creeks. Again in 2011, Smith’s survey came up empty.

So according to the experts, the coho simply weren’t there to be seen. What had happened? Researchers have zeroed in on poor ocean conditions as one likely cause, and the impact rippled inland as well. Changes in ocean surface temperatures led to more frequent El Niños, says Smith, which meant bigger storms washing away more redds, killing eggs and juveniles. Even fish that survived faced starvation when they got to sea, due to changes in the coastal upwelling that drives the productivity of Northern California’s marine environment. Upwelling drives cold, nutrient-rich waters to the surface and sets off cycles of plankton production that reverberate up the food chain to top predators like salmon. Many scientists now think that poor upwelling from 2005 to 2008 meant very lean years for salmon and other creatures that live offshore.

While coho from watersheds north of San Francisco suffered the same troubles and saw population declines as well, they were starting from a higher baseline. Lagunitas Creek, located in west Marin County, currently supports the Central Coast’s largest run of wild coho salmon. Neighboring Redwood Creek has also been somewhat of a stronghold for wild coho. However, with no coho spawners observed in the winter of 2007–2008, Redwood Creek’s coho also appeared to be in decline. I decided to head north to find out what was being done to address this.

Michael Carl

20-inch fish, you’re looking for a target less than three inches long. During one such trip to Scott Creek north of Santa Cruz, in late summer of 2010, bright sun combined with an absence of onshore wind to heat the Santa Cruz coast to 80 degrees.

Driving south along Highway 1 past Waddell Beach, I turned left onto Swanton Road. At the summit of the hill, a view to the east revealed a landscape charred by the 2009 Lockheed Fire, which had burned though much of the Scott Creek watershed over two weeks, nearly taking out a fish hatchery on Big Creek.

Coming down the backside of the hill, I arrived in the Scott Creek Valley. I parked at a bridge near the old Seaport School and put on my wading boots. Low summer flows would make a walk in the creek much easier than pushing through the thick bank-side wall of willow, alder, and poison oak. But even with less water running, progress here was slow. Approaching a small pool, I could see fish darting for cover. Waiting quietly for a few minutes brought them back, and that’s when the identification began. Looking through my binoculars, I saw that most had spots on the dorsal fin, a trait of rainbow trout. After several

an

s

Michael Carl

Seeking Slow Water (Muir Beach)

Seeking Slow Water

mar in lagunitas creek muir beach

Some 150 years ago, a coastal lagoon expanded behind Muir Beach, where Redwood Creek meets the ocean. The lagoon provided acres of slow, open water for fish and other wildlife. Such brackish water habitat near the ocean is essential for fish like salmon, which need to undergo a physiological change before they leave freshwater streams for the ocean. But subsequent human settlement brought a levee, a bridge, and a parking lot to the banks of Redwood Creek. The creek, no longer capable of expanding into its natural floodplain, was encased in an earthen straitjacket.

That’s now changing. I came to Muir Beach to meet Carolyn Shoulders, a restoration project manager with the National Park Service who sits here at a busy intersection of science, backhoes, and a small army of consultants, staff, and volunteers — directing

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Betting on Brood Stock (Big Creek)

teo ma

Summer on Scott Creek

gazos, waddell, & scott creeks

(above) Redwood Creek, which flows through Muir Woods, meets the ocean at Muir Beach, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. (right) Workers installing a new bridge across the creek, which underwent massive restoration to create better conditions for migrating coho salmon.

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

Jessica Weinberg, NPS

north of Año Nuevo State Reserve, is one of three creeks where San Jose State University researchers once found coho. No coho were seen in 2010 or 2011. (below) This hatcheryraised spawning salmon was released in Scott Creek. The hatchery at nearby Big Creek is run with an eye toward preserving the genetics of the Santa Cruz Mountains’ dwindling coho runs.

traffic. For almost a decade, she’s managed a complete transformation at Muir Beach.

Before a single shovel of dirt was moved for the project, fisheries biologists surveyed Redwood Creek upstream of Muir Beach. They discovered something troubling: very few places for juvenile coho to escape fast water. These tiny fish cannot survive in fast water and must swim to slow-moving backwater or “offchannel” pools to avoid getting swept downstream during periods of high flow.

“In our design revisions,” she explained, “we added a lot of specific features for off-channel habitat for coho.” As we walked the edges of Redwood Creek, she pointed out a few of those.

“That’s the old creek channel. It will now provide backwater habitat for coho.” Directly across from the old channel, workers from the National Parks Conservancy were busy planting stream banks that lead to a much larger backwater, one of six off-channel habitats created by the restoration.

A variety of native species, including threatened red-legged frogs and steelhead trout, are certain to welcome a more naturally functioning ecosystem. Shoulders outlined the restoration’s numerous benefits beyond just helping coho. “Starting out, our goal really wasn’t just to increase the population of coho in our system,” she explained. “However, if that happens it would be one of the most outstanding results we could have.”

Several miles north of Redwood Creek, the Lagunitas watershed — a historic coho stronghold — has also lost slow water habitat for young salmon.

From a legal perspective, this watershed serves at least three masters. The National Park Service calls the shots in the lower reach, where the creek empties into Tomales Bay. Samuel P. Taylor State Park covers the middle portion, while the headwaters fall under the jurisdiction of Marin Municipal Water District.

Michael Carl

(left) Gazos Creek,

Todd Steiner, executive director of the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (spawn), tells me that the headwaters section typically has about half of the spawning activity. “You would think if you’re a fish that you’d want to spawn in that protected national and state park area with the big, beautiful redwood trees. But they don’t, because these fish have evolved to spawn in tributaries.”

As I drove along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard with Steiner and spawn watershed scientist Aaron Fairbrook, they pointed out how homes along the creek east of the state park alter the landscape. Steiner is most worried about roofs and traditional landscaping (e.g., lawns). It’s not just one roof, but a suburb of roofing. Rather than getting absorbed in the ground, rainwater runs off from roofs and driveways into creeks or storm drains, greatly magnifying the flows in important spawning tributaries like San Geronimo Creek.

Steiner says the answer lies in a simple device, the rain barrel.

“If you catch that rain in a barrel or a big cistern, then you can take the peak off the storm events.” Besides reducing peak flows in winter, rainwater harvesting lowers demands on treated water supplies for landscaping, reduces flooding and erosion, and ultimately improves fish habitat. In 2010 alone, spawn built five demonstration rain gardens and completed 67 rainwater harvesting consultations for residents throughout Marin County.

Harvesting rainwater, adding backwater habitat, and restoring october–december 2012

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h)

mar in lagunitas creek muir beach

k)

strong genes. Mounting evidence points to a decline in the longterm fitness of wild salmon populations when their hatchery counterparts compete for food and habitat.

So in 1994, the National Marine Fisheries Service recommended that salmon hatcheries eliminate the practice of transBetting on Brood Stock ferring salmon between different streams.

Two men wade ankle deep in water inside an above-ground Armed with increased knowledge of cell biology combined pool. They hold what look like long-handled pool skimmers with technology to analyze genetics, California fisheries managwhile staring down at the water. It’s a cleanup operation. Russell ers are pushing ahead with the use of captive brood stock to Enriquez, the assistant hatchery manager, pushes his net along restart lost runs or runs near collapse. Brood stock coho are the the bottom of the pool. “Got a large one.” As Enriquez lifts the progeny of wild fish collected from their native stream. net, a 21-inch-long, bright silver coho shakes hard, throwing The hatchery I visited near Scott Creek is one such brood water in all directions. stock program, which grew out of a cooperative effort between “Now that’s what I call fishing,” someone says, grinning. the Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project (mbstp) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (nmfs), using coho from But the dozen people gathered at the Big Creek Hatchery Scott Creek in Santa Cruz County. aren’t here to fish. On this summer morning, eight volunteers The nmfs’s Santa Cruz office works closely with mbstp to along with hatchery personnel and fisheries biologists from noaa are moving several hundred adult coho to their new home apply complex breeding strategies. With the goal of maximizing Michael Carl at the hatchery. variation in dna and minimizing inbreeding, geneticist Carlos Garza Once netted, the coho get uncereinspects each spawning adult’s dna moniously placed in a large, sterile before breeding. Garza says brood garbage can partly filled with water stocks will play a critical role in and carried off to the new pool. recovery of declining coho runs.

Every fifth fish is taken by Dave How that plays out here remains Streig, the longtime hatchery manto be seen. Up north, in response to ager at Big Creek. “Forty-six,” Streig the grave status of Russian River coho, yells out after a length measurement. a brood stock program has been under A noaa biologist notes 46 centimeters on her clipboard. way for a decade. The California A hatchery-raised adult coho salmon held by a worker at the Big Creek The size of these adults will be Department of Fish and Game colhatchery, which has been run by the nonprofit Monterey Bay Salmon and monitored closely until the end of lected juvenile coho native to the Trout Project since 1976. the year. They need to grow in size Russian River watershed and placed and strength to reach reproductive maturity. Sometime between them in the Warm Springs Hatchery on Dry Creek below Lake late December and early January the coho reaching full reproSonoma. These juveniles were reared to adults, they spawned, ductive development will spawn at the hatchery. and their offspring were released throughout the Russian River I grab one handle of the garbage can and noaa fisheries biolwatershed in fall 2004. ogist Erik Sturm takes the other. We scramble up a short path A significant rebound in returning adults for the Russian and lift the 12 gallons of water and four coho over the wall of River was slow to materialize, but recent results show more the new pool. Then we stand at the edge of the pool and watch promise. In the winter of 2010–2011, an estimated 190 adult coho our fish quickly swim into the mix of other coho. A pump circureturned to the Russian River watershed, the largest such return lates water, creating a steady current that’s important for these since the population crashed in 2000. Faced with dwindling runs fish. “It forces them to work,” Sturm says. “Swimming against in other North Bay streams, state and federal officials are seria steady current will strengthen them.” ously considering expanding the brood stock program to stem Ideally these coho would have grown strong in the ocean further declines of coho salmon in Marin, Sonoma, and possibly before migrating back to Scott Creek. Unfortunately, not Mendocino counties. enough wild coho spawned in 2008 to keep this run going.

From on-the-ground habitat restoration to water conservaWithout this hatchery maintaining a brood stock, the unique tion advocacy to reimagined fish hatcheries, the efforts to save genetics of Scott Creek coho would have vanished. the coho are broad and diverse. But it’s too early to say whether But hatcheries have gained a sometimes justified bad rap in they’ll also be successful. fish restoration circles. It’s not true that a coho is just a coho.

Until that chapter is written, I’ll continue walking the creeks Each wild coho comes from, and returns to, a specific watershed. near my home, looking closely and hoping to witness the return So a coho from the Klamath River is different genetically than of my local coho. one from the Russian River. Unfortunately, traditional hatcherMichael Carl is a freelance writer and fly fisherman living in Half Moon Bay with his wife Debbie and a coonhound named Walker. ies have focused more on pumping out fish than on maintaining

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floodplains represent critical improvements to facilitate coho survival in their respective watersheds. But what can be done in watersheds where coho have all but vanished? To answer that question, I drove back across the Golden Gate, heading south for home.

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

on Pier 96 in San Francisco

all the gilled mushrooms and boletes harbor insects; the newly on coals. Up the coast, the Kashaya Pomo baked chanterelles, reclassified California chanterelle, however, is normally insect-free. boletes, and oyster mushrooms on hot stones, but regarded While some mushrooms attract insects and other invertepuffballs as poisonous. brates by smell, a few use light. According to biologist Dennis All the species mentioned so far are native and local. Exotic Desjardin of San Francisco State University, bioluminescence mushrooms may not be on most conservationists’ radar, but occurs in four different fungal lineages and appears to have been they’re around. Mycorrhizal species can travel with their host inherited from an ancient common ancestor. The cold fire of plants. “If you move living plant material, you’re moving stuff fungi is produced by the interaction of substances called lucifwith it,” says Bruns. Sometimes the introductions are low-impact: erin and luciferase, chemically distinct from analogous com“Eucalyptus fungi came to California with the trees, but there’s pounds used by fireflies and deep-sea fish. Sometimes, as in the pretty low diversity.” jack-o-lantern mushroom (Omphalotus olivascens), the fruiting The death cap (Amanita phalloides), which is thought to have body glows; in the honey mushrooms, the underground hyphae arrived in the roots of cork oaks, may have had diverse European are the source of foxfire, a bluish-green glow sometimes seen in origins; the Bay Area population appears related to that in maindecaying wood. land France. Whatever its provenance, it took readily to the No one’s quite sure why so many mushrooms are toxic. native coast live oak and later to tanoak. Death caps were col“Mycologists lack a satisfactory theory for the meaning of lected at the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey in 1938 and on the mushroom toxins,” writes botanist Nicholas Money of Miami UC Berkeley campus in 1945. “It was found as an isolated popuUniversity in his recent book Mushlation in the Santa Cruz Mountains room. Toxins can deter predators, or in the ’60s or ’70s, then popped up they may be a metabolic byproduct. all over the place,” recalls Russo.

“It would be more effective for the “Near Joaquin Miller Park in Oakmushroom to be distasteful than to land there was a fairy ring of phalloibe lethal,” notes author Arora. He des 25 or 30 feet across.” Bruns and suggests that amanitas, more depenother mycologists have calculated dent on airborne spore dispersal than that this invasive symbiont is animal transport, may benefit from expanding its California range a chemical deterrent. However, the by about 10 kilometers [about six genus Amanita contains both edible miles] per year. Is it competing (to humans) and lethal species. with natives? “That’s just a theory,” Toxins aside, larger creatures David Arora says. “It could be just Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) can be found growing on streamalso feed on mushrooms, both the a niche they were grabbing that side alders and big-leaf maples. above-ground fruiting bodies and wasn’t occupied.” the subterranean truffles. No East Bay mammals are fungal speCalifornia has no special-status mushroom species, but local cialists, but several species are opportunistic mushroom eaters. declines in some Bay Area species have been observed. “There’s a Small native rodents like deer mice and wood rats include fungi whole suite of Agaricus species that used to be abundant in grazed in their diets, as does the introduced fox squirrel. Their dropcoastal pastures,” says Arora. “They disappeared almost compings package fungal spores, yeasts, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and pletely in the late ’90s. It’s an open question why.” The habitat nutrients — a perfect recipe for the spores to thrive. Russo says hasn’t changed, and the mushrooms weren’t heavily gathered. He fox squirrels store mushrooms in their nests as winter provisions. suspects a change in the soil microfauna, but that theory remains Black-tailed deer dig up truffles on occasion and relish Amanita speculative. muscaria. Feral pigs have a taste for truffles; Russo has seen oak Although mushrooms are protected from picking in the savannas at Sunol and Ohlone Wilderness that the pigs have regional parks, nonconsumptive mushrooming is another matter: rototilled for fungi and bulbs. Viess says pigs prefer russulas and On winter days, you can always enjoy these extraordinary and edible amanitas and avoid chanterelles. An East Coast mycolohighly photogenic organisms in situ. After all, birders seldom gist has observed wild turkeys feeding on morels. eat grilled warblers on toast.

Mushroom eating (mycophagy) is a well-established, although Joe Eaton lives in Berkeley and writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and not universal, human trait as well. We know that the Ohlone and Estuary News.

Miwok people of the East Bay harvested and ate mushrooms, Special thanks to Debbie Viess for assistance with this article. although specifics are hard to come by. The Sierra Miwok recognized at least eight kinds of edible mushrooms, including three redwood regional no-pick mushroom walk puffballs and a shelf fungus that was also used as a poultice for Saturday, December 1, 10 a.m.–noon wounds and a treatment for arthritis. They ate some species raw, Search for mushrooms at Oakland’s Redwood Regional Park with the Bay Area Mycological Society’s Debbie Viess and an EBRPD docent. some sun-dried, and others boiled. The Rumsen- and MutsunRSVP required. Sign up after October 11 by calling (510)544-3187. speaking Ohlone of the Santa Clara Valley roasted mushrooms Ron Wolf

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(continued from page 27)

b ay n at u r e

october–december 2012

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Los Vaqueros Watershed’s North Side and Interpretive Center Have Reopened Come visit us!

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40

Books of Note Our annual “Bay Nature Library” is taking a hiatus, but we wanted to let you know about new works from a few favorite Bay Nature collaborators.

John Muir Laws — creator of our Naturalist’s Notebook — has published The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds, from Heyday Books. More than just a howto, this book also covers bird anatomy and behavior. Who else shows how oranges and toothpicks can help you understand birds’ legs? [johnmuirlaws. com, heydaybooks.com] John Hart’s new An Island in Time: 50 Years of Point Reyes takes a long view of this beloved park and confronts the current oyster controversy with his usual elegance and nuance. The book, a limited run from Lighthouse Press, will be available at Point Reyes Books, Book Passage, and Amazon.com.

Naturalist David Lukas has just produced a second bird field guide, following his Sierra birds volume. Bay Area Birds offers 221 definitive species accounts,

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with life history and other details not generally found in illustrated field guides. [lukasguides.com] The California Coastal Conservancy and Coastal Commission have just released the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Guide and Beaches and Parks from San Francisco to Monterey. Both are well produced, with color photos and broad coverage, from coastal geology to Bay stewardship to the history of the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk. [ucpress.edu] Also from UC Press, the new Field Guide to Mushrooms of Western North America features many images by Ron Wolf (who shot this issue’s cover). The guide is a must-have for anyone interested in fungi.

(Not yet interested? Be convinced by our feature on page 24.)

Sean Arbabi, whose photo graced the cover of our July 2012 Point Reyes special section (“Crowning Glories”), shares a wealth of nature photography tips in his Complete Guide to Nature Photography, from Amphoto Books. [amphotobooks.com]

LEFT LEFTCOAST COAST

Our trendsetting Bay Area radio show was the first to extensively cover the CargillOur Redwood City Bay Saltworks Project trendsetting Area radio show was the first to cover among many other Northern California environmental and the Cargill Redwood City Saltworks Project among many other regional, environmental and political issues. political issues.

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Efforts to overturn the wilderness status at Drakes Estero could open the door for industry to do the same in other wilderness areas and national parks. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of our public park, I encourage readers to boycott Drakes Bay Oyster Company, patronize Tomales Bay oyster farms, and support efforts to protect wilderness in Drakes Estero, the ecological heart of Point Reyes National Seashore.

Jeff Miller, Inverness We acknowledge that the publication of the DBOC ad introduced a controversial topic that has riven the Point Reyes community. We also published an ad from the Environmental Action Committee stating the case for wilderness. Both points of view should be heard. Bay Nature supports both the fullest possible protection for native wildlife and sustainable local food production, while recognizing that at times these may conflict. (continued from page 5)

To the Editor, We have all your issues, but this latest (July–September 2012) is the greatest.

My wife and I get to Point Reyes every

CNPS

chance possible, but one’s insight can always be enhanced, and this most recent Bay Nature sure did it for us!

Owen Mulholland, San Anselmo To the Editor, We thoroughly enjoyed the July–September issue of Bay Nature, especially the articles celebrating Point Reyes National Seashore’s 50th anniversary.

As a longtime resident of Inverness and a regular reader of the local sailing magazine Latitude 38, we have long been aware of our latitude. On page 30, Jules Evens locates Point Reyes at “38 degrees w and 123 degrees n.� That should be 38 degrees n, 123 degrees w.

Latitude is expressed as degrees north or south of the equator, up to 90 at each pole. Longitude is expressed as degrees west or east of Greenwich, England, meeting at 180 w and 180 e at the International Date Line.

Charles Gay, Inverness Thanks for catching our error!

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unusual to see them near Point Reyes, where the access crew saw this one and others that came so close they had to stop the engine.

This year (2012) in the Cordell and Farallon sanctuaries, as well as in Monterey Bay, scientists and tour boat operators reported earlier-than-usual sightings of blue and humpback whales, some of which came closer to shore than expected.

Why? As the krill go, so go blue whales that specialize in eating these shrimplike crustaceans. But it wasn’t an “off-thechart” year for krill like 2010, says Jaime Jahncke, lead investigator for access.

That year, access counted four times more humpbacks than in any year from 2004 to 2008. Krill production was depressed from 2004 to 2007, he says, and missing from the area entirely in the 2005–2006 season. The krill have since recovered.

There’s more at play than whales and krill, however. “We saw a lot of productivity out there, but also a lot of weirdness,” says National Marine Fisheries Service’s John Field, who conducts a

mid-water trawl survey in May and June.

The chief weirdness was an enormous number of salps, gelatinous zooplankton about an inch long. Salps compete with krill for food, so it’s possible that the salps pushed the krill closer to shore than usual, and the blue whales simply followed their prey.

Conditions off our coast have shifted again and will affect more than whales.

An El Niño cycle has begun and will continue to strengthen, according to Sophie Webb, PRBO conservation Science/NOAA-ONMS

(continued from page 6)

government forecasts. But El Niño is an unruly child, says Jahncke. El Niño conditions in 1982–1983 and 1998–1999 resulted in low productivity on the Farallon Islands, but El Niño–like conditions

in 2010 brought an explosion of krill and the best year ever for Cassin’s auklets (for more on auklets at the Farallones, see page 18). So all we can do is wait and see — and enjoy the ever-changing show.

I

n the ongoing debate over just how many hills there are in San Francisco — anywhere from seven to 70 — you are unlikely to hear it argued that San Bruno Mountain in South San Francisco should be included in the mix. This iconic peak is technically in San Mateo County and often feels worlds away from the city.

But when you stand atop the ancient sand dunes on the mountain’s northwestern flank, it’s easy to see that this was once part of the vast San Francisco dune system that spread from Land’s End to San Bruno Mountain. And that’s why San Bruno Mountain Watch is fighting to protect this small backdune remnant.

The Daly City Dunes, adjacent to San Bruno Mountain State and County Park and above Hillside Park, belong to an ancient dune system that formed dur-

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ing an interglacial period at least 100,000 years ago. These weathered and yellowed Pleistocene dunes stand in contrast to the younger, white-sand dunes in the Presidio and along the Great Highway that formed atop the older dunes around 10,000 years ago.

The older dunes are more efficient at retaining water and nutrients. These dunes also support rare and endangered plants such as San Francisco spineflower,

silver beach lupine, and the endangered San Francisco lessingia. “Lessingia is more than a cute yellow flower,” says Joe Cannon, stewardship director at San Bruno Mountain Watch. “It provides food for pollinators all summer long until the rain starts.” Unlike most

annuals, lessingia lives for a full year. It thrives on open dunes, starting in spring as a basal rosette and pumping all its energy into a deep taproot. In June it bolts into flower — little yellow blossoms that live all summer.

San Bruno Mountain Watch, a grassroots nonprofit that has worked to preserve and expand the native ecosystems of the mountain for 40 years, wants to see the dunes protected and connected to the parklands on San Bruno Mountain. Most of the Daly City Dunes are publicly owned, explains Cannon, but about four acres are in private hands, and one of the owners wants to cap the dunes with eight houses and accompanying infrastructure.

“This dune site has a long-term future,” says Cannon, “because it is connected to wilderness and already part of a system”— the rest of San Bruno Mountain. To get involved, go to mountainwatch.org.

M

att Stoeker, director of Beyond Searsville Dam, (continued on page 44)

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is a homegrown activist. He grew up in Portola Valley upstream of the 65-foot-tall dam. He says that as a boy his chosen “religion” was to fish and explore Corte Madera Creek above the dam. The fish he saw in that creek were small, so when at age 19 he saw a 30-inch silver fish jump out of the scour pool at the dam’s foot, he was surprised. “Whoa, what was that?” he said to his friends. The fish, a steelhead trout, jumped out of the water several times in its attempt to get upstream.

Each time it slammed into the dam.

“That moment of seeing that steelhead trying to swim home and bouncing off the concrete wall was something I couldn’t walk away from,” says Stoeker, who went on to study restoration ecology in college. Then he returned to his natal creek to start Beyond Searsville Dam, a nonprofit organization that wants to see the dam removed and wild steelhead back in their historic spawning grounds in Corte Madera Creek.

As dam sites go, Searsville is in an

Alice Cummings

(continued from page 43)

ideal location. Six creeks converge in a meadow upstream of a narrow gorge where the dam hovers above San Fransisquito Creek, one of few creeks flowing into San Francisco Bay that still supports a consistent steelhead run. Spring Valley Water Company built the concrete block dam in 1892 and in 1919 sold it to Stanford University.

A Stanford University steering committee is in the process of studying alternatives for future management of the dam, including its possible removal.

Like most aging dams, this one is no longer efficient. Sediment accumulated in its reservoir has choked water storage capacity to ten percent of what it once was. But even with its hobbled capacity, the reservoir is a major source for the one million gallons of non-potable water used by the university each day, according to Stanford Report.

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“It’s a complicated and nuanced issue,” says Philippe Cohen, executive director of the 1,189-acre Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, about a fifth of which is occupied by the dam, reservoir, and associated freshwater wetlands.

Cohen says the committee hopes to make a recommendation to the president and provost by the end of 2013.

Whether the dam comes down or stays, the biggest headache for the university is the sediment behind the dam.

Should it be left where it is to protect the freshwater wetlands created by the dam, on which migrating birds have come to depend? Should it be mechanically removed (an expensive proposal), or should it be allowed to slowly flush into the Bay? For Stoeker, that would be a win-win.

Dams have been starving downstream wetlands of sediment for years, says Stoeker, who argues that the sediment will come in handy as sea level rises.

“The only sustainable way to deal with rising sea levels is to have enough sus(continued on page 46) pended sediment in

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the system,” he says.

Find out more about Stoeker’s work at beyondsearsvilledam.org. (continued from page 44)

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he Metropolitan Transportation Commission (mtc) is trying something new. Folded into a transportation grant program is a $10 million fund for land conservation. “It’s amazing for a transportation agency to invest in open space,” said Stephanie Reyes, Greenbelt Alliance’s policy director. “They are the only regional transportation agency in the country doing it.”

The funds are part of One Bay Area, a four-year, $320-million program that is central to the region’s Sustainable Communities Strategy, a land-use plan designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of California’s landmark climate change laws.

In the context of land conservation, $10 million is not a lot: Any number of organizations could spend that amount on just one acquisition. But the symbolic importance of the new fund may be much greater because it brings new priorities

to regional planning discussions that often revolve almost solely around roads and housing.

Andrea Mackenzie, chair of the board of the Bay Area Open Space Council, says the idea of combining land conservation, green infrastructure, and ecosystem services with regional planning has been a goal of the land conservation movement for decades. “Plan Bay Area [the larger regional plan] and the Sustainable Communities Strategy is a oncein-a-generation opportunity to plan and implement the Bay Area’s future footprint in a more integrated way, where protection and maintenance of open space, farmland, and natural resources is integral to climate-smart infrastructure,” she says. “We see the One Bay Area $10 million grant as a down payment.” mtc is still establishing the grant program’s guidelines and will put out a call for projects in late 2012 or early 2013, starting with projects in Marin, Napa, Solano, and Sonoma. For more information go to mtc.ca.gov.

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october–december 2012

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su pport f or bay natur e By making tax-deductible contributions above and beyond the price of a regular subscription, Friends of Bay Nature invest in the continued growth and development of Bay Nature magazine and the Bay Nature Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Bay Nature Sustainers are businesses and organizations that make an annual tax-deductible donation of funds or in-kind services of $500 or more. (Contact david@baynature.org.)

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

(Contact david@baynature.org.)

The Friends of Bay Nature list includes donations received between June 2 and September 4, 2012. Donors of $500 or more become members of the Publisher’s Circle and receive invitations to special events and outings. Call (510)528-8550 x205 or email judith@baynature.org for more information.

Thank you for your interest and support!

Publisher’s Circle Anonymous (5) Gertrude & Robert Allen Brian Ashe & Cynthia J. Rigatti Carol Baird & Alan Harper Lee Balance & Mary Selkirk Janice Barry Valerie Barth & Peter Wiley Louis Berlot Stewart Brand & Ryan Phelan Daniel & Kathleen Brenzel David Breskin / The Shifting Foundation Robert & Shelagh Brodersen Phyllis Browning Kathleen Cahill & Anthony Chorosevic Minder Cheng & Wen Hsu Jon Christensen George & Sheri Clyde Christopher & Kathryn Dann Lynden Davis Thomas Debley & Mary Jane Holmes Sean & Wendy Dexter Carol Donohoe Sarah Dorrance & David Kardatzke Todd & Marge Evans Elizabeth Fishel & Bob Houghteling Eric Folmer Catherine Fox David Frane & Charla Gabert Harald & Sabine Frey Norman Fritz & Fran Mueller Heyley & Hilary Gans Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber Tracy Grubbs & Richard Taylor Carlyn Halde Bruce Hartsough & Leslianne Lee Claudia & Scott Hein Glenn & Juanita Hemanes Jorgen Hildebrandt Karen & Robert Jachens Louis Jaffé & Kitty Whitman Bob & Harriet Jakovina Jerry & Lola Kent Nancy Kittle Doris Klein Gudrun Kleist & Jim Morel Kimberly & Matthew Krummel Peter & Sue LaTourrette

Matthew Leddy & Gail Raabe Virginia Loeb Mark & Paula Lowery The March Foundation John & Valerie Metcalfe Mia Monroe Leslie Murdock & Kathleen Hall Russell Nelson & Sandy Slichter Larry Orman & Marice Ashe Anita Kelley Pearson Jane & Richard Peattie Eleanore & James Plessas John Raeside Margit & Richard Roos-Collins Sue Rosenthal Les Rowntree & Meg Conkey Carol & Mike Sabarese Sara Sanderson & Eric Weaver Bob & Brenda Schildgen Jake Sigg Virginia Slaughter Pat Snow Cindy Spring & Charles Garfield Michael Max Stoaks Crissy & Ted Straub Thomas Theodores & Patricia Smith Laney & Pasha Thornton Barbara Vance John Waterbury Bart & Nancy Westcott Trevlyn & Jumbo Williams David Wimpfheimer Friends of Bay Nature $5,000+ Jorgen Hildebrandt Virginia Loeb $1,000+ Anonymous (1) Marilyn & Nat Goldhaber Harriet & Robert Jakovina Nancy Kittle Patricia Snow $500–$999 Anonymous (2) George & Sheri Clyde David Frane & Charla Gabert Harald & Sabine Frey

Hayley & Hilary Gans Bruce Hartsough & Leslianne Lee Claudia & Scott Hein Karen & Robert Jachens Paula Lowery Jacob Sigg Virginia Slaughter Crissy & Ted Straub in honor of Marsha Hastings $250–$499 Janice Barry Mark Cocalis Lynden Davis Frank Delfino Robert Dodge Craig Lanway Ann & Michael Loeb David Ogden Thomas Theodores & Patricia Smith $100–$249 Anonymous (2) Doug & Diane Allshouse Magnus B. Bennedsen Edward & Mildred Bennett Constance Bowencamp Ann & Winslow Briggs David Bushnell Kristin & Ronald Dick Marta Drury Nancy Falk Richard Ferry Kay & Leslie Filler Marilynn Gallaway Peter Gleick & Nicki Norman Carol Goodwin Pamela Gray Wade Greene Mike Hammes Christie & John Hastings Davis Hershey Jan Z. Hintermeister Margaret Ingalls & David Lindsay Eric Jaeger Jon Johnsen Larry Jones Dorothy Kakimoto Frank & Sally Lopez Sandy McCoy Kathryn K. McNeil Motorola Foundation

Karen Musalo Arleen Navarret Audre & Roger Newman Robert Newton William Nisbet Gary & Robin Nosti Ruth Nuckolls Grace Perkins Patricia & Robert Raburn Joanna & Thomas Reynolds Phila Rogers Allen Rudolph Ken & Marjorie Sauer Doris Sloan Toshi Suzuki Nancy Teater Randy Vogel Lyman Wear $50–$99 Anonymous (3) John Atwood Helen Bodington Don Broderson Linda Carson Brenda Carter Joanne Castro Deborah Celle Joan & Fred Collignon Conestoga-Rovers & Associates Robert E. Connick Edith Copenhaver William E. Davis Jr. Dale Della Rosa Licia Demeo John Derdivanis Evan Evans III Helene T. Frakes Paul Goldstein & Dena Mossar Sherry Goodman & Jordan Luttrell Martin & Joyce Griffin Paul Grunland John Harris Faye & Tom Hendricks Melissa Hippard Breta Holgers James Huang Judith L. Katz Annie & John Kenny Barbara & Phil Leitner Dieter & Huguette Lenz Farida & Thomas Mein Edgar Mendelsohn

Mary Anne Miller Charles Mohn Steve Mullin Sharon Ordeman Ellen Peterson Dominique & Donna Pinkney Elizabeth & Robert Raisler Anne Rerolle Martin J. Rosen Christine & Martin Sculati Carolyn Serrao Cindy Shamban & Marse Sussman Igor & Shirleymae Skaredoff Nicki Spillane William Toaspern Jack & Trudy Washburn Don Weden John & Sallyanne Wilson $25–$49 Josh Adams & Hannahrose Nevins Andrew Aldrich Leo Allamanno George & Stephanie Almeida Mike Banister & Nora Privitera Robert Berman Thomas Branca Bei Brown Prudence Carter Elizabeth Clark Ellie Cohen & Miki Goralsky Fran Cox Joanne Drabek & Thor Start Suzi Eszterhas Joan Ferguson & Craig Uhrich Theodosia Ferguson Robert Fox Heather Furmidge Ira & Janet Gelfman Dave Ginsburg Elisabeth Gleason Rita Haberlin Jules Heumann Elizabeth Hook Douglas Johnson Thomas Johnson Diana & Robert Kehlmann Max Kirkeberg Margaret & Michael Koenig Hildegard Kural Watson Laetsch Danelle & Thomas Mann Theresa McGovern James McGrew Sylvia McLaughlin Pam Mendelsohn Barbara & Gerald Meral William Milestone Dragana & Arlee Monson Shelby Morales John Motter Linda Northway Roberta S. O’Grady Miriam Pollock John & Margaret Poole Ellen & Richard Price Diane & Don Rhett Michael Rogers Marguerite Ryan Deborah & Paul Sagues Bruce A. Schine

Pamela Shreeve Virginia Snyder Ileana Soto Tom Spiekerman Peter Szabo Michael Tong Linda Wagner Kristen Wick Pauline Yeckley Bay Nature Sustainers Seyfarth Shaw LLP (in-kind) Bay Nature Funders Clif Bar & Company Coastal Conservancy, Bay Area Program Dean Witter Foundation East Bay Regional Park District Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Jewish Communal Fund JiJi Foundation Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District The Nature Conservancy Pacific Gas & Electric Point Reyes National Seashore Association Regional Parks Foundation Rintels Charitable Foundation San Francisco Public Utilities Commission S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation Thomas J. Long Foundation Subscription Partners Acterra Bay Area Older Adults Berkeley Partners for Parks California Native Garden Foundation California Native Plant Society City CarShare Close to Home Edible East Bay Friends of Edgewood Natural Preserve Green Chamber of Commerce Marine Mammal Center Randall Museum Sonoma Land Trust UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley In-Kind Donors Extreme Pizza Jupiter Brew Pub Carrie McAlister | The Grubb Co. Vogel & Associates Special Thanks Kemper Bankhurst Kristi Britt Kelley Higgason Hub Bay Area Dennis Jongsomjit James Kassemi Gerry McChesney Melissa Pitkin

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Why Bother Recycling?

Let the Earth turn. Watch the methane clouds in action at http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?1020

Landfilling is the largest human-generated source of methane, a greenhouse gas 17– 100 times more potent than CO2. The shorter the timespan, the higher the number.

Much more is produced and escapes into the air while filling the landfill than can be captured after equipment is in place. Watch NASA’s 1999 animation of the Earth; green shows the methane clouds at the melting poles. Don’t waste discards. They’re resources that were cut or mined, refined, made into something, and shipped around the world. Nearly all materials can be recovered and reused, recycled, or composted today if handled well. If you’re not for Zero Waste, how much waste are you for?

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Urban Ore salvages for reuse at Berkeley’s transfer station. People also bring us things and call for pickups. We conserve To End the Age of Waste h t t p : //u r b a n o r e . c o m about 7,000 tons a year and sell the reusable goods in retail sales. We’re open until 7:00PM (receiving closes at 5:00) 360 days a year at 900 Murray near Ashby @ 7th, Berkeley.

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Construction & Design Neil Collier

Berkeley, CA

510-527-9445

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Families Afield

with URBIA Adventure League concept and design by Barbara Corff & Damien Raffa

shoRe LI ne sPottI ng !

A deeper sense of place and a treasure hunt are yours to discover in this activitypacked outing. Schedule an hour to visit Arrowhead Marsh in Oakland (map: ebparks.org/parks/martinlking). print out the supplemental Activity Page at baynature.org/families-afield. Then head out! Find your way to the Observation Tower shown on your map.

What is a shoreline?

Imagine a line that moves with each tide. San Francisco Bay is always in motion, where fresh and salt waters meet and mix, and plants adapt to the salty waters, providing a special diet for shorebirds and other salt marsh dwellers. Let’s see how many of them we can find!

1. Start! Climb the Observation Tower pictured here and fill out the field notes on your Activity Page.

2. Survey! Use the telescope to take in the terrain.

Spot the pier pictured below.

SCOp

e!

Spot the

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PIckL

s Betw e

w

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LL

the B en htt gh

BI R

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Telescope Chal lenge!

Scan the marsh for birds.

Mark their locati ons on your Activity page m AcLes Be ap. n Then return to th e Observation To wer and use the telesc ope to find the bi rds you marked on yo ur map. Follow th is arrow to complet e your journey...

BA R

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oReLIne

What are “refugia”? Look for the grassy structures sticking out of the marsh. These floating shelters protect the endangered California clapper rail.

Scientists monitor the shelters regularly for nesting birds, tracking these rare birds with radio collars.

tg the s hn o

~Sharol Nelson-embry east Bay Regional parks naturalist

llers:

Rds In BI

dsfLAI In R Lg dBsI

“More than 80% of the original Bay Area marshes and wetlands are gone, but new wetland habitats are being created and are thriving. What’s good for intertidal creatures at the shoreline is good for shorebirds! Marsh habitats are crucial to their survival.”

line dwe

A

BI R

se shore

AR o

TeLe

3. Explore! Find your way out onto the pier and to the water’s edge.

Ask the Naturalist m i c h a e l

“To see even more shoreline creatures that are important food for birds, sharks, and bat rays, at low tide gently lift a rock (the size of your hand), and spot yellow shore crabs, mussels, and clams. please gently put the rock back!”

~Anthony DeCicco, Golden Gate Audubon Society naturalist

Fun Family event When: Saturday October 20th 10 a.m. to noon Where: MLK Regional Shoreline What: A family event with Bay Nature, east Bay Regional parks, Golden Gate Audubon and the URBIA team. Binoculars and exploratory tools provided!

For more information and to RSVP, visit www.urbikids.com.

Complete this adventure by looking for a hidden box under the railing near the bottom of the Observation Tower steps!

stamp space!

For more outdoor adventure fun, visit urbikids.com, ebparks.org, or baynature.org/kids-nature Special thanks to Sharol Nelson-embry, Anthony DeCicco, and Katherine LeRoy. photo credits: “Birds in a Flock” and “Birds in Flight” by Ingrid Taylar

Q: How does water move from the soil all the way to the leaves at the top of the world’s tallest trees, like our coast redwoods? [Sue, Oakland] A: Great question. First of all, how tall is tall? In 2006 the Hyperion tree in northern California’s Redwood National Park was identified as the world’s tallest living tree, at 379 feet. It is — no surprise — a coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens).

There were others taller still: There’s a reliable record of a 415-foot-tall Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) felled in British Columbia in 1902.

It’s a long way from a root hair in the soil to a leaf at the top of these trees.

Woody plants have two kinds of conducting vessels. Phloem, the innermost layer of the bark, is living tissue through which photosynthetic products (sugar and sap) are transported down the organism to the roots. Xylem is essentially nonliving material deeper inside the tree that forms tubes for the transport of water and soluble minerals and trace elements up from the ground to the leaves or needles. That water is an essential component of the process of photosynthesis, which combines hydrogen from the water with solar energy and carbon from airborne carbon dioxide to create the sugar molecules that feed the growth of the tree. (And life on the planet, for that matter!)

One fundamental property of liquid water is its “stickiness,” or adhesive quality. Hydrogen bonds between the water molecules are extraordinarily strong.

Basically there is an unbroken chain of water molecules in the xylem from the surface of a leaf all the way down to the root hair. As evaporation (called transpiration in plants) draws water out of the stomata (pores) in a leaf, water cohesion — basically, the hydrogen bonds between the molecules — pulls more water molecules up the chain, all the way from the roots.

Plant physiologists have long wondered what limits the height to which a tree can grow. Apparently the answer is

e l l i s directly related to the limit of water transport, which directly affects photosynthesis. Eventually the cohesive force of those hydrogen bonds in the water cannot overcome the sheer physical weight of the water in the column, and the chain will break. So at the top of a tall tree photosynthesis is constrained by the absence of water. Theoretical calculations indicate that the upper limit of the water column would be about 420 feet. What do you know? That’s just about the height of that Douglas fir.

And where is the Bay Area’s tallest tree?

In Sonoma County’s Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, the Parson Jones Tree (a redwood) tops out at 310 feet. But the winner is likely the so-called Mother of the Forest redwood in Big Basin Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz. She is 329 feet tall. Wow! Send your questions to atn@baynature.org.

See what’s inside | Visit the Garden UC Botanical Garden

510-643-2755 | http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu 200 Centennial Drive, Berkeley, CA 94720-5045

Visit Us!

Daily | 9 am - 5 pm

No admission after 4:30 pm

Garden Shop & Plant Deck Open Daily until 4:30 pm

Calypte anna - Anna’s Hummingbird | Photo by Melanie Hofmann

october–december 2012

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BayNature

1328 Sixth Street, #2 Berkeley, California 94710

Nonprofit Org US Postage PAID Permit CPS Oakland, CA

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Save West Berkeley

NO ON MEASURE T

HOW VISIONS BECAME ISSUES Measure T would implement Phase 3 of the City is already law and isn’t contested. But Phase 3’s huge changes are nearly unanimously opposed by the increasing numbers of citizens who came to meetings and by many existing businesses. Existing businesses could be driven out.

In a multi-year process, West Berkeley’s residents and businesses developed a consensus West Berkeley Plan that integrates homes and industries, both big and artisanal. City Council passed it unanimously in 1993. Business vacancies have been very low except for properties Then in 2005 a new Council began a long established stakeholder groups that weren’t set up to talk to each other despite requests for joint meetings. Residents weren’t included as stakeholders until they clamored. Then they were kept separate too. A handful of developers who had bought up big industrial properties

from upzoning, which would increase their parcels’ value, as well as from the developments. Citizens had wanted to prevent just such speculation and After seven years, residents are still opposed to these ideas, as are many businesses. An Environmental Impact Report found more than

THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT REPORT SHOWED THESE POTENTIAL SHADOWS ON DECEMBER 21 AT 3:00PM. DARK SHADOWS SHOW CURRENT HEIGHT LIMITS, LIGHT ONES SHOW PROPOSED CHANGE. THE TROUBLES WITH MEASURE T UP TO 50 CITY BLOCKS OF OVERSIZED OFFICE PARKS would be allowed, with up to 7-story (75-foot) multiblock projects and 6-story apartments.

More could be allowed after ten years. They would dwarf this modest neighborhood. Today’s height limit is 4 stories, actual average 25 feet.

NO DAMAGE CONTROL FOR AQUATIC PARK. Properties next to Aquatic Park are included in Measure T, but City Council rejected protections asked for by the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and Citizens for East Shore Parks.

UNKNOWN COMMUNITY BENEFITS. Developers may be required to get to make the proposals, and Measure T doesn’t say what the City might AIR POLLUTION, TRAFFIC, NOISE, AND SHADOWS. The Environmental impacts including gridlock at major intersections, air pollution and potential toxic releases, potential health problems, and loss of light in the neighborhood and water views from the lower hills.

COUNCIL CAN MAKE CHANGES. At the last minute Council reduced the permitted heights from 100 feet (shown in the EIR) to 75 feet. But if Measure T passed they could raise the limits back at will.

City Council wants voters to say okay anyway.

URBAN RE To End the Age of Waste

The Environmental Impact Report showed this outline of buildings that could be allowed, seen from the pedestrian bridge over I-880.