Bay Nature Supplement: A Mountain of Stories

PRODUCED BY BAY NATURE FOR THE TAMALPAIS LANDS COLLABORATIVE

A Mountain of Stories

George Ward, georgeward.com

An update on the health of Mount Tamalpais and its denizens

Mount Tam 2 Badgers 4 Dipsea Trail 6 Owls 8 Theatre 10 Stickleback 12 Rare Plants 14 B A Y

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Meet the Mountain

Courtesy of the Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library.

cre for acre, Mount Tamalpais might just be the bestloved peak in the San Francisco Bay Area. If so, it’s not because of scale. At 2,571 feet, “Tam” is far down the list of regional high points. Ruggedness doesn’t explain the attraction, either; other peaks are craggier. Wildness doesn’t explain it. With its many roads and reservoirs, not to mention its hordes of cars and hikers, the Tamalpais neighborhood is much tamer than the slopes of Mount Diablo, say, or Mount Saint Helena.

But Tam is close to a great many people, and this hillock is sculpted to call attention to itself. Many Bay Area peaks show themselves to us as long ridges, seen from the side. Tamalpais lies across the grain of the hills, its east peak breaking off abruptly toward San Francisco Bay. The mountain mass is foreshortened into a cone you might imagine is a volcano, its hulking frame visible from much of Marin County and the East Bay. Also, we have a kind of boiling-down of beauties: great variety in a small compass. On some 60 miles of state park trails the landscape is always changing, near and far: from city to sea to inland lakeshore, from fog to sun, from intimate to expansive and back again. When you’re in the shade of the conifers, they seem likely to go on forever; but five minutes later you will be walking in an open meadow with running springs, or on a serpentine patch, seemingly barren but rich in unfamiliar flowers. Biotic

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communities fluctuate with soil, elevation (the upper slopes, above the fog, are typically drier), and orientation to the sun.

Tam was among the first high points in the region to draw tourists. Between 1896 and 1929, the Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais Scenic Railroad, “The Crookedest Railroad in the World,” took guests to a summit hotel. Even as cars became popular in subsequent decades, hiking clubs claimed the mountain as their strenuous playground.

This was also one of the very first spots in the region to attract the ardor of conservationists. The pioneer champion was William Kent, a patrician, progressive Republican leader who dreamed of turning the whole of the privately owned mountain into a public park. “Need and opportunity here are linked together,” Kent told the conservation-star-studded initial gathering of what he christened the Tamalpais National Park Association. “What would New York or Chicago pay for such an opportunity?”

That was in 1903. In 1905, his resolve was tested at the place then called Sequoia Canyon, a moist, wind-sheltered valley on the mountain’s southern flank that still held a stand of towering virgin redwoods. By the turn of the 20th century, such groves had become rarities. Now long-delayed logging threatened it.

Other options exhausted, Kent stepped forward to buy the land himself. Then a local water company tried to seize the canyon as a reservoir site, so William and Elizabeth Kent donated the heart of the parcel’s redwood forest to the federal government. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a National Monument. Kent insisted that the new park bear the name of famous conservationist John Muir.

The next piece of Kent’s park plan was carried out by indirect means. In 1912, with his backing, a public vote established the Marin Municipal Water District to replace private water companies. In the next several years, the district bought up the long, verdant canyon of Lagunitas Creek on the opposite side of Tamalpais. The water district domain has provided drinking water and secondarily functioned as parkland ever since.

Muir Woods National Monument and the water district lands did not adjoin. In the 1920s, subdivision threatened to keep them separate forever. Kent, the Tamalpais Conservation Club (which he had helped to found), and the state joined forces to plug the gap with a new preserve, which in 1928 became Mount Tamalpais State Park.

The next pulse of preservation came in the 1950s and ’60s, with a new ringleader: Edgar Wayburn of the Sierra Club. Thinking not in terms of trees but of watersheds, the courtly San Francisco physician

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(First page) Mount Tam at sunrise from San Anselmo. (left) A gentleman stands in the shade of redwood trees circa 1900.

Mount Tam rises in the background with the Tavern visible near the peak and the railroad cut below. (right) Derica Jackson takes in

and his wife, Peggy Wayburn, set out to protect the whole ocean-facing side of the mountain.

His campaign succeeded in more than tripling the size of the state park before refocusing on a grander goal: creation of a vast greenbelt to be called the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Authorized by Congress in 1972, the GGNRA would amass the remaining undeveloped parcels on the Tamalpais coastline.

Something resembling Kent’s desired Mount Tamalpais National Park had in fact come into being. Or had it?

Tom Kaliski / Derica Jackson

the 21st century evening view from Mount Tam’s East Peak.

Seventy years of effort had produced not one park but several, with several custodians: the National Park Service, the Marin Municipal Water District, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and (after 1972) the Marin County Parks’ Open Space District, which acquired important peripheral lands. Hikers and other trail users barely noticed these boundaries, but for bureaucrats they were real. Cooperation certainly occurred, but by special effort, and it ebbed and flowed with changing personnel.

Over the decades there were stirrings toward consolidation.

Records show bids to shift Muir Woods to the state, water district land to the state, Mount Tamalpais State Park to the federal government. None of these transfers occurred.

Yet the need for joint effort was obvious, and nowhere more than along Redwood Creek, the stream that flows among the Muir Woods redwoods, where the preservation story had begun.

A drop of water rolling off a shoulder of Ridgecrest Boulevard on the spine of Tamalpais finds itself first in Mount Tamalpais State Park, then on water district land, then in the state park again, then in the National Monument, then once more on state land, before reaching the sea in the GGNRA. By the turn of our century it was clear that this supposedly preserved watershed was in trouble. Soil erosion was a problem.

Coho salmon, once the pride of Muir Woods, were in decline.

Exotic plant species were spreading alarmingly. These problems were beyond the reach of any one manager.

In 2003, the land managers teamed up with each other and the Muir Beach community to produce a foundational document called “The Redwood Creek Watershed: Vision for the Future.”

But it took a state budget crisis to bring about deeper change.

In the dark days of 2012, when it looked as if Mount Tamalpais State Park would have to close, GGNRA General Superintendent Frank Dean made an unprecedented proposal: to support the state park with a two-dollar increase in the Muir Woods entry fee. With that, old barriers crumbled.

During this time, the Marin Municipal Water District and ( To p B o r d e r P h oto, A l l Pag e s ) B i l l A bb ot t

Marin County Parks were each independently exploring the creation of a friends organization comparable to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy that supports the GGNRA. But with so many groups in the field, so many good causes jockeying for money, was there really room for more? A wider conversation began.

The time for a mountainwide partnership had come, yet its creation was no easy matter. The four agencies had different mandates, different cultures. Kevin Wright of Marin County Parks observes, “We might well have said at some point, Health Report ‘This doesn’t work, we’re just too different.’”

It was also vital to bring along all those passionate groups and The agencies that care for Mount Tam— collectively referred to as the Tamalpais individuals who felt Lands Collaborative—convened 60 scienthemselves guardians of tists in 2016 to grapple with the question: the mountain and had How healthy are the plant communities and wildlife living on Mount Tam? In firm ideas about what answer to the question they produced a should and should not seminal report Measuring the Health of a Mountain: A Report on Mount happen there. Countless Tamalpais’ Natural Resources. meetings were held even Overall, Mount Tam’s natural resources before the final form of are in “Fair” condition. Scientists found that some of the mountain’s plants and the collaboration was wildlife are thriving, while others have unveiled. been displaced by invasive species, suffer Another skull-cracker from plant disease, fewer fires, and climate change. There are other species whose was how to define “Mount condition remains largely unknown, and Tamalpais.” Geologically? in 2017 the TLC began collecting data to fill Ecologically? By jurisdicthose gaps.

The report provides a baseline of tions? By public percepdata from which scientists can track tion? The “area of focus” the changes—improvement, stasis, and that emerged from these decline—and make better-informed decisions about Mount Tam’s health. Read the discussions was “a hybrid full report at onetam.org/peak-health. of all these together,” says october–december 2017

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the Parks Conservancy’s Sharon Farrell. It goes well beyond the core of the mountain mass, finally comprising more than 53,000 acres, or 80 square miles.

After two years, on March 21, 2014, a memorandum of understanding created a formal alliance of the four land agencies along with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, called the Tamalpais Lands Collaborative (TLC). It would work with the community under the banner “One Tam.” The conservancy raised a million dollars in seed money, and the work of refining the vision and picking priority programs and projects began.

Three years later, the record is impressive. The TLC has been able to offer regular staff support, for the first time, to youth and community programs, volunteer restoration work, and citizen science throughout much of the One Tam area. It published the first free, multi-agency trail map of the region, together with the sixth edition of Barry Spitz’s guide now renamed Mount Tamalpais Trails. In further aid to recreation, it is updating and improving

trail signage across the region. TLC’s website is remarkable for its clarity and openness—project and program budgets and actions are routinely posted there—with a stunning interactive image of the mountain to which people can pin remarks and photographs (one.tam.org/explore). A prime illustration of the agencies’ joint strength is their offensive against invasive species: They’ve engaged both volunteers and paid workers and set up an Early Detection Rapid Response program—167 miles of roads, trails, and streamsides have been screened and all of the known high priority patches are being managed. The TLC has also installed the continent’s largest array of automated wildlife cameras, yielding more than a million images, collected and catalogued by some 125 volunteers. But perhaps the proudest moment for the partnership so far was the release, late in 2016, of the comprehensive report called “Measuring the Health of a Mountain,” also available in boiled-down form under the title “Is Mt. Tam at Peak Health?”

“Y

In Search of a Badger

by Mary Ellen Hannibal

ou know it is very, very unlikely we will actually see a badger, right?” National Park Service wildlife ecologist William Merkle says, trying to manage my expectations as we hike through Roy’s Redwood Preserve in San Geronimo Valley in early spring. With Lisa Michl from Marin County Parks and Open Space District, we are headed to inspect the site where a motionactivated camera has recently documented a badger, its black-and-white triangular head making an instantaneous appearance in one frame among literally thousands of pictures of grass waving in the breeze. My own image of a badger has a lot to do with the gentlemanly host of the underground in Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. “Badgers have become mythical to us,” Merkle notes, “because we hardly ever see them.” I persist in hearing the friendly banter of Badger, Rat, and Mole, even as I reflect that Taxidea taxus would in reality not give Rat and Mole a tour of his domain but instead consume them in one or two bites.

Badgers are of special interest in the One Tam area, partly because of their scarcity and partly because they play an

Ken Hickman

An American badger triggers a camera trap near Half Moon Bay in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2013.

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The peak health report goes back to questions the TLC encountered as it was reaching out to supporters and volunteers.

As Farrell recalls, people asked, in effect, “Great, but what are we actually doing this for? Is Mount Tamalpais in trouble?”

In trying to answer that question, the TLC undertook something new for California and rarely attempted anywhere (except for certain well-studied wetlands): the creation of a baseline inventory of the biotic condition of an entire substantial region. Excited by both the place and the concept, scientists from all the involved agencies, Point Blue Conservation Science, and the larger Bay Area proved avid to take part.

Peers from other areas cautioned against waiting for new research, advising, “Take advantage of what you’ve got.”

Accordingly, the team proceeded by distilling huge troves of existing data, building a mosaic from prior work on species of high concern, like the northern spotted owl and the foothill yellow-legged frog, and on broader communities, like grassland

or redwood forest or coastal scrub and chaparral.

And the diagnosis? Mixed. Some species and communities on Tam are holding their own very well; some are declining, but still in a state where modest interventions can make a big difference. In a natural world that is rapidly changing, and rarely for the better, we can only welcome the tentative overall verdict: “cautionary, but fairly stable.”

Important though it Ecological Health already is, this work will Indicator Key show its full value in the unfuture, as reassessments good poor fair known every five years track the Good Moderate Significant Unknown landscape’s evolution and Condition Concern Concern provide better guidance for the many willing hands and minds devoted Improving No Declining Unknown Trend Change Trend to this mountain.

important role in the grassland ecosystem that is their preferred habitat. Today, native grasslands are among the top ten most endangered ecosystems in the United States, according to the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, and in the top five in California.

“We have less than one percent of our native grasslands,” says Andrea Williams, a Marin Municipal Water District botanist.

Calling them “the old growth at your feet,” she explains that native grasslands are an ancient ecosystem tying us to a past California landscape that endures in remnants today. We have about 50 native grasses in the One Tam area, but what we call grasslands is also home to rich centers of diversity, including meadowfoam, clover, baby stars, and lupine—endemic wildflowers that in turn host endemic butterflies. “They provide forage and nesting areas for hundreds of species of native bees,” Williams says. “Birds like horned larks, western meadowlarks, and grasshopper sparrows also prefer areas of bare ground among grass clumps, which animals like badgers and other fossorial mammals create.”

Fossorial means underground, and the fact that this is where badgers dwell is one reason we don’t know that much about them.

They have also been hunted and persecuted for so long we don’t have a good picture of their history. Around Mount Tamalpais, there’s been no effort to understand their population until recently. As far back as 1937, famed zoologist Joseph Grinnell and his colleagues wrote that the California badger was threatened with complete elimination by an “overzealous campaign to remove all the native animals from the range because they might prove unfriendly to some phase of agriculture.” They cautioned that badgers act “as a check upon rodent irruptions” and ought not to be treated as “vermin.” Today, though the rarity of badgers gets the designation “species of special concern” in California, there is no limit on hunting them for more than a quarter of the year in the state.

The challenges of puzzling out the badgers, their history in the landscape and their continuing impacts here, are increasingly coming into focus thanks to an innovative monitoring platform

called the Wildlife Picture Index (WPI). One Tam’s WPI project includes a grid of 128 cameras arrayed throughout the Lagunitas Creek corridor. Since September 2014, these cameras have borne witness to the wildlife doings in their purviews. They’ve documented a wide variety of mammal activity, revealing skunks, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and deer, among others. Volunteers help maintain the cameras and identify the wildlife caught on camera.

In 2016, volunteers catalogued more than 800,000 images from One Tam’s WPI project. My 16-year-old son and I occasionally assist in this gigantic task. One memorable afternoon we sat in the Sky Oaks Ranger Station looking at photo after photo on computers. The photo memory card assigned to my son that day revealed a veritable bestiary of species, while on mine I watched what appeared to be a single woodrat run around a tree trunk twice a day. I actually felt pretty fond of the critter by the time I was through.

The Wildlife Picture Index sounds like a simple tool: put a bunch of cameras in a landscape and see what images they capture. “One thing we’re learning is that the medium-size carnivores are pretty much everywhere,” Rosa Schneider told me. Schneider is Community Science Program Grassland Manager for One Tam, and Schneider’s are the Communities eyes that first saw the badger caught on film at fair Roy’s Redwoods. Cameras can get triggered as a hiker walks by; one frame might show a backpack or a leg going forward, the next might then reveal a bobcat, a fox, or a coyote trotting past Declining Trend unbeknownst to the human who came before.

The ubiquity of the carnivores signals a healthy American landscape. On the one hand, it means there is Badger plenty of prey for these animals. On the other, unit means we have sufficient predators to keep known those prey populations in balance. The presence Lack of data of these midsize carnivores is a heartening find october–december 2017

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that tells us the One Tam area is ecologically pretty healthy.

This secret life of One Tam’s fauna is beguiling enough, but the WPI reveals much more. The platform is organized according to strict protocols so the data it collects can be used in sophisticated statistical analysis. For example, it can help pinpoint trends in biodiversity—is it increasing, decreasing, or stable?—and whether large tracts of landscape are well-connected with each other or not. WPI data can be sorted to measure the abundance of an individual species, like the badger, but can also reveal relationships among what biologists call “trophic” levels in the ecosystem. Trophic basically means food—who eats what, in what amounts, at what time of year—and is a fundamental way to assess landscape health. Among many other things (they are omnivorous), badgers eat rodents, and in doing so they help modulate rodent populations. Healthy rodent populations in turn help support other species. The badger and the spotted owl (for example), though they occupy different habitat types and don’t so much as say boo to each other, are thus intimately connected: This trophic relationship ties the health of the grasslands where the badger lives to the health of the forest where the owl lives.

Merkle and I stop on a hillside and look at a camera aimed unobtrusively ahead. He points out a mound of unearthed soil, musing it could possibly be the work of a badger. Belonging to a mammal family called mustelids that includes the wolverine and the mink, badgers are considered ecosystem engineers because their digging aerates the soil, churns up the seed bank, and facilitates water flow. Their dens also provide shelter for other species, including burrowing owls, lizards, insects, and amphibians. In short, they help maintain healthy grasslands—an important part of a diverse habitat mosaic. Yet “we have relatively few acres of grassland, relative to forest and chapparal,” Merkle says.

The grasslands we do still have here face myriad threats.

Historically, native Californians controlled the vegetative and faunal succession unfolding on the landscape by periodically burning it. Today we don’t let a single spark fly if we can help it, but that means our grasslands are vulnerable to being taken over by chaparral, Douglas-fir, and invasive nonnative species like French broom. “We have to maintain our grasslands by physically removing encroaching species,” Merkle points out. A healthy population of badgers won’t solve all the grassland problems here, but it will provide another layer of ecosystem resilience to help the land stay healthy and functioning.

The WPI project not only helps assess where badgers are today but also makes it possible to set a quantitative goal for their future existence here. Currently, we know there are at least two badgers in the One Tam area, but scientists suspect there are more they haven’t yet confirmed. One Tam would like to maintain at least six suitable habitat patches of greater than 1,000 acres in its area of focus and would like to “detect badgers at all camera locations in grassland or coastal scrub greater than 1,000 acres,” the Peak Health report reads. As Merkle and I look around at the grass and the redwoods beyond, I wonder who, exactly, might be watching us from where. b ay n at u r e

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The Nature of the Dipsea Race

by Alisa Opar

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echnically, we’re cheating. Or we would be, if we were competing in the Dipsea Race, the nation’s oldest crosscountry running competition, dating back to 1905. The grueling 7.4-mile trail starts in downtown Mill Valley, climbs the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, and then drops nearly 1,400 feet to Stinson Beach. I’m hiking the famous trail a month before the June race with two National Park Service scientists. We skip the first two miles of trail, which crisscrosses paved roads, in favor of setting out on dirt near the Muir Woods National Monument visitor center. On my own, I’d focus on the old-growth redwoods and ocean views as I tackled the steep terrain. But there’s far more here than legendary trees and vistas, my guides tell me. The Dipsea passes through a shifting suite of habitats that supports remarkable biodiversity. You just have to look for it.

We step onto the trail and enter the shaded redwood understory along Redwood Creek, a 6.5-mile waterway that begins in the peaks of Mount Tam and spills into the Pacific Ocean at Muir Beach.

On race day, most of the 1,500 runners who pound over the creek on wooden planks won’t know endangered juvenile coho salmon are swimming in the inches-deep water below. Today the makeshift bridge is missing. The National Park Service removes it, every winter through late spring, to ensure it won’t impede the two-foot-long

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(left) The verdant moss covering California bay laurel and oak trees along wooded sections of the Dipsea Trail is sustained by the fog. (right) The trail also traverses open

Martin Sundberg/Getty Images

lands in a couple of hours, when we reach the coast. Behind us are towering redwoods, and greengray shrublands cover a distant hillside. Immediately in front of us is a sweeping grassy hillside, called Hogback. In the One Tam area, grasslands comprise about 10 percent of the open spaces, providing herbaceous expanses for American badgers and dozens of species of songbirds to forage and raise their young. Forrestel explains that keeping meadows like this healthy requires intense vigilance and person-power. She points to a stand of Douglas-fir at the edge of the grasses; fires formerly prevented the trees from encroaching on and taking over the grasslands, but now land managers must remove them. Invasive plants are an even bigger challenge. French broom, for instance, the fast-growing evergreen shrub likely introduced to the Bay Area as an ornamental in the mid-1800s, today swiftly chokes out natives—from iconic purple needlegrass to rare star tulips. There’s no French broom in sight on Hogback, thanks to the staff and volunteers who clear the intruder by hand and keep close watch for seedlings. They concentrate on clearing invasive nonnative plants from trail edges, where humans unwittingly pick up, transport, and deposit seeds. (The quirky rules of the Dipsea race allow runners to take shortcuts, but Forrestel suggests sticking to the trail—if not out of concern for the ecosystem then for personal well-being, as poison-oak is rampant along the course.)

We soon get some respite from the strong sun as we cross back into Muir Woods and enter a patch so noticeably sodden that runadult coho and steelhead trout that journey from the ocean to spawn ners nicknamed it “the Rain Forest.” Thick summer fog accumuin these shallow waters. Coho need all the help they can get. Habitat lates here, causing moisture to drip like rain off the redwoods, loss, pollution, and poor ocean conditions mean fewer than a dozen tanoaks, and Douglas-firs. These old-growth woods receive about adults return to Redwood Creek each year, despite restoration eftwice the annual precipitation of Stinson Beach, only a few miles forts. To boost their numbers, Michael Reichmuth, a fisheries bioloaway. Redwoods and other fog-dwelling plants have evolved to take gist for Point Reyes National Seashore, and advantage of the moisture by absorbing it Support Tam his team have partnered with the California through their leaves, not just their roots like Department of Fish and Wildlife, along with • Volunteer: Help pull invasive weeds, restore most flora. So far, the coastal redwoods have habitats, maintain trails, count wildlife, and other groups, to begin collecting juveniles survived the extended drought, but how the more: onetam.org/volunteer from the creek, rearing them to adulthood in trees will fare in the future is uncertain (in • Learn & Share: Take part in a bioblitz or ancaptivity, and then re-releasing them here to nual bird count, share sightings on iNaturalist, part because fog is tricky for climate modbreed. Reichmuth points out a couple young- or join one of many educational programs: one- els to forecast). If rising global temperatures sters—tiny silver flashes in the shallow water— tam.org/calendar lead to more frequent droughts or decreased • Care: Stay on designated trails to protect sensitive fog, some trees and organisms living beneath and we hike on. species and habitats and clean your shoes after Up, up, up we climb, moving out of Muir passing through areas with Sudden Oak Death. their soaring canopies could suffer—includWoods and into Mount Tamalpais State • Join: Become a member to support projects and ing coho salmon, which live primarily in the cool, shaded streams of redwood forests, Park—and direct sunlight. Alison Forrestel programs that help maintain and restore this stops us. I gratefully catch my breath as special place: onetam.org/join Reichmuth points out. Another concern, Forrestel, a vegetation ecologist with the Forrestel says, nodding to two dead trees in Golden Gate National Recreation Area, goes into detail about the front of us, is Sudden Oak Death. The pathogen, a mold that landscape. This seven-mile trail winds through many of the ecosystem scientists believe came over from Asia in the nursery trade (though types found within the 53,000-acre One Tam area. We’ll see oak woodthat remains unconfirmed), is killing tanoaks in Muir Woods and

Richard Johnstone/ flickr.com/photos/1flatworld

grasslands and reaches the sea at Stinson Beach.

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beyond: The disease has infiltrated 90 percent of One Tam’s oak woodlands and killed tens of thousands of its trees. Besides tree loss, it’s worrisome because dusky-footed woodrats, the preferred prey of the endangered northern spotted owl, dine on acorns.

I’m despondent to learn there’s no way to stop the pathogen, but my mind turns elsewhere as we approach the infamous Cardiac Hill. For years a “No U-Turn” sign at the base goaded runners, signaling they were about to trudge up the Dipsea’s steepest section. A sign marks the trail’s highest point, at 1,360 feet, and relates the history of the race, accompanied by a blackand-white photo of dozens of men dressed in suits, ties, and flat caps jauntily cresting Cardiac.

We take in the Pacific stretching to the horizon, sip from the only water fountain on the trail, and then head (mostly) downhill for the final three miles. For half that distance we cut across hillsides, passing through grasslands and shrubland dominated by coyote bush; its fluffy white seeds look a lot like One Tam area that canid’s tail. We startle a deer of focus and her white-speckled fawn, and a lone turkey vulture wobbles overhead. Biological surveys of One Tam’s coastal shrublands reveal that they’re healthy, supporting a rich mix of songbirds—something that’s obvious even during the 53,000 acres over 80 square miles, non-birdy midday hours. Bushtits including Mount Tam. and orange-crowned warblers zip around low in the shrubs, and the insistent, bright “chip” of the California towhee pierces the air, though the large brown sparrow remains invisible.

I cringe when I see the sign for our turnoff; if Cardiac Hill busted my lungs, Steep Ravine seems certain to strain my knees. We drop sharply through redwoods, and a few minutes later, the dirt trail becomes stairs, slick with moisture. I lose count somewhere north of 100, distracted by the recollection that top runners were rumored to take the steps four at a time. Finally, we reach Weill Creek at the bottom of the ravine. Reichmuth spots a rainbow trout. It’s the same species as the steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) in Redwood Creek, he explains as we move on, but rainbows live only in freshwater, while steelhead take their chances in the ocean.

Suddenly, we emerge from the woods onto a hill with a spectacular vista of Stinson Beach. We’ll soon make our way down to the sand to rest our tired legs and eat lunch. But first Reichmuth points out Bolinas Lagoon, a tidal estuary north of Stinson where leopard sharks prowl and harbor seals haul out. The marshy trough, he says, was formed by the San Andreas Fault, which runs directly beneath it.

On a day filled with discovery, forced to slow down and observe my surroundings instead of breezing through, I’m struck by this revelation. The San Andreas Fault, born millions of years ago when the Pacific and North American plates first collided, shaped this landscape. Those ancient geological forces wrought the mountains, streams, and rugged coastlines we’ve traversed on the Dipsea, paving the way for abundant biodiversity within a few short miles. b ay n at u r e

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The Southern Range of Northern Spotted Owls

by Jules Evens

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t’s late on a mid-March afternoon when we enter the shadowy forest on the north slope of Mount Tamalpais. Earlier surveys here have located northern spotted owls, a territorial species that favors core areas of intact forest. We walk with caution, stepping over fallen branches, trying not to disturb the silence by breaking the brittle twigs, all the while looking upward toward the middle tiers of the forest canopy where an owl might roost. After crossing an unnamed runnel and sidestepping a woodrat lodge, we come to a dense family ring of redwoods. The trees here are not uniform and straight, but somewhat gnarly, with bole cavities, broken-topped snags, and flat-topped candelabras. Such mature many-layered gallery forests—with overlapping branches, nearly closed canopies, tangled understories, and vigorous living trees as well as decadent snags—are classic spotted owl habitat.

And there, next to the trunk of a massive tree, are two owls roosted side by side, still and silent, almost spectral. In the dappled light the birds’ coffee-brown feathering, speckled white, blends with the rusty bark. They appear to be aware of us observing them through our binoculars, but unconcerned, their dark, moon-shaped eyes reflecting the quintessential ancient spirit of the old growth forest.

These luxuriant forests of upper Lagunitas Creek, Phoenix Lake, and Bolinas Ridge are critical sanctuary for the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina). A medium-size owl, perhaps the most emblematic animal of the Northwest’s temperate coastal forests, it is listed by both federal and state agencies as “threatened.”

The birds don’t migrate, commonly staying within the same home range year-round, rarely venturing far from the forest shadows. After forming a pair bond that may last a lifetime, a couple settles in a cryptic nest of sticks and lichen, often in the crotch or platform of branches of old growth redwoods and Douglas-fir, sometimes in live oaks and bays. In the early spring the female (slightly larger than the male) incubates a clutch commonly of one or two eggs, three when food is abundant.

The male does most of the foraging and feeding of his mate for the four weeks of incubation. When they are about seven to nine days old, the downy young open their dark eyes. At about four weeks, the fluffy owlets are able to perch away from the nest (they’re sometimes called “branchers”), but still depend on their parents for food. Parents care for their offspring generally into September, when the young owls are finally able to forage for themselves and disperse in search of their own territory.

This reclusive owl is a nocturnal “perch-and-pounce” predator. Dusky-footed woodrats (Neotoma fuscipes) are a primary prey species here at the southern edge of the owl’s range, which

extends north into British Columbia; flying squirrels (Glaucomys species) are the preferred prey farther north.

Over the last 200 years throughout the owl’s range, suitable habitat has been reduced by some 60 percent. Mount Tamalpais’ heterogeneous forest conditions, extensive protected habitat, and abundant prey, coupled with a relatively mild climate, provide a unique sanctuary. The forests of West Marin are separated from those of Sonoma County by unforested grasslands and all manner of human infrastructure. This relative isolation has limited the gene flow between the Marin population and more northerly populations, and research has shown these local birds occupy a somewhat broader habitat niche than those farther north.

Although Mount Tam’s sanctuary forests are relatively free from threats the owls face elsewhere, especially logging and extreme habitat modification, the owls here aren’t entirely “out of the woods” when it comes to survival. Mount Tam was identified as ground zero for Sudden Oak Death (SOD) in the mid-1990s and the disease has altered, and threatens to further alter, the structure of these forests. Tanoak (Notholithocarpus densiflorus) has been the primary victim of SOD, and its die-off has opened up the forests, creating a patchier and somewhat (left) Once northern spotted owlets leave the nest they hang around on nearby branches before learning to fly; this pair hatched in the Mount Tam area in 2017.

(left) Carlos Porrata; (right) Pamela Rose Hawken, PamelaRoseHawkenPhotography.com

(right) A young owl perches in a redwood forest at night within the Mount Tam area.

drier environment, not typically considered prime spotted owl habitat.

And there’s an invasive species on the scene that could pose another threat to the spotted owls of Mount Tam. The barred owl (Strix varia), which thrives more in “edge” Redwood Second habitats (although it has occupied dense forest Growth Most of Mt. Tam’s fragments in the Pacific Northwest and Muir redwood forests are previously logged Woods), has expanded its range westward over second-growth stands, which are in fair the last half-century (or more) in response condition. to landscape-level changes in the continent’s boreal forests, resulting in a breakdown of fair ecological barriers that formerly separated the two closely related species. Although the barred owl has usurped and displaced the spotted owl Declining Trend throughout much of the Pacific Northwest, the story in Marin is somewhat more encouraging. Northern Spotted Owl Barred owls were first confirmed nesting in Marin in 2007, but so far they have not good established a firm foothold here as they have in spotted owl territories farther north, and there have been no successful barred owl No Change in Trend nests observed in Marin in more recent years.

Exactly why is not yet clear to researchers, but they do confirm (continued on page 16) the status of these mixed conifer forests of

Maya Gardens Courtesy Creative Commons

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z. Never-Never Land. Brigadoon. The West Side streets of New York.

Coast live oak. Douglas-fir. Serpentine. Acorn woodpecker and western fence lizard.

This is one extraordinary crossroads of nature and culture.

Welcome to Mount Tamalpais State Park and a forested slope at just over 2,000 feet elevation, where breezes blow in from Stinson Beach, hikers come and go, and wildlife abounds. Welcome also to the Sidney B. Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre, better known as the Mountain Theatre, where plays and productions have taken place outdoors in the park for more than a century, these days replete with live orchestra, special effects, elaborate temporary staging, and stone slab seating for 4,000 people.

Listen in on a conversation at the theatre on Mount Tam with Bree Hardcastle, environmental scientist with California State Parks, and Sara Pearson, executive director of the nonprofit Mountain Play.

Bree Hardcastle: Up here you realize that people watching a play are almost certain to also experience nature. I can’t imagine that you could sit here at a play and see what’s all around you, and feel and smell the air, and not let that get in at some level—have it move you.

Sara Pearson: The power of this place is palpable. Some of the big rock outcrops and trees nearby have actually had roles in the plays!

One really big oak used to be right in back of Open Canopy Oak Woodlands the stage and the actors could get some shade there. It was known as God’s Tree, because when fair God spoke in a play the voice would actually come from up in that tree!

But the amphitheater itself is the biggest character we have. It’s a being. James Dunn, Declining Trend who directed our plays for 30 years, used to talk about walking the trails of Mount Tam when he was a boy. He said that directing the Mountain Play in this sacred space was the thing that touched his heart the most.

Bay Nature: Just the stones that make up all these seats are fantastic. It feels like they’re growing out of the hillside. What kind of rock are they?

BH: Some are serpentine—the state rock of California.

SP: Look at the green in the rock, shining all along the rows.

That’s one of the things I love—that you can see the colors. The blocks are actually huge; we’re only seeing the very tops.

BH: And all the stone here was quarried from the mountain.

There are multiple quarries in the state park because the Civilian Conservation Corps had multiple projects in the park in the 1930s.

BN: So right now there are acorn woodpeckers and juncos calling, and I’m guessing some of the critters that live here may appear during shows.

SP: They definitely do! We often have turkey vultures come in and fly really low over the action, checking out what’s going on. They’re really curious!

BH: And they can smell from so far away.

SP: We always get squirrels and chipmunks b ay n at u r e

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running around, and there’s one famous story. This squirrel came running right out across the stage, all the way to the center, and I swear he stopped right at the edge, facing front, and just stood there and put up one paw like he was hailing a cab! Of course the audience burst into laughter—and it was in the middle of a ballad.

Also, some of these beautiful oak trees were planted by the designer Emerson Knight back in the 1930s to grow inside the amphitheater. They look like they’re sprouting right out of the rock. They’re important to us for another reason: shade. If you’ve been to a play here, you know it can get really warm by the middle of the afternoon. The first thing a lot of people ask for when they call for tickets is…shade. So it was devastating when a beloved tree that shaded the front orchestra section died.

It succumbed to Sudden Oak Death.

BH: It had to be removed, for safety. But one thing we could do here is plant new live oaks—that’s the species growing here—to take the place of some of the older ones that inevitably will die from old age or Sudden Oak Death. We could come out and collect acorns from these same trees. We’d select the sites to plant them to make sure that in 50 years we still have beautiful live oaks to supply shade.

SP: I like that idea! I think the Mountain Play could get involved with that because we’ve spent significant resources trying to keep the trees that remain here healthy. Now we’re watching this oak— you can see we tucked a shade structure up underneath the tree.

If we lost any of these huge limbs, we might have to double or even triple the size of that shade structure. Our shade structures actually cost about $10,000 to put up and take down every year.

BN: This makes a person grateful for live oak trees in a whole new way.

BH: Something we’re trying to do with One Tam is to go deeper and really encourage people to steward the mountain with us.

To say, “Oak woodlands like the ones we see here are incredibly important, yet right behind the theater you can see dead tanoaks and madrone trees. This habitat is in decline, even here on the mountain, so it needs assistance!”

SP: That’s also in our mission statement—that we are teaching people about stewardship of the natural environment in Mount Tam State Park. Maintaining and taking care of this space, which is spiritually important to us, is enmeshed in almost everything we do. Though I guess sometimes it may not look that way if you’re a naturalist or someone outside the Mountain Play’s history and culture.

BH: We’ve been saying we need more capacity, we need more help, but it’s a much deeper and more meaningful collaboration when we can sit down and say, “OK, here’s where our needs and our missions and our goals overlap. How can we really work together to lift each other up?”

SP: We’re really grateful for that collaboration. It’s just been so long needed. (clockwise) The Mountain Play performed Beauty and the Beast at the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre in spring 2017; a giant native oak tree grows amid grasslands; at the empty amphitheatre, Mountain Play executive director Sara Pearson (left) and California State Parks environmental scientist Bree Hardcastle discuss the arts on Mount Tam.

Courtesy Andre Villeneuve

Franco Folini

O

BAY NATURE / TAMALPAIS LANDS COLLABORATIVE

Theatre Amid the Oaks

(Clockwise from Top) Mountain Play Association; Rosanna Petralia/California State Parks; Paul Myers/Parks Conservancy

by Claire Peaslee

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A Fish Story

by Ariel Rubissow Okamoto

S

norkeling off a coral reef is nothing like snorkeling in a shallow stream on the backside of Mount Tamalpais, Eric Ettlinger says. His job is to find out how the fish in Lagunitas Creek are faring and it sends him scrambling along banks, peering into pools, bobbing on traps, wading through riffles, and snorkeling in water so shallow he gets a crick in his neck.

“In lots of places I’m dragging myself along the streambed with my mask turned sideways, moving upstream so the sediment I stir up flows away behind me,” the earnest biologist says.

In other words, if he looked down he’d have a mask full of silt rather than an eyeful of salmon.

Now, you might think salmon are big pink fish in need of deeper water, but the kind Ettlinger tracks are very young and still spending time in the freshwater stream of their birth. Ettlinger works for the Marin Municipal Water District, a partner in the One Tam initiative, monitoring each phase of the life cycle of endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout in their watersheds and experimenting with ways to improve fish habitat.

Over the last century, dam building, logging, and development on Mount Tam’s flanks greatly diminished what was once extensive freshwater stream habitat: creeks, pools, and rapids overhung with willow, alder, and sedges and filled with fish, frogs, and otters. These activities drove the mountain’s five major creeks into deeper and deeper channels, separated them from their natural floodplains, blocked fish migrations and sediment redistribution, and spurred erosion. Today, about 850 acres of riparian woodland and forest remain on Mount Tam, shading and buffering more than 110 miles of streams. Three major streams—Olema, Redwood, and Lagunitas—drain to the Pacific Ocean. Twenty-mile-long Lagunitas Creek has the largest watershed, and it sustains the southernmost population of wild coho salmon in the world. b ay n at u r e

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Ettlinger built his first fish habitat—a pile of logs in the middle of Lagunitas Creek—15 years ago. But when he then dived under it looking for coho, his bright underwater lamp revealed the turquoise bulging eyes of an entirely different species.

When alarmed, threespine sticklebacks lift their spines, locking them in place. With a fish that rarely grows longer than three inches, this may not seem very menacing. But if you’re a big hungry trout and you eat one, you might not do it again. Those spines interfere with easy consumption.

Though Ettlinger spends most of his days chasing the fast disappearing coho and steelhead, he remains fascinated by the more common stickleback. He likens this “twitchy” tiny fish— with its bug eyes, armored plates, and habit of curling into a J shape—to the charismatic sea horse.

“I still remember the first time I allowed myself to watch the sticklebacks instead of the coho. I noticed a school of all different sizes, young and old, all pointing their snouts in the same direction. When the sun hit them the reflection was so strong it was like an array of mirrors,” he recalls.

Sticklebacks are one of the most common native fish in Bay Area streams and can tolerate a wide range of water qualities; if they aren’t in a creek, that may raise an eyebrow of concern about pollution.

According to the One Tam report, 22 years of monitoring show the creek’s stickleback population is in good condition while the coho’s continues to be in pretty poor, if not critical, condition. (Indeed, the water district is about to spend $1.5 million to create better habitat for overwintering coho in the lower reaches of Lagunitas.) Current salmon monitoring by Ettlinger and others includes counting redds (gravel nests) in winter, snorkel surveying in summer, electrofishing in fall (in which adding an electric current to a patch of water briefly immobilizes fish so they can be more easily examined), and trapping in spring. Much care is taken to return fish to the water unscathed.

P hoto g r a phy by Pa u l Mye rs / Pa r k s Co n se r va n c y

(left) A threespine stickleback is among the smolt—there were salmon and steelhead, too—caught in Lagunitas Creek by Marin Municipal Water District researchers Brenna Fowler and Eric Ettlinger for monitoring. (below) The young fish, removed from the smolt trap, are weighed and measured before being returned to the creek.

On a spring day, I volunteered to help Ettlinger’s field crew with a phase of their annual fish monitoring cycle that hurts the knees more than the neck. A mile inland from Point Reyes Station, a break in a barbed wire fence next to a field of sweet peas and bell beans was our access point to Lagunitas Creek.

When I first saw the screw trap, bobbing violently in a rush of brown water, I wondered if I was getting too old for this kind of field reporting. The trap is a steel raft holding a spinning drum with a corkscrew funnel that guides fish into a 3- by 3-foot metal tank with a lid. Ettlinger’s field crew checks and empties the trap seven days a week for two months each spring, just as the coho and steelhead get big enough (4-6 inches) to think about heading out into the ocean.

Coho salmon, steelhead trout, and some stickleback are “anadromous” species, born in a freshwater stream or river, maturing out in the ocean, and then returning to their birthplace to spawn. While salmon and trout build redds in gravel hollows on the creek bottom, male stickleback craft their tubular nests with a combo of sand grains, plant bits, and a glue-like protein excreted from their back ends. When the male is ready to mate, his throat reddens, and he coaxes a female into the tunnel-nest where she releases her eggs. He fertilizes them, and then proceeds to court another six or seven likely ladies. He guards the egg hoard, fanning with his fins until they hatch. After that, unlike many stickleback, those in the Bay Area live out their one to two years in freshwater, while the average life cycle of coho can last three years and the steelhead’s two to four.

Stepping onto the steel platform, Ettlinger instructed me in how to use a variety of nets to scoop out branches and leaves, then fish, without squashing them against the bottom

and sides. That day we netted 132 coho salmon and 24 steelhead and dumped them into orange buckets full of water and air bubbles, while sorting all other species into white buckets. That day’s selection included three Steelhead Trout sticklebacks, among others. Ettlinger clubbed poor a striped bass, a nonnative consumer of the species he’s trying to save.

Back on the bank in a cloud of mosqui- No Change in Trend toes, the field crew sat on bucket bottoms and Threespine measured, weighed, and identified every fish— stickleback murmuring terms like “parr” (young) or “smolt” (ready to migrate) as they documentgood ed the different life stages. The visuals are a giveaway. Spots, speckles, and pink stripes help these fish blend in with the gravelly, No Change in Trend dappled environment of their streams. “The Coho Salmon more silvery they get, the farther along they are in the smolting process,” says Ettlinger. poor The maturing process silvers spots and loosens scales, preparing them for life in the salty Coho in Redwod Creek deep blue sea. are declining; Coho in Creek, while In all his years of monitoring, Ettlinger has Lagunitas more stable are still tenuous. only ever caught one stickleback he thought was coming back from the ocean. This particular one was “huge,” says the biologist, about the size of a bay leaf.

Stickleback probably can’t grow that big without gorging on the abundant plankton of the Pacific.

Ettlinger hopes more citizens will get involved with stream monitoring, and he thinks the stickleback—with its oddball looks and spiny charisma—could be a draw. “They’re pretty tiny but easy to see from the stream bank,” he says. “Just look for something twitchy, with a shape like a sea horse, swimming backwards.”

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by John Hart

Charles Kennard

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f William Kent was a kind of godfather to preservation on Mount Tamalpais, its godmother might be the eminent botanist, Kent family acquaintance, and indefatigable hiker Alice Eastwood.

Born in Toronto in 1859, transplanted in her teens to Denver, Eastwood developed her passion for plants without much formal education. She was already well known in botanical circles when she made her first ascent of Mount Tam, on a visit in 1891, instantly falling in love with the mountain. By the next year she had moved west and was working at the California Academy of Sciences, helping to bring order to its incipient chaotic collection of plant specimens. In 1906, she rescued her precious “type collection” of 1,497 species from the academy building on Market Street in the hours between its partial destruction by earthquake and its obliteration by fire. When the academy reopened in 1912, she returned to her post as curator of botany, a position she held until she retired, in 1949, at age 90.

Though her botanical travels took her far and wide, Eastwood retained a special fondness for Tamalpais. Every Sunday, she and assorted friends would take the ferry and train from the city to the mountaintop, hike, cook lunch at Rock Springs on the ocean end of the summit ridge, hike some more, and return to the summit station in time for the six o’clock descent. A four-mile-anhour walker when there was a train to catch, she was welcomed into the all-male Cross-Country Club as an “associate member.”

She and several trail-wise companions were dubbed the “Hill Tribe.”

Always she was botanizing, describing her finds technically for one kind of reader and in clear and lively language for another. Some Serpentine of her popular writings about Tam plant life Barrens Endemics were collected in a still-illuminating booklet published by the Tamalpais Conservation Club, fair of which she (along with William Kent) was a charter member.

One of her special local interests was the Declining Trend manzanita genus; she described nine species in Marin County, including five on the mounSargent Cypress tain. Another fascination was the plants that grow on the serpentine substrates that occur in good streaks and patches along the mountain mass.

Serpentine-derived soils, poor in calcium and high in magnesium and heavy metals, discourNo Change age most plants, yet provide a special niche for some, including the rare Sargent cypress, the leather oak, and the Mount Tamalpais manzanita, an Eastwood discovery.

For the modern managers of Mount Tamalpais, Alice b ay n at u r e

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photo. The location is unknown.

Eastwood is both an inspiration and a vital source of information. Her notebooks are still at the Academy of Sciences; her work of a century ago forms a baseline for all later assessments of the health and vitality of Tam’s plant life.

One of those modern custodians is Andrea Williams of the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD). On a cool spring day not long after late winter rains, she leads me to the broad back of Pine Mountain, the ridge that faces Tamalpais proper across the deep trough of the Lagunitas Creek valley. We stop in a section of sparse vegetation, an almost-desert place, drab perhaps to a hasty and untrained eye.

Andrea’s eye, patient and trained, is finding a world of rarities. Easy to spot are two of Eastwood’s specialties, the Mount Tamalpais manzanita (Arctostaphylos montana ssp. montana) and the leather oak (Quercus durata).

Underfoot is a wash of pale pink Calochortus umbellatus, the Oakland mariposa lily. “This is a great year for it,” Williams says.

Like many rarities, this one was hard to find during the recent drought and hardly appeared at all in the spring of 2014.

Here is Mount Tamalpais lessingia (Lessingia micradenia var. micradenia), a light purple flower of the daisy family. “It’s a rare species that’s extremely common here,” Williams says. “There are thousands of them here—and that’s it.”

In a few steps we move from the merely severe to a seemingly lifeless zone of rock outcrops. Serpentinite boulders don’t even support much lichen. But right on the margin is a whole field of purple, orchid-like Mount Tamalpais jewelflowers, a subspecies of Streptanthus glandulosus. She bends for a photograph; I shift position to provide a shadow. Serpentine landscapes are bright.

Green flags here and there mark the spots where exotic weeds have been pulled. Serpentine communities, like others, are prey to intruders from similar Old World landscapes. Here among the jewelflowers is one that was missed: a stalk of barbed goatgrass. Williams pulls on one glove to tug it out of the ground.

Silica-rich hairs on the leaves will cut your hands.

Three weed-pullers have been working downslope, near the line where a sudden wall of woods shows the change to more hospitable soils. They are professionals employed by the water district. With the arrival of the One Tam initiative, Williams notes, “more people are doing this kind of work.” “We’ll be back tomorrow,” they call.

“We’ll be back tomorrow” could be the motto of the Tamalpais Lands Collaborative. It’s a work that can never end.

Since she joined the MMWD staff in 2009, Williams has been working to redo a rare plant survey last updated a quarter-century ago. Her data fed into last year’s big study, “Measuring the Health of a Mountain”; she hopes this year to complete this latest link in the chain of inventories going back to Eastwood.

MSS. 142, Alice Eastwood Papers, California Academy of Sciences Archives, San Francisco, CA.

Tam’s First Botanist

Alice Eastwood sorts through specimens in this 1929

1) Rachel Kesel, One Tam; 2) David Greenberger; 3) Charles Kennard; 4) Raphaela E. Floreani Buzbee; 5) Scott Simono/ scottsimono.com; 6) Marin Chapter, California Native Plant Society

BAY NATURE / TAMALPAIS LANDS COLLABORATIVE

She is also pursuing a study on “serpentine endemic occupancy.” The populations of these serpentine forbs vary widely from year to year. “Lessingia may be here in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.” How alarmed should we be when counts are low? Perhaps not very. Many scarce species have returned in force with the rains. Pending further work, the state of the serpentine landscapes, which occupy a tiny fraction

of the One Tam area but have a much larger share in its biodiversity, can be assessed as good.

“I kind of laugh at being called a descendant of Alice Eastwood,” Williams says. But like her predecessor, she is not hesitant to stick her neck out about conditions on the mountain. “We like to make bold but qualified statements.” Some won’t do that.

There is value in “being able to not be afraid to be wrong.”

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Clockwise from upper left: 1) Serpentine barrens

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interrupt grasslands in the Rock Spring area of Mount Tam; 2) a Tamalpais bristly jewelflower (Streptanthus glandulosus ssp. pulchellus.) grows on San Geronimo Ridge; 3) an Oakland star tulip (Calochortus umbellatus);

4) Mount Tamalpais manzanita (Arctostaphylos

montana ssp. montana); 5) Mount Tamalpais Lessingia (Lessingia micradenia var. micradenia); 6) Sargent

cypress (Hesperocyparis sargentii).

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Mount Tam as an important refuge for the spotted owl.

Intensive research, such as the surveys we’re conducting here for One Tam, has shown that in the watersheds around Mount Tam, the density of spotted owls is greater than elsewhere, reproductive success is relatively high, and a wider variety of habitats are used. Extensive protected public lands and the absence of logging are only part of the reason; in addition, other potential disturbances—recreational impacts, noise, urban encroachment, rodenticide use—have not been severe enough to cause population declines for this species, yet. Indeed, the 2017 breeding season was a productive one for the spotted owl, with 70 confirmed fledglings in Marin. So its population here appears to be stable, healthy, and sustainable, at least for the

(OWLS continued from page 9)

near future.

We watch as the daylight fades and the owls begin to stir.

The male slowly stretches one of his wings, then swivels his round head toward his mate. Soon the male begins preening (grooming) the female and she lets out a quiet purr. After a few minutes she turns to face her mate and they begin a ritual of mutual bowing and cooing. Then, suddenly, he flies off but returns shortly with a headless woodrat that he presents to her. This food exchange will initiate the nesting cycle that, if successful, will result in the hatching and fledging of chicks.

Soon it’s getting too dark to see the owls, so we retrace our steps and leave them to their quiet hideaway, assured, at least for now, that they will survive and even thrive in their forested One Tam sanctuary.

writers John Hart is an environmental journalist and poet who has authored sixteen books and several hundred other published works.

Mary Ellen Hannibal is an award-winning environmental journalist and author of Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction.

Alisa Opar is the articles editor at Audubon magazine.

Jules Evens, a naturalist and writer, is author of The Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula and An Introduction to California Birdlife.

Claire Peaslee is a naturalist, writer, editor, graphic designer, and improvisational theater artist whose home is Point Reyes.

Ariel Rubissow Okamoto is coauthor of Natural History of San Francisco Bay and editor of Estuary.

A Mountain of Stories was produced by Bay Nature magazine with the generous support of the Tamalpais Lands Collaborative for publication in the October-December 2017 issue of the magazine. Additional copies of this publication can be obtained by contacting Bay Nature Institute or Tamalpais Lands Collaborative.

BayNature

Bay Nature magazine is a quarterly publication of the Bay Nature Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization dedicated to inspiring people to explore and protect the natural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, or to subscribe to the magazine, visit baynature.org or email baynature@ baynature.org. b ay n at u r e

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One Tam is a community-wide initiative of the Tamalpais Lands Collaborative (TLC) to ensure the long-term health of Mt. Tam. The TLC is a partnership of the Marin Municipal Water District, Marin County Parks, California State Parks, National Park Service, and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. For more information, visit onetam.org or email info@onetam.org.