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A Joint Venture – SF Bay Wetlands

March 6, 2013 by Adrian Cotter

From the Federal Government on down there is a not so virtual alphabet soup (swamp?) of public and private organizations collaborating to protect and restore San Francisco’s wetlands. In fact as of Feb 2nd, it’s become an international concern with San Francisco Bay being named an Wetland of International Importance. Arthur Feinstein, our speaker on February 21st, 2013, has been part of this mix for along time as an Audubon and Sierra Club activist, and as a board member of the San Francisco Bay Joint Venture (SFBJV).

Salt Pond

This Joint Venture is one of 18 that were established by the Migratory Bird Act of 1971 to protect birdlife. The joint ventures originally got off the ground protecting ducks, building on the work of Ducks Unlimited, and their efforts to preserve habitat and species for hunting. These Joint Ventures were so successful that the Fish&Wildlife Service decided to expand the program to in essence save all the birds in the country — and now really goes beyond that to all species in general.

SFBJV — the Joint Venture that is smallest in area of all 18 — has three main areas in restoration: wetlands, riparian habitat, and associated uplands. It works with organizations like Audubon, Save the Bay, Sierra Club and government agencies like the Fish and Wildlife, that have funds. The joint venture’s board and staff work on things like acquiring land, doing evaluation and monitoring, project development and implementation, outreach, and most importantly funding support, looking to get the biggest bang for the buck in these restoration programs.

Arthur spent the rest of his talk walking through the projects up and down the bay looking at the challenges and successes of these projects. One thing that you might not expect is that wetlands restoration is a lot about earth moving. Dyked off areas of the bay begin to sink (think New Orleans). The most famous place locally for this is Alviso in the south bay 16′ below the water line. This means you can’t just breach a dyke, you have to bring in dirt and a lot of it to bring the bottom up.

Happily this leads to a fine talking point — restoration means construction jobs, which is a selling point which reaches past people who are primarily concerned about the environment into a broader community.

These projects can also take a lot of time. This might be negotiating with a land owner, like the Navy at Scagg’s Island (worried about the implications of past contracts with adjacent landowners), others require lots of study — and Army Corps of Engineers studies can take a long time. The South Bay’s wetland restoration program (the largest project in the country outside of the Everglades) will take 50 years, with time built in for study and evaluation. The work is as much art as science, it’s not always certain how things will work. Inshore communities also need to be protected against potential flooding.

There are unintended environmental consequences as well — birds like Canvasbacks like shallow water salt ponds, but with some of these being removed this bird is not coming back in the same numbers. Snowy Plovers have been using dry salt ponds for nesting ground. Some of the restoration projects are now trying to take this into account — leaving a variety ot habitat.

There are all sorts of political & legal battles in this too — elections deciding between development and restoration, at places like Redwood City (46 votes decided one referendum on Bair Island) and Cullinan Ranch (which 20 years ago nearly became a Marina).

All of these things take a lot of effort from a lot of different people and organizations. What we get out of it — the past 30-40 years to make the Bay a better place — includes some intangibles: more resilience against climate change events like rising seas, healthier bay ecosystems, better spawning grounds, and better fisheries, but we also get to see beautiful things like the Clapper Rail returning to San Francisco at Heron’s Head park, and maybe all this effort has also gone to help with the return of harbor porpoises, the otter at Sutro Baths, and the huge herring runs the last two years has brought. I’m looking forward to what the next 30-40 years of restoration might bring.

If you want to play a part — you can look for opportunities in many places, but I will leave it with http://sfbayjv.org today.

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February 21 – Changing the face of San Francisco Bay

February 7, 2013 by Adrian Cotter

February 21, 2013 – Changing the face of San Francisco Bay
7:30pm, FREE, at the Randall Museum
Guest Speaker: Arthur Feinstein, Chair 

Arthur Feinstein, Chair of the Bay Area chapter of the Sierra Club, examines the largest wetland restoration effort on the west coast – the challenges of sea level rise, saving endangered species, and answering the question as to what we can do about it and how it will make a difference in our lives.

birds in a small wetland of SF Bay

A wetland amidst industry

Posted in Upcoming Events | Tagged , , , , , |

Joel Pomerantz Explains Everything

January 14, 2013 by Adrian Cotter

It’s taken me a while to get around to typing up these notes, but the memory of Joel’s talk is still strong (plus I have notes :)! He was with us November 15th, Joel led us around San Francisco with all sorts of delightful tidbits of San Francisco as it is and was: from a living wall on Drew high school, the Bradbury waterworks, lakes on maps from Golden Gate Park in 1872 where there are no lakes, the Magnolia tree that blooms in february which makes for an excellent way to press words from plaques, the pepper and cork trees in Dolores park, the trees on the Park Presidio divide that offer species that grow well in San Francisco, and the Tenderloin National Forest at Coen alley.

There was also his tour of SF water: from the reservoir that used to be where the Safeway is at Market below the Mint (which produces memorial coins and coins on contract) where there was once a hill and the bottom of the reservoir was 30′ higher and the water surface 100′ higher, Laguna Honda which was once a lake then made into a reservoir, aqueducts that carried SF water too and fro, the water that used to be brought over from Sausalito and sold by the bucket, the Pilarcitos gravity-fed flume that broke in the 1906 earthquake which was never rebuilt because of  Hetch Hetchy water, the water tank that used to be on Tank Hill where you can still see the rivet marks in the concrete, a bridge in GGP park that didn’t cross water but kept the people up and away from the horses and carriages that used to promenade in the area, Mission Creek which isn’t the original mission creek but defined and shaped by fill, and the 4th street bridge that crosses it with its huge fake counterweight.

And then there were the hills and sands: the black sand of ocean beach that isn’t pollution, but is magnetic sand, magnetite from weathered granite, the sands that used to spread across the city, 60′-80′ dunes downtown and through the Mission where you’ll still find sandy soil, one of the reasons it flopped as an agricultural area, the twin peaks that aren’t twins, on being chert the other basalt, one slowly crumbling away, Red Rock Island a part of 3 islands, privately owned and once a source of red rock for tinting paint, and for ship ballast, the Senole water temple, the old aqueduct known as the haunted sidewalk of Niles Canyon, the quarry in San Pablo Straight that goes down below the bay, and the springs that are still found in the city, but are sadly not tracked (and are required to be diverted into the sewer system).

In other words, some of the many wonders and oddities that San Francisco and region provide to us, if we are willing to take the time to seek it out.

If you want to hear more from Joel, check out his Thinkwalk tours.

 

Posted in Lecture Notes |

2013 Schedule so far

December 20, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

Philip has been working up the schedule for 2013 and this is what we have so far. Hope to see you up at the Randall in the not too distant future.

Lectures are always at 7:30pm — FREE — at the Randall Museum Theater, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA

March 21 – San Francisco Under your Feet – Geologist Jean DeMouthe, will take us through our local geologic history. We start with the big picture beginning in the Mesozoic Era (Dinosaurs) and end with what lies under our city today. Local rock types and fossils will be illustrated and discussed.

April 18 – Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Great Blue Heron Colony in GG Park – Nancy DeStefanis, Director of SF Nature Education, will speak on the 20th Anniversary of the first nesting pair of the Great Blue Herons at Stow Lake in GG Park. DeStefanis discovered the first nest in 1993, and has monitored and studied the behaviors of the herons since then.

May 16 – Rethinking Invasive Species in San Francisco Bay: could a new non-native mud shrimp be good for the sub-tidal ecosystem? Michael McGowan, fisheries oceanographer and aquatic ecologist, will discuss how an invasive species may actually be beneficial.

June 20 – Stories in the Sand – Author Lorri Ungaretti, will guide us through the quick development of the Sunset District from “inaccessible” sand dunes to a city suburb. Her talk is based on her books, Stories in the Sand: San Francisco’s Sunset District, 1847-1964 and Then & Now: San Francisco’s Sunset District.

Posted in Upcoming Events | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments »

An Era of Restoration & Understanding

October 31, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

Sometime in the 70s a murder victim washed up on a bay shore. The police knew to go ask a scientist — where might this body have come from? The answer it turned out was the Golden Gate Bridge. Gangs used to think of it as a good place to dump bodies, thinking they’d soon be carried out to sea, never to be seen again. But our bay waters are more complicated than that. It turns out that the surface water tends to move out to see, but the undercurrents — where a dead body might sink — move inland.

Scientists have spent a good amount of effort and equipment puzzling this out. Not dead bodies per se, but with boats like the Polaris and the Long Fin that are out there collecting and measuring.

The story of our San Francisco Bay is a long one, and for a long time a sad one – impacted as it is by all the hunting, mining, fishing, filling, draining, blowing things up, alien invasions, trash, and dam building that has effected its waters over the last 150 odd years in particular.

Many of those impacts are ongoing and difficult to control (alien species being a good case in point). But the last 50 years has seen an increase in those who would wish to protect, understand, and restore our waters. No longer does the bay stink, and serve as the collective trash dump.

There us still plenty of nature to be found here – the estuary is open ended a mixing bowl of rivers and tides and the bay still serves as a murky nursery to many species of fish. Little fish thrive, there are seals, sea lions, and the only recently returned porpoise. The larger estuary is still a stopover on the Pacific Flyway.

What many people and organizations are working on now is bringing more of that nature back. Bringing us back to a hopefully healthier mix of urban and natural: there are grand 50 years plans to restore salt ponds to wetland, which have has already begun with great signs; plans to restore underwater bay meadows of eel grass — a good habitat for all sorts of creatures and which secures the mud; plans to see if beds of Olympia oysters can be built. We are aiding some species more at risk than others — like for the Clapper Rail — building floating homes where they are safer from all the raccoons and other meso-predators out there.

There are of course risks and additional challenges in all of this — plans for more fill, or the possibility of erosion of the bay bottom which has been securing gold mining mercury for decades. And this is of course, where we hope the science will come in to aid our understanding, help us meet challenges, shift courses, and have a healthy bay for us all to enjoy.

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Next Lecture: November 15th – Everything Explained

October 31, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

Joel Pomerantz volunteered to take over our November 15th spot (Laura Cunningham had to cancel, but we hope to reschedule her for next year). Joel , our local nature historian, will share a dozen or more secret windows into San Francisco’s natural history and infrastructure such as whether Twin Peaks were always, or will always be, twins. Find out how City Hall was designed, then redesigned, to withstand quakes, why the Highway One tunnel through the Presidio isn’t really a tunnel, and of course, Joel’s main research, a little SF water history.

Joel is a writer and educator who has been delighting in the discovery of the hidden nooks and crannies of SF’s past and present. He’s spoken with us a couple times in the past (on underground streams and the history of transportation in Golden Gate Park). You can learn more about him on his website: http://www.joelpomerantz.com/

Posted in Upcoming Events |

Next Lecture: Oct 18 – The UNnatural History of San Francisco Bay

October 8, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

The UNnatural History of San Francisco Bay
Guest Speaker: Ariel Rubissow Okamoto and Kathleen M. Wong
7:30pm, Thursday, October 18th, 2012
FREE at the Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA 

Natural History of San Francisco Bay Book CoverJournalist and author Ariel Rubissow Okamoto and science writer Kathleen M. Wong will answer a few burning questions from their new book Natural History of San Francisco Bay: How do you “make” a wetland if you’re not Mother Nature? If you throw a dead body of the GG Bridge where will it end up? Why splashing in the surf off Crown Beach might you give something like poison oak?

The book itself “delves into an array of topics including fish and wildlife, ocean and climate cycles, endangered and invasive species, and the path from industrialization to environmental restoration.”

> Get the book: Natural History of San Francisco Bay
> more about Ariel
> more about Kathleen

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Life Cycles

October 8, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

Becky Jaffe is a biophiliac. E.O. Wilson made the term up to describe “the connection human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.” Except that for Becky, that connection is sought consciously with great care and effort. She is a photographer, an artist, and amateur naturalist with a keen eye for what the rest of life has to offer. A favorite subject of hers is insects, watching them peer back up at her, but this past lecture (9/20 Bay Area Life Cycles), Becky gave us a tour, not so much of place, but of time — and the creatures that can be found. One of the most delightful things about nature is about how regular she can be in her habits:

Photo by Becky Jaffe "Nest Builder"

September finds tarantula’s migrating. A good spot to find these is on Mt Diablo, as the males come out to look for the decorated burrows of females.

In October, preying mantis like it hot and can be found mating in places like Walnut Creek. You might see a female eat the head or entirety of her consort. or not, as it doesn’t ALWAYS happen.

Sandhill cranes come to Lodi in November – flocks half a million strong. There’s a dictionary by which you can decode their elaborate dances – performed in courtship, or for their mate of 25-30 years.

In Monterey in December you might find Bald Eagles starting to build their massive nests.

January, newts come out from underneath the leaf detritus into the creeks. The male and female clasp together for hours, while other males mights form tussling balls to and combat and lay eggs. There was some discussion on their toxicity and the evolutionary “war” waged between them and garter snakes (make sure to wash your hands if you ever pick one up).

February, in claremont canyon, you a pair of nesting great horned owl who caused a stir this past year swooping down on dogs. The owl will come back to the same tree, the same branch. Everyone was talking about this pair, and a five year old was overhead saying, “better than TV!”

In March, male elephant seals battle at Ano Nuevo state park. Or you might find a tranny wild turkey — 20% of females have the same beard out of the chest as the males. Or lady bugs in Redwook Park clustered together in the thousands.

April has Egrets nesting together in Alameda, possibly to protect themselves from marauding corvids – even though they squabble amongst themselves constantly. Becky has some amazing photos of one male proudly displaying twigs he tore from trees. His mate if he had one would go on to actually build the nest — but he was apparently still looking.

She also told the story of one particular Egret parasite who has a life cycle that includes a snail, a tadpole, and frogs who end up growing extra legs – making them easy targets for Egrets where the cycle begins anew. There are apparently 4 parasites for every non-parasite!

In May, dragon flies and damsel flies mate as strange contortionists. The different cycles of insects we often ignore beyond caterpillars, but many other species have their own interesting cycles of growth.

Go to Lake Merritt in June, and you might find “Hank” the white pelican joined by other migrating pelicans. Hank was injured and can not fly, but over the years he seems to have accumulated friends who come to visit him while on their way to other destinations. You’ll also might find the nests of cormorants.

July has swallowtails emerging from cocoons, beavers building dams in Martinez, and hummingbirds building their gorgeous little expandable nests (Becky passed around a sample).

Hawk Hill in August to see the migration of these fabulous creatures.

All this and much much more for those who have a mind to pay attention.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
– Mary Oliver

 

 

 

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Next Lecture: Sep 20th – Bay Area Life Cycles

August 25, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

Bay Area Life Cycles
Guest Speaker: Becky Jaffe
7:30pm, Thursday, September 20th, 2012
FREE at the Randall Museum, 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA 

Photographer and naturalist Becky Jaffe will discuss the Bay Area’s seasonal wildlife migrations and offer tips on the best local observation sites. She will illustrate her talk with photographs that unite a biologist’s curiosity with an artist’s sensibility.

You can find some more of her wonderful photography on Flickr. She currently has a show (through Sep 1) at the Bone Room in Berkeley, and will be presenting a show on insect photography at the Berkeley Camera Club on Sept 25th.

Posted in Upcoming Events | Tagged , , , |

The Ethics of Foraging

August 24, 2012 by Adrian Cotter

When he was a boy, Jonah Raskin’s father used to take them out down the beach at low tide,  and below the water line looking for clams. They’d occasionally fall into arguments with their neighbors, but his father — a lawyer — knew his business, the property line stops at the waterline. He also brought home perhaps another important lesson — don’t take home more than you need.

Jonah Raskin now lives on an old farm in Sonoma, and gleans from old orchard trees,  a neighbor farmer lets him pick what he needs from his fields, and goes out know and again for mushrooms.

Mushroom pickers delight in sharing recipes for their finds, but are notoriously secretive about their locations. Locations are jealously guarded secrets because people fear coming back to their spot and finding nothing left.

Leaving something behind is a big part of a foragers ethic — not just leaving it for others, but leaving something to continue growing. Jonah Raskin once recalled pulling a friend up off the ground to get the friend to stop, so consumed he was by the idea of getting it all (the impulse perhaps that underlies the success of places like CostCo!).

And this is the dilemma that underlies foraging, or at least the continued expansion of foraging — if significant numbers of people did it, we could strip the land bare. Jonah started the talk talking about the definitions of foraging — and one image is that of armies having foragers marching across the land taking everything and anything they could lay their hands on.

We talked about mushrooms of course, but also hunting, and fishing, berry picking, snail eating, looking for roots, stalking asparagus (read Euell Gibbons), and things like nettles and miner’s lettuce.

As an activity to bring food from the wild to ones table, there is a lot to recommend foraging. It tastes better. It gets us outdoors. It connects people to the outdoors in ways unlike any other activity. Jonah has met more than a few Native Americans gathering, and has come to more of an understanding the reverence for which they hold those things they take and eat. None of it we can take for granted. From early on, humans have sadly proved to have great capacity to reduce what nature has to offer.

As a bonus, here is a great Robert Haas poems Jonah read:

Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan

(there was another: Fall, which I was unable to find online)

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