Volunteers Wade Into Wetlands to Gather a Summer’s Worth of Trash

Dirty, muddy and up to their knees in marshy water, about 100 volunteers braved the Bolsa Chica wetlands Saturday morning to gather a summer’s accumulation of trash and help preserve this home for migrating birds.

“If we want to live around here, we better clean it up, or it won’t be here any longer,” said Kristine Shisler, who heard about the event in her Crisis Ecology class at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. “I say we call on (President) Bush right now and tell him to ban Styrofoam,” she added, citing fast-food containers as the biggest find.

About 2,000 bird species inhabit the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach, including five endangered species. Most birds feed on plants and small fish in the marsh, and they can be fatally harmed by cigarettes butts, plastics, broken bottles and other trash.

Most of the garbage is blown from the beach and Pacific Coast Highway into the reserve at Warner Avenue. Some of it floats from Seal Beach via the ocean, said Adrienne Morrison, executive director of Amigos de Bolsa Chica, which sponsored the annual fall cleanup event.

But not all trash arrives by wind or sea, as the hypodermic needle and whiskey flask found by Rick Gronos of Newport Beach suggest.

“It just makes you sick the way people just toss out (garbage) and don’t think about how it affects them,” Gronos said. The 34-year-old banker, who would have preferred to sleep in, explained, “It doesn’t matter where you live, it’s important to act locally and do what you can.”

Two birds on the Endangered Species List inhabiting the wetlands, the Belding Savannah sparrow and clapper rail, feed off pickle weed and cord grass plants, which grow naturally in the reserve’s seawater. The fertile environment offers an opportunity to preserve these nearly extinct fowl, Morrison said.

“For future generations, this place will be a rarity, a living library,” said Tom Libengood, a Huntington Beach resident who has worked to preserve the area from development.

The Bolsa Chica Planning Coalition, formed last year by representatives from Signal Landmark developers, the state Lands Commission, the city and county, and Amigos de Bolsa Chica, is the local force determining the fate of the marsh.

The state wildlife preserve once covered about 30 square miles. But by about 1980, local development and oil industry operations had reduced it to 200 acres. The Amigos, formed in 1976, have helped restore the marsh to its current 1,100 acres.

“It’s really a neat place to roam,” said Alice Daugherty of Garden Grove. “It’s the only place around that’s unkilled, undeveloped.”

Shell Oil Co., which owns property bordering the wetlands, provided refreshments for the volunteers. The event coincided with the first annual Estuaries Day, a national celebration of the country’s coastlines.

Corbin Weed, a Shell employee for three years, clad in company overalls and picking up garbage, said he was volunteering because he has “a personal environmental concern, just like anybody else.”

If people continue to litter the wetlands, “it might just as well be made into a dump,” said Lou Miller from Huntington Beach, who came to pick up garbage.

Daugherty, who brought her 2-year-old son, Brian, daughter Jennifer, 6, and neighbor Andrea, 10, said, “It was important to get the kids involved, so that when you tell them not to throw something out, they understand why. I don’t think they’ll forget.”

Brian said he knew he was picking up trash for the fish and birds “so we can see them again.”