Wetlands: Lost and Found

If you could step back 100 years to early California, rivers would flow freely into saltwater marshes like the ones that once ran from Newport Bay to where the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles lie today.

The wetland habitat of mud and sand and saltwater, fed by the ebbing and flowing of the tides, would be teeming with waterfowl.

On a spring morning in the bay of San Quintin in Baja California, you might think you had taken that step back in time.

A white blanket of mist covers everything, and the air is alive with the conversation of geese. As the fog lifts, silhouettes of thousands of geese emerge, grazing on the eelgrass beds that stretch across the wide, shallow bay.

Biologists from Alaska studying the geese head out in a small boat that skims over the rippling silver bay. As the swirling fog returns, they lose their way and watch different species of birds to learn where the deep channel runs--black brants are in the shallow water, grebes where the bottom drops off, surf scooters are in deeper water.

The rich habitat is the winter home of about 30,000 black brants, saltwater geese that arrive each fall after a spectacular flight 3,000 miles nonstop from Alaska.

The biologists will hunker down with spotting scopes to read bird bands as the geese gather on sandbars. They are mapping the life histories of the birds whose population is down about a third since the mid-’60s.

When the brants fly north in March and April, they stop to rest and feed, but they mostly skip Southern California--where their habitat has been transformed into ports, marinas, farmland and housing tracts.

The missing wetlands are missing steppingstones in the Pacific Flyway--one of the largest north-south migrations of waterfowl in the world.

The most ambitious attempt to date to put one of those missing steppingstones back into place is the restoration of 880 acres of wetlands at Bolsa Chica, once one of the largest oil-drilling fields in the state.

A number of small wetland restoration projects have been completed in Southern California in the last two decades, funded by a variety of sources. A major vehicle for large-scale restoration has now become port mitigation, which compensates for loss of resources associated with the expansion of ports.

So far, three projects have been paid for by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles: 28 acres in Upper Newport Bay (one of three restoration projects there between 1983 and 1988); 110 acres in Anaheim Bay at the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge; and, in San Diego County, 360 acres at Batiquitos Lagoon.

The next port mitigation project--and by far the largest in acres and dollars--is Bolsa Chica.

In an agreement announced by the state in February, $91 million has been budgeted for the purchase and restoration of Bolsa Chica wetlands. Oil-field contamination will be cleaned up, with some wells remaining until they play out. The agreement calls for a new tidal inlet, and there will be substantial excavation and improved managed tidal areas. Money is also set aside for future dredging needed to maintain tidal flow.

The blueprints for reviving damaged Southern California wetlands are the unspoiled Baja wetlands. Both are part of the same biogeographical region of salt marshes and contain most of the same plants and animals.

“The Pacific Coast of Baja is a portrait of California’s coastal marshes as they were before their wholesale damage and destruction,” says Barbara Massey, 73, a biologist and pioneer in the study of endangered bird species--including the least tern and light-footed clapper rail. Massey has become a strong advocate for preservation and restoration of wetlands on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border.

Ironically, even as the Baja wetlands are studied as models for restoration projects, they are facing the same kinds of development pressures that destroyed 75% to 90% of Southern California’s coastal wetlands.

Joy Zedler, who heads the Pacific Estuarine Research Laboratory at San Diego State, is studying San Quintin and mapping the lagoon and vegetation.

“San Quintin tells us what the topography of wetlands should be like, how many little tidal creeks there should be and how we should design our Southern California marshes,” says Zedler. “San Quintin is the model, what we’re trying to produce here are mimics.”

Zedler is putting some of what she’s learned to use as a member of the Tijuana Estuary Management Authority, which is overseeing an experimental restoration project at the mouth of the Tijuana River on the U.S. side of the border.

In the project, a new curving tidal channel has been dug to increase productivity of a degraded area of marsh.

Great attention is being paid to saving the rich, dark anaerobic mud so it can be distributed over the newly exposed channel dug out of former uplands.

“Well-aged marsh has fine sediments, microbes and probably smells a little bit because it’s got decaying organic matter and sulfides in it,” says Zedler.

Wetlands reconstructed in the past have often been excavated out of dredge spoils. The soil is sandy and does not hold nutrients well, so the plants don’t grow well.

“We like the fine mud,” she says. “Some people steal it and use it for poultice on race horse legs. It also makes a mudpack like what some people put on their faces,” says Zedler, adding: “I don’t recommend putting this stuff on your face.”

Talbert Marsh: A Small Start

Barbara Massey began her study of endangered birds on the damaged barrier beaches and salt marshes of Huntington Beach and Anaheim Bay.

When Massey decided in 1970, at age 45, to go back to school to get her master’s in biology at Cal State Long Beach, the first federal list of endangered species was just being compiled. The attitude that wetlands were wastelands waiting to be developed was changing.

Her thesis professor, Charles Collins, told her about a bird that lived within 10 miles of her home that nobody knew anything about--except that there weren’t many around any more.

Massey began to study this bird, the least tern, at Sunset Aquatic Park.

She went on to study the Belding’s savannah sparrow, the light-footed clapper rail and other endangered species, an undertaking that meant spending years crouching behind dunes in Huntington Beach and in the marshes of Upper Newport Bay and Anaheim Bay.

When Massey followed the least terns south on their migration to discover where they winter, she was not successful. The winter home of the least terns remains a mystery to this day, but in the search she encountered the Pacific Coast wetlands of Baja California, rich with pristine lagoons, mudflats and great numbers and diversity in species of birds.

In the late 1970s, Massey proposed a marsh-restoration project at the mouth of the Santa Ana River to create a feeding area for least terns while their habitat was disturbed by a flood-control project.

“Nobody knew what to do, so I got together with two Fish and Game biologists, and we sort of looked at a marsh and designed a little 25-acre project. I was thinking, if we don’t do it, who’s going to?”

That’s when she met Zedler, who was just setting up her estuary research lab at San Diego State.

“She was the authority on marshes. I went down and ran this by her, but she didn’t know either.”

Massey and her team brought in tidal flow through culverts to an area that had been cut off from the ocean for a century. The marsh quickly began to come back to life, but six months later, the county removed the culverts and it died again. It would be more than a decade before the marsh was again restored.

Though officially called Talbert Marsh, it is known informally by those aware of its history as “Massey Marsh.”

Upper Newport: What the Birds Have to Say

As dawn breaks in Upper Newport Bay, the sounds of coots picking their webbed feet up out of the mud are interspersed with the loud “clappering” calls of light-footed clapper rails singing, male and female calling back and forth to each other: “kek kek kek kek.”

Dick Zembal of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will tell you the endangered birds are saying “I’m here, this is my mate, we’re calling together, this is our territory and we intend on mating here.”

To most people, the call sounds like hands clapping.

Massey and Zembal learned bird talk working together on the first census of the light-footed clapper rail in 1979. The bird is more often heard than seen. Massey and Zembal discovered the meaning of the “kek burr” call of a female who’s lost her mate, which alerts biologists to look for an explosion in the population of predators.

Zembal, now multispecies planning coordinator for Fish and Wildlife, has continued the census work with the help of the volunteer Clapper Rail Study Team and spends every March and April surveying 50 marshes from Carpinteria to the Tijuana Estuary, listening for the “single dawn chorus” of the shy bird.

In 1996, his census found 325 pairs of light-footed clapper rails, up from 142 in 1985. Upper Newport, with 158 pairs, is the premiere population of the secretive bird.

Clapper rails do not migrate, and most marshes will have two to five pairs if any at all. Populations like that can disappear almost overnight, he says.

Zembal emphasizes that wetlands have to be connected to other open space, otherwise they become like “little isolated zoos.”

Upper Newport Bay is connected to thousands of acres of upland habitats. If pinched off, it would become isolated, as happened at Seal Beach in the late 1980s.

Suddenly, coyotes disappeared, causing other small predator populations, such as the red fox, to explode and decimate bird populations.

On this morning in Upper Newport Bay, Zembal is feeling optimistic. The clapper rail is the indicator of our healthiest, most productive wetlands, he says.

Their range is the 10 feet of tidal marsh inundated twice a day with salt water. What was feeding the birds at low tide will be feeding the fish later.

Zembal says Upper Newport Reserve--with its growing population of clapper rails next to such a heavily populated area--”is a wellspring of hope that makes you think that perhaps we can make it all work--for the human population and the swarm of life.”

Border Link: The Birth of Pro Esteros

Early one morning in 1988, Massey was in Baja California doing a census of Light-footed Clapper Rails when she discovered bulldozers leveling dunes for a resort development at Estero da Punta Banda, south of Ensenada.

She rushed to the home of her Mexican colleague, Silvia Ibarra, and rousted her out of bed. Ibarra, also a biologist, found out that the developer was also planning to dredge to create a marina but had no permits.

There was no conservation organization operating in Baja California able to help protect the estuary and endangered bird habitat. Massey and Ibarra organized a meeting of about 35 U.S. and Mexican scientists and conservationists to see what could be done.

A binational conservation organization to protect Baja wetlands--pro esteros--was born.

During eight years of struggle, more dunes were lost to beachfront vacation houses, but there is now a nature reserve at Punta Banda. And pro esteros has become the keystone of a conservation movement that links people north and south of the border.

The Sea and Sage Chapter of the Audubon Society in Orange County was an early supporter of pro esteros.

Dick Kust, who was president of the chapter at the time, remembers one of the first efforts of pro esteros was to get a few thousand dollars together for aerial photography. Since that time, geographic information system maps of the four major Baja wetland lagoons--San Quintin, Ojo de Liebre, San Ignacio and Magdalena Bay--have been created as habitat records for land-use planning.

Today, north of the border, the co-chair of pro esteros is Pat Flanigan, education director at the San Diego Natural History Museum. South of the border the co-chair is Laura Martinez.

Catching the bus in Ensenada at 6 a.m. on a Saturday in February, Martinez and her 14-year-old son Martin are taking a “treasure chest” care package to the Brant Monitoring Program in San Quintin.

The chest contains bird-watching materials and letters from students in Coos Bay, Ore., to students at Zapata High School in San Quintin. This day, Martinez takes the kids on a field trip to the biologists’ research station. She trains a teacher to use the computer that connects the school with the brant Web site and schools along the Pacific Flyway in Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

Martinez’s sister Patricia also works with pro esteros. She was selected this year to represent Baja California nongovernment organizations to the Secretariat of Environmental and Natural Resources and Fisheries, which approves all development permits in Mexico.

The sisters have strong ideas about the right way to fight conservation battles, and this year organized Grupo de Trabajo pro Peninsula de Baja California to collaborate on conservation issues.

As a first project, this working group of conservation organizations is establishing a communications network to link remote communities so they can keep each other informed about development projects in their areas.

In a remote village on Laguna San Ignacio without telephone lines or electricity, that means setting up a laptop computer and installing solar panels to power a satellite telephone link.

The working group hopes that if local people, such as fishermen and ecotourism guides, are linked to the outside world, they will become a first line of defense against development that might return short-term economic gain but result in long-term ecological damage.

San Quintin: A Push of Development *

The development pressures experienced in Southern California are coming quickly to the unspoiled peninsula of Baja.

Inaccessibility and lack of water protected Baja, but improved highways and population increases now threaten destruction of wetlands. At San Quintin, a number of projects have been proposed, including a blueprint for a “new Cabo” with golf courses and hotel development.

The depression in the Mexican economy in the early ‘90s caused a major migration from mainland Mexico as people sought work in the agricultural valley of San Quintin, putting increasing pressure on the bay.

Campsites have sprung up. Men scour the lava outcroppings pouring bleach into crevices to chase out octopuses. People have been plowing under delicate desert vegetation in hopes of getting a crop from the arid landscape--instead creating a dust bowl from the red earth.

Ibarra is now part of a team studying how the processes of the San Quintin bay work as a system. The team is concerned about the expansion of oyster growing in the bay, population increases, what will happen when the ground water is depleted by agriculture and that no one is measuring sewage that may be going into the bay.

“Ecology and sociology and economy are all tied together,” Ibarra says. “We don’t know what the effect of this intense activity will be on the bay.”

The presence of the black brant is reassuring for now.

The birds are an indicator specie, says David Ward, who heads the team of biologists who wintered in San Quintin with the geese. Where there’s eelgrass, the birds’ main food, there are fisheries. And, he says, where there are brants, there’s not high human use or a high level of pollutants.

But this year, Ward’s team reported only three sightings of the light-footed clapper rail, which could mean a dramatic crash in that population.

In a census taken 1993, Zembal found a large population of clapper rails at San Quintin. People moving into camps along the bay who have brought cats that go wild and become predators may have triggered a collapse.

Clapper rails rely on their camouflage coloring and cover from thick marsh vegetation for protection from their natural predators, hawks. When they detect a predator they freeze. This instinctive behavior affords them no protection from cats.

Zembal, concerned that so few clapper rails were spotted this spring, says,”We better get down there and see what’s going on.”

Bolsa Chica: Clean and Add Water

When motorists on Pacific Coast Highway drive past Bolsa Chica, they see a glimpse of the future. The highway passes by the 300-acre state ecological reserve created in 1979 by raising dikes--creating two bird islands . . . and flooding.

It is one of the best limited-restoration efforts ever undertaken at a low cost, according to Jack Fancher of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, lead person for that agency on the restoration of Bolsa Chica.

The reserve now supports more than 200 species of birds, up from roughly 10 to 20 before.

There are, however, few fish species because there is only about six inches of tidal flow. That is why a key element of the upcoming Bolsa Chica restoration is the opening of a new channel to the ocean--even though some involved in the project are concerned that the channel will have some undesirable effects.

The 880-acre project stretches inland--on land now dotted with oil-drilling rigs.

The project reflects a dramatic change in attitudes about the importance of wetlands and the impact of laws such as the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.

The debate over the future of Bolsa Chica heated up 20 years ago with a proposal for dredging to create a marina. Now, the dredges will be working for the wetlands, opening a new tidal channel and excavating subtidal and intertidal areas.

“There’s a lot of potential for restoration of wetlands in Southern California,” says Craig Denisoff of the state Resources Agency, “simply by changing the hydrology and/or changing the contour of land or dropping a levee and reflooding an area that’s dry. Bolsa Chica is a classic example of that.”

When the tidal flow is restored to Bolsa Chica and green ribbons of eelgrass again wave in the estuary, will the black brants return in large numbers?

Probably not, Ward says.

Brants are skittish birds that dislike human disturbance and prefer to be left alone.

But it is likely that other birds will flock to the restored Bolsa Chica.

There are now 2,400 pairs of least terns in California, up from a low point of 600. Elegant terns, royal terns and black skimmers have extended their range northward, and large numbers now nest on the islands created at Upper Newport and Bolsa Chica.

So far, other wetland-restoration projects are showing positive results.

The project at Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge at Anaheim Bay was excavated from a dry upland area that had been used for farming. It was completed 2 1/2 years ago and supports bird and fish numbers expected to take five to 10 years to reach.

The signs are also promising for Batiquitos Lagoon, just completed and opened to tidal influence in December. Monitoring by biologists has found more species of fish and invertebrates, including hundreds of small halibut. Salt-marsh seedlings are popping up, and there is use by endangered species, particularly the western snowy plover and least tern.

“Any wetland will attract a common set of birds, like egrets, which are kind of the pigeons of wetlands,” says Mike Josselyn of Wetlands Research, who is monitoring the restoration projects at Anaheim Bay and Batiquitos and helped plan the Batiquitos project.

“You could measure the quality of a wetland by the kinds and numbers of birds that use it,” he says.

The hardest thing about the restoration of Batiquitos was developing a plan everyone could agree on, he says. The project took about six years to plan and another three to build.

Planning, design and environmental review for the Bolsa Chica restoration is expected to take three years and will proceed concurrently with oil-field cleanup.

Construction will start around 2000 and is expected to take three years.

If all goes according to plan, early in the next century Bolsa Chica will have taken a step back in time toward rebirth as the thriving wetland of 100 years ago.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Wetlands: Lost and Found

Pacific Coast Salt Marshes

Wetland restoration projects in the past two decades have reclaimed hundreds of acres of coastal wildlife habitat. The largest project will be Bolsa Chica at Huntington Beach. The relatively undisturbed lagoon and salt marsh at San Quintin in Baja California is being studied as a blueprint for a natural wetland.

*

Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach

To mitigate loss of wildlife and fisheries habitat due to dredging for port operations, funds have been set aside to restore wetlands in other locations in Southern California, including Bolsa Chica.

*

Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge

110-acre project in Anaheim Bay; restoration was completed in 1994.

*

Bolsa Chica

* Ecological Reserve

300-acre limited tidal restoration completed in 1979. Now supports over 200 species of birds.

* Restoration Project

Planned 880-acre restoration will be the largest undertaken. Construction expected to begin in 2000.

*

Talbert Marsh

Early 25-acre project at mouth of Santa Ana River. Tidal action was restored in 1989; dunes were restored 1991.

*

Upper Newport Bay

Three restoration projects have been completed, including 28-acre port mitigation project that was finished in 1985. Premier home of the light-footed clapper rail, with 325 pairs.

*

Bataquitos Lagoon

360-acre restoration was completed in December.

*

Tijuana Estuary

Currently being restored.

*

Estero Punta Banda

Ecological reserve

*

Bahia San Quintin

One of four major Pacific wetlands in Baja California. It is a primary wintering grounds of the black brant.

UP CLOSE: BOLSA CHICA

The wetlands reclamation project at Bolsa Chica calls for purchase of 880 acres, with about 600 of those to be restored. The land, once one of the largest oil drilling fields in California, is adjacent to an existing ecological reserve along Pacific Coast Highway. The California Coastal Conservancy is the lead agency for the restoration project. A number of issues must be resolved:

* Orange County Flood Control District would like to integrate the adjacent flood control channel with the tidal basin, but this is not part of the currently approved agreement.

* There is concern about the impact of a new tidal channel on beach use, surfing, formation of sand bars, wave changes, safety and sand supply down the coast.

* There is a question about how restoration will affect ground-water movement--homes inland of the marsh are at a low elevation.

Recipe for a Marsh

At an experimental restoration site in the Tijuana Estuary at the U.S.-Mexico border, researchers are testing the most effective way to put nature back together again, using techniques similar to those that will be used at Bolsa Chica after the toxic cleanup is completed. These are the basic steps:

* Salvage native plants by cutting blocks of marsh.

* Excavate curving channels with precise gradients and salvage the mud. “Marsh muck” cannot be rehydrated; it must be kept wet.

* Liquefy sandy dirt and pipe it to the ocean as slurry to replenish the beach.

* Plant according to elevation in the tidal area. Irrigate and maintain plants to get them started.

The Major Players

Eight government agencies--four federal and four state--were signatories to the Bolsa Chica agreement announced in February and will participate in restoration planning. Project managers from the agencies are:

* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Tom Yocom

* U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Jack Fancher

* Army Corps of Engineers

Ruth Villalobos

* National Marine Fisheries Service

Robert Hoffman

* State of California Resources Agency

Craig Denisoff

* California Coastal Conservancy

Melanie Deninger

* California Fish and Game Department

Troy Kelly and Patty Wolf

* State Lands Commission

Robert Hight

Other agencies will be actively involved in Bolsa Chica restoration planning include the state Department of Parks and Recreation, Orange County Flood Control District and the city of Huntington Beach

Getting Involved

The next public meetings on the Bolsa Chica restoration will be July 9 in the Huntington Beach Central Library, 7111 Talbert Ave. Two meetings with identical agendas will be held, the first from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. To be notified of other meetings, contact Melanie Denninger, California Coastal Conservancy, (510) 286-4180. e-mail: mdenninger@igc.apc.org

* Amigos de Bolsa Chica

* Bolsa Chica Conservancy

* Bolsa Chica Land Trust

* Surfrider Foundation

* Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club

* Huntington Beach Tomorrow

* Sea & Sage Audubon

OTHER CONTACTS

* pro esteros

(U.S.-Mexico conservation organization)

Chuck Mitchell: (714) 850-4830

Laura Martinez: proester@telnor.net

* Clapper Rail Study Team

Sue Hoffman: (714) 675-3460

UP CLOSE: SAN QUINTIN

In a landscape punctuated by ancient volcanoes, the large, shallow lagoon at San Quintin in Baja California, Mexico, supports many species of birds and other wildlife. The nearly 50,000-acre bay and salt marsh area is considered a prime example of a nearly undisturbed wetland. Increasingly, though, it is facing pressures of development.

UP CLOSE: UPPER NEWPORT BAY

With 158 pairs of the light-footed clapper rail, Upper Newport Bay is the premier population center of the secretive bird. Three restoration projects have been completed in Upper Newport, which is connected to thousands of acres of upland habitats.

UP CLOSE: TIJUANA ESTUARY

In an experimental wetlands restoration project, a curving tidal channel has been carved out of an upland in the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge. The work is being done in a 2-acre area, but the impact of the changes is expected to affect 200 acres of marsh in the 2,100-acre refuge.

Brant Monitoring Project

Black brants undertake a spectacular migration along the Pacific Flyway. After breeding along the Arctic rim, about 150,000 geese congregate at Izembek Lagoon in Alaska to spend six weeks feeding. About Nov. 1, they start to fly nonstop to Baja California, about 3,000 miles, to spend the winter. In spring they make the trip north. An international monitoring network for black brants has been established so students can learn about the connections between the estuaries in their communities and elsewhere. In its first year, there are four sites participating:

* Northernmost is a town at Izembek Lagoon National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska

* Padilla Bay Reserve in Washington

* South Slough Reserve at Coos Bay, Ore.

* Bahia de San Quintin in Baja.

At Zapata High School in San Quintin, the program installed the school’s first telephone line to connect to the World Wide Web. Each school has an Internet home page to log observations. The curriculum soon will be posted on the Internet, so any school along the flyway can join the program at no cost.

* Brant Web Site Observation Log

https://woodknot.wce.wwu.edu/blackbrant

* Nina Garfield / Sanctuaries and Reserves Division

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

(301) 713-3141, Ext.171

ngarfield@ocean.nos.noaa.gov