Community works together to protect wetlands

It started in late February with a man named Mark, who walks his dog every day at Talbert Marsh at Brookhurst Street and Pacific Coast Highway. Mark noticed that the marsh wasn’t draining properly and algae was growing rampant. So he alerted Lena Hayashi, chair of the board of the Huntington Wetlands Conservancy, the group that owns and manages the marsh.

Lena found that a sandbar was blocking the opening to the marsh. She called Gary Gorman, the conservancy’s project manager, who tested the water quality and discovered that oxygen levels had fallen dangerously low. Gary and Lena contacted Chris Webb, an engineer with Moffat & Nichol, the group that designed the Talbert Marsh restoration project. Chris met with Lena and Gary on a Sunday and agreed with them that the channel needed to be reopened. That would require bulldozers.

Lena and Gary called Mary Ann Skorpanich, a watershed planner with the county of Orange. She got the flood-control people involved. If a flood-control channel is blocked when a major rainstorm hits, the people upstream aren’t going to be very happy. Lena also contacted David Pryor, a biologist with State Parks and Recreation. David rode his bike to Huntington State Beach to assess the situation. Among other duties, David monitors the tern colony at the Santa Ana River mouth next to Talbert Marsh. He agreed that the channel needed to be reopened, but there was a complication: The threatened Western snowy plovers were already setting up nesting sites, so a biologist would need to monitor the bulldozing of the channel.

Vic gave a tour of Talbert Marsh to the docents from the Amigos de Bolsa Chica a few days before the bulldozers arrived. He noted a species of marine snail, known as cloudy bubble snails, floating on the surface. Thesebrown snails, each about the size of a chicken egg, normally spend their time on the muddy bottom, nosing around for tasty tidbits of vegetation. The fact that they were on the surface was not good. These snails are very sensitive to adverse conditions.

This being the 21st century, work to reopen the channel couldn’t begin until all of the forms, permits and paperwork were in place. As soon as the pile of permits was in order, the bulldozers began working to clear the channel.

I drove to the Santa Ana River mouth to see what was happening and noted that the tern colony had a lot of vegetation in it. The Amigos de Bolsa Chica clear nonnative plants off the tern islands at Bolsa Chica prior to the arrival of the birds from South America. I wondered if David Pryor did the same thing with the tern colony at Huntington State Beach. I called him and offered the services of my Orange County Conservation Corps crew. The call couldn’t have come at a better time. David was getting ready to do a major weed removal project outside the tern colony fence to keep weeds from spreading inside the fenced area.

I get a new corps crew every two weeks. The program allows young adults to develop job skills while helping the community and the environment. In the classroom, I teach the corps members about biology, ecology, habitats and conservation. Then I take them into the field for their first exposure to conservation work. After that, they go to a regular work crew and I get another batch of young adults to put through orientation.

I brought my work crew of nine new corps members to the tern colony last Thursday to meet David and his crew of six from State Parks. I would have had 10 corps members, but unfortunately, one of them had been stabbed after work the day before in a gang-related fight. The fight was a violation of his probation, and he’ll be going back to juvenile hall once he’s out of the hospital. It brought home to me once again how vulnerable these young people are as they try to improve their lives.

I like to mix fieldwork with education. As part of that educational experience, David gave my corps members a nice lecture about endangered California least terns, and also talked about ocean currents and sand movement. He pointed out that sand moves south along the beach with winter storms and drifts back north in the summer. As the sand moves, ocean inlets are often silted closed. Oxygen levels decline with lack of flushing, and the invertebrates and fish sometimes die. Because the sand is constantly shifting, inlet monitoring and reopening is often necessary.

After my corps members and I had pulled up and bagged two pickup trucks full of nonnative sea rocket, Crete weed, and devil’s thorn, we hiked up the Santa Ana River to Talbert Marsh. The bulldozers had been working and the wetlands were getting some flushing, but the outlet was still not flowing freely. We found many dead cloudy bubble snails, a consequence of a marsh that had gone too long without flushing. We finished our day by visiting the life-filled tide pools at Crystal Cove, something new corps members always enjoy. Most of them have never seen tide pools before, and they love this part of the educational experience.

This is a terrific example of how our community can work together to protect and care for our local wetlands. The wetlands will heal themselves, the snails will recover and another group of young people got to experience the healing power of nature.