NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic and I attended the debut of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust’s restoration plan for the lower bench of Bolsa Chica Mesa last week.

The plan is to remove the non-native plants and plant native coastal sage scrub, grasses, and wetland plants. No objection there. The Land Trust intends to do it within a 10-year time frame at a cost of $4.3 million. No objection there either.

The lower bench is 120 acres, of which 111 acres are non-native grassland, six acres are ESHA (Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area), and three acres are Warner Pond, a coastal salt marsh.

The trust plans to change this to 65 acres of native grassland, 30 acres of coastal sage scrub, nine acres of mixed grassland and seasonal ponds, and six acres of grassland, coastal sage scrub and “herbaceous wetland.” We were unsure if the trust meant a fresh-water wetland or a salt marsh, which is how biologists describe wetlands.

The Land Trust plans to do this 120-acre project in 10 years using only volunteer help from the public — and without herbicides.

This will be an incredibly difficult challenge. A project of this size is unlikely to be completed in 10 years using only volunteers. Large-scale projects — and this one is huge — are usually handled by professionals. The Land Trust has already spent 14 years working on the 13 acres that lie along the bluffs overlooking Outer Bolsa Bay, and trust officials are to be commended for their efforts. But if it took the Land Trust 14 years to restore 13 acres, then by extrapolation, it will take them 129 years to restore the remaining 120 acres.

Furthermore, after 14 years, trust officials are still not done with the area that they’ve been working on.

A highly invasive plant, star thistle, has taken hold in their project area and is threatening to overrun the 16,000 native plants that they’ve installed. Mustard, radish and non-native grasses still grow in their project area.

In my opinion, they shouldn’t be allowed to expand their project into the fenced part of the mesa until they’ve finished their work on the area that they’ve already disturbed.

Although the intentions of the Land Trust are good, the restoration efforts of this volunteer group do not pass muster with everyone. University biologists refer to the group’s efforts as gardening, not restoration, mainly because the plantings are all shrubby perennials. In a natural coastal sage scrub habitat, the shrubs are more widely spaced, with grasses and annual herbaceous plants growing in between. Also, the trust sometimes uses exotic plants that were never at Bolsa Chica, such as St. Catherine’s Lace, an endangered plant from Catalina. It doesn’t grow naturally on the mainland. And officials inexplicably avoid planting certain shrubs that are a natural component of coastal sage scrub, such as laurel sumac.

Native grasslands are difficult to create from old agricultural fields, and everyone acknowledges that. But it has been done at least on a small scale. When Hearthside wanted to produce a grassland downslope from its housing project, Hearthside hired professional biologists from LSA Associates. Workers mowed the non-natives, watered to encourage sprouting of the non-native seedbank, then sprayed herbicide on all of the emergent non-native plants that sprouted. They repeated this process several times to exhaust the seedbank, then sowed seeds of purple needlegrass and other native bunch grasses. They mowed the bunch grass once at the end of the growing season to distribute seeds more broadly. In 18 months, they had a weed-free grassland.

We are not aware of any successful grassland restoration projects on the scale that is proposed for Bolsa Chica Mesa. And certainly none that were done without use of herbicide and using only volunteer labor. Even the 18-acre Shipley Nature Center project relied heavily on herbicide use and professional labor from the Orange County Conservation Corps for four years. And after seven years, it is still not done with restoration.

The Land Trust also plans to construct a series of four fenced-in Terra-Farms of one acre each that will serve to compost the non-native plants it cuts down. These “farms” will also be nurseries that grow native plants for the restoration. These farms will have large compost piles and will be powered by both solar panels and wind turbines. Trust officials even plan to grow switchgrass to generate biofuel. While these are innovative, green concepts, we’re not sure that the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve is the right place for such experimental farms.

For openers, wind turbines are notorious for killing birds. And switchgrass is a prairie grass native to the Great Plains. It was never a component of California ecosystems. The farms are supposed to be decommissioned at the end of 10 years, but what happens if the mesa restoration is only partially complete by then?

Finally, this project will create a series of trails that will dissect the mesa into multiple small areas. The largest contiguous area will be the 60 acres of grassland. This dissection of habitat, as biologists know, is destructive to wildlife diversity. The more trails that bisect an area, the less diverse the wildlife will be.

If the mesa is really for the wildlife, which was one of the arguments that was used to protect the mesa from development, then it should not be cut up into little fragments by a series of trails nor covered by plant nurseries and switchgrass farms with solar panels and wind turbines. Especially not near the great blue heron nesting colony nor where white-tailed kites and red-shouldered hawks nest.

The mesa is owned by California State Lands Commission, which means the public. Eventually, the community should have an opportunity to comment on this plan before it is put into effect. The project will go to the Coastal Commission, where biologists on staff will weigh in on the plan and the methods proposed to implement it. Because of the size of the project and the impact on existing wildlife that any restoration project will have, we hope that the Land Trust will produce an environmental impact report. And we hope that the Land Trust will succeed with restoration in a time frame that is less than a century.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.