NEW LIFE FOR BAY SANCTUARY

[Guest guest]

NEW LIFE FOR BAY SANCTUARY

Once farmland, salt ponds, Bair Island now protected and ready for restoration

Jane Kay, Chronicle Environment Writer

 

Thursday, March 15, 2007

 

 

More... The biggest undeveloped island in San Francisco Bay, hidden between

Redwood City and San Carlos, is a haven for the harbor seal, the great egret and

the salt marsh harvest mouse.

 

Yet Bair Island might have been home to malls and high-rises instead of marine

mammals and herons had it not been for a group of conservationists.

 

Today, the 3,000-acre island -- twice as big as the Presidio in San Francisco --

is ready for restoration. Old earthen berms diked for farming, grazing and salt

production will come down, letting in the tides for the first time since the

1800s. Construction starts this summer, but it could take four years to finish

the project and a decade more for the marsh plants to return.

 

Restoring the tidal marsh will benefit the estuary and open a window to the wild

side of the bay to visiting schoolchildren, photographers, bird-watchers,

hikers, bicyclists and kayakers. Eventually, a parking lot for school buses will

be built. A pedestrian bridge from Redwood City to the nearest part of the

island will lead to a 1.8-mile trail, ending in two wildlife viewing platforms.

Another viewing platform will be built on the outer island.

 

Tidal marsh is the foundation of a healthy estuary, scientists say. The soggy

ecosystem will help control floodwaters, including those caused by rising seas.

The marsh also will catch pollutants and act as a rich nursery for mussels,

oysters, worms and crustaceans at the base of the bay's web of aquatic life.

Without a functioning tidal marsh, there's not much to eat for young Dungeness

crab, salmon and steelhead.

 

Over the past 200 years, the growing California population built towns, roads

and other development on top of filled tidal marsh, cutting the bay's original

ring of 190,000 acres to 40,000 acres -- an 80 percent loss.

 

Local natural resource managers set a goal of restoring 100,000 acres in 2000.

So far, about 13,000 acres have been returned. Creating 1,400 acres of tidal

marsh at Bair Island and completing work at some 15,000 acres of other former

salt ponds would easily double that number.

 

 

 

--

Last week, Ralph Nobles and Florence and Philip LaRiviere, three saviors of Bair

Island, met at their old haunt, Waterfront Restaurant in Pete's Harbor in

Redwood City. From a deck, the white-haired octogenarians admired the island, a

prize they savored and won.

In 1982, Nobles and his late wife, Carolyn, fought for a referendum that stopped

a Redwood City Council plan to build a new town on the island and transform it

into another Redwood Shores, a town with 15,000 office complexes such as the

towering Oracle Corp. headquarters.

 

The referendum passed by only 44 votes.

 

When Nobles, a nuclear physicist, read about the development plans, he said he

cried out, " They can't do that'' and began gathering friends.

 

" Islands are special,'' Nobles said last week. " They're isolated from urban

predators, and that includes people.''

 

Yet even the public vote on the island's future didn't stop subsequent

development proposals from such companies as Leslie Salt Co., Mobile Development

Corp. and, the final one, the Japanese multinational corporation Kumagai Gumi.

 

In the mid-1990s, Florence LaRiviere traveled to Japan to meet with

environmentalists there working to convince corporate executives to sell Bair

Island for a refuge. Bay Area activists took out a full-page ad in the New York

Times to put pressure on Kumagai Taichiro, president of the company. Weeks

later, the corporation agreed to sell.

 

In 1997, the Peninsula Open Space Trust bought the island using $15 million

raised from private donors and government agencies. The group turned over the

island to the government, and today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages

it as part of the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

 

 

 

--

Bair Island, said to be named after a long-ago hay farmer, is a throwback to

days when fish jumped in the sloughs and scented pickleweed and cordgrass

carpeted the shores.

During high tide on a recent warm day, Fish and Wildlife Service Ranger Sean

Reier headed out Redwood Creek in a motorboat to survey the island. Two wavy

sloughs, or channels, divide the island into three sections.

 

Thousands of visitors each year walk and bicycle on the 3.3-mile Bay Trail along

inner Bair Island, starting at a land bridge that connects at Whipple Avenue.

Middle and outer Bair are almost entirely off limits to people, and rule

violators face a $125 fine.

 

As Reier putted through Corkscrew Slough, the only mammals in view were clusters

of harbor seals lounging along the banks, eyeing the advancing boat.

 

" I've seen 20 harbor seals hauled out at one time,'' said Reier, who was careful

not to get too close to the timid seals. They inhabit only a few isolated spots

in the bay, including Mowry Slough and Greco Island. Humans have scared them

away from other spots, and scientists suspect that this prevents the bay's

population from growing beyond about 700.

 

Buffleheads, ruddy ducks and scaups safely flew over the bay water. Grebes

circled in the water and took off en masse. Two heron stood, watching to see if

the Reier's boat posed a danger.

 

On the outer island, biologists have put up nesting boxes to help out the great

blue heron, black-crowned night heron and snowy egret. Red foxes, nonnative

predators that can swim to the island, had been eating the eggs before wildlife

officials started trapping and removing them. Now, the hope is that the birds'

numbers will rise.

 

 

 

--

Once a month for the past four years, volunteers with Save the Bay visit the

island, pulling nonnative ice plant and planting about 1,700 plants, including

marsh gumplant, alkali heath and salt grass.

The work is part of the restoration overseen by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Already workers have begun to build up parts of the inner island with dredge

spoils from the port of Redwood City. The island had sunk from farming. Without

the extra soil, the island would become a lake at high tide instead of a salt

marsh.

 

On a January day, Suresh Raman, a 36-year-old computer software engineer at

eBay, was one of the volunteers who canoed out to middle Bair to work.

 

" I'm just a big eco-nut. I'm interested in all environmental issues. This is my

chance to practice to what I preach to other people about being eco-friendly and

having a minimum impact on the environment, " Raman said.

 

Other bayside gardeners include high school students, retired executives and

others just wanting to do something for the bay.

 

Ginny Anderson, 71, an Atherton author of " Circling San Francisco Bay: A

Pilgrimage to Wild and Sacred Places,'' was another volunteer on the January

trip. She worked to spare the island from development in the 1990s. Digging up

invasive plants is " a nice opportunity to helping to sustain this wonderful spot

that's really a treasure in the middle of the bay,'' she said.

 

Back at the Pete's Harbor, Nobles, active and ready to take on other development

battles at 87, acknowledged that winning protection for Bair Island " was a very

uphill battle because nobody was on our side. "

 

But as he looked over the island and thought about the upcoming restoration, he

said, " I just feel so full of pride and happiness that it's hard to describe.

Every time, my wife, Carolyn, and I would drive by, we'd say, 'That's our

monument.' "

 

 

 

--

Bair Island at a glance

History: Diked in the late 1800s, the island was used for agriculture until

1946, when it was converted to salt ponds. In 1982, a voter-approved measure

halted development plans

 

Critters: Animals on the island include the harbor seal, California clapper

rail, salt marsh harvest mouse, great blue heron, black-crowned night heron and

snowy egret.

 

Plants: Pickleweed is a native salt marsh plant species that supports a variety

of habitat, including the salt marsh harvest mouse. Native species of cordgrass

is prime habitat for the clapper rail. Also found in the salt marsh are alkali

heath, salt marsh dodder and jaumea. Marsh gumplant is found at higher

elevations

 

Size: 3,000 acres

 

How to help: Call Save the Bay at (510) 452-9261 or the San Francisco Bay

Wildlife Refuge at (510) 792-0222.

 

How to visit: Contact refuge officials at (510) 792-0222 or go to

www.fws.gov/desfbay. An easy and popular 3-mile hike starts at a trailhead off

Whipple Drive. A boat launch is available off Seaport Boulevard. Hunting is

allowed under state regulation during the season, which ended in January.

 

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Save the Bay, California Department of Fish &

Game

 

E-mail Jane Kay at jkay.

 

 

" NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may

have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this

without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor

protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President. "