Tules on Twitchell Island in the Delta. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

With thousands of acres of rich farmland, the Delta has a long agricultural legacy. But farming there can be a risky business. Dozens of farms have been flooded over the past half century as aging levees have collapsed.

That became a reality for farmer Rudy Mussi on the morning of June 3, 2004. It was clear, sunny day. "You never expect a flood in the summer months," says Mussi.

Mussi was growing corn and asparagus on lower Jones Tract, an island in the Delta, 10 miles west of Stockton. That morning, he got a phone call. Water was flooding onto his farmland.

"Your heart stops for a second or two and then realism sets in. And you just start moving your equipment and get it to high ground," says Mussi.

How did a flood happen a on a sunny day? It's because of a basic rule of physics. Mussi farmed on an island below sea level, like a lot of the islands in the Delta. The Delta used to be a huge swath of wetlands, where two major rivers met San Francisco Bay. Today, earthen levees hold that water back – most of the time.

"Once a break occurs, you know, there's no way you're gonna stop that, not with 10 feet of water on the other side," Mussi says. Draining the island and repairing the levees around Jones Tract cost about $90 million.

The levee break on Jones Tract in 2004. (Photo: CA Department of Water Resources)

It wasn't an isolated incident. Over the last century, more than 150 levees have failed in the Delta.

Delta Infrastructure at Risk

"This is how we get ourselves in kind of an arms race between the water and the land," says Jeff Mount, professor with the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis.

Levee-building began in the 1850s, when settlers came to the Delta for the rich soil. More than a thousand miles of levees were built. "This network of levees through time had to get bigger and bigger for a very basic reason: the land has been steadily lowering," says Mount.

As farmers exposed the rich peat soil, it started decomposing. The land level dropped; "In some places they talked about four inches per year," says Mount. Today, it's less than an inch per year thanks to better farming practices.

Add up all those inches over the past century and some islands are now 30 feet below sea level. That puts a lot of stress on the levees. There are also other concerns: rising sea levels and extreme floods. "And then the big 800-pound gorilla in the room – we're due for a very large earthquake on the San Andreas system."

Add up all these risks and Mount says there's a two-thirds chance of a catastrophic levee failure in the next 50 years. That, of course, affects farmers and communities in the Delta, but it could also impact California's water supply.

"The raindrops that fall in Mount Shasta are consumed by people in San Diego. Water moves a great distance and this is one of the critical hubs in that system," says Mount.

Fixing the Delta's levees is estimated to cost billions. But on some islands, scientists are experimenting with a new fix.

Farming Carbon

Peat soil samples on Twitchell Island. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

On a windy day on Twitchell Island in the Delta, ecologist Lisa Windham-Myers of the US Geological Survey pushes her way through a wetland filled with a tall, reed-like plant known as tule.

"The plant grows… some of these are 16 feet tall. They're just huge," she says. That growth is changing the ground we're standing on. Windham-Myers pulls out a sample of the dark peat soil.

The wetland produces soil at a rapid rate – four inches a year on average. That's huge, says USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi, in a place where the land is sinking. "These islands are like bowls and the way we see projects like this is you want to fill up the middle of that bowl and help level out the whole island."

Planting wetlands like this one could raise the land level and water table on the inside of levees, relieving some of the pressure. But why would farmers want to replace cash crops with tule? Windham-Myers points to the soil.

"This is basically almost 100 percent carbon. These take up far more than a typical forest environment," she says. California is setting up a market for carbon, as part of the state's effort to cut global warming emissions. Early next year, companies that need to reduce their emissions could pay farmers to store carbon in wetlands like this.

USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi talks with Delta farmer Al Medvitch. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Today, two farmers are here checking out the project: Steve Mello, a Delta farmer on Tyler Island and Al Medvitch, a farmer in the Montezuma Hills.

"The potential has been demonstrated well. You guys are standing in the middle of it. But in order to move from here to market, we need to develop a lot more techniques so people can come and verify that the carbon is stored," says Brian Bergamaschi, describing how wetland farming might work.

Both farmers seem open to the idea. But Mello says ultimately, it depends on the bottom line. "It would absolutely need to cash flow. While it could dovetail with levee stability, it would still need to generate enough to amortize your property value."

Still, Mello says assuming carbon prices are high enough, growing patches of wetlands could be a feasible way to improve the levees and to stay farming.

The film is about an unusually large population of whale sharks that gathers off the coast of Mexico’s Holbox Island during the summer months to feed and mate. Narrated by marine biologist, Sylvia Earle, the film explores how the recent discovery of this population of whale sharks – the largest fish in the world- is shifting the economic focus of the surrounding area from fishing to eco-tourism. The film highlights the successes as well as the ecological concerns that have arisen from this transition.

Diver and whale shark vertical feeding. Photo by Kip Evans

If I was actually able to switch places with Kip Evans, I’m not sure how he would feel about working at KQED and running the QUEST TV series. I’ll admit, my job is pretty much as cool as it gets for a Bay Area science geek and TV producer like me, but Evans's resume makes the day-to-day aspects of my job look downright mundane.

He’s an internationally known photographer who’s been widely published in books and magazines including National Geographic, Outside, Sea and Patagonia. He’s an underwater cinematographer and documentary producer who’s worked on shows for BBC, CNN, Discovery Channel and National Geographic. He’s also the Director of Photography and Expeditions for the Sylvia Earle Alliance and has served for many years as the great marine biologist’s chief photographer and videographer.

I first became aware of Kip Evans's work in 2008 when I produced a QUEST TV story about Sylvia Earle. We only had about two hours to shoot an interview with Earle and that was all the time she could give us for the whole story. We normally shoot with the main subjects of our stories for two or three days in order to get enough footage to make a 10-minute story. So, because I had only a sit-down interview with Earle, I had to acquire all of the footage and photographs of her throughout her career. We were happy to locate Kip Evans and licensed some spectacular underwater footage and photographs from him.

Dr. Sylvia Earle in the Deep Rover submarine. Photo by Kip Evans

So, when I was thinking about who we could feature in our new segment, “Your Videos on QUEST,” where we feature the work Bay Area filmmakers who tell science, environment and nature stories, I immediately thought of Evans. I feel lucky that he answered the phone when I first called because it seems that he’s often traveling around the world to shoot photographs and video about what he and Sylvia Earle call “Hope Spots”- places that are critically in need of protection and conservation because they are vital to saving what’s left of the planet’s oceans.

When I was in college studying biology and cinema production, my dream was to one day, travel the world as a cinematographer shooting films and TV shows about science and nature. I’m not at all disappointed with where I ended up but I realize that one of the most special things about my job is that I get to meet people like Kip Evans and Sylvia Earle and showcase the important work they are doing to protect the environment. I suppose it’s the next best thing to being them.

A map of the Delta created by the US Geological Survey in the 1910s.

As detective stories go, this sunny, spring day in the Delta isn't a typical backdrop. In the distance, tractors move slowly through dry fields of row crops.

"Once he got lost, they were wandering all over," says Alison Whipple of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a non-profit research group based in Richmond. Her colleague, Robin Grossinger, agrees. "They were all over this place." The two are trying to piece together the path of William Wright, a man who got hopelessly lost somewhere nearby.

I should probably mention: it happened 160 years ago. Whipple and Grossinger are historical ecologists. They use sources like old photos, hand-drawn maps and early land surveys to sleuth out what this landscape looked like before it was dramatically remade by Californians.

The Delta's landscape has been dramatically remade over the last 200 years. Today, it's a crucial part of the state's water system, supplying 25 million people and irrigating millions of acres of farm land. But with this re-engineering, the Delta's ecosystem has collapsed, harming the fishing industry and putting water supplies at risk. Little is known about what it once looked like.

Lost in a Delta Marsh

Standing on a levee about 20 miles south of Sacramento, Whipple and Grossinger are discussing what they found a tattered, yellowing notebook uncovered in a state archive. It contains stories from William Wright, a duck hunter who spent a long, cold night lost in the Delta in 1850.

"On all sides stretched a vast wilderness of tules from ten to fifteen feet in height. The driving storm of sleet was bad, but the pitchy darkness was infinitely worse… Our situation was so miserable that no words can do justice to it."

It's not just the dramatic story they're interested in. It's passages this like one:

"The lakes proved to be from one hundred to three hundred yards in width, as near as we could judge. The water was very cold and often waist‐deep."

When Whipple and Grossinger read his account, they knew they’d found a Holy Grail source document. Its detail reveal a landscape that doesn't exist here today and hasn’t existed for some time.

"The Delta is probably one of the most intensively transformed parts of California and it was also changed really early on because of such fertile land," says Grossinger.

As California's Gold Rush boomed, farmers came to the Delta for its rich soil. Land went for a dollar an acre and settlers turned the wetlands into dry, agricultural land. 97% of the historic marshes were lost.

“We have here maybe one of the most important parts of the state's ecosystem and we don’t actually know how it used to work," Says Grossinger.

Alison Whipple and Robin Grossinger examine historic maps in the Delta.

He and Whipple have layered together thousands of historical sources that reveal an ecosystem of incredible complexity. “We would be in trees right here with a couple winding channels that were dry in the summer but had flowing water in the wintertime," explains Whipple.

Yearly floods from the Sacramento River inundated Delta marshes creating habitat for birds and young salmon. Closer to San Francisco Bay, hundreds of miles of small tidal channels branched out like capillaries in the wetlands. Today, most of those channels have been filled in.

Returning the Delta to this pristine state just isn’t possible, says Whipple, and that’s not the goal of the project. But knowing how the ecosystem once worked could improve the habitat restoration efforts that are happening.

Restoring Habitat

Liberty Island is one place in the Delta that looks as it might have 200 years ago. Not long ago, it was a low-lying expanse of farmland, protected by tall levees.

“The levees broke and it wasn’t financially worth reclaiming,” Says Carl Wilcox of with California’s Department of Fish and Game. The landowners gave up when the island flooded 15 years ago. After that, nature took over. Tules and cattails started sprouting and wildlife followed.

Returning vegetation at Liberty Island in the Delta.

Now, “some of the endangered native fishes, Delta smelt, longfin smelt are using this area,” says Wilcox. They're finding endangered Chinook salmon as well. "These are more productive areas for them, they’re more protected, they’re less prone to predators."

California Considers Ambitious Restoration Plans

California is using the Liberty Island project as a model for a proposal to restore 65,000 acres of Delta habitat. It's part of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan – a major overhaul of the Delta’s water infrastructure.

Leo Winternitz of the Nature Conservancy says bringing back habitat for declining wildlife could make the state’s water supply more reliable. Restrictions under the Endangered Species Act have limited how much water can be pumped from the Delta in recent years.

There is one big problem with restoration: most of the islands in the Delta are below sea level.

"Just south of here, some of the islands, they're in the 17 to 25 below sea level range. So if their levees broke, what you’d have is a large open body of water. You can’t create tidal marshes in those areas," says Winternitz.

That leaves only a few places where restoration is feasible. Winternitz says in those areas it’s crucial the state look to the past to create the same interconnected habitat that once was.

Governor Jerry Brown's administration is set to unveil the sweeping plan to restore the Delta later this year.

There are many admirable conservation organizations around the world, but zoos and aquariums have a unique advantage: they welcome 175 million people through their gates each year. On a nice, affordable day out, these zoo-goers can be exposed to conservation messages at a variety of levels. In fact, zoos were ranked among the top most trusted messengers of wildlife conservation.

Zoos and aquariums are now on the forefront of wildlife protection. They raise and donate funds, send medical, educational and operational supplies to projects, raise awareness through lectures, classes and publications, donate expertise by sending vets and other staff to project sites and sell indigenous wares in their gift shops. They band together with other zoos in their ecosystem to work on local conservation issues, breed and release species, and provide medical attention to local wildlife. They are full service.

The conservation of wildlife is central to the mission of the Oakland Zoo as well, and we fully embrace the projects we are closest to. The Budongo Snare Removal Project in Uganda is a good example.

A chimp from the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda

This project protects endangered chimpanzees by providing a snare patrol and removal team, an educational outreach program and a means for getting protein for ex-poachers: goats!

The Oakland Zoo Conservation Fund has been the sole financial supporter of the project since 2001. The funding is raised through an evening event and silent auction, called For the Love of Primates, in February, giving us a chance to raise awareness about the project, as well as funds. Discovering Primates Day also happens in February, where guests participate in fun, hands-on stations and learn about all primates and what each of us can do to help them.

Kids participate in The Oakland Zoo's "ZooCamp"

In 2011, the Oakland Zoo’s ZooCamp selected the Budongo Snare Removal Project as their beneficiary, thereby designating one dollar of every camper registration as a donation to the project.

During the week, 1000 plus children donned in yellow t-shirts with the Budongo logo, connected to chimps and the project in a variety of ways. They visited our dynamic group of chimpanzees, created enrichment for them and participated in a theatrical, live presentation called Budongo Hour. Their ZooCamp gift was a Kibale Bead bracelet made by an artisan group in Uganda.

Meanwhile, an intrepid group of adults and an enthusiastic group of teens collected cameras, laptops, books, school supplies, medical supplies and notes of appreciation from staff and ZooCampers, and set sail for Uganda to visit the project. After a very warm welcome, each group delivered their goods, walked the forest with the snare patrol team, attended ex-poacher meetings, got schooled in their outreach programs, and experienced first-hand the joys and challenges of maintaining a successful conservation program. I think the highlight for many of us was the day spent working to de-worm the many goats in the program.

The Oakland Zoo team in Uganda

Back at the zoo, a new concept launched: Quarters for Conservation. This program donates $.25 from each zoo admission to one of three featured conservation programs, and in our inaugural year, the Budongo Snare Removal Project was selected. Visitors receive a token at the gate and vote for their favorite project at the conservation voting station. Signage and often a volunteer, enlighten all Oakland Zoo visitors about the plight of these Ugandan primates.

As we have reached a critical time in the history of conserving wildlife, now is the time for all of us to care and take action. It is fortunate that most zoos do just that. We look forward to creating more ways our zoo can fully embrace the Budongo Snare Removal Project and all of our planet’s precious wildlife.

A canal in the Delta, heading to the Central Valley Project.

If you're not familiar with where the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is or why it's so important to the state, you're not alone. Polls show most Californians have never heard of it.

This relatively small part of California plays a crucial role in the state's water supply. And, as might be expected, it's become ground zero for a decades-long water war involving cities, farmers and fish. This year, the state is taking on an ambitious planning effort to break that deadlock.

Re-plumbing California

The reason the Delta has this starring role is thanks to a basic geography problem. Almost all of the state's water is found in the top third of the state. Most of the population lives in the bottom two-thirds of the state.

This issue was painfully obvious to state planners a century ago. The Central Valley promised rich soil for farmers, but had little rainfall. They knew for California to grow, they had to move water to drier parts of the state.

The Delta is where California's two largest rivers come together, carrying runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To water planners, it looked like the perfect place to tap into. California began building water infrastructure at a massive scale.

Water is exported out of the Delta primarily through two large pumping plants near Tracy, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. Each moves millions of gallons of water a minute. From there, the water rushes into concrete canals that reach Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and millions of acres of farmland.

This 700-mile system has made California the state it is today. But it's come with a cost…

An Ecosystem in Decline

On a boat in the western Delta, environmental scientist Julio Adib-Samii and team from California's Department of Fish and Game pull in a long fishing net.

A Delta smelt.

"Well, we have an adult Delta smelt," he says, holding a small, silver endangered fish that smells distinctly like a cucumber.

Fish and Game scientists have done these monthly fish surveys for decades. But starting in 2002, they noticed something strange. Where they once caught a lot of Delta smelt, now, they weren't catching any. The population had crashed, as well as populations of striped bass, threadfin shad, longfin smelt and Chinook salmon. In 2008, the commercial salmon fishery shut down completely for two years.

"Their decline is an indication of a changing environment and place they didn't evolve to be in," says Adib-Samii.

The Delta was once a massive tidal marsh, full of winding channels that spread out like capillaries. After the Gold Rush, settlers put up levees to create low-lying islands for farming. Ninety-seven percent of the historic wetlands were lost.

Multiple Stressors, One Big Question

"We've converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland and we need to return some of that to habitat," says Barry Nelson, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The ecosystem has also been hit by pollution, invasive species – and by the pumping plants.

"The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow. It's very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps," says Nelson. A few years ago, federal wildlife agencies issued decisions requiring the pumping to slow down during certain times of year to protect fish.

This brings us to the central debate in the Delta: how much water should be pumped out and how much should be left for fish?

"There's a limit to the amount of water you can pump from the Delta ecosystem and in the last decade it's become incredibly clear that we've exceeded that, and we've exceeded it by a lot," says Nelson.

Not everyone agrees. "There is, you know, always going to be shortages. But there's also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there," says Jason Peltier with Westlands Water District, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin Valley that depends on Delta water. He says limits on pumping have hurt the district's farmers.

"You can't get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don't have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers," says Peltier.

The battle over the environmental rules went to the courts. "There was lawsuit after lawsuit," says John Laird, California's Secretary for Natural Resources. "It got to the point that it made much more sense to look at the entire Delta as a whole."

A New Attempt at Progress

Laird's agency is trying to reach a compromise with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The 10,000-page plan calls for a new way to pump water out of the Delta, through what's commonly known as the peripheral canal. Huge tunnels would take water from further upstream, bypassing the Delta, which supporters say would make the water supply more reliable.

This isn't a new idea. In 1982, California voters defeated a similar plan. "The real debate is not the tunnel itself. It's how much water and when can it flow through the tunnel," says Laird.

The massive project could harm the Delta's endangered species, but Laird says they'll restore thousands of acres of wetlands to compensate. California voters would be on the hook for that cost, while the $12 billion tunnel would be paid for by water users.

It's a tough sell but, according to Laird, a necessary one since climate change will make the state's water supply more unpredictable. The agency will release a full draft of the plan in July.

Earth in our hands for the future / Credit: Royalty-free image from Corbis

How did you celebrate Earth Day?  This year an estimated 1 billion people participated in Earth Day events world-wide around  April 22.  For the last 42 years, this international day of awareness-raising and festivities has provided a needed focus on the health of local ecosystems and our planet.  While a lot of good has come from the first Earth Day begun by Senator Nelson and his “teach-in” on the mall in Washington D.C. in 1970, much remains to be done.

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is accelerating at an unprecedented rate.  Some scientists at Stanford are taking a new look at geologic time and are proposing we’ve entered into a new geologic era: the Anthropocene.  Most scientists recognize the Holocene, our current era, in the grand scale of geologic time.  The Holocene is also called the Anthropogene, meaning the “Age of Man”. This geologic era spans from the last major Ice Age and includes ancient civilizations as well as our current time. There are fascinating interviews on the Anthropocene Generation website with professors and researchers from multiple disciplines exploring the question of when the era began. They're also trying to determine what’s been affected by our activities; evidently, there remains very little that we haven't impacted in some way.  Aldo Leopold had a saying that you shouldn’t throw away any of the parts if you “tinker” with natural systems. Predictions forecast that a stunning 20% of the world’s species will go extinct in the next 25 years, a serious loss of parts.

With our fingerprints present in every part of the earth — far-flung seas, the highest mountains and from pole to pole — we need to consider our sheer numbers and the impacts of our lifestyles. 

Blue Marble in the Balance by Tanner Embry

There’s hope when there are people concerned about the environment who take action.  President Obama said in 2010, "The true story of the environmental movement is not about the laws that have been passed.  It’s about the citizens who have come together time and time again to demand cleaner air, healthier drinking water and safer food -– and who have demanded that their representatives in government hold polluters accountable."  (Voice of America News)

So help keep the Earth Day spirit going: organize a beach or neighborhood cleanup, plant a tree or native plant garden, choose to live more lightly on the Earth (and here's a quiz that will help you find your environmental footprint). Keep encouraging our kids to get outdoors and help them connect with nature so they will also value our irreplaceable home planet.  Celebrate Earth Day every day, keep it alive and well for everyone’s sake.

Additonal Links:
Photos of Earth Day 2012 from around the Bay Area

A grizzly bear in British Columbia. Its California cousin,
Ursus horribilis californicus, is long extinct.
(Photo: Charlesjsharp)

Earlier this month, California’s beleaguered salmon fishing industry finally got a break. After the catastrophic collapse of Central Valley’s fall Chinook run in 2008-2009, hundreds of thousands of fish may be on their way back to Sacramento riverbeds.

With a forecast of 820,000 Chinook now at sea, commercial salmon boats, rendered irrelevant for two straight seasons and set loose for just eight days in 2010, can return to business as usual this summer. And though the apparent rebound is good news for salmon, the fall Chinook’s future is far from secure.

The disheartening run of 2008 followed a lean spawning year (which biologists call “escapement,” after the number of fish that elude fishermen to reproduce), with just under 88,000 survivors returning to streams or hatcheries in 2007.

California has four seasonal salmon runs, each with distinct behavioral and genetic traits. Conservation biologists like to compare genetic diversity to a diversified stock portfolio. More diversity means a better chance of weathering tough times. (See, for example, "Irish potato famine.") And while the National Marine Fisheries Service cited poor ocean conditions as the “proximate cause” for the dismal runs (because freshwater habitat, though degraded, was no worse than usual), the agency also noted several other factors, including heavy reliance on hatchery fish, which homogenized the fall Chinook’s historically diverse genetic portfolio.

Fall Chinook once thrived in every major river in the Central Valley. Biologists suspect the runs rivaled the storied San Joaquin spring runs. Documents from 1870 unearthed by historian Paul Vandor described salmon returning in “such shoals” that “restful sleep was disturbed because myriads of them can be heard nightly splashing over the sand bars in the river opposite town.”

Chinook Salmon on the Lower Stanislaus River. (Photo: USFWS)

Spring run Chinook are long gone from the San Joaquin watershed. Just 3,802 fish made the Sacramento run in 2009.

Pacific fisheries managers monitor Chinook take to allow 122,000-180,000 fish to escape capture and swim upriver. In 2008, just 66,000 fish made it back. Fewer than 40,000 returned in 2009 (close to 54,000 counting hatchery fish), the worst run on record.

(The runs in 2010 barely made it above the minimum target, with close to 40,000 returning to hatcheries and about 86,000 returning to wild streams.)

This season’s good news notwithstanding, the grim returns of the past few years didn’t affect just fishermen and salmon consumers. Biologists have long known that ecosystems suffer when managers value economics over ecosystems and allow overfishing.

But cutting back on harvests to let more salmon spawn in rivers and creeks will not only help safeguard their ecological role, argues a study published last week in PLoS Biology, but will help commercial fishers and consumers by ensuring a future for salmon.

When salmon thrive, so does everything else, says Taal Levi, a PhD candidate in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, who led the study. “Abundance matters in ecosystems.”

The study supports a growing literature linking abundant salmon to positive ecological effects, Levi says. “It suggests we should be letting more salmon into rivers.”

Letting more salmon return to coastal streams
to spawn will benefit bears, ecosystems,
and eventually the offshore salmon catch.
(Photo: Jennifer Allen)

Salmon are the ultimate mobile nutrient-delivery system. They spread the wealth wherever they go, from streams to sea and back again. Healthy salmon runs boost primary productivity in coastal lakes (by providing nutrients for algae), fuel vegetative growth along streams, creating better habitat for salmon hatchlings and leading to higher densities of diverse insects and songbirds. They also feed all manner of predators and scavengers, from orcas to raptors and—in the places they still exist—grizzly bears.

Hundreds of thousands of salmon once injected massive seasonal pulses of nutrients from the sea to Pacific coastal and riparian ecosystems. Commercial harvests deprive ecosystems of this historic recharge. But restricting harvests cuts into fishery profits. Levi and his colleagues developed a model to help fishery managers weigh the costs and benefits to commercial fishers and ecosystems of allowing more spawning, using grizzly bears as a proxy for salmon’s ecosystem benefits.

Studies show that spawning and dead salmon are the single most important fall resource to grizzlies preparing for hibernation and cub-rearing on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. In this study, the authors show that grizzlies are good indicators of salmon’s ecosystem services because bear densities are so closely tied to salmon abundance.

The authors used fishing records to model increased escapement across various management options for six sockeye salmon stocks in Alaska and British Columbia to determine how bear numbers and income from fishing change with the number of fish harvested. For each stock, more spawning meant more bears. And for sockeye stocks that breed in streams alongside other salmon species, both long-term fishing yields and bears benefited from higher escapement.

Conservation and economic interests conflicted only where grizzlies are threatened and eat primarily sockeye, because reducing harvests would cut into profits. But the tradeoffs would be clear, and managers could estimate the costs of protecting salmon runs and endangered bears. It’s conceivable that managers could even find ways to help fisheries recoup their losses in the name of conservation.

The fishing industry in California doesn’t dominate the state economy as it does in Alaska. But Levi argues that having more salmon in streams would also have economic benefits from better wildlife viewing opportunities.

Increased salmon abundance would surely help California’s bald eagles. “We don’t have abundant bald eagle populations anymore but we have a nesting pair at Pinto Lake in Watsonville,” Levi says. (There’s another pair in San Mateo now.) More salmon would be a boon to the state’s recovering eagle population.

More salmon would also increase black bear populations, he says, which is good for both hunters and wildlife observers.

Black bears often move in when grizzlies go extinct, serving a similar ecological role. In fact, biologists say, black bears eat more salmon than grizzlies because they’re more widely distributed.

But there’s no reason that restoring California’s salmon runs couldn’t go hand in hand with restoring the state’s grizzly population, Levi says: California and Oregon have millions of acres of contiguous protected land, more than enough to support grizzlies.

In the 1970s, grizzlies survived on only 4 million acres in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, he points out. Protected areas in six national forests from Klamath to Mendocino provide nearly 9 million acres of contiguous habitat, not counting available habitat along the coast range from Humboldt down to Point Reyes.

Grizzly bear (Photo: Eric Sambol/www.raincoast.org)

Grizzlies once inhabited nearly every part of the state. In the 1800s, there were so many in the Santa Cruz Mountains where Levi lives that a Spanish missionary said they prowled about “in herds like hogs on a farm.”

Even as late as the 1850s, grizzlies roamed San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties. By the 1870s, they were gone because, as legendary naturalist Joseph Grinnell wrote, “Great numbers of people…have been alert to seize any and every opportunity to kill bears.”

Levi admits the prospect for reintroducing grizzlies could be “politically insurmountable,” but adds wistfully, “this would be ambitious wildlife conservation.”

“It is not at all crazy to think that grizzlies could have a viable population in California," he says. "The question is just whether we want them back.”

Kyla, a female mountain lion rescued as a kitten after
poachers killed her mother, now lives at Sonoma County
Wildlife Rescue in Petaluma. (Photo: Liza Gross)

Should the head of an agency charged with regulating California’s natural resources stay on after flaunting his delight in killing one of the state’s most iconic species? That’s the question on many minds since a photo surfaced showing California Fish and Game Commission President Dan Richards grinning ear to ear, clutching a massive, lifeless mountain lion against his chest.

It’s not that the hunt itself was illegal. Hunting mountain lions, or cougars as they’re commonly known, is legal in Idaho, where Richards bagged his trophy, as it is in every other state where they're found—except California.

Richards killed the lion, a 115-pound, three-year-old male, after an eight-hour hound hunt left the weary animal stranded, an easy target, in the tall reaches of a Douglas fir.

The hunt happened on the Flying B Ranch, which charges $6,800 for the privilege. But Richards didn’t pay $6,800. A manager on the ranch told the Associated Press that the commissioner paid $3,200 to hunt birds. California law bars officials from accepting gifts exceeding $420 in one year, and now Richards faces an ethics complaint, filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission.

Putting aside the question of how shooting a trapped animal constitutes “sport,” lions are “a specially protected mammal” in California. It’s illegal to “take, injure, possess, transport, import, or sell any mountain lion,” unless you can prove possession on June 6, 1990, the day after voters prohibited lion hunting. That means Richards couldn’t legally bring the carcass back into the state. A moot point, anyway, since he says he ate it.

The history of lions in California follows the sorry story of large carnivores across the country. Early (non-indigenous) residents considered predators unacceptable threats to livestock and game and, in 1907, the state hired bounty hunters to exterminate them. There’s no doubt extermination was the goal: Females commanded a higher price. By the time the bounty ended in 1963, more than 25,000 lions were dead.

As public attitudes softened, the state reclassified the lion, first as a non-protected mammal in 1963, and then again as a game animal in 1969. But it wasn’t until the early ’70s, when Napa Democrat John Dunlap, backed by 52 conservation groups and thousands of concerned voters, managed to pass a four-year moratorium on trophy hunting, with the goal of conservation, not killing, in mind.

Dunlap’s moratorium was extended until 1986, when then-Gov. Deukmejian vetoed reauthorization, placing lions legally in hunters’ sights once again. But public outcry, followed by legal action, upheld the moratorium, which became permanent in 1990, when voters approved Prop. 117, the California Wildlife Protection Act. (It’s still legal to kill lions considered a threat to life or livestock.)

The last major push to repeal the ban was rejected in 1996.

Mountain lions are notoriously shy and prefer to avoid humans if possible. (Photo: US FWS)

Still, campaigns to reinstate hunting continue, most recently led by farmers and ranchers in San Benito County asserting (without basis) that a growing lion population places residents and livestock in jeopardy. Wildlife biologists, meanwhile, worry that humans pose the bigger threat, by developing prime lion habitat.

It’s against this backdrop that Richards, a San Bernardino County commercial real estate developer and National Rifle Association life member, traveled to Idaho, killed the young lion, sent his celebratory photo to a hunting web site, and then fired off a defiant letter to California Assemblyman Ben Hueso, one of 40 legislators asking him to resign, essentially telling him to bug off.

Richards then took his case to talk radio, calling his critics “well-funded enviro terrorists” and “lawsuit machines,” singling out the Humane Society as the “primary culprit in this deal.” He charged the society, and environmental groups, with trying “to infiltrate the department” to stifle debate. “Not only do I challenge them on a daily basis,” Richards asserted, “but it’s more insidious than that, because if they can get a toehold in there…they have the long-term handle. We’ve just done some of that with this MLPA process.”

Richards was referring to the Marine Life Protection Act, a landmark science-based initiative to conserve ocean life and habitat that some sport fishers view as a threat to jobs and fishing rights. The radio show host said the Legislature would be “pretty sick” to pursue Richards’ ouster.

Aiming to prevent that, the NRA and Keep America Fishing urged their members to support their ally in Riverside when the Fish and Game Commission met on March 7. In a press release, Keep America Fishing thanked the commissioner for “being a voice of reason throughout the Marine Life Protection initiative.”

By "reason," they meant Richards’ votes against implementing the MLPA.

Richards also voted against renewed efforts to protect California condors from lead ammunition, despite solid evidence that it’s poisoning the critically endangered birds. In 2011 alone, Richards voted against moves to protect several native species, including the black-backed woodpecker, Cedars buckwheat, American pika, and steelhead salmon.

OR-11, a male pup (born spring 2011) from the Walla Walla pack in Oregon, waking up from anesthesia after being radio-collared on Oct. 25, 2011. (Photo: ODFW )

I won’t guess how he’ll vote on a petition before the commission to list the gray wolf under the California Endangered Species Act, sparked by the appearance of OR-7, the dispersing male from Oregon. Gray wolves receive protection under the federal ESA, except in Idaho (and Montana) after a surprise move by Congress last year. When Idaho’s Fish and Game Commission met in March, its wolf management plan considered five ways to kill them.

And, yes, Flying B Ranch offers wolf hunts, which you can learn about on the Idaho commission’s web site.

Given Richards’ background, his actions shouldn’t be surprising. Officials, says the commission’s web site, have “expertise in various wildlife-related fields,” though it’s unclear how real estate qualifies as a wildlife-related field. But then only one of the five commissioners, all political appointees, has a background in biology. All the rest have careers in business, labor and farming.

Research over the past decade suggests that predators help maintain plant communities by regulating herbivores. Reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone in the mid-1990s, led to a rebound of cottonwoods, willows and other riparian species by keeping elk numbers down, and provided more habitat for songbirds.

Mountain lions, it seems, offer a similar service. A 2008 study showed that after lions disappeared from Yosemite in the 1920s, mule deer populations expanded only to decimate black oak stands by eating up all the tasty shoots before they could take hold, paving the way for other species like pines and firs to fill the void.

Biologists are also finding evidence that hunting can drive evolutionary changes in target species, selecting for smaller body size and earlier sexual maturity. But it’s unlikely the current commission would care about these studies.

It’s no wonder that hunters and sport fishers want the commission to protect their interests. Their license fees pay the bulk of state wildlife agency budgets. If the commission is serious about deflecting charges that it favors the interests of hunters and fishers and is concerned only with consuming wildlife resources, why not appoint biologists, rather than businessmen, as wildlife officials?

Prop. 117 allocated $30 million a year to protect, restore and acquire habitat for lions and other native species. If Californians really want to protect our wild heritage, we’ll have to do better than that.

A wolf from OR7's pack in Oregon. (Image: Oregon Department of Fish and Game)

OR7, the lone gray wolf from a pack in Oregon, crossed back into his home state yesterday after two months of wandering in Northern California. OR7’s trek made him the first wolf in California in almost 90 years. Officials say it’s possible the wolf will continue to use both states.

With OR7’s arrival, California has been thrown into a national debate about how to manage wolves. Environmentalists want to see a wolf population restored in the state. For others, OR7 is not a welcome visitor. In Lassen County, where OR7 has spent the bulk of his time, wolf opposition is heating up.

"If it's killing my cattle, I'm gonna kill it."

At a recent county board of supervisors meeting in Susanville, a town in the state’s rural northeast corner, Fish and Game biologist Karen Kovacs takes the podium. “What we’re here today to do is just to share what we know about wolves in California,” she says to the crowd.

Kovacs’ agency gets daily downloads about the two-year-old male wolf’s location through its radio collar. “Are there other wolves in California? That’s a $64 million dollar question,” she says.

If there's one thing Kovacs has learned since OR7 arrived, it’s that wolves make people emotional. For several weeks, Kovacs and other wildlife officials have attended a number of public meetings about California’s wolf. In the state’s northern counties, the reaction has been vocal.

“The protection afforded something that doesn’t belong here in the first place doesn’t make any sense,” says Susanville resident Len Grizwold. “Be cautious, folks. They’re here to tell you there’s nothing to worry about,” says another resident. The reception from county supervisor and rancher Bob Pyle isn’t any warmer.

“I really don’t care what it is. If it’s killing my cattle, I’m gonna kill it," he says.

“Any wolf in California is considered endangered,” responds Susan Moore of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “And if you should take it, kill it, it is a $100,000 fine or a year in jail, or both.”

That sentiment has followed wolves from the moment they were reintroduced in the West almost 20 years ago. In states like Idaho and Montana, where wolf populations have rebounded, there’s been an all-out war. Ranchers and hunters say wolves kill too many livestock and elk. Environmentalists see the wolf as a key part of a healthy ecosystem.

With OR7’s arrival, that debate has come to California.

On the Wolf’s Trail

In a quiet pine forest outside of Susanville, Kovacs and Fish and Game biologist Richard Callas walk through a light layer of snow. OR7 crossed a major highway nearby a few weeks ago, not far from where California’s last wolf was trapped and killed in 1924.

Click to see a larger map of where OR7 has traveled.

“The way we find his tracks is because they’re pretty darn big,” says Kovacs.

OR7’s exact location is secret to protect the wolf, but once he leaves an area, Kovacs and Callas go in to see what he’s been eating. “We know that OR7 has fed on two deer. We don’t know if he killed them or scavenged them,” Callas says.

Life isn’t easy for a wolf on his own. But there’s a reason OR7 has traveled 2,000 miles since he left his pack in Oregon last September. “His love life hasn’t been much to brag about lately,” Callas says. “But he’s certainly looking for a mate.”

In other states, it’s taken about 10 years for a pack to be established after the first wolf showed up. But biologists aren’t sure how successful wolves will be here. “Our elk population is smaller than some state like Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. Our deer numbers were lower than they were,” he says.

Since Oregon’s wolf packs live hundreds of miles from the border, it could be some time before another wolf wanders this way. But for the Department of Fish and Game, that may not matter. Groups on both sides are calling for some kind of plan to manage wolves.

“There are entities out there who are ready to litigate at the drop of a hat,” says Kovacs. “Can we get those stakeholders here in California to the table to collectively meet to move forward?”

Local Ranchers Concerned

OR7 wandered close to Willow Creek Ranch outside of Susanville.

On a cold morning at Willow Creek Ranch outside of Susanville, Jack Hanson is getting ready to feed 300 hungry cattle. A few weeks ago, OR7 wasn’t far from here. “About 17 or 18 miles as the crow flies,” says Hanson.

Hanson says it’s not OR7 that’s he’s worried about. It’s that wolf populations could grow. In other states, some ranchers are trying out tools to deter wolves, like special fencing and loud noises. Some even get text messages when wolves are close.

Most ranchers see wolves as one more thing to deal with in an already tough industry, says Hanson. Still, he wants to be part of the discussion. “We’ll be able to have a dialogue with agencies. I don’t think it will ever come to exactly where we want it, which is not to have them back in the first place.”

State and Federal Protections

Wolves are currently protected in California under the federal Endangered Species Act, but several environmental groups are petitioning the state to protect them under California law as well. That would require the Department of Fish and Game to figure out how many wolves belong in California and how they’ll recover.

The federal government is also considering whether to specially protect California wolves. Populations in Idaho, Montana and parts of Oregon and Washington have already been taken off the endangered species list but this week, the agency recommended removing protection for wolves in some of the remaining parts of the lower 48 states.

California wolves may still be protected, however. Fish and Wildlife is considering whether to specially protect wolves in parts of Oregon, Washington and California. If so, the agency would consider writing a recovery plan for what would be known as the Pacific Northwest population. That decision is due by September 30th.

“We don’t see California as being essential to the recovery of wolves. It’s not prime wolf habitat,” says Dan Ashe, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “But certainly, wolves will move hopefully in the future and will find some hospitable territory in California. Some may establish themselves there, but hopefully they’ll be well-managed under state law.”

Weathering the Debate

The question is: can California avoid the battles that other states have seen?

“No, I don’t think so,” says Ed Bangs, the recently retired Wolf Recovery Coordinator at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He’s been in the middle of the Western wolf debate for two decades.

“You have to remember wolves and wolf management has nothing to do with reality. I mean we can give you facts, you know all this biology stuff. That isn’t what people talk about. They’re talking about what wolves mean to them symbolically.”

But he thinks that debate isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Imagine if it was the way it was before when no one cared at all about natural resources or wildlife. Apathy is a lot worse.”

Just 30 years ago, there were only a handful of gray wolves in the West. Today, there are more than 1,600.

Dusky-capped flycatcher (credit: mdf)

Most people know the Philadelphia suburbs for cheesesteaks and unruly sports fans. But it’s no wonder that John James Audubon started his lifelong affair with birds just 25 miles northwest of Center City, and a 20-minute drive from my natal stomping grounds. The dense, rolling woodlands of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County where I grew up offered prime habitat for cardinals, chickadees, blue jays, wrens, and countless other species my mom loved to point out to us kids. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mom’s avian affinities taught me not just to pay attention to the biology in my backyard but, ultimately, to consider which species lived there and why.

This weekend, novice Bay Area wildlife watchers get the chance to play field biologist in their own backyards and join forces with expert birders and scientists to gather data on the incidence, abundance, and distribution of birds. Between February 17 and 20, the 15th annual Great Backyard Bird Count invites people of all ages and experience to spend as little as 15 minutes (or as long as you like) counting birds wherever you are.

The event is a joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Audubon, and Bird Studies Canada, leading bird conservation organizations that provide a wealth of resources for participants, including tips for getting started,
regional checklists, and tools for resolving tricky identifications.

“The Great Backyard Bird Count is an excellent introductory citizen science project for any level of birder,” says Brian Sullivan, an expert on North American birds and project leader of Cornell’s online resource for birders around the world, eBird.

“You can just count the birds you see in your backyard or go to your local park and count what you see there. The idea is to get a weekend snapshot of late-winter bird distribution across the United States and to make things really simple so just about anyone can participate.”

Sullivan, who has 1,669 species on his life list, says lucky birders could see “mega-rarities” like an Iceland gull, “a very rare bird in California” spotted near Sausalito in early February, or maybe the dusky-capped flycatcher that's been living in Golden Gate Park all winter.

The largest estuary on the West Coast, the San Francisco Bay Delta provides habitat and refuge to more than 250 species of waterbirds, some (including pelicans, loons, herons, and egrets) year-round residents, others, like the Wilson’s phalarope and Sabine’s gull, on stopovers to feed and rest before resuming their long-distance migrations. As many as 800,000 birds inhabit Bay Area waterways at any given time.

To find out which birds you’re likely to see in your area, go to Cornell’s eBird, click on “View and Explore Data,” then click on “Bar Charts,” select “United States,” “California,” and then “Counties in California.” Choose your county, click “continue,” and you’ll see the occurrence of birds throughout the year.

Last year, participants entered more than 92,000 checklists with 1.4 million birds from 596 species. Their data helped researchers identify changes in abundance (including an increase in evening grosbeaks, which declined 50% between 1988 and 2006) and distribution (winter finches moving south), and spot anomalies (an Asian brown shrike in McKinley, California).

The bird counts give weekend nature lovers an easy way to help scientists gather data on a widely distributed group of animals that serve as valuable indicators of biodiversity. Because birds occupy many different “trophic” levels in food webs, eating everything from insects to fish to mammals (and, for top predators like owls, hawks, and eagles, other birds), they play critical roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems. Among their many “ecosystem services,” all of which benefit humans, birds help regulate prey populations, facilitate plant reproduction through pollination and seed dispersal, and recycle nutrients by scavenging carcasses.

This widespread influence on their environment also makes them extremely sensitive to ecosystem disruptions, including habitat destruction and climate change. An alarming 13% of the world’s birds, 1,253 species, face extinction, according to the 2011 IUCN Red List. The Great Indian bustard, a native of India and Pakistan that barks when alarmed, has been reclassified as critically endangered, a victim of hunting and widespread habitat destruction. Scientists think fewer than 250 mature birds remain.

Closer to home, black-crowned night herons and snowy egrets have been on a downward slide since 2005. And the endangered California clapper rail, once abundant in the tidal marshes of San Francisco Bay, offers a case study in the unintended consequences of development. Extensive filling and diking of the bay has destroyed some 85% of the clapper rail’s salt marsh habitat, making a shy species that seems to prefer scampering over swimming and flying easy pickings for feral cats and invasive red foxes, which now have unfettered access to adults and their ground-nesting offspring.

California clapper rail (Don Roberson)

Roughly 60% of the critically endangered clapper rail population, estimated at between 1,000 and 1,500, lives in San Francisco Bay’s Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, in Fremont.

Researchers will use the information collected from the bird count to learn how birds like the clapper rail are coping with these new predation pressures, as well as other stresses from ongoing urbanization, global climate change, and disease.

The decline of suitable habitat for these species affects us as well. Tidal marshes filter contaminants to enhance water quality and serve as natural flood barriers. If the marshes can no longer support species like the clapper rail, chances are they can’t provide these ecosystem services for us either.

Birds are among the most diverse and ubiquitous vertebrates on the planet and often offer humans a first brush with wildlife.

As a little girl, I marveled that my mom always knew when Jenny Wren and her husband, Joe (as she liked to call the resident house wrens), would appear in our backyard, build their nest, and settle into the business of raising, feeding, and protecting their broods.

She couldn’t have known that scientists would one day blame the precipitous declines in Bewick’s wrens in the eastern United States on the expansion of her beloved house wrens, known for ejecting eggs, and even young, from coveted nest sites.

Blue jay (Liza Gross)

As I listened to Mom’s fanciful tales of avian domestic dramas, my young imagination conjured all manner of worrisome scenarios. Would Joe find enough food for the babies? Could Jenny protect them from a torrential summer downpour? How would either of them cope with a curious cat? Some may shudder at such anthropomorphizing, but I wonder: If more people viewed birds the way my mom did, struggling to survive like the rest of us, would they worry about their welfare, too?

Henry David Thoreau first said “In wildness is the preservation of the world” in a lecture some months after Audubon’s death. I like to think, had they discussed the question, Audubon would have objected: “My dear sir, I believe you meant to say, ‘In birds is the preservation of the world.’ ”