The Marsh in My Old Back Yard |
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Dawn on the Carpinteria Marsh was a salty calm. Long shadows slowly retreated beneath a thin layer of dewy mist across a palette of purple, red, green, and yellow pickleweed. As the morning sun warmed the wetland on a full tide, gadwalls, ruddy ducks, widgeons, and blue- and green-winged teal emerged from the dense pickleweed. White-crowned sparrows filled their beaks with seeds rummaged from saltbushes, and a lone osprey made several swooping passes overhead. I walked out to the most recent addition to the reserve, the bridge connecting the City of Carpinteria's Salt Marsh Nature Park to the adjacent South Marsh. Where Franklin Creek empties into a channel swollen with the incoming tide, it was crowded with Northern pintails, buffleheads, and pied grebes. Several stoic great blue herons and snowy egrets stood frozen along the steep banks, as a variety of fish breached just out of reach of their sword-like beaks. Later in the day, after the tide receded, the slick mudflats, dotted with cone-shaped California horn snail shells, glistened a milk-chocolate brown in the baking sun as whimbrels, long-billed curlews, and marbled godwits tiptoed in the murky shallows. All of this wildlife diversity was thriving in one of California's last remaining coastal estuaries. Living and Watching A love for nature evolved during those early years, but I had no idea how a marsh works. That didn't come until much later--1998, to be exact. That's when the 15 acres along Ash Avenue, east of the University of California reserve and a stone's throw west of our house, received a massive facelift. What had become a wasteland of tangled weeds, dirt, and trash was restored to something like its true self, a functioning salt marsh. When the restoration project began, the only obvious signs of wetland life were occasional herons and egrets foraging for rodents and snakes. During the next three years, huge amounts of fill were excavated and hauled away, sinuous tidal channels were built, invasive alien plants were removed, and natives were planted. During most of my years on the marsh I hadn't been aware of what had been happening to it. From the perspective of my doorstep it looked vast. But it had been shrunk to about half the size it was 200 years ago, much of it filled in to construct tract homes and businesses, which happened along most of the California coast. Only ten percent of the historic southern California wetlands remain. In the 1970s, the last remaining portions of the marsh to the west of our house were targeted for a marina, and a condominium complex was planned for the scruffy 15-acre area along Ash Avenue. "That's where it was headed," said Michael Feeney, executive director for the nonprofit Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. "It would've been all over." Instead, local people and several agencies and organizations joined forces to save this remnant slice of wetland habitat, and then continued to collaborate to reclaim more of the historic Carpinteria Marsh. The main partners in these efforts were the City of Carpinteria, the California Coastal Conservancy, the Land Trust, and the University of California's Natural Reserve System, but many others joined in. There had been a shift in perception in the early 1970s about the value of wetlands, leading to legislation, including the California Coastal Act, to protect them. | |||
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