Birds and Vegetation Return to Bulldozed Marshland

The vegetation has grown back, though not quite entirely. The birds are more plentiful than ever. But the water has been gone for a couple of years now.

So says Daryl Smith, who was depicted as one of the heavies in February, 1987, when the Environmental Protection Agency alleged that the city of Huntington Beach and Smith, the city parks director, violated federal law by bulldozing three acres of marshlands used as a nesting habitat for songbirds.

The EPA ordered the city to replant a thicket of cattails, willows, mulefat and other wild grasses destroyed by the city’s mosquito-abatement project at the Jack Green Nature Observation and Playground Area in Huntington Beach Central Park in December, 1986.

Local bird watchers and wildlife biologists were outraged that, in their opinion, the city had destroyed a noted bird-watching oasis. About 40 species of birds regularly bred in the area, and about 200 species, including the American lesser gold-finches, bushtits and northern orioles had been sighted there.

After 2 years the controversy appears to have subsided, though the city took none of the corrective action ordered by the EPA when it alleged that the Clear Water Act had been violated.

“We sent a spirited defense for our employees, but we never heard back,” said Huntington Beach City Atty. Gail Hutton. “I presume they just let it die because they didn’t have the jurisdiction, and perhaps health and safety overrides environmentally sensitive concerns.”

(EPA officials familiar with the 2-year-old dispute could not be reached for comment.)

“The population of birds out there has been increasing,” Smith said Friday.

But Loren Hays, a member of the local Audubon Society chapter and a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, expressed some skepticism. Hays said he was the one who reported the bulldozing to the EPA.

“If they claim that (more birds than before the bulldozing), they must have done a scientific study. That’s the only basis I can see for such a statement,” Hays said.

His impression, he said, is that the area now has fewer birds.

“It is still valuable as habitat for birds, particularly during migration, but there isn’t nearly as much habitat as there was. And fewer habitat means fewer birds. That’s all there is to it.”

Smith said the flocks of ducks don’t come around anymore, only because “there isn’t any water. But that’s not our doing, it’s old mother nature.”

There had been only a 50-foot pond, perhaps a foot deep, in the man-made basin for run-off water from local storm drains, but drought conditions dried it, Smith said. Nevertheless, ground water and occasional rains have provided enough moisture for the natural vegetation to return.

“Everything has grown back, but we are keeping (it) under control,” he said.

What is missing today are the rats and mosquitoes that prompted the city’s action in the first place, Smith said.

Orange County Vector Control District Manager Gilbert Challet recalls “getting a lot of mosquitoes breeding . . . around the stuff coming up from the bottom of the pond. We had to resort then to . . . putting out an aerosol spray to kill the mosquitoes flying around.”

The aerosol approach was unsuccessful, forcing residents living near the project to cope with rodents and hordes of mosquitoes.

“Those people were getting inundated by mosquitoes,” Challet said.

The preferred method of eradicating the mosquitoes is to treat the water that harbors their eggs and larvae, he said. But hindered by the thick growth of vegetation, vector control agents could not get into the areas where mosquitoes bred.

At the request of the Vector Control District, the city moved in with small tractors to scrape away much of the wild grasses from the swampy sediment.

“It helped us immeasurably,” Challet said. “The following 2 years there have been no mosquito problems at all. It saved us spraying pesticides, time, manpower and equipment and having to go down and monitor the mosquitoes.”

“I wish all our projects turned out that well,” Challet said.

Hutton conceded that protecting plant life is “is important, but we are most concerned about the health and safety of the people.”