Continuing Battle Over Sage Scrub Brings Botanist at UCI to the Fore

When Fred M. Roberts Jr. hits his car brakes, it isn’t necessarily because of traffic. It may be for something as simple as a snake or lizard on the highway, reason enough to make him leap from his car, ruler in hand, to catch the critter and take its measurements.

Roberts, 34, has been recording wildlife in Orange County since he was a child, encouraged by a mother who was an avid bird watcher and a father who was a pioneer in underwater photography. As a student at Dana Hills High School, Roberts identified and plotted the plants along a footpath between the school and his family’s house.

And now, years of curiosity and record-keeping have earned him distinction as a pre-eminent authority on Orange County plant life.

Most recently, conservationists turned to Roberts in their quest to protect some of the area’s fast-disappearing coastal sage scrub and the animals and birds that it shelters from the bulldozers of development.

It has been Roberts’ work, in fact, that has supported arguments for placing two of that plant community’s birds--notably the California gnatcatcher and cactus wren--on the federal endangered species list.

In the past 2 1/2 years alone, Roberts has determined that about 3,000 acres of coastal sage scrub, including up to 20% of the gnatcatcher’s habitat in the county, have been lost.

“Fred Roberts has few peers in his knowledge of the status and distribution of plant species and habitats in Orange County,” said Loren Hays, a biologist in Orange County for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In his view, Hays said, Roberts’ field work has been “right on the mark. He doesn’t engage in hyperbole. He is concerned with the facts.” But not everyone is such a fan of Roberts and his work.

“I think Fred Roberts is very well-respected. He is a gentleman, a professional and he is very sincere. But we sincerely disagree on some issues, such as the peril to the gnatcatcher by imminent development,” said Hugh Hewitt, an Irvine attorney representing the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California on the gnatcatcher-preservation issue.

Within the academic community, however, Roberts has a strong following. C. Eugene Jones, chairman of the biological science department at Cal State Fullerton, said Roberts “has done more in a relatively short time than anyone I know to catalogue and identify the flora of Orange County. He has established himself as the expert.”

In 1989, Roberts published a checklist of 1,157 species of Orange County plants, based in large part on field work he did as a student at Saddleback College and the University of California at Santa Barbara. He now is working on a book that will describe where the plants can be found now and where they flourished in the past.

The manual, which Roberts is illustrating with his own sketches, is expected to be valuable to scholars as well as conservationists who want to save and restore wildlife areas threatened by urbanization.

For eight years Roberts has worked as a botanist at UCI’s Museum of Systematic Biology, where he personally picked and identified about half of the museum’s 5,000 mounted specimens of Orange County plants--representing the largest Orange County plant collection anywhere.

Because of university budget pressures, however, the museum will soon close and Roberts, the facility’s assistant curator, is evaluating other employment opportunities, most of which he says would lead him out of Orange County.

“His loss will be greatly felt by the biological community,” said Richard MacMillen, a professor of biological sciences at UCI and former chairman of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology.

He said Roberts’ advice is in demand by consultants and conservationists because “Fred says things the way he sees them. And he views these things from a sound biological perspective.”

For most of his life Roberts has focused his attention on documenting a wide variety of wildlife in Orange County, a diversity that he contends has diminished substantially since he was a boy.

“A lot of my natural history training occurred outside the classroom,” said Roberts, recalling how as a youth he would roam the once grassy hillsides of Dana Point and Cleveland National Forest.

At the time, he said, many people didn’t see the value in his lists, which he did mainly for fun. “I was incredibly enthusiastic at doing these things. But I heard it said that I was always doing things that didn’t seem to have any bearing on reality.”

Roberts was originally interested in reptiles and amphibians, but said he later became fascinated by the challenge of trying to identify the foliage in which they crawled and made their home.

“What drove me was trying to find out what something was. I wanted to be able to go out in a field in Orange County and not to have to carry a book with me. I wanted to know all the plants on sight.”

Now Roberts’ notebooks form a picture of what the county’s wildlife was like 20 years ago.

“Up (Ortega Highway) there aren’t nearly as many animals as there used to be,” he said. In the 1970s, he said, a snake called the red racer was common, but today they are “virtually gone in the county. I don’t know anyone who has seen one for a couple years.”

In addition, Roberts said a rare oak shrub native to South County is becoming increasingly scarce, and southwestern pond turtles, once found in every major creek system in the southern part of the county, are also disappearing.

As an active member of the Orange County chapter of the California Native Plant Society, Roberts’ research is often used by groups trying to place local plants on endangered species lists. He was successful in getting one, the big-leaved crown beard, a wildflower resembling a daisy and found only in Laguna Beach and northwestern Baja California, as a state-listed “threatened” plant.

Although he shies from public debate and abhors the thought of being dubbed a “radical,” Roberts started speaking out about two years ago when he saw his cherished coastal sage scrub being torn away by grading and “weed abatement” projects.

Aerial photographs that he took a year ago were used by Orange County inspectors to help document the extent of illegal grading in Aliso Viejo being done by the Mission Viejo Co. The developer subsequently was required to restore adjacent parkland that had been buried by dirt.

Roberts concedes that not everyone considers coastal sage scrub--consisting of plants that are a scruffy brown much of the year--worth preserving. But as more plants and animals disappear, Roberts predicted that awareness of the loss will grow.

“Eventually people will come around. But will it be too late?” he asked.

“Today if I were a kid I don’t know how I would get into this field,” he said. “Think what it is going to be like in 2005. Kids aren’t going to know what a snake looks like, much less different kinds of snakes.”