CREATURE FEATURE : Dune

“Welcome to the last Los Angeles sand dunes. A dry ark adrift in a sea of urban development.” That’s how Rudi Mattoni greets visitors and volunteers interested in restoring the El Segundo sand dunes.

In 1984, the Los Angeles Airport Authority hired the biologist to conduct surveys on a 300-acre lot LAX bought in the mid-’60s for airport expansion. Since then Mattoni, 64, has discovered hundreds of species struggling for survival beneath the constant roar of jet turbines, including the nearly extinct El Segundo blue butterfly, the Jerusalem cricket, the crab spider and a cache of 25 types of reptiles, rodents and other animals.

“This is one of the only remaining habitats for the endangered San Diego horned lizard and the coastal pack rat, a rather handsome rodent found only in coastal sage bushes,” he says. “A pocket mouse once found here has already become extinct. Least terns used to nest on the sand dunes. We’re trying to bring them back.”

Mattoni also found 58 species of native plants, some of them rare or endangered. “The area is badly in need of restoration,” he says. “We’ve already lost 38 plant species and 20 more have dwindled to numbers too small for survival.”

Mattoni, who relies on grants to continue his work, oversees volunteers who weed and cultivate the surviving native flora. He hopes that LAX will decide against expanding on these acres and turn the dunes into a conservancy. “When the Coastal Commission originally shot down the idea of LAX expansion in the area, the airport administration wanted to build a golf course instead,” he says. “Fine, build a hundred-acre course, but use the recreational revenue to support a 200-acre city wildlife preserve in the remaining portion. “

Meanwhile, Mattoni prefers to see the airport as a blessing in disguise. “If LAX wasn’t there,” he says, “this plot of land would have been a shopping center a long time ago.”