Group Weeds Out Wildlife Habitat’s Tall Leafy Enemy

Michelle Franck, 19, scooped up a pile of long, bamboo-like reeds scattered on the ground at the Arroyo Simi flood channel Saturday morning and prepared to carry it to higher ground.

“I can’t think of anything more important to do today,” she said, awkwardly balancing the leafy, 10-foot-long bundle on her hip. “I go walking around here all the time and I’m so concerned about preserving what’s left.”

Franck joined about 35 other volunteers in chopping down and moving the giant, non-native reeds that have taken over wide swaths of land along the Arroyo Simi, sucking up all available ground moisture and slowly crowding out the native willow and mule fat plants.

The day marked the second of three that the Moorpark chapter of the Environmental Coalition will use to recruit volunteers to whack away at the giant arrundo grasses.

Leafy and slim, the weeds look pleasant enough, lining the gurgling stream that runs down the flood channel. But Environmental Coalition members say wildlife prefer the willow and mule fat vegetation and will abandon the channel if the reedy grasses take over.

This summer, the city of Moorpark and the Environmental Coalition jointly received a $64,000 state grant to restore five acres of wildlife habitat along the flood channel and draft a management plan for the entire six-mile stretch of the Arroyo Simi that runs through the city.

The Arroyo Simi, which originates in Simi Valley, empties into the ocean at Point Mugu.

Next spring--where the volunteers are now cutting the grasses and hired crews are poisoning the roots with an aquatic-safe herbicide--other volunteers will plant sprigs of willow and mule fat.

Roseann Mikos, Arroyo Simi project director for the Environmental Coalition, tried to pep up her troops as they walked from their meeting point in the parking lot of Teledyne Laars on Condor Drive to the flood channel a quarter of a mile down a dirt path.

“It can be heavy or hard work, but it can also be kinda fun, with everybody working out there,” she told the dozen volunteers following her.

The workers, mostly Moorpark residents, came shod in hiking boots and were armed with the type of oversized gardening shears needed to snap the grasses’ bamboo-like stems in half.

Mikos worried that her crew would have little time to chop weeds, as thick gray clouds loomed ominously overhead and drizzle sprinkled the communities to the south and east.

But as the weeds began to fall, the sun pushed through the gloominess and the volunteers kept going.

“I love hard work and a good cause,” said Madeline Hartley, 49, of Moorpark explaining why she came out for the day. “I have to laugh, though, because I have all this yard work at home, and it’s no fun, and this is much harder work and it’s a lot of fun” because of the camaraderie. “I’m a glutton for punishment,” she said.

Other volunteers, however, did not enjoy themselves so heartily.

“I was dragged by my mom,” said Jennifer Harper, 12, of Moorpark, whose mother, Sharon, is an Environmental Coalition member. “I don’t really like it here ‘cause it’s dirty, and the bugs are annoying me.”

Lauren Polito, 9, wearing a “Beauty and the Beast” T-shirt and a perky white bow in her hair, also tried valiantly at first to stay clear of grime.

“I came down because I wanted a patch for my Girl Scout vest,” she said, minutes before joining other members of her troop in jumping up and down on a springy pile of discarded reed grass. The girls had been asked to haul the reeds from the riverbank--where the adults were chopping them down--to a cleared dirt area, but the jumping exercise proved a potent diversion.

Mikos, the coalition project director, just laughed. “You expect these kinds of things,” she said, adding that she hoped the girls took some environmental lesson from the morning.

“If you don’t preserve a place like this,” she said, “it will be lost forever and people will forget what it used to be like before man came to live here.”