Volunteers Struggle to Build Butterfly Safety Net : Endangered species: Expiration of $430,000 grant worries those working to restore dunes near LAX where the El Segundo blue flourishes.
They stride across the dunes like foot soldiers in some ecological army, sporting T-shirts emblazoned with a single blue butterfly.
Some stoop to do battle with the alien ice plant and brushy acacia trees that threaten the El Segundo dunes.
Others kneel in the sand to plant native shrubs that vanished from this seaside kingdom long before many members of this volunteer gardening army were born.
What has brought these volunteers here, weekend after weekend, is a heartfelt vision that time can be rolled back and the dunes restored.
Their mission is to rebuild an ecosystem that vanished a generation ago as urban Los Angeles pressed toward the sea. They operate by a simple but delicate equation: banishing the ice plant and other non-native species while nurturing coast buckwheat, the El Segundo blue butterfly that feeds on it and a myriad of other plants and insects that once called the dunes home.
The group’s icon is the El Segundo blue, a federal endangered species whose primary home is this fragile snippet of dune-scape wedged between sprawling Los Angeles International Airport and the sea.
Today, the ice plant is nearly vanquished. The butterfly is flourishing, up from 400 10 years ago to more than 10,000 today. But on this misty October morning, what should have been a celebratory event--a salute to a job nearly finished--takes on a somber cast.
Triggering concern is the Oct. 7 end of the $430,000 grant that financed restoration work under the direction of Rudi Mattoni of Beverly Hills, who has received national attention for his fight to save the El Segundo blue.
Now, no one knows for sure how the dunes will be protected in years to come.
“Who looks after these plants that we’ve just planted?” asks a frustrated Mattoni.
The El Segundo dunes is at a crossroads. When the grant expired, responsibility for the area moved from the city Department of Environmental Affairs to the city Department of Airports, which owns the dunes.
The juxtaposition is a curious one: LAX, the nation’s third-busiest airport, high-tech launching pad for hundreds of jumbo jets each day, is charged with protecting the habitat of a fluttering thumbnail-size butterfly.
Although an airport official promises to “do the right thing by the dunes,” some environmentalists are nervous that a mammoth agency accustomed to dealing with high-powered airlines and fast-flying machines may not fully grasp the importance of buckwheat and insects. After Mattoni began studying the dunes for the Department of Airports in 1984, he discovered that it contained 28 plants and animals that are native to the Southern California dunes system.
But years of development and soil contamination helped foster non-native species, he reported, threatening the survival of native wildlife.
As departing jets screech overhead on this overcast Sunday, Mattoni and his supporters issue a rallying cry to about 60 people gathered at the dunes for the last scheduled volunteer cleanup-and-planting effort.
“The work is not done,” says Jon Earl, director of Rhapsody in Green, a Los Angeles environmental group that has championed the dunes.
A botanist shows a group of Westside students how to plant seedlings of coastal buckwheat and how to mulch them with withered strands of ice plant.
Elizabeth Harrison, 17, of Van Nuys displays the spindly insect called a “walking stick” she just discovered in a pile of mulch. On an earlier visit, she reports, she found two legless lizards, which she describes as “wormlike with scales.”
As the volunteers weed and plant, Mattoni, 66, stands slightly apart, ear protectors cupped around his neck, observing the activity with deep blue eyes that nearly match the blue of the butterfly imprinted on his T-shirt.
In a playful moment, he disappears under a tattered, turquoise-colored tarp until his head re-emerges through a hole in the center.
Then, as giggling teen-agers watch, he slowly flaps his tarp-covered arms.
“Sweet butterfly . . .” he sings under his breath.
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Mattoni’s life has been intrinsically tied to blue butterflies--the El Segundo blue he has helped preserve at the dunes, the Palos Verdes blue butterfly he rediscovered in San Pedro this spring.
Yet the butterfly is simply a metaphor, he says, of the complex native ecosystem that is slowly taking root again.
Mattoni, a UCLA visiting lecturer in geography and environmental science, talks passionately of the dunes’ other crown jewels, the 11 species of plants and animals that can be found only on this narrow strip of sand: the El Segundo goat moth, the El Segundo Jerusalem cricket, the Lange’s dunes weevil, the El Segundo spineflower, the El Segundo crab spider.
He sounds astonished that others might not notice the mysteries to be found here. It is baffling to him that Angelenos can be obsessed with saving the Amazon rain forest--even reporting the acres lost on a lighted digital monitor outside the Beverly Center’s Hard Rock Cafe--while they ignore the home-grown wonders just west of LAX.
“We don’t know how many insects there are in Downtown L.A.,” he laments. “We don’t even know what we have right here.”
Mattoni found his first blue butterfly 50 years ago mounted in a cardboard box at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
At the time, he was a schoolboy fascinated by butterflies, collecting them, puzzling over the colors of caterpillars that clung to the bush outside his bedroom window in Beverly Hills.
Then, as a teen-ager during World War II, he visited the dunes for the first time and witnessed the butterfly alive. The airport was tiny then, and only a few houses perched on the dunes. He remembers flocks of butterflies and huge expanses of coastal buckwheat.
He left Los Angeles to study entomology at UC Berkeley, returning to earn his Ph.D. at UCLA in population genetics.
His resume portrays him as a Renaissance man of science, assessing the effects of the first atomic explosion on native insect populations in New Mexico, conducting studies on astronauts’ personal hygiene in space.
A company he founded produced millions of cotton pink bollworm moths--so named because of their bright pink larvae--that were sterilized with radiation and used to control the bollworm attacking the San Joaquin Valley cotton crop.
Although he is not a professional entomologist, he kept returning to butterflies--especially blue butterflies.
And in 1984, he returned to the dunes, charged with studying how blue butterflies and other native insects remained.
The dunes had changed dramatically since he last saw them.
Much of the dunes coastal buckwheat was probably destroyed when homes were built. Ice plant, which was popular among developers who used it to stabilize sand, can squeeze out the remaining buckwheat and other native species.
“The ice plant was all over the place. It was ghastly,” he recalls. To worsen matters, after constructing Pershing Drive on the dunes’ east side in the 1970s, the city had planted the wrong kind of buckwheat, Mattoni said. Instead of coast buckwheat--the sole food of the El Segundo butterfly--workers had planted common buckwheat, throwing the ecosystem out of sync.
One of the most startling changes of all was not on the dunes, but above them. As many as 900 to 1,000 low-flying jets roar above the butterflies and walking sticks each day.
Although the noise can be deafening, volunteers are so passionate about the dunes cause that they simply bring earplugs. One volunteer wore a Sony Walkman as he planted buckwheat, hoping to drown out the jet noise with music.
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Ironically, it was the burgeoning growth of LAX that created the dunes preserve and thus enhanced the El Segundo blue’s hopes for survival.
Once houses and streets covered the very dunes where the butterfly now frolics. But the rise in jet traffic in the early 1960s forced the removal of almost 800 homes under the noisy takeoff routes, baring the dunes again.
Today, the preserve exudes an eerie sense of in-between.
Remnants of the old neighborhood remain, like ruins of some Roman village.
Cracked concrete streets run like frayed ribbon through the dunes, weeds sprouting through the cracks. Street numbers are barely visible on decaying curbs. A peeling yellow fire hydrant sits next to one dune, and brick steps lead nowhere.
Yet most of the area has returned to wilderness, a soothing tapestry of brown-gray shrubs against tan sand. Then, a dune away, LAX comes into view, its terminals and control towers spread across the horizon like a space-age metropolis.
This juxtaposition of sand and city, nature and technology endows the restore-the-dunes project with much of its drama.
The 300-acre area is the last large remnant of a series of dunes systems that once ran from Point Conception north of Santa Barbara to Mexico.
Airport officials had long planned to use about 200 acres of the cleared dunes to build a seaside golf course, with the remaining 100 acres set aside as a preserve. But then the California Coastal Commission questioned how the development would affect the El Segundo blue butterfly.
City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter helped spearhead a 1990 city agreement under which 200 acres were designated a preserve, with 100 acres to the north set aside for the golf course. Activity shifted to restoring the dunes, although airport officials say that a golf course is still possible.
Mattoni and his colleagues have been working to restore the dunes, most recently with the $430,000 grant from the state Resources Agency and a $75,000 grant from the Coastal Conservancy. The work was overseen by the city Department of Environmental Affairs.
The project has spawned a small but intensely loyal band of defenders. Hundreds of volunteers, including UCLA professors and Westside schoolchildren, regularly visit with trowels and gardening gloves.
Now, as the Department of Airports shoulders responsibility for the dunes, trepidation is apparent among some dunes defenders.
“I want to assure those people that we’re not going to turn our backs on the work they’ve done,” Phil Depoian, Department of Airports deputy executive director, promised.
But Mattoni says the airport has promised only that he can volunteer at the dunes for an additional 30 days. He has no idea if he will be allowed on the site after that time, he said.
Galanter has written airport officials to urge them to plan for long-term maintenance. She said that she is “reasonably optimistic” that the airport can be persuaded to arrange for that maintenance, which she estimates would cost about $45,000 annually.
Some environmental groups have banded together to form the Coastal Dunes Conservancy, hoping to provide management and scientific expertise for preserving the dunes, said Fred Heath, president of the Los Angeles Audubon Society.
At the Department of Airports, Depoian said he does not know enough about the conservancy plan to say if it is feasible.
Meanwhile, environmentalists hope the airport will continue to allow the hands-on volunteer work that they say has been key to the restoration’s success.
“It surprises me that I feel this way about this pile of sand,” said Heath.
“There’s something very different about pulling out weeds and planting plants,” Heath said, “a rush that I’ve never gotten from saving a piece of land by political means.”
