Forward, Marsh

If you could step back 100 years to early California, rivers would flow freely into saltwater marshes like Ballona Creek Marsh and others that once ran from Newport Bay to where the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles lie today.

The wetland habitat of mud and sand and saltwater, fed by the ebb and flow of the tides, would be teeming with waterfowl and fish.

On a recent spring morning in the bay of San Quintin in Baja California, you might think you had taken that step back in time.

A white blanket of mist covers the water, and the air is alive with the conversation of geese. As the fog lifts, silhouettes of thousands of the waterfowl emerge, grazing on the eelgrass beds that stretch across the wide shallow bay.

Biologists from Alaska studying the life histories of the geese head out in a small boat, watching different species of birds to learn where the deep channel runs--black brant are in the shallow water, grebes where the bottom drops off, surf scooters in deeper water.

The rich habitat is the winter home of about 30,000 black brant, saltwater geese that arrive each fall after a spectacular flight of 3,000 miles nonstop from Alaska. Their population is down about a third since the mid-’60s.

When the brant fly north in March and April, they stop to rest and feed, but they mostly skip Southern California--where their habitat has been transformed into ports, marinas, farmland and housing tracts.

The missing wetlands are missing steppingstones in the Pacific Flyway--one of the largest north-south migrations of waterfowl in the world.

The most ambitious attempt to date to revive one of those vanished wetlands is the restoration of 880 acres of wetlands at Bolsa Chica, south of Long Beach, once one of the largest oil-drilling fields in the state.

A number of small wetland restoration projects are also underway or have been completed in Southern California in the last two decades, funded by a variety of sources.

At Ballona Lagoon, 16 acres have just been dredged and planted. Ballona Creek Marsh once covered 1,550 acres from Venice south to the bluffs of Playa del Rey. Destroyed by a flood control channel, aerospace buildings and the construction of the Marina del Rey harbor, between 180 and 190 acres remain, according to the Army Corp of Engineers and the California Coastal Commission. These are on the site of the proposed $8-billion Playa Vista development and are included within a 340-acre habitat preserve to be created by a $12.5-million restoration to be funded by the developer.

The phase one permit for 3,200 residential units and more than 3 million square feet of new and recycled buildings (including the new DreamWorks studio) has been approved, but delayed by financing problems. Opponents of the project argue that most of the Playa Vista site is occupied by wetlands or uplands critical to wetlands and should be left as open space. They have appealed the development permit to the state Supreme Court.

But restoration of 25 acres of freshwater marsh has started. A 26-acre riparian corridor is also part of this phase and restoration of eight acres of dunes is underway.

Phase two of the development calls for 9,000 residential units, more than 2.5 million square feet of commercial and retail space and 750 hotel rooms. If financing is secured, environmental review will proceed. Saltwater marsh restoration is linked to obtaining phase two permits.

A major source of funds for wetlands is port mitigation, which compensates for loss of resources associated with the expansion of ports.

So far, three projects have been paid for by the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. And now, in an agreement announced by the state in February, $91 million has been budgeted for the purchase and restoration of Bolsa Chica, the largest port mitigation project to date. The agreement calls for oil field cleanup and a new tidal inlet, and there will be substantial excavation and improved managed tidal areas. Money is also designated for future dredging needed to maintain tidal flow.

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The blueprints for reviving damaged Southern California wetlands are the unspoiled Baja wetlands. Both are part of the same biogeographical region of salt marshes and contain most of the same plants and animals.

“The Pacific Coast of Baja is a portrait of California’s coastal marshes as they were before their wholesale damage and destruction,” says Barbara Massey, 73, a biologist and pioneer in the study of endangered bird species.

Joy Zedler, who heads the Pacific Estuarine Research Laboratory at San Diego State, is studying San Quintin and mapping the lagoon and vegetation.

“San Quintin tells us what the topography of wetlands should be like, how many little tidal creeks there should be and how we should design our Southern California marshes,” she says.

Zedler is putting some of what she’s learned to use as a member of the Tijuana Estuary Management Authority, which is overseeing an experimental restoration project at the mouth of the Tijuana River on the U.S. side of the border.

In the 2-acre project, a new curving tidal channel has been dug out of former uplands. Great attention is being paid to saving the rich, dark anaerobic mud so it can be distributed over the newly exposed soil.

“Well-aged marsh has fine sediments, microbes and probably smells a little bit because it’s got decaying organic matter and sulfides in it,” Zedler says.

After Barbara Massey decided in 1970, at age 45, to go back to school to get her master’s in biology at Cal State Long Beach, her thesis professor told her about a bird that lived within 10 miles of her home that nobody knew anything about--except that there weren’t many around anymore.

Massey began to study this bird, the least tern.

She went on to study other endangered species, an undertaking that meant spending years crouching behind dunes in Huntington Beach and in the marshes of Upper Newport Bay and Anaheim Bay.

In the late 1970s, Massey proposed a marsh restoration project at the mouth of the Santa Ana River to create a feeding area for least terns while their habitat was disturbed by a flood-control project.

“Nobody knew what to do, so I got together with two Fish and Game biologists, and we sort of looked at a marsh and designed a little 25-acre project. I was thinking, ‘If we don’t do it, who’s going to?’ ”

Massey and her team brought in tidal flow through culverts to an area that had been cut off from the ocean for a century. The marsh quickly began to come back to life, but six months later, the county removed the culverts and it died again. It would be more than a decade before the marsh was again restored.

Though officially called Talbert Marsh, it is known informally by those aware of its history as “Massey Marsh.”

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As dawn breaks in Upper Newport Bay, the sounds of coots picking their webbed feet up out of the mud are interspersed with the loud “clappering” calls of light-footed clapper rails singing, male and female calling back and forth to each other: “kek kek kek.”

Dick Zembal of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will tell you the endangered birds are saying, “I’m here, this is my mate, we’re calling together, this is our territory and we intend on mating here.”

Massey and Zembal worked together on the first census of the light-footed clapper rail in 1979. The bird is more often heard than seen. Massey and Zembal discovered the meaning of the “kek burr” call of a female that’s lost her mate, which alerts biologists to look for an explosion in the population of predators.

Zembal, now multi-species planning coordinator for Fish and Wildlife, has continued the census work with the help of the volunteer Clapper Rail Study Team and spends every March and April surveying 50 marshes from Carpinteria to the Tijuana Estuary. In 1996, his census found 325 pairs of light-footed clapper rails, up from 142 in 1985.

On this morning in Upper Newport Bay, Zembal is optimistic. The clapper rail is the indicator of our healthiest, most productive wetlands, he says. Upper Newport Reserve--with its growing population of clapper rails next to such a heavily populated area--”is a wellspring of hope that makes you think that perhaps we can make it all work--for the human population and the swarm of life.”

Early one morning in 1988, Massey was in Baja doing a census of light-footed clapper rails when she discovered bulldozers leveling dunes for a resort development at Estero da Punta Banda, south of Ensenada.

She rushed to the home of her Mexican colleague, Silvia Ibarra. Ibarra, also a biologist, found out that the developer was also planning to dredge to create a marina but had no permits.

There was no conservation organization in Baja California able to help protect the estuary and endangered bird habitat. Massey and Ibarra organized a meeting of about 35 U.S. and Mexican scientists and conservationists to see what could be done.

A binational conservation organization to protect Baja wetlands--pro esteros--was born.

During eight years of struggle, more dunes were lost to beachfront vacation houses, but there is now a nature reserve at Punta Banda and maps of the four major Baja wetland lagoons--San Quintin, Ojo de Liebre, San Ignacio and Magdalena Bay--have been created as habitat records for land-use planning.

And pro esteros has become the keystone of a conservation movement that links people north and south of the border.

Today, in the U.S., the co-chair of pro esteros is Pat Flanigan, education director at the San Diego Natural History Museum. In Baja, the co-chair-woman is Laura Martinez.

Catching the bus in Ensenada at 6 a.m. on a Saturday in February, Martinez and her 14-year-old son, Martin, are taking a “treasure chest” care package to the Brant Monitoring Program in San Quintin.

The chest contains bird-watching materials and letters from students in Coos Bay, Ore., to students at Zapata High School in San Quintin. This day, Martinez takes the kids on a field trip to the biologists’ research station. She trains a teacher to use the computer that connects the school with the brant World Wide Web site and schools along the Pacific Flyway in Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

Martinez’s sister Patricia also works with pro esteros. She was selected this year to represent Baja California non-government organizations to the Secretariat of Environmental and Natural Resources and Fisheries, which approves all development permits in Mexico.

The sisters this year organized Grupo de Trabajo pro Peninsula de Baja California to collaborate on conservation issues.

As a first project, this working group of conservation organizations is establishing a communications network to link remote communities so they can keep each other informed about development projects in their areas.

In a remote village on Laguna San Ignacio without telephone lines or electricity, that means setting up a laptop computer and installing solar panels to power a satellite telephone link.

The group hopes that if local people, such as fishermen and ecotourism guides, are linked to the outside world, they will become a first line of defense against development that would result in long-term ecological damage.

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When motorists on Pacific Coast Highway drive past Bolsa Chica, they see a glimpse of the future. The highway passes by the 300-acre state ecological reserve created in 1979 by raising dikes, creating two bird islands-- and flooding.

It is one of the best limited-restoration efforts ever undertaken at a low cost, says Jack Fancher of U.S. Fish and Wildlife, lead person for that agency on the restoration of Bolsa Chica.

The reserve now supports more than 200 species of birds, up from about 10 to 20 before.

There are, however, few fish species because there is only about 6 inches of tidal flow. That is why a key element of the upcoming Bolsa Chica restoration agreement is the opening of a new channel to the ocean.

“There’s a lot of potential for restoration of wetlands in Southern California,” says Craig Denisoff of the state Resources Agency, “simply by changing the hydrology and / or changing the contour of land or dropping a levee and re-flooding an area that’s dry. Bolsa Chica is a classic example of that.”

So far, other wetland-restoration projects are showing positive results.

The 360-acre Batiquitos Lagoon was completed and opened to tidal influence in December. Monitoring by biologists has found more species of fish and invertebrates; salt-marsh seedlings are popping up; and there is use by endangered species such as the western snowy plover and least tern.

Planning, design and environmental review for the Bolsa Chica restoration is expected to take three years and will proceed concurrently with oil-field cleanup.

Construction will start around 2000 and is expected to take three years.

If all goes according to plan, early in the next century Bolsa Chica will have taken a step back in time toward rebirth as the thriving wetland of 100 years ago.

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Pacific Coast Salt Marshes

Wetland restoration projects in the past two decades have reclaimed hundreds of acres of coastal wildlife habitat. The largest project will be Bolsa Chica at Huntington Beach. The relatively undisturbed lagoon and salt marsh at San Quintin in Baja California is being studied as a blueprint for a natural wetland.

Ballona Lagoon Marine Preserve

A 16-acre project involving dredging and native plant restoration just completed north of Marina del Rey Channel.

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Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach

To mitigate loss of wildlife and fisheries habitat due to dredging for port operations, funds have been set aside to restore wetlands in other locations in Southern California, including Bolsa Chica.

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Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge

110-acre project in Anaheim Bay; restoration was completed in 1994.

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Bolsa Chica

Ecological Reserve: 300-acre limited tidal restoration completed in 1979. Now supports over 200 species of birds.

Restoration Project: Planned 880-acre restoration will be the largest undertaken. Construction expected to begin in 2000.

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Talbert Marsh

Early 25-acre project at mouth of Santa Ana River. Tidal action was restored in 1989; dunes were restored 1991.

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Upper Newport Bay

Three restoration projects have been completed, including 28-acre port mitigation project that was finished in 1985. Premier home of the light-footed clapper rail, with 325 pairs.

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Bataquitos Lagoon

360-acre restoration was completed in December.

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Tijuana Estuary

Currently being restored.

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Estero Punta Banda

Ecological reserve

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Bahia San Quintin

One of four major Pacific wetlands in Baja California. It is a primary wintering grounds of the black brant.

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UP CLOSE: BOLSA CHICA

The wetlands reclamation project at Bolsa Chica calls for purchase of 880 acres, with about 600 of those to be restored. The land, once one of the largest oil drilling fields in California, is adjacent to an existing ecological reserve along Pacific Coast Highway. The California Coastal Conservancy is the lead agency for the restoration project. A number of issues must be resolved:

* Orange County Flood Control District would like to integrate the adjacent flood control channel with the tidal basin, but this is not part of the currently approved agreement.

* There is concern about the impact of a new tidal channel on beach use, surfing, formation of sand bars, wave changes, safety and sand supply down the coast.

* There is a question about how restoration will affect ground-water movement--homes inland of the marsh are at a low elevation.

Recipe for a Marsh

At an experimental restoration site in the Tijuana Estuary at the U.S.-Mexico border, researchers are testing the most effective way to put nature back together again, using techniques similar to those that will be used at Bolsa Chica after the toxic cleanup is completed. These are the basic steps:

* Salvage native plants by cutting blocks of marsh.

* Excavate curving channels with precise gradients and salvage the mud. “Marsh muck” cannot be rehydrated; it must be kept wet.

* Liquefy sandy dirt and pipe it to the ocean as slurry to replenish the beach.

* Plant according to elevation in the tidal area. Irrigate and maintain plants to get them started.

The Major Players

Eight government agencies--four federal and four state--were signatories to the Bolsa Chica agreement announced in February and will participate in restoration planning. Project managers from the agencies are:

* Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Tom Yocom

* U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Jack Fancher

* Army Corps of Engineers: Ruth Villalobos

* National Marine Fisheries Service: Robert Hoffman

* State of California Resources Agency: Craig Denisoff

* California Coastal Conservancy: Melanie Deninger

* California Fish and Game Department: Troy Kelly and Patty Wolf

* State Lands Commission: Robert Hight

Other agencies will be actively involved in Bolsa Chica restoration planning include the state Department of Parks and Recreation, Orange County Flood Control District and the city of Huntington Beach

Getting Involved

For further information about wetlands restoration, contact Melanie Denninger, California Coastal Conservancy, (510) 286-4180. e-mail: mdenninger@igc.apc.org.

* Amigos de Bolsa Chica

* Bolsa Chica Conservancy

* Bolsa Chica Land Trust

* Surfrider Foundation

* Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club

* Huntington Beach Tomorrow

* Sea & Sage Audubon

OTHER CONTACTS

* pro esteros: (U.S.-Mexico conservation organization) Chuck Mitchell: (714) 850-4830;

Laura Martinez: proester@telnor.net

* Clapper Rail Study Team: Sue Hoffman: (714) 675-3460