Just another trashy weekend at the Bolsa Chica

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

The fog hanging over the coast on Saturday morning was thicker than

the hide of a career politician. The tide drifted into the wetlands

under a silencing blanket of white mist, and the normal blues and

greens of Outer Bolsa Bay were muted to a monochrome of subdued

grays.

It was into this surreal scene that several kayaks and one canoe

were paddled. Normally such activities are prohibited at the Bolsa

Chica Ecological Reserve. In fact, this was only the second such

sanctioned event that we’re aware of in at least 20 years. But this

was no recreational outing. Under the auspices of the California

Department of Fish and Game and led by Laura Bandy of the Bolsa Chica

Conservancy, these kayak enthusiasts were part of the annual

September coastal cleanup.

A number of years ago, Vic and Jim Robins, who is current

president of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica, obtained permission from the

Department of Fish and Game to take a canoe into outer Bolsa Bay to

pick up some of the more visible trash littering the mudflats.

Shopping carts, orange traffic cones, and plastic milk crates often

find their way into the flood control channels from some of the less

socially conscious neighborhoods of Santa Ana, Garden Grove,

Westminster and Huntington Beach. After a heavy rain, the refuse of

urban living winds up stuck in the mudflats. The rubbish is an

eyesore to visitors to the wetlands, and clutters up the feeding

grounds of the tens of thousands of migratory and wintering birds

that use the Bolsa Chica.

As is usual on a coastal cleanup day, hordes of dedicated people

in orange vests swarmed over the pickleweed and sand dunes on

Saturday, picking up the debris and detritus of a disposable society.

What was unusual was the opportunity for a select few kayaking and

canoeing enthusiasts to get into the water for a very limited time to

pick up trash from the mudflats.

The experiment was remarkably effective. The kayakers filled trash

bags and handed them off to the crew in the canoe. Once the canoeists

had 10 to 12 bags, they paddled to shore, delivered their load to a

waiting land crew, and returned for more bags. By late morning, the

fog had lifted and the flotilla of kayakers had removed 40 to 50

large bags of trash, including lots of fishing line, lures, plastic

six-pack holders, and even a rubber duckie that escaped from the

Duckathon. They had also managed to retrieve a couch, a chair and a

55-gallon drum that used to contain Lord only knows what.

The work crew also removed some old, decaying wooden nesting

platforms that unfortunately were never used by the endangered

light-footed clapper rails that they were intended to benefit. Some

of those clapper rail platforms were installed in the early 1990s by

Dick Zembal, then of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, with the

help of Jim Robins, Phil Smith, Chuck Drescher and myself.

At the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, Zembal had had

remarkable success in improving the survival rate of clapper rail

chicks. Normally, light-footed clapper rails build their nests on the

stems of cordgrass. The nests are engineered to float up and down on

the tide, with stems of cordgrass anchoring them in place. But with

the introduction of red foxes to the area in the late 1800s, clapper

rails began to decline.

Red foxes can swim. They didn’t mind getting wet if the payoff was

a snack of tasty clapper rail chicks. In the days when red foxes

numbered in the hundreds at the wildlife refuge, the clapper rail

population plummeted to only a few pairs.

Zembal’s nesting platforms changed that, at least temporarily. He

tied tumbleweed to wooden loading pallets and anchored these

platforms to the mudflats with two vertical poles. The platforms rose

and fell on the tides. Somehow the clapper rails figured out that

these floating platforms would be really neat places to build their

nests. The prickly tumbleweeds gave the little chicks just enough

cover to enable them to avoid the hungry jaws of the red foxes and

the snapping beaks of great blue herons and other predatory birds.

Unfortunately, clapper rails didn’t nest at the Bolsa Chica,

despite the provision of nesting platforms. There are no resident

clapper rails at Bolsa Chica, and only an occasional few wander in

from Seal Beach or Upper Newport Bay. The rail population is in

severe decline in Seal Beach. Upper Newport Bay still has about 70%

of the U.S. population of the light-footed clapper rail.

Because the wood of the unused platforms is now water logged and

decaying, it was time for them to come out of Outer Bolsa Bay, along

with all the other trash.

After several hours of work, the kayak crew was timed out. They

had removed nearly 50 bags of trash, plus some major eyesores and

hazards. The discouraging news is that they made only a small dent in

the trash that was there.

We hope that the Department of Fish and Game will sanction

additional such mudflat cleanups. They are badly needed. We also hope

that the boating public will understand that the bay is closed to all

boating traffic except for these very rare cleanup days, when boating

in this sensitive habitat area is limited to invited work parties of

trained volunteers.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].