Pieces of the Puzzle
Working with landowners
to protect key properties

This collection of birds in the wetlands of the slough is an indication
of a healty habitat. And what happens in the hills determines
the health of the slough. (Click here to see this photo enlarged
in a new window.)

Protecting Elkhorn Slough is a lot like assembling a very large and complicated jigsaw puzzle. Those who love Elkhorn Slough have been working on it for over thirty years. The Porter family pioneered the protection of Elkhorn Slough in the 1970s by preserving the ranch that had been their home for six generations. The biggest piece of the puzzle was put in place in 1980 with the establishment of the 1500-acre Elkhorn Slough Reserve. Almost a decade later, the Nature Conservancy added another big piece when it protected 500 acres by acquiring the Azevedo and Blohm ranches at the north end of the slough. Five years ago, the Elkhorn Slough Foundation identified the hills east of Elkhorn Slough as its top land conservation priority. Over the last four years, a string of acquisitions protected another 1400 acres in these hills: Triple M (196 acres) in 2000, Elzas (134 acres) in 2001, El Chamisal (201 acres) and Brothers (356 acres) in 2002, Hambey (540 acres) in 2003 (see map). As we began 2004, most of the big pieces of the puzzle were in place, and we started to work on the many smaller pieces needed to complete the protection of the lands that drain into Elkhorn Slough.

This fall we put two key pieces into place. The properties – and the agreements we reached with their owners – are important parts in our drive to complete the Watershed Conservation Plan we adopted in 1999. The 32.5-acre Harris/Vasquez Ranch is located at the tip of Porter Marsh and is surrounded on three sides by protected lands. The Cormack property stands alone and virtually untouched – an 11.5-acre hillside overlooking the slough across from Kirby Park (photo, below).

Together these properties include 28 acres of oak woodlands and 14 acres of maritime chaparral, the rare plant community that dominates the ridge tops east of the slough. ESF now protects more than one quarter of the remaining maritime chaparral in the Elkhorn Slough watershed. These oak woodlands and maritime chaparral plant communities are the dominant natural habitats of the Elkhorn Highlands. They stabilize soils, help recharge groundwater supplies, and provide food and shelter for the many species that have lived here for millenia. During the past two decades we have protected thousands of acres (like the 44 acres we protected this fall) and each one is a piece of the puzzle that is being completed step by step.

The Cormack property viewed from the rock outcrop
above shows its relationship to the North Marsh.

As important as these properties are for their natural resources, their acquisition also speaks to the Foundation’s willingness to work with landowners and to reach agreements that serve everyone’s needs. The Harris/Vasquez agreement involved two owners with different needs. One wanted to sell now, and the other wanted to continue his small agriculture operation for a few more years. We reached an agreement where we immediately acquired Vasquez’s half and will pay Harris installments over the next five years. The result is the protection of a key piece of land directly bordering Porter Marsh and Carneros Creek, which supplies Elkhorn Slough with most of its fresh water.

Like the 2.5-acre Kvitek property ESF acquired last year, the Cormack property was a bargain sale – the chance to obtain at a very good price a priceless piece of land. Mildred Cormack donated 55 percent of the appraised land value to us as a tax-deductible charitable contribution. Mildred loves the land and the slough and wanted to ensure that the land would remain forever wild and untouched.

At this writing, we are about to close on a third property, which we will report on in our next issue. These acquisitions will bring the total acreage under ESF protection to almost 3600 acres – just 400 acres short of the ambitious goal we announced three years ago. As the chart below shows, we are steadily moving toward our goal of protecting the land around Elkhorn Slough. Twenty years ago the jigsaw puzzle was a collection of pieces, big and small, spread out before us. You needed a vision of the future to imagine what the completed puzzle would look like. Today the picture is clear and the pieces are falling into place, one piece at a time.

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Stewardship Update
What happens in the hills
determines the health of the slough

Taking care of land is a lot like farming: it’s constant work and news is seldom all good. The news this fall that ESF had protected more land is good for the health of Elkhorn Slough. But for our land management staff it is also more work, work that comes during what is always their busiest time of year – the narrow window between the end of annual crop cultivation and the beginning of the rainy season. It is during this narrow and unpredictable period that most erosion control work has to be done.

This year the good/bad news mix has two new elements. On the good side is the addition of a third person to our land staff. On the bad side is that this is expected to be an El Nino year, which likely will mean much heavier rains and soil-erosion problems than usual. All these factors – more land to care for, a new staff member, the looming impact of El Nino – made the fall full of activity and very exciting for us.

ESF land staff sowing some of the 11,000 pounds of seed
and spreading some of the 2000 bales of rice straw used to stabilize
farmed fields on Hambey Ranch.

The newly expanded team’s first priority this fall is a familiar one to readers of Tidal Exchange – dealing with soil erosion, which is a major threat to the health of Elkhorn Slough. There were more than a dozen soil erosion projects under way this fall – laying straw (2000 bales), planting cover crops (11,000 pounds of seed), and cleaning out, repairing, and building sediment basins. Sediment basins allow you to farm and keep eroding soil on the land and out of the creeks that provide the slough’s fresh water.

We returned this fall to Hambey Ranch, where we did major work last year. The three sediment basins we built held up well, but heavy rains damaged some of the drainage channels that feed them. The volume and speed of water at one particular point is forcing us to lay pipe under a road. The drainage channels were just collapsing under the pressure. This year’s work builds on last year’s and is a major investment in maintaining agriculture on this property for years to come.

Hambey Ranch, which we acquired in 2003, is also the site of major cleanup work. In September we removed 470 illegally dumped tires from the property. There’s a long history of tire removal in Elkhorn Slough – hundreds of tires are regularly fished out of the slough itself on Coastal Clean Up Day. ESF Executive Director Mark Silberstein calls cleanup the first stage of restoration, and many of the properties we have acquired need major trash removal.

Elkhorn Slough Foundation members are still talking about the 175 tons of trash we removed from El Chamisal ranch two years ago. Hambey’s 470 tires didn’t break the record set at El Chamisal (720 tires), but removing them involved days of work by ESF staffer Ken Collins and 12 hours of heavy labor from Philip Godoy, a California Conservation Corps volunteer. Also assisting was the Monterey Regional Waste Management District, which waived the $1140 in fees. Our thanks to them and to Philip.

In partnership with the Resources Conservation District, we are seeking grant funding for a major trash cleanup of Hambey and Elzas Ranch. As we did at El Chamisal two years ago, we will be removing plastic and metal pipe left over from drip irrigation, as well as abandoned vehicles and farm equipment. Some of the abandoned farm equipment is so heavy it will have to be cut into pieces to remove.

This is not the glamour work of conservation, but it is the vital first step along the road of restoring to health the lands that feed into Elkhorn Slough. When our members were kayaking this fall (see story on page four) they marveled at the birds all around us and the hills overlooking us. What happens in those hills, ultimately, determines the health of the waters we paddled..

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Members Kayak the North Slough
A trip up the slough is also a trip back in time

On a pair of fine days in October, ESF members discovered the joys of kayaking the north end of the slough. The north slough is a long 12-mile round trip from the kayak rental shops in Moss Landing (map) and, for that reason, it isn’t visited as often as the western reaches of the slough.

To make it reachable for our members, Moss Landing’s two kayak shops – Monterey Bay Kayaks and Kayak Connection – ferried kayaks to Kirby Park and offered big discounts for ESF members.

The kayakers raft up at the north end of the slough and learn about the importance of Hudson's Landing in the history of the Central Coast. The entire ridge in the background is now protected by the Elkhorn Slough Foundation. (Click here to see more photos from this tour.)

Hudson's Landing as it looked in the 1870s.
(Click here to learn more.)

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