Guest author Siera Nystrom is a certified UC Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve California Naturalist, and writes about the Sacramento and San Joaquin Biogregions for California Biodiversity Week 2021. You can follow more of Siera's writings posted on Notes from a California Naturalist.

September marks the beginning of a great awakening across California's Great Central Valley. As summer fades quietly into the warm, golden tints of autumn, long-absent birds begin to return, filling sleepy wetlands with sound and color and motion, the throbbing pulse of life.

Scattered up and down the Central Valley, carefully engineered wetlands, many of which are managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as National Wildlife Refuges, provide pockets of protected habitat, humble but precious remnants of what was once an extensive system of freshwater marshes, sloughs and riparian corridors, linked together within a mosaic of arid upland habitats stretching the length of the Valley. 

Native Yokut people, who have long called this beautiful valley their home, make wise use of the natural abundance found here, their lives intertwined with and dependent on the bounty of the wetlands. Tule reeds, which grow in the still, freshwater marshes and sloughs once so characteristic of this region, provide plentiful food and fiber, while the marshes themselves afford valuable habitat for a seasonal abundance of waterfowl, a rich and reliable food source for the Yokut. 

The majority of the Central Valley's freshwater marsh habitat has long since disappeared – and with the wetland, her people. Diked and drained, paved and plowed beyond recognition during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the once abundant freshwater marshes of the Valley vanished at the hand of progress. 

Like the coming of the first autumn rains, the mid-twentieth century once again brought change to the Valley's wetlands: change and hope. Through the Herculean efforts of both government and private organizations, with the cooperation of conservation-minded landowners, wetland restoration began in earnest. 

Three quarters of a century later, the Central Valley wetlands of today are a far cry from the wild places they once were before European settlers arrived. Though highly fragmented and intensively managed, freshwater marshes in the Central Valley persist as functional blocks of priceless habitat for the wide array of plants and animals that rely on them. And, most importantly, they are protected in perpetuity.

Though the damage to Central Valley wetlands can never be undone, it can be somewhat mitigated: water can be redirected to fill dry sloughs and sinks, native plants can be regrown. The tules themselves breathe new life into rehabilitated wetlands, drawing wildlife into their sheltering thickets. Migratory birds are drawn by instinct to the mild winter climate of the Central Valley, following ancient flyways to return each autumn to their ancestral overwintering grounds. 

Yes, hope remains for the diverse assemblage of species that rely on Valley wetland habitats.

A cursory glance across the Central Valley landscape from the highway belies its true value.  What the casual observer sees are rural communities, sprawling towns and cities, and the intensive farming operations of one of the most productive agricultural regions in the U.S.  But tucked away, hidden within the rigid patchwork blocks of almond orchards and corn fields, are the sinuous curves of meandering sloughs and marshes, painstakingly carved out of the landscape and set aside for the birds – and for the future. 

During the short, gray days of winter, waterfowl overwhelm the wetlands: ducks and geese swirl through the air like avian confetti, and blanket open water like drifts of snow; Tundra Swans glide through dense tule fog like apparitions, emissaries from the Arctic. 

With the coming of spring, the animated chatter of Marsh Wrens, buzzing notes of Song Sparrows and rollicking songs of Common Yellowthroats fill wetlands with a joyous chorus, the sound of life reveling in a landscape that has suddenly cast off her somber winter tones in exchange for vibrant green finery. 

But spring is fleeting, and all at once Valley wetlands are plunged into the heat of yet another seemingly endless summer, the lush growth of April rapidly fading to the dry, muted shades of August. Pools of water shrink before drying completely to reveal basins of cracked mud.  All is still and quiet in the wetland, save the soft droning of dragonfly wings and the rustling of dry reeds in a hot breeze. 

After sleeping through the long, dry days of summer, tule marshes awaken in the autumn with the return of countless millions of birds, from raptors and songbirds, to waterfowl and shorebirds. And with them come perhaps the most iconic Central Valley bird of them all, the Sandhill Crane. 

From late September through the end of March, these elegant, three-foot tall birds grace Central Valley wetlands with their stately presence, bestowing on the tule marshes a certain dignity that is lacking in their absence. Large flocks of Sandhill Cranes spend the winter months in the gold-and-gray landscape of Central Valley marshes, dancing and grazing in fields of grain grown especially for them. In a scene that has remained unchanged for countless generations, trailing skeins scrawl across the sky, silhouetted against the sunset as the cranes fly in for the night, seeking refuge in the wetlands. 

With autumn on the way again, the marshes know that change is coming: change and hope. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly at first, the seasons begin to shift. Morning mist lies heavily over the water; a cool breeze stirs; cottonwood leaves fade from green to gold. With any luck, the autumn rains begin. 

And once again, the birds return to this special place, the place their ancestors have relied on for millennia. Once again, the cranes' bugling cries sound across foggy marshes, haunting echoes of the prehistoric heart and soul of the Great Central Valley. 

 September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!

The California Biodiversity Collaborative correctly identifies “engage and empower” as one of four key strategies for biodiversity conservation. Together with “knowledge,” “protection, “and “restoration,” the state seeks to put people at the center of its strategy to protect the genes, species and ecosystems that sustain our society and economy. The emphasis on engagement and empowerment is well founded as it is one of the most challenging but necessary elements of the strategy. The UC California Naturalist program provides an excellent example of how the state can engage and empower more people to support this important statewide initiative.

Biodiversity conservation can't be accomplished without mobilizing a good percentage of the 40 million people in the state whose daily choices and actions directly affect biodiversity. The decentralized nature of biodiversity means that its conservation requires the participation from many - not just elected officials, agency personnel, and scientists. The challenge of engaging a large percentage of the state's population in any form of normative behavior has been illustrated nicely by the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowledge and information alone will not bring about changes in behavior. The experience of the UC California Naturalist program suggests a few approaches that may help catalyze meaningful public engagement and empowerment: 1) transformative learning experiences; 2) participation in locally relevant efforts, and 3) building relationships and cultivating a shared identity that reinforces and sustains participation.

Many of our course participants describe their experience in their California Naturalist course as something that “opened their eyes” or “gave them a whole new way of viewing the environment around them.” Talented instructors, hands-on learning experiences, and opportunities for reflection – such as journaling – help participants critically examine long held assumptions and beliefs and rethink old habits. These changes are primed and amplified when we experience disrupting, disorienting, and discrepant events such as record breaking wildfires, extreme weather events, and pandemics. At the end of their course, California Naturalists don't simply walk away with new knowledge and a certificate. With new eyes, they see the world differently, with new beliefs they understand their environment differently, and with new skills, they contribute in new ways. The manifestation of these changes is often in the form of increased volunteer service.

Engagement is another important part of the California Naturalist learning experience. Every California Naturalist completes an eight-hour volunteer service project and a class participatory science project. These projects combine learning with service, and typically focus on locally relevant issues that are important to the individual naturalist or community. Projects include everything from participation in bioblitzes, to designing native pollinator gardens, to removing invasive species, to supporting environmental education efforts. These experiences not only support learning, they often support scientific research, and in many cases they result in California Naturalists reaching and engaging others.

While engagement is important, sustaining that engagement is even more important. The California Naturalist program doesn't require volunteer service hours from its naturalists. Instead, it seeks to incentivize engagement by building a shared culture and identity. By promoting volunteer service opportunities, by celebrating the success of our naturalists and network partners, by building and inclusive and diverse community, and by promoting lifelong learning through convenings and other continuing education opportunities, the California Naturalist program advances a culture of conservation for all.

The California Naturalist program supports the mission and efforts of the California Biodiversity Collaborative. Our tag-line “Discovery, Action, and Stewardship” alludes to the importance of transformative learning, engagement, and empowerment. Together with our decentralized network of over 55 partners around the state, we believe our program is a model for advancing the goals of the California Biodiversity Collaborative.

 September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!

Guest author Karan Gathani is a certified Grassroots Ecology California Naturalist, and writes about the San Francisco Bay and Delta Biogregion for California Biodiversity Week 2021. You can follow more of Karan's writings posted on California Naturalist Diaries.

What things do you love about your bioregion?

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area/Delta Bioregion which means there is more to life than just paying Jacksons for your Avocado Toasts and artisan brewed coffee. For starters, it is one of the few bioregions on the Pacific coast where you can spend the morning tide pooling, get humbled while hiking through a redwood forest during the afternoon and still be on time to watch the sunset from the top of a mountain on the same day. And since the weather is usually cooperative for such outings, one can go exploring all year-round.

What are the highlights in terms of wildlife, geology, watersheds, beloved cultural resources, iconic species, etc?

San Francisco Bay is among the largest estuaries on the Pacific coast. This makes it an invaluable rest stop along the Pacific flyway. Hence, every winter you will see all the tidal wetlands swarmed with thousands of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. The scene is reminiscent of the town of Indio taken over by selfie-obsessed kids during the annual Coachella Valley festival and then abandoned at the end of the festival.

Another fascinating thing about this area is the presence of North American beavers residing inside a popular neighborhood park in the South Bay Area. Trying to convince people that a beaver is residing in the creek 50 ft from where people are walking and biking makes them wonder if I believe in unicorns as well.

A North American Beaver at a popular neighborhood park in South Bay

What natural phenomena do you look forward to annually?

There are so many things that I look forward to at different times of the year, but I will be mindful of the people reading this and list just one, which is not fair, but so is life.

San Jose being one of the largest and most populated cities in the United States has a remarkable event occurring every year in its Guadalupe River. The Chinook Salmon make their journey back swimming upstream from the Pacific Ocean to the place they were born. It is a sight I wish every resident gets to experience when the exhausted Salmon is using its last ounce of energy to power through the obstacles in hopes of passing along its genes. They die soon after mating and spawning. It is one event that makes you appreciate the struggle for life, the tragedy of death and joy of birth all in one landscape. It is a sober reminder to why it is so important to keep our watersheds clean and healthy, if we ever want to sustain a healthy Salmon population for future generations.

A Chinook Salmon swimming upstream in the Guadalupe River

Favorite guides and/or local naturalists that helped you to learn more about the bioregion

I owe a debt of gratitude to all the naturalists I get the opportunity to share the space with and constantly learn about new things. Among those, Dr. Merav Vonshak, Jan Hintermeister and Colter Cook are some people who have influenced me in looking holistically at the ecosystem rather than concentrating on a few species.

Activities you love to do to explore the unique nature of your bioregion

I try to participate in every local BioBlitz, and lucky for me that BioBlitz.club and Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful organize one every month. Other than that, exploring with docents by going on bird walks organized by San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory and Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society. And finally, explore a different world by going on night hikes with Grassroots Ecology and MidPeninsula Regional Open Space Preserve docents.

 September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!

A "Natural History Note" From UC California Naturalist's lead scientist, Dr. Cameron Barrows, in celebration of California Biodiversity Day.

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“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” - E.F. Schumacher

Asking questions about patterns in nature, or perhaps the sometimes apparent lack of patterns, can seem to lead to more confusion than answers. Why is this species here but not there? Why are there so many species here but not there? Why is this population growing while that population seems to be in decline? The number of questions one can ask is nearly endless, but solid answers are far scarcer. For those wanting a future that includes existing natural assemblages of plants and animals for their own sake, for a resilient earth, as well as for awe, enjoyment, and inquiry of future generations, these sorts of questions are more than just an intellectual exercise, they are critical for knowing the impact of our footprint on this planet, and with that knowledge how we might step a bit more lightly and soften that footprint.

Knowing where species occur and ideally some measures of their abundance are often the first questions. If you know those answers for some point in time, you can return later to see if numbers or occurrences have changed. Growth is good, declines are bad. Simple, right? Or is it too simple? Darwin and Wallace were inspired by economist Thomas Malthus' essay on population growth. Malthus was speaking about people and showed mathematically that unless there were wars, famine. or pandemics, human populations would grow geometrically until they had consumed all available resources. Darwin and Wallace extrapolated that prediction to the rest of nature and recognized that species were not growing until they had devoured all available resources. Rather species' populations ebbed and flowed. Nature is always in flux. For Darwin and Wallace, survivors of times when resources were scarce represented individuals that were better able to survive and pass those traits onto future generations. Ipso facto, survival of the fittest.

Changes in population abundances occur with seasons, between years, between decades, and beyond; the difference might be due to the vagaries of temperature, precipitation, food supplies, vegetation cover, or even the abundance of a competitor or a predator. In a laboratory you can try and control variables. In nature everything is a variable. The size and location of populations of plants and animals reflect the strength of those variables. Recording only the occurrence or abundance of a species without the context of the most important variables is almost meaningless. Long ago, when I first started surveying Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizards, I noted that the populations had been declining for several years. There was an immediate uproar claiming that the conservation design for the lizard was clearly inadequate and we needed to start over before it was too late. In arid environments drought is common, while consistently wet conditions are rare. Yet rain inputs and the plant and insect populations those rains catalyze are essential for positive population growth in desert species. It had been three years of drought and I argued that before starting over we need at least one wet year. The next year was wet and the lizard population doubled.  Context is everything.

I (along with an invaluable cadre of community scientists) still keep tabs on those fringe-toed lizards. The last couple years, 2019 and 2020, were a bit wetter than average and so there should have been positive population growth. For populations in the western Coachella Valley, north of Palm Springs, that was certainly what happened. However, for populations in the eastern-central portions of the valley, north of Palm Desert and La Quinta, those populations did not grow. How could I explain the lack of response to what has been the strongest variable influencing the lizard's population fluctuations? Was there some missing variable that required better management to restore, or was this a long-anticipated decline, a symptom of hyper aridity catalyzed by modern climate change? For most other lizard species there is an option for their populations to incrementally expand into cooler less arid habitats at higher elevations as lower elevations become increasing arid and less productive. Because fringe-toed lizards are inextricably tied to their sand dune habitat, moving up a mountain slope is not an option. There is a strong east-west gradient in rainfall in the Coachella Valley, with the western areas receiving up to and sometimes exceeding twice the rainfall of the central-eastern regions. Was this different response between the western and eastern/central fringe-toed lizard populations a signal that we had reached an aridity tipping point dooming those central-eastern populations?

That western-eastern difference in response to rainfall levels is precisely what I would have predicted if climate change was the culprit. But are there other possible explanations? Another variable that we measure is sand compaction. Fringe-toed lizard populations are more abundant where sands are less compacted. Sand compaction results from reductions in new sand inputs from sand sources. One of the greatest challenges in crafting a system of protected areas for the fringe-toed lizards was to include corridors that would deliver sand from sand sources to sand deposition areas. Sand movement through the corridors occurs due to both floods and high winds, both of which are antithetical to human habitation. By the time the fringe-toed lizard conservation plans were being developed, all the sand corridors were compromised by human development to one degree or another, but one of the most compromised regions was that central-eastern dune system.

So, while the western-eastern difference in response to rainfall levels is precisely what I would have predicted if climate change was the culprit, so would it be if a lack of new sand inputs-increasing sand compaction was the culprit. Our sand compaction measures did indicate increasing compaction in the central-eastern sand dunes, but that does not rule out climate change. What may be the best evidence for determining the relative strength of sand compaction versus increasing aridity in dictating the fringe-toed lizard abundance, was the abundance of other species, species that were not so tied to low sand compaction. Flat-tailed horned lizards occur of the central-eastern sand dunes, but they prefer sites with higher sand compaction. If they too did not increase their populations in response to the 2019-2020 wetter years, the scales would tip in favor of hyper aridity reducing food and overall habitat suitability for insectivorous lizards. On the other hand, if the horned lizard populations increased as did the fringe-toed populations on the western sand dunes, then sand compaction-lack of new sand delivery was more likely the stronger variable. The 2020-2021 horned lizard population was the highest we had measured in almost two decades. Context matters.

Nullius in verba

Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe

 September 4-12, 2021 is California Biodiversity Week. Join us in celebrating the unique biodiversity and renewing our commitment to stewarding the state's incredible natural heritage! During the Week, CalNat is posting blogs authored by members of our community, ending in our September 14th CONES event from noon-1:00 PM. Be sure to also check out a list of activities and resources online from the CA Natural Resources Agency!