If you haven’t been to the Carpinteria Salt Marsh, you are missing out!
The Carpinteria Salt Marsh is an incredibly diverse and fragile area easily visible from the 101, but difficult to access given its protected status. I look forward to any opportunity to work there, and evidentially so do many of our volunteers. I see the same people returning to do hard, dirty work for free. (You all know who you are, thank you!) The improvements we have made along the salt marsh in the last couple months simply would not have been possible without the involvement of our dedicated volunteers. I have to admit when I saw the budget for the project and finally grasped the full scope of work, I had doubts that maybe in this instance, success might be… elusive. But more on that in a bit, first some background.
Southern California tidal salt marshes are nearly extinct. Only about 3-10% of the historic salt marshes remain. The rest have been dredged for harbors or filled in for developments. Think of where airports are located in SoCal. Santa Barbara, Point Mugu, LAX, are all sitting on huge areas that once were tidal salt marshes. And the Carpinteria salt marsh makes up a large percentage of what little remains.
It might be a symptom of such a limited amount of habitat remaining, so many species competing for an area, but the Carpinteria salt marsh is teeming with life and diversity - above and below the water and everywhere underfoot. There have been over 200 species of birds sighted there, including my favorite local, “Ollie” the Osprey. We have also seen sharks and seals a number of times. It is a critical spawning ground for many fish, including some of the more delicious kind.
The endangered salt marsh bird’s-beak, (Chloropyron maritimum ssp. maritimum) is found there and only 6 other estuaries in the rest of the world, restricted in its range between Morro Bay and northern Baja California, Mexico. However, at this time, salt marsh bird’s-beak in Carpinteria Salt Marsh is extremely threatened by an invasive plant, European Sea Lavender, (Limonium duriusculum) that grows particularly well in the tiny niche remaining that the Birds Beak occupies. (We’ve also done a significant amount of work to remove this invasive.) The quadruple threat of reduced habitat, competition with invasive plants, sea-level rise and lack of funding to intervene may mean that bird’s- beak disappears forever during our lifetime. Because of the incredible interconnectedness of this delicate ecosystem, that seemingly minor event could set into motion a cascade of events with unimaginable consequences.
With all this in mind, I walked the nearly half-mile of ice plant covered road shoulder next to the marsh. This is where that aforementioned doubt crept in. We needed to remove the entire span of it by hand, and then haul it to a dumpster that couldn’t be parked close to the work site. Then when all that was done, we had to plant 500 native plants in the bare ground and set up drip irrigation. And all of this would have to be done on the sparse budget afforded to habitat restoration projects. Things weren’t looking good.
And then the volunteers arrived. The first workday was raining at starting time. Still about 15 people came out and eventually so did the sun. We had a glorious and productive day clearing about 300 feet of the project’s half mile. Each successive workday was more efficient and 5 workdays later we had removed around 50 tons of ice plant (100,000 pounds) from over 2,200 feet of road shoulder and were ready to plant the natives we had been raising in our Camarillo nursery (with the help of yet more volunteers!).
Planting day came and so did the volunteers! About 25 people joined me and our Nursery Manager Kelle Green, and of course our UCSB Interns Viviana and Sophia (funded by the University’s Associated Students Coastal Fund). It’s a good thing we had so many staff on site because this group of volunteers came to make a difference! We had about 500 plants to install and irrigate, and three days budgeted to do it. This crew of “fire-eaters” had most of the holes dug before first break. By the end of the day we had all the plants in the ground and the irrigation system almost halfway complete.
This project is only possible because of the contributions of the neighbors on Sand Point Road and the Gas Company who contributed funding, and volunteers who did the dirty work. The Carpinteria Salt Marsh needs all the help it can get. I no longer have doubts about the success of this project. With community and volunteer support like we have had on this project, I’m confident the salt marsh will outlast me, and with a little assistance, so will salt marsh bird’s-beak.