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Natural History Trips
A few hours away from Santa Barbara and Ventura, the Carrizo Plain is a hidden gem that will allow our community to view the full bloom of California poppies, lupines, goldfields, fiddlenecks, phacelias, owl's clover, and blue dicks that are seen during late March or early April, coinciding with our trip date.
Channel Islands Restoration held our highly anticipated White Mountains Educational trip during the 4th of July holiday weekend. CIR Volunteer Coordinator Nancy Diaz writes about her firsthand experience on this annual Natural History Trip.
Our trip last week to the White Mountains was an unqualified success, and many CIR volunteers and supporters want us to schedule additional trips there and to Death Valley National Park. CIR has an educational mission in addition to our main focus, which is habitat restoration.
Things typically slow down a bit for CIR in midsummer. Weed growth slows and planting time at our restoration sites finishes, but several projects still keep us busy:
We continue to make trips to Anacapa Island at least twice a month with volunteers from our email list and with support from corporate partners like Citrix Online. Check out our Anacapa blog for details:
We started a new project at the Conejo open space near Thousand Oaks. They have a great volunteer program, and they asked CIR to help with some specialty weed eradication and we also recruited some of our volunteers to help. We should announce some other volunteer days in the near future.
CIR also began a project at More Mesa in Goleta, as part of the replacement of the large staircase from the mesa top to the beach. The County of Santa Barbara required that the invasive iceplant and Myoporum trees at the site be replaced by natives, and CIR has been hired to assist with this aspect of the project.
Rein Teen Tours joined us at our San Marcos Foothills and Lake Los Carneros projects last week. Rein is a tour group, consisting of mostly high school aged kids from the East Coast. They spend several weeks in California doing many activities, including service work for non-profits. This is the fourth year CIR has worked with them.
Work continues at the San Marcos Foothills sites. Although planting is finished for this season, we continue to irrigate our native plantings. Weeds tend to sprout up where we apply water, so we will still be calling on volunteers for help providing love and care to the great native plants now growing in what used to be weed patches! Watch your email for announcements about volunteer days. Starting around November, we will do a second round of planting at both sites in the Foothills.
For more information about this projects or to learn about volunteering, please contact:
More than 25 people came to our presentation on the White Mountains in Ventura earlier this week. Dr. Tanya Atwater provided a super PowerPoint on the plate tectonic history of Southern California and the geology of the White Mountains. Ken Owen showed a presentation on "ecological islands" (ecosystems surrounded by unlike ecosystems) like high mountains surrounded by desert. Twenty eight people have signed up for our White Mountains trip that will start on Thursday.
Our pre-trip meeting for our second White Mountains educational trip is coming up on Tuesday, and we have produced a new video to highlight the best parts of the four day excursion. We plan to offer the trip to the White Mountains periodically, and the video will serve as a showcase of some of the wonderful educational opportunities that CIR offers.
