Kate Wing's Blog: Saving Wildlife and Wild Places

The ballad of the Delta smelt

2008-05-28T21:42:34Z

Let me tell you a story
of a fish whose glory
might have just escaped your eye
were it not for the dams
and diversion plans
that stopped it swimming by

For fate had dealt
a cruel hand to the smelt
in the shape of levees and pumps.
Small silvery fishes
with migrating wishes
and numbers down in the dumps.

As a tiny prey,
smelt may lack the cachet
of their anadromous kin.
but their plight was a sign
of the rivers’ decline
and the state the State was in.

Then a judge named Wanger
saw the smelt were in danger
and shut the pumping down.
The little smelt went
(with its cucumber scent)
to become the talk of the town.

The cities and farms
are concerned about harm;
Irrigation canals grow dry.
California’s drought
is not in doubt,
no water falls from the sky.

Will water conservation
be the state’s salvation?
Will we build a big straw to LA?
Or will the Delta Vision
meet indecision
and inertia rule the day?

For the water of the west
Is scarce at best,
On this we can all agree.
How we can share
With the fish and the bears,
That’s the work for NRDC.*

* Note: this work is also being done by the CSPA, CalTrout, Bay Institute, CBD, PCFFA, and many others but I just couldn’t fit everyone into the rhyme.

Taxes? Sign me up!

2008-01-11T17:24:31Z

Of our Governor's movies, "True Lies" is a favorite of mine because it comments on the way death happens off screen in so many action movies. Extras get plugged and fall out of the frame, presumably dying quietly in some easy-to-clean area. I think about this at State Budget time, because the real impacts of cuts that seem tiny (if you can even see them) are often just a little ways in the distance, out of sight, but very, very real.

Not that some of the cuts aren't big headliners, like the decision to close 48 state parks and take seasonal employees off 16 beaches. For the beaches, that means few or no lifeguards, maintenance workers, and folks testing for water quality; for the parks that means a lock on the gate. The LA Times is suggesting that the park closure is a way to get the public hopping mad and drive a tax increase, but Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the legislature say no way, no how, no new taxes.

So, I'd like to take a moment and speak in favor of taxes. I like my taxes just fine. I like them when I breathe and don't keel over from air pollution, I like having roads to drive on and water that comes out of my tap, and I like that if I think the government is messing up my taxes, I can get that info with a FOIA request, vote someone out of office, or sue. Not always an option with corporations. The world outside your door is a public world, a public resource, and a public good. As a member of the public, I'm proud to pay to protect it and keep it open.

Which is the reason I wish California were more like Missouri. Back in 1977, the state passed a 1/8th of one percent sales tax to fund the Department of Conservation. In 2006, that raised $99 million for land and water conservation programs and hunting and fishing activities, which is about the same amount as California's Department of Fish & Game received from the General Fund in 2006-7. Missouri is raising as much money from the general public as California is, with only 16% of California's population. And I'm not including fees from licenses or permits for either state, which make up the rest of their conservation budgets.

We'll be fighting over "budget dust" soon, as we call these 10% and 13% cuts that seem small by comparison to the whole budget, but in reality equal whole programs and parks. It would be nice if we could think bigger, about growing the pie instead of scraping by on crumbs, but it doesn't look like that will happen this year.

A year of falling chips

2007-11-20T16:21:48Z

Yesterday, the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation met for the second hearing on the oil spill we've had here in the last week. The state Legislature held its hearing last Thursday, where we heard from the ILWU that some employees of the contractor charged with spill response felt that company was understaffed, though they were not able to speak publicly without fearing for their jobs. Meanwhile the private contractor said he was just doing what he was told by the state, and the state should raise its standards if it wanted a better response. And we all learned alot about OSPR and its large binders of emergency response plans.

But there's a big difference between Sacramento and Washington, D.C., and it's not just the bomb-sniffing dogs. Yesterday was drizzly out at the Presidio, where doors for the hearing opened just ten minutes before the hearing started. I chatted with a park ranger about abalone diving, and then it was a bit of a reunion with staffers I hadn't seen since my days in DC in the late 1990s. There were flags, there was the mayor of San Francisco, and there was a wall of windows framing a view of the bay under discussion.

They got right down to business: have the Homeland Security mandates stretched the Coast Guard's resources too thinly? Why would it take the National Transportation Safety Board a year to complete its investigation? And if everyone agreed this was something that could have been prevented, why wasn't it? Call it a combination of working on Coast Guard and shipping issues for years and good staffing, but the Representatives had done their homework.

At the end of the day, even the Coast Guard Vice Admiral had to agree that something went terribly wrong on the deck of the Cosco Busan. Hundreds of ships turn right from the Port of Oakland and pass under the Bay Bridge every week, in foggy weather, and only this one hit it. Congress and the state are right to be worried about the uncoordinated response, especially since it sets a bad precedent for responses to other emergencies. But when recovering 20% of a spill is considered a great success, you've got to take a better look at your containment. The best containment is no spill at all.

Photo provided by Defenders of Wildlife, Ocean Conservancy, San Francisco Baykeeper, and SkyTruth, from image taken by the Radarsat-1 satellite, operated by MDA Geospatial Services Inc.

Oil in the bay

2007-11-09T20:21:39Z

By now, everyone out here is abuzz with the news that the Cosco Busan struck one of the support stanchions of the Bay Bridge on Wednesday and dumped 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the water. Ideally, that buzz would have accompanied a fast response to the spill itself on Weds, but many folks are disappointed with the Coast Guard and the private contractors the state uses to do emergency response.

Thursday we heard from fishermen that their boats were coming in with broad black stripes of oily fuel along the waterline. The tides and currents in the bay are so complex and vary with the winds that keeping track of the oil has been difficult, and it's shown up in surprising places. A few pieces of information I've picked up:

For Bay Area residents, if you find an oiled bird, call the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at 1-877-823-6926. There's also a flickr group for photos of the spill
SFSU has used data from various parts of the Coastal Ocean Monitoring System to model the possible trajectory of the spill. This is a fairly large Quicktime file.
It's not just birds but fish as well. With a low estimate for this year's herring population, oil in Richardson Bay could wipe out the fish and the fishery, due to start next month. Dungeness crab boats may vote to start their fishery late and fishermen are worried about the impact of the toxic oil on baby crabs in the bay.
As the SF Chronicle found out, the international maritime laws make it very hard to track down who actually owns the ship and thus who might be responsible. COSCO Container Lines Americas ("Experience/Quality/Service: that's what makes COSCO your choice of carriers') now states on its home page that the spill ships was not ownerd or operated by any of its carriers. You can change a ship's name, flag, and ownership with a few strokes of a pen, which is a long-standing problem for prosecuting illegal fishing, not to mention oil spills. William Langeweische's book "The Outlaw Sea" is an excellent read on the no man's land of big ships on the high seas.

Finally, just as with other natural disasters, the take-home lesson is to be prepared. Which does make me want to sing that song about Boy Scouts, but here we're talking not only about getting booms in the water faster bit also keeping the oceans healthy so they can survive events like oils spills. It's one thing to have a population of 100,000 herring when disaster strikes, and another altogether to have only 2,000 fish.

Bring out the dead

2007-10-13T03:50:50Z

Dang, today's Washington Post story on the California condor beat me to the punch on the Monty Python reference. My fellow blogger Andrew Wetzler has already ably characterized the situation in California, where we're counting down the hours until midnight on October 14th--the last day for Governor Schwarzenegger to sign or veto a bill to get lead ammunition out of the condor range. Condorman, where are you when we need you?

Condors aren't exactly my bailiwick, being as they have yet to evolve gills, but I'm drawn to the saga of a bird that's just trying to help us complete the circle of life, as it were. How often do we take time to give thanks to the decomposers, the composters, the most elemental recyclers on earth? Even Disney celebrated the hyenas, albeit giving them a slightly Machiavellian role. In India, the precipitous decline in vulture populations is leading to public health concerns as cow carcasses pile up at dumps. The same story in the Economist also describes the predicament of Parsees, who traditionally offer their dead to the "birds of the air" in lieu of burial but must now jury-rig other methods as vultures disappear.

Death feeds crabs and mushrooms and, eventually, us, one way or another, through the carbon cycle. It's natural that we are drawn to protect the cute and furry, even from the animals that depend on them for food. We should not forget to offer the same protection to the wildlife with less glamorous jobs and titles.

I like big fish and I cannot lie

2007-09-19T23:17:52Z

Let's face it, all fish are not the same. When we count fish for management, we lump them all together--quite literally--into pounds or tons but we know in our hearts that a baby fish and a mature fish aren't the same. They don't fetch the same price and they don't play the same role in maintaining the population. Your odds of making it from fish larvae to 3-year old fish are slim, 100,000 to one in some cases. But once you're a big fish, especially a big female, well, you can rule the underwater reproductive world. If you don't get caught first.

Scientists, who are as susceptible to acronyms as the rest of us, refer to these fish as Big Old Fat Females, or Big Old Fat Fecund Female Fish, or BOFFFs (I think each subsequent paper adds an F). The late, sorely missed, Dr. Steven Berkeley found that for Pacific rockfish BOFFs not only had more babies but these baby fish had a better chance of survival than the eggs produces by younger females. Not because they taught their fish some wily tricks but because the babies got a little extra food to keep them going through the rough period of finding a pile of rocks to call home.

As more news comes out about the importance of BOFFFs it is causing some folks to rethink how we manage the sea. After all, I'm not the only one who loves big fish. Maybe we should let some of the big ones go, or better yet, not catch them in the first place.

It's just too much work to worry about whales

2007-09-11T18:10:03Z

Andrew, I can't believe you didn't blog the whale lawsuit decision on Aug. 31st! I mean, it wasn't in our favor, but that seems like even more reason to talk about it. The Navy won an appeals court decision in San Francisco, of all places, where there are whales swimming 1000 yards from the courthouse. Our whale folks have been working on this for years and there's a long list of "simple things you can do to keep from deafening whales" for the Navy, including picking your testing times to stay out of the paths of whales and using passive sonar to check for whales before you test your new devices. These are not insurmountable barriers. It's plain wrong to set up this false dichotomy between national defense and environmental protection and I'm disappointed that the court bought into that argument. With all due respect to the judge who cited our current wars "with two countries" I would like to see the evidence that it's our lack of submarine detection that's the problem there.

Who gets up at 6am on a Saturday to get cold & wet?

2007-08-27T02:30:34Z

There were fourteen of us at Miller Point Park by nine am on Saturday, sipping on coffee and munching scones from the local bakeries (thank you, early rising bakers of Point Reyes). Peter organized the kayak trip for the Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association, helping get people out into the Sanctuary itself, in this case, an unusually glassy calm Tomales Bay. Besides me we had:

a passionate jellyfish fan, who scooped them out of the water upside-down
a couple who'd signed up two days before, after seeing a flier at a film about skulls
a high school senior and experienced kayaker/climber/outdoors adventurer
a guy who worked for a clothing line and rescued seals in his spare time

I was something of the relief naturalist, there to talk about underwater parks and the Marine Life Protection Act, but occasionally pressed into service to answer questions like "what is this thing on the eelgrass?". There's a lot of eelgrass in Tomales Bay, which is what makes it such a great place for Dungeness crabs and fish and also part of why I love the place so much. My home bay, the Chesapeake, once harbored huge eelgrass meadows alongside its oyster reefs, but they've been in decline for years for many of the reasons mentioned in this post. My mother used to volunteer for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's eelgrass restoration program, and she loved casually mentioning to people that she grew grass in the basement (Hi Mom!).

We saw river otters catching fish, harbor seals, purple starfish, and the far away butts of Tule elk herding their harems up the hills. Achillius and John took great care of our group and nobody flipped, even in the wake of the power boats passing through. There were almost as many power boats on the water as there were canoes and kayaks, but it looked like the national trend was holding up in the Bay. Which is to say, wildlife watching as an outdoor activity is on the rise, with a 19% increase in participation over the last ten years, while fishing participation declined by 15% over the same period of time. There are still a lot of people engaged in outdoor recreation in the U.S.--87 million, or 2 in five people you meet -- and that doesn't even include the high school senior on my trip, since they didn't count anyone under 16. But the way we choose to interact with nature is changing. It doesn't always require early weekend mornings, though yesterday was definitely worth the wake up. Besides, there's always Sunday for napping.

There's gold in them thar streams

2007-08-08T02:57:07Z

In preparation for a talk I'm giving tomorrow night, I've been rereading the great book "The Fisherman's Problem," by Arthur McEvoy. It's a fabulous book, and if you like Doris Kearns Goodwin or Kevin Starr, I recommend tracking down a copy. It's actually the product of McEvoy's thesis research and it's an indispensable reference for anyone who works on fish in the west, or pretty much anywhere. Here's the passage that stopped me today, from a section about goldminers turning to salmon fishing when the gold dried up:

"A fish, however, is more than a gold nugget. It is part of a species - a coherent, self-perpetuating entity that works...Unfortunately for this particular species, its genetic program included instructions for collecting that accumulated food into a form, a salmon run, which happened to be convenient for the human economy to tap for it's own purposes." p.72

That's really the trick about catching, selling, and buying wild fish. They're not just gold nuggets you can pick up and sell, but complicated living creatures that depend on a web of environmental factors to survive. Even if you never caught a one, you couldn't guarantee that you'ld see the same number of fish in a river every year. Which can make it hard to plan a business.