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On Sunday Nov. 9, some 30 volunteers planted more than 700 young native plants in that section of Audubon Canyon Ranch on Marin County’s Bolinas Lagoon. The canyon is named for the volunteers who worked to save the lagoon and other parts of the local seashore from a catastrophic oil spill in 1971.  

On the anniversary of a more recent spill from the Cosco Busan last November, these folks are working to stem a more insidious disaster. Invasive plants have been altering the California landscape for at least a century, and not for the better.  

One reason wildland weeds are so successful is that they have fewer local predators—that is, they support fewer other species. Another is that they happen to be species with a tendency to colonize disturbed sites, where the web of local life has been ruptured, the way opportunistic microorganisms become pathogens in wounds and with compromised immune systems. Clear-cut forests, abandoned pastures, plowed fields, and even roadside gravel strips host these plants that were brought into the Americas by Europeans as cattle-feed contaminants, ornamentals, even medicinal herbs.  

Volunteer Canyon used to be a working ranch. The good: ancient apple and pear trees, the odd grapevine. The bad: poison hemlock, French broom, assorted thistles, non-native grasses.  

Audubon Canyon’s charismatic project leader, Denise Della Santina, has been here only a year. She’d rebuilt a shadehouse, a greenhouse, and various useful sheds; more important, a seedbank and a volunteer corps. They’ve planted native honeysuckle, coastal sage, mugwort, cow parsnip, coffeeberry, coyote brush, coast live oak, bigleaf maples, alders, and more over the past seasons. They’re supporting California’s unique lifeweb, building a system that reduces silting-it’s a significant problem accelerated by recent human activities like ranching, and it’s aging Bolinas Lagoon prematurely-and, hopefully, fosters the return of species like salmon.  

“All the plants-we have over 5,000 of them, for the Ranch’s four canyons-were propagated from seed we gathered right here,” said Della Santina. “First, we had to clear this”—she sweeps an arm in a broad arc over several visible acres—“of Himalayan blackberry and poison hemlock, French broom, all those invaders. We’re laying down hay as mulch, to suppress weeds and give our plants a head start. We’ll need volunteers for regular maintenance, too. 

“It’s education too-when people invest their time and labor and get dirty, it changes their perspective,” she said. She didn’t need to point out that they’re working in one of our most beautiful spots, with hawks and ravens flying over to supervise and rafts of newly-arrived wintering ducks and shorebirds joining the lagoon’s resident egrets and visiting pelicans.  

Audubon Canyon Ranch holds weekly workdays on Thursdays, 9 a.m. to noon. More volunteer days like Sunday’s are scheduled for December 6, 2008 and January 10, 2009. See the Volunteering page at http://www.egret.org or call(415) 868-9244 or e-mail Denise Della Santina at denise@egret.org for more information. Everyone’s welcome! 

Bolinas Lagoon Preserve 

4900 Highway One, Stinson Beach 

(415) 868-9244 

FAX (415) 868-1699 

acr@egret.org