UCD restoring area for habitat

Davis Enterprise - June 22, 2005
By Cory Golden

UCD restoring area for habitat
Davis Enterprise – 6/23/05
By Cory Golden, staff writer

Looking ahead to UC Davis' future has begun benefiting wildlife away from the campus, through an effort to restore nearby farmland and orchards to a more natural state.

On Tuesday, UCD hosted a tour of its Russell Ranch Wildlife Area, about 6 miles west of the campus. The 2-year-old restoration project is turning back the clock more than a century, to a time of grasslands and riparian forest along Putah Creek, converting 380 acres to wildlife habitat and a teaching and research area.

The new wildlife area - in which UCD has invested about $500,000 so far - will serve as mitigation land for current and future building projects. Habitat mitigation fees of $4,555 per acre, charged when a building project is planned on campus, are paid for by the funding source, be it a donor or a public fund.

"It was more cost effective to (do the restoration) all at once," said Andrew Fulks, UCD Riparian Reserve manager, "and it assured there would be habitat in place before anything takes place on campus. We looked at mitigation banks, but we liked this idea better.

"It's not just teaching and research - it's doing something good for the environment."

Unlike the university's 170-acre main reserve, and its 3 1/2 miles along Putah Creek, the new wildlife area will not be open to the public.

It will, however, be a short drive for researchers and students.

UCD hopes the wildlife area also will attract valley elderberry longhorn beetles, listed as federally endangered, Swainson's hawks, listed as threatened by the state, and western burrowing owls, a bird whose unprotected status continues to be a heated topic because of their declining numbers in Northern California.

The 1,589-acre ranch, where the wildlife area is located, was purchased in 1990 for $7.88 million from William Russell and Charlotte Russell Ham, descendants of the family that settled there in 1850.

The remainder of the ranch is either leased to non-university farmers or is being used by the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences for long-term research on the sustainability and environmental impact of conventional and alternative farming methods.

Tuesday's tour, led by Fulks and Sid England, UCD director of environmental planning, began in a wide expanse of restored grassland stretching from the creek to Russell Boulevard.

Here blue wild rye, meadow barley, creeping wild rye, California onion grass and purple needle grass are among the native perennial species replacing wheat and sunflower fields. Through careful planning, the fields are returning to what they might have looked like 150 years ago.

"The public should care (about grasslands) because they represent our wild heritage," Fulks said. "There's a lot about our native ecosystems we don't entirely understand and that we need to research. In California we only have about 1 percent of our original grasslands left. I think we lose something as a society if we lose them."

The grasslands will afford researchers a chance to try different mowing, grazing and burning regimes in their studies of restoration practices. Here, as elsewhere on the wildlife area, all preparation, ongoing care and research, will be mapped to create a historical database of what's been tried where.

The new swaths of grass also will provide foraging habitat for Swainson's hawks, which feed on insects and, when they have young in their nests, small rodents.

If all goes well, the notoriously picky burrowing owls may take up residence there too. Artificial burrows haven't attracted the birds yet, but at least one has been seen on the property. The good news is, ground squirrels have already returned to the fields - it's into former squirrel burrows the owls most often settle.

Fulks said the grass also will be kept relatively short, which owls prefer and which should make foraging easier for hawks.

Wildflowers - like monkey flowers, lupines and California poppies - will eventually grow there, too, once initial spraying for broadleaf weeds can be reduced and grasses alone cover the fields.

In one pasture where a timed burning wiped out invasive medusahead grass, which was suppressing native species, wildflowers have already sprung up on their own.

"We're just learning different techniques," Fulks said. "Nature is helping us and showing us what to do next."

The tour then moved to the site of an abandoned kiwi orchard above the creek. When the university took over the property, it was covered with about 10,000 pressure-treated posts and miles of wire - leftover trellises on which kiwi had grown.

In the 15 years since the orchard was in use, about 700 young valley oaks had started growing there on their own.

A contractor left the oaks but removed the trellises, selling off many of the chemically treated posts to grape-growers while UCD recycled about 1,000 for fences and other uses.

With the obstructions gone, "almost instantaneously, birds started moving in," Fulks said. The ground is being prepared for a planned fall planting of another mix of native grass.

Overhead, as Fulks spoke, red-tailed hawks and a turkey vulture circled. A Swainson's hawk turned into the midday sun, then dove. A red-shoulder hawk shrieked in the distance.

Closer to the creek sits a 6 1/2-acre plateau, an Asian pear orchard abandoned because floods and mud made it impractical. Here a massive effort removed acres of the dense invasive species arundo donax, a bamboo-like giant reed, and tamarisk, a woody shrub, which were outcompeting native plants and causing erosion by forcing the creek against its opposite bank.

In their place, UCD has planted valley oaks, box elders and Oregon ash and arroyo willow. In 18 months' time, many of the trees are outgrowing the wire meant protecting them from jackrabbits and beaver.

Down by the creek, with the tamarisk gone, cottonwood seedlings have sprung up. To a nearby nest box - one of many hung along the creek in an effort to better a population hurt by loss of native trees - an ash-throated flycatcher returned.

Two years ago UCD began transplanting elderberry shrubs here, one still growing around a post from a horse corral. Other shrubs, their seeds gathered nearby to maintain genetic purity, have since been planted.

The elderberry longhorn beetle, a wood borer, has never been found on bushes on campus, England said. But it has been found along the creek.

Fulks said that the bushes planted here, when mature, should provide better habitat for the rare insect than shrubs on campus.

The beetle spends most of its life in a larval stage, living among the stems of the plant, only to emerge when the elderberry blooms.

For now, as planting and planning continue, UCD can only wait for them, and hope. #
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