Natural Perspectives:

With the weather as hot as it’s been lately, I’ve been taking my orientation crews from the Orange County Conservation Corps to work on projects along the coast. For our most recent job, I checked with Grace Adams at the Bolsa Chica Conservancy to see what needed doing the most. She pointed out that the Brazilian peppers that my crews cut down last year had resprouted.

The biologists with the Department of Fish and Game were supposed to have sprayed the resprouts with herbicide after we cut the nonnative trees, but they didn’t. So the work had to be redone.

Because my crews are new to field work, I give them an orientation lecture that includes safety. Most of our corps members are city kids with no experience in nature. Hazards that they may face on the job range from poison oak to rattlesnakes to mountain lions. They need to learn how to deal with these things.

After my lecture, I estimated that the crew of six corps members could cut the two dozen trees over the course of the morning. What I didn’t count on was the enthusiasm of this remarkable crew. Dennis Smith discovered that he could pull the smaller trees right out of the sand, along with several feet of root. He showed the others how to do this, and they made short work of the smaller resprouts. The larger stumps had multiple branches sprouting from the stumps, so those had to be cut with loppers.

When I saw how fast my corps members were working, I knew they were going to finish the job early. On the spur of the moment, I called Lisa Birkle at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center and asked if we could have an educational tour. The center is closed to the public, but the corps has done work for them in the past, and they were happy to accommodate us.

The mallard that I helped capture at Central Park a couple of weeks ago had already healed and been released, but my crew got to see a brown pelican, a cormorant, a lot of young raccoons and other assorted wildlife. One of the animals being treated was a female opossum. A volunteer asked us if we wanted to feel the pouch. Some of the young men took advantage of this unique opportunity, and so did I. Neither Vic nor I have ever put our finger into an opossum’s pouch. I gotta tell you, a opossum’s pouch feels weird, kind of puffy and hairy.

Our next stop was the Bolsa Chica Conservancy, where we go for education after lunch. With a marine aquarium, live snakes and lizards, touchable furs, and mounted birds, it’s a great place for learning about nature. This visit was unusual in that two fishermen had each just brought in a two-spotted octopus. Grace was out for lunch, so I made an executive decision to leave the cephalopods in the bucket rather than put them in the aquarium. The reason was that octopuses can cause problems in an aquarium. First, they’ll eat anything they can catch. Then these escape artists will crawl out of the tank.

These octopuses were destined to go back into the Bolsa Chica, but not before visitors and my crew had a chance to observe them. True to their Houdini reputation, they began to crawl up the side of the bucket and over the edge. I kept pushing them back down into the bucket, which was my second novel experience of the day. I had never touched an octopus before, although Vic says he has. Their tentacles are remarkably strong. Because they have a mouth that is like a parrot’s beak, one has to be careful not to let them pull a finger into their mouth. They can bite it off. I assigned a reluctant corps member the job of keeping the octopuses in the bucket.

The rest of us went outside to finish up a Native American story stick for the conservancy. I had already tied some rabbit fur, raccoon tail, reproduction eagle feather, reproduction grizzly bear claws, and assorted shells to the stick using long leather thongs. The corps members used an electric drill to make holes in deer hooves and clamshells, which we then tied to the stick along with an obsidian arrowhead. Corps members had a great work experience along with a unique educational opportunity. And the conservancy now has a Native American story stick for their docents to use while interpreting how local tribes used local resources for food and clothing.

After our work on conservation awareness in the corps classroom the next day, my crew got their permanent crew assignments. I was very pleased that two of them, Sedrick George and Salvador Sanchez, were placed on the Audubon Starr Ranch crew. We currently have a small crew that is helping to restore Bell Creek by removing vinca, an invasive vine. They will be working in poison oak and prickly pear cactus, but that isn’t what pleased me about their assignment. Starr Ranch is an incredibly wild location near Coto de Caza and Caspers Regional Park, where mountain lions, bobcats and coyotes still roam freely. That crew is going to get a wonderful education about nature.

The corps sent me several pictures of a mountain lion that were taken by webcams at the ranch last week. Seeing a mountain lion in the wild is one experience that neither Vic nor I have had yet. Maybe some day.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].