Northern California wetlands are getting back to natural

[depakid]

Across Lagunitas Creek and Tomales Bay, the hills to the east are privately owned and still support dairy ranches. Cattle were gradually phased out of the new wetlands area when its restoration began in 2000. By last year the cattle were mostly gone.
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Reporting from Point Reyes Station, Calif. -- Conservationists often speak of restoring landscapes as erasing the "hand of man." But sometimes the job of undoing decades of human manipulation requires wielding an even heavier hand.

It took eight years of planning, of which two were spent bulldozing and excavating to knock down levees and redirect creeks, to re-create the "naturalness" of the Giacomini Wetlands, one of the most extensive restoration projects of its kind undertaken by the National Park Service.

The project comes more than 60 years after one of the largest estuary systems on the Central Coast was obliterated to make way for dairy cattle providing milk and butter during World War II.

Today, after the last levee is breached and high high tide is restored to most of the 560 acres of former pasture, the Giacomini Wetlands at Point Reyes National Seashore will begin to perform their natural function: restoring the health of Tomales Bay.

The new estuary system is integral to a 200-square-mile watershed, where it filters pollutants. It also serves as a habitat and nursery for a menagerie of marine life and birds.

As some water has seeped in during the last months, park rangers have reported rare sightings: rays and leopard sharks gliding into the shallows of the former pasture.

"We couldn't get it back to what it looked like in 1860, and that's OK," said park service hydrologist Brannon Ketcham, standing atop an 8-foot-high berm that was about to be scraped away. "The idea is to return the natural hydraulics, and the habitat will come back. In a year, no one will know we did anything."

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-wetlands26-2008oct26,0,7736899.story

[tabatha]

1. That is wonderful.

I visited Point Reyes and was distressed to see something different from what I expected - too much cattle where I had expected a natural reserve.

[XemaSab]

2. The ranches there are historic

n/t