It’s still too soon to say how the 2010 salmon season will turn out. The Pacific Fisheries Management Council is considering options ranging from entirely closed to “substantial” seasons

California and Central Oregon

In 2008 and 2009, poor Sacramento returns led to the largest fishery closure on record. While this year’s run should be better, the season options are still limited.  Last year about 122,000 fish were expected to spawn, but only about 39,000 actually returned.  Without any fishing, 245,000 fish are expected to return to the Sacramento River this year.  This year the Council will manage for a minimum conservation goal of 150,000 – 180,000 spawning adult salmon to provide more assurance of meeting the minimum goal of 122,000. 

Also in California, Klamath River Fall Chinook are forecast to meet the minimum natural spawning goal of 35,000, and the 2010 management objective of 40,700.

Coho returns are expected to be lower in 2010, and quotas for Oregon fisheries will be substantially less than in 2009.

Along the San Mateo County coast, trained volunteers play a major role in protecting the Western Snowy Plover—a small shorebird that lays its eggs on the sand at a few California beaches every summer.

The snowy plovers, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, may be found on several local beaches during the winter months.  In the spring and summer, the plovers congregate on the few beaches that can provide safe nesting sites, including Half Moon Bay State Beach—a busy recreational beach where a protected habitat is set aside for the plovers to nest.

Volunteers in the Half Moon Bay State Beach Plover Watch program monitor the beach to help protect the plovers and point them out to beach visitors.  Public education—sometimes including presentations for school groups—is an important part of the volunteer program.

When volunteers find a plover nest—well-camouflaged eggs laid in a depression in the sand—they call in help to build a wire “exclosure” around it to prevent predators such as ravens and gulls from taking the eggs.  When the eggs hatch, about four weeks later, the plover chicks are cared for by the male parent for almost a month until they can fly (fledge).  The female parent often leaves for another beach where she may breed with another male.

The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District is holding a public meeting in Half Moon Bay on March 17 to consider purchasing a 340-acre property known as Lobitos Ridge from the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). Please help the District inform your readers about this meeting to be held:

March 17 at 6:30 p.m.
Coastside Fire Protection District
1191 Main Street
Half Moon Bay, CA. 94019

The property is adjacent to the District’s existing Purisima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve near Half Moon Bay, and is an important link in the goal of connecting “Purisima to the Sea” by preserving a corridor of public open space and agricultural land from Skyline Ridge to the San Mateo County coast. The District purchased an adjacent 260-acre property from POST in June 2009, and an adjacent 450-acre property from the University of California in August 2009. The District hopes to add one final piece of land to complete this project in 2011.

“Lobitos Ridge is a key link connecting public lands together that provide all of us with scenic beauty, as well as vital necessities like clean water and locally produced food,” said District General Manager Steve Abbors.

The District is a public agency whose mission is to preserve open space and agricultural land, protect and restore the natural environment and provide for ecologically sensitive public recreation and education. If purchased by the District, Lobitos Ridge would continue to be grazed and farmed, and would remain closed until a public planning process looks at opportunities to balance public access with environmental preservation and agriculture.

UPDATE at 10:56: Forecast initial wave height in Half Moon Bay is 3.3 ft, shortly before forecast arrival in San Francisco at 1:26pm today.

A tsunami advisory (low-level warning) has been issued for the coastal areas along California. The tsunami is expected reach San Francisco at 1:26pm, and the San Mateo coast shortly before that.

Significant widespread inundation is not expected for areas under an advisory.  Tsunami advisories mean that a tsunami capable of producing strong currents or waves dangerous to persons in or very near the water is imminent or expected.   

Currents may be hazardous to swimmers, boats, and coastal structures and may continue for several hours after the initial wave arrival.

NOTE: This was originally posted as a comment on an earlier story. We’ve republished it as a letter in order to spark some conversation about the proposal.

Absent from the recent “Traffic & Trails” outside consulting effort last year were:

1. An awareness of the coastal environment in general—what it means to be “coastal”—and our local coastal environment in particular.
2. An awareness of the California Coastal Act and our LCP.
3. An awareness of the history and character of our local communities.
4. An awareness of the numerous past considerations of vehicular and non-vehicular transportation in our area.
5. An awareness of the essential natural and financial resources of our area, in concert with what development our area can absorb without being degraded.

What we saw was a set of “principles”, etc., for imposing the designs of landscape architects and community planners on, essentially, a blank slate.

In every example of their work elsewhere, we saw designs that resulted in greater development and the increased hardscaping that goes with it. These people are for increased building and pavement—at least that is what their designs show. They do not know the physical difference between a road and a trail. They don’t recognize huge energy and pollution costs of industries involved in implementing their designs—for example the cement industry.

Some of their ideas would come close to creating de facto transportation corridors and hubs that would exempt, via last year’s SB375, surrounding new development from vital environmental regulations and reviews. Such simple matters as their prolific use of tree “walls” in their designs would block coastal views in El Granada that some residents have rightfully fought to preserve for decades. (There were no native trees on our coastal terrace.)

Rather than restore the now-parking-blighted Burnham Strip to the community commons it was originally laid out to be, they would cut off edges of it for widened roads. The runoff from the additional paving in their designs would add to the problems we already have, further degrading some local creeks into the storm sewers they are becoming.

Now I’m well aware some locals, including our urban environmentalists, like the idea of turning the midcoast into a putatively-“upscale,” artificially-designed suburbia, not unlike some of the planned and paved-over coastal communities created or retrofitted in Southern California and Florida. But I’m hoping those who appreciate the remaining coastal character of our communities and who prefer to live more in harmony with our area rather than institute ever more expensive efforts to dominate it will push for genuine improvements to our roads and trails and not fall for this setup for further urbanization.

It is difficult to see this consultant’s work as anything more than justification and a step toward the overdevelopment our county supervisors are trying to foist on us in their (so far unapproved) revised LCP worded for the benefit of their developer and builder buddies.

Reprinted from Newsdesk.org

For the second straight year, the much-loved California Brown Pelican population is experiencing a mystifying die-off.

“It’s a mystery,” said Dana Michaels, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Game, She is quoted in the Mercury News as saying, “It’s tragic. It’s very sad to see these poor birds suffer,” she said “I hope we can get to the bottom of it. There’s something really endearing about pelicans.”

Indeed, the pelican is the inspiration behind one of the most-quoted limericks of all time:

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I’m damned if I see how the helican!

—Dixon Lanier Merritt, 1910

DFG wildlife biologist Esther Burkett said, in a report in the Chronicle:

“We think it’s probably related to El Niño and the big storms. “When the ocean gets all mixed up, the fish are moving around and the birds cannot find them. The majority of birds we found were just weakened by the lack of food.” The pelicans began turning up sick and dead in odd places throughout California and Oregon in mid-January. The wave of starving and emaciated pelicans overwhelmed the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia, which took in about 400 pelicans at its two branches. Many of the ill pelicans were waterlogged and suffering from hypothermia, problems that normally occur during oil spills.

A similar die-off occurred in 2009. The birds had been spending time off the coast of Oregon when a severe storm hit, driving the birds south and inland, fleeing the winds and freezing temperatures. Many of the birds recovered by rescuers showed signs of frostbite on their feet and pouches, suggesting that the birds were indeed unprepared for the unusually harsh conditions.

The pelican has had a precarious time of it in recent years, according to a report in Scientific American.

Brown pelicans are a rare endangered species success story. Once ravaged by the effects of DDT, the brown pelican was formerly protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. But decades after DDT was banned in the U.S., pelican populations have rebounded, and the bird was removed from the endangered list last November. The current population is estimated at around 650,000.

The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District’s board of directors approved purchase of a 160-acre property in Half Moon Bay at a public meeting Wednesday night. The seller, a private party, will retain ownership of the adjacent property which includes their working Christmas tree farm. Less than two acres of the tree farm is on the land the District is purchasing, and will be leased back to the seller to be operated as part of the tree farm.

The property is located near Highway 92 and Skyline Boulevard, an area identified as a priority for land conservation because it serves as a gateway to the San Mateo County Coast. The District’s purchase of the property helps to preserve agriculture, rural character and scenic beauty of the Half Moon Bay area. Protection and restoration of the natural environment are also a priority for the District, and the purchased property provides rich and diverse habitat for wildlife.

Because the property is surrounded on all sides by private land, it will remain closed to the public for the time being. Future land purchases will be necessary to connect it to the District’s existing Mills Creek Open Space Preserve, less than a mile away. 

The National Weather Service forecasts gusty winds until 9pm Friday night. This could result in power outages.

Strong winds along with periods of heavy rain will likely make travel difficult at times. The combination of wet soils from recent rainfall along with very windy conditions will likely cause downed trees. This could lead to local power outages.

The county Planning Commission has cancelled its planned visit to the site of the Big Wave development.

The cost of updating the project’s draft Environmental Impact Report has caused a cascade of delays. Because the consultant requires more money to complete the EIR, the release of the final report has been delayed. The Planning Commission has delayed its scheduled March 10 hearing until the final EIR is completed.  This led the developer has delay putting up story poles until the minimum 10 days before the hearing, and the Planning Commission has delayed its site visit until the story poles are erected.