Saturday, February 28, 2009
Workshop from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
At the Train Depot, 110 Higgins Canyon Road, Half Moon Bay

Please join us for an exciting workshop led by Alvaro Jaramillo, local biologist, life-long birder, eco-tour guide to the Americas, and author of Field Guide to the Birds of Chile and New World Blackbirds. Come learn about the Coastside birds of prey: hawks, eagles, falcons, kites and owls. Study field marks, behavior, ecology and migratory patterns. Find out how to tell them apart and where to locate them. Light refreshments will be served.

Wavecrest Bird Walk from 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Meet at Smith Field at the end of Wavecrest Road, Half Moon Bay

Come stroll through this beautiful bluff top open space, lead by Alvaro Jaramillo and Gary Deghi, HMB wildlife biologist, environmental consultant and Sequoia Audubon board member. Apply your workshop skills and identify birds and other wildlife. Warm beverages and cookies will be served at the end.

Suggested donation for Workshop: $15, seniors $5, under 18 free.
Wavecrest Bird Walk: free. Bring binoculars, dress in layers and wear sturdy shoes.

For more information:
office: 650.284.5056
[email protected]
coastsidelandtrust.org

Drought made California in the 1840s a dusty and desolate backwater, writes Gaye Lebaron in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

There was no land suitable for agriculture anywhere around the pueblo of Sonoma, [Lt. Charles Wilkes] wrote in his report. And the Sacramento Valley was no more than a "barren wasteland."

Wilkes, you see, had the bad luck to arrive in California in the year 1841, which was a drought year in this area of such significant proportions as to change the course of history.

I raise this issue now because it looks like the course of history may wobble, or at least bend a bit, in subsequent months. We’ve had rain, but the experts tell us that 2009, like 1841 and a dozen or more years since, will be recorded as another drought year. ...

Certainly the population couldn’t drink enough to matter. There was only a Presidio, nothing more, in San Francisco. Northern California was divided into large (I mean 40,000-acres large) land grants.

[John] Bidwell, traveling south, estimated there were 200 people in Santa Barbara, 250 in Los Angeles and 150 in San Diego. He may have missed a few, since estimates for Mexico’s Alta California in the 1840s placed the population at about 80,000. But there were still a lot fewer water drinkers, lawn-waterers and driveway-hosers than today’s 36 million-plus.

Still, there had not been enough rain to go around. In another recollection, Bidwell wrote about the "parched earth" that blew out of his hand and about the "total failures" of corn and grain crops.

ONE OF THOSE significant failures altered the destiny of our North Coast. If we had had a little more rain that winter, John Sutter might have been able to pay the departing Russians for Fort Ross. As it happened, Sutter had three successive years of crop failures and couldn’t pay the Russians the $5,000 worth of wheat he owed them in ‘41 and ‘42, or the $10,000 in wheat and produce that was due in ‘43, which Bidwell described as "dryest year I’ve ever known, in fact it was almost rainless."

A powerful Pacific storm is forecast for Saturday night:

A powerful Pacific storm system will strengthen off the coast today and tonight capable of producing heavy rain and strong winds. Southerly winds will increase late today and overnight as the pressure gradient tightens over northern California. Winds will be strongest tonight and early Sunday therefore a wind advisory has been issued for tonight and early Sunday.

... and more rain and heavy winds to follow through next Friday:

A period of moderate to heavy rain is expected on Sunday and Sunday night. The heaviest precipitation is expected to occur over areas of elevated terrain. Especially hazardous conditions will be present across the burn scar areas of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties. People in and near these burn scar areas should keep abreast of the latest forecasts and be prepared to act if any watches or warnings are issued.

Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) announced the addition of Donna Dubinsky to its Board of Directors and the appointment of Board member Mark Wan as Chair of the private, non-profit land trust.

High-tech entrepreneur Dubinsky is regarded as one of the driving forces behind the rise of PDA (personal digital assistant) and "smartphone" technology in Silicon Valley. After stints at Apple and Claris, she co-founded Palm, Inc., with computer-design visionary Jeff Hawkins, and served as CEO.  In 1996, Dubinsky and Hawkins introduced their new invention, the popular PalmPilot. Their association led to the founding of Handspring, which in 1999 introduced the next-generation PDA the Visor and, later, the successful smartphone Treo.  Subsequently Handspring merged into Palm, where until recently Dubinsky served on the board of directors.

Venture capitalist Mark Wan joined POST’s Board in 2003. As Board Chair he succeeds Karie Thomson, who joined the Board in 1996 and served as Chair from 2006 to 2008.  Thomson is now Vice Chair.

Formerly a general partner at Brentwood Associates, Wan helped fund and found companies such as General Surgical Innovations, Odyssey Healthcare and Perclose Medical. In 1993, he launched the investment fund Three Arch Partners, in Portola Valley, where he continues to seek out new healthcare firms, often assuming temporary operating responsibility and managing key functions during a company’s early years.

The public is invited to attend a meeting of the Sanctuary Advisory Councils for San Francisco-based Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.  For more information on the Sanctuary Advisory Councils, please visits: http://farallones.noaa.gov/manage/sac.html and http://montereybay.noaa.gov/intro/advisory/advisory.html.

For more information on the Gulf of the Farallones and the Monterey Bay national marine sanctuaries please visit: http://farallones.noaa.gov/ and hyttp://montereybay.noaa.gov/

Agenda after the jump.

About 150 Coastsiders showed up for a meeting to discuss recreation in Rancho Corral de Tierra after it becomes part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, reports the County Times.

Nearly 200 locals have signed Bechtell’s petition to set aside some land for dogs to roam free once it comes under public management, but Bechtell says he isn’t optimistic given the federal agency’s history of enforcing leash laws in areas where there previously were none.

Parks officials wouldn’t comment on specifics, since they are just beginning to draft a management plan and environmental impact statement, which won’t be ready for implementation until 2011.

A tentative outline of the plan, presented last week at the meeting, would divide the property into two zones. There would be a rural uplands zone with trails for horses, hikers and mountain bikers, along with the possibility of a new hiking trail connecting Rancho Corral de Tierra with Montara Mountain through property owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. ...

Nothing may get done for several years, considering the Peninsula Open Space Trust has attached a $15 million sale price to Rancho Corral de Tierra, and federal legislators have appropriated only $1.96 million toward that goal so far.

The dog-walking issue will likely not be resolved until 2012 or later because it is being dealt with as part of a separate dog-management plan that will establish a bureaucratic process for analyzing which dog areas can remain off-leash, according to GGNRA spokeswoman Chris Powell.

Two small park zones in San Francisco allow off-leash dog use under a 2006 court order; the GGNRA was sued in 2000 by dog owners after enforcing a ban on off-leash dog walking that had long been on the books.

Many of those mountain lions, which seem to be spotted more and frequently, may in fact be bobcats, reports the County Times.  In the desert, female mountain lions have a range of about 32,000 acres and males about 64,000 acres (100 sq miles).

However, territories in San Mateo County are smaller because food sources are more readily available, Roessler said.

Animals seen in several recent sightings may have been bobcats, which "seem to be less shy" and "get acclimated to people and neighborhoods," even cozying up on porch chairs, she said.

Bobcats outnumber mountain lions in San Mateo County, and may be the actual source of most mountain lion reports, she said.

Lions "need big ranges, and if you look at that, the Santa Cruz Mountains themselves wouldn’t provide much habitat except for a few lions," Roessler said. "If that’s the situation, then the reports we get are either inaccurate or people are seeing the same lion over and over again."

One possible reason for mountain lions being spotted in residential areas could be that they are young, have just been pushed away from their mothers, and are attempting to establish their territory, Roessler said.

In recent years, animals thought to have been mountain lions have turned out to be bobcats, coyotes or raccoons, say police in Half Moon Bay, Daly City, South San Francisco and Millbrae.

Earlier, Darin Boville suggested that a recent mountain lion sighting near Seal Cove was probably a bobcat.

"When we have enough places that are not worth caring about, we will have a nation that is not worth defending."—James Howard Kunstler

I’ve mentioned in the past that my view of development and community has been strongly influenced by Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere.Take 20 minutes to watch Kunstler’s take on the Tragedy of Suburbia. Kunstler is not only right, he’s incredibly funny.

Kunstler introduced many Americans to "New Urbanism" and "Smart Growth".  The Tragedy of the Coastside is that these terms are being used to promote projects that are the opposite of what they mean. Watch this video, and think about projects like Wavecrest, Beachwood, or Peeble’s Pacifica Quarry. Ask yourself what kind of community their promoters have in mind for us.

"Golden Lands, Golden Opportunity", a new report from San Francisco’s Greenbelt Alliance and the Bay Area Open Space Council, urges more and better protection of Bay Area land from misuse, reports the Chron.

The giant green corridor envisioned in the report would not mean commerce or private business would cease. The 100,000-acre coastal dairy belt in Sonoma County, vineyards in Napa and fertile farmland in Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Solano and Marin counties would be protected.

Trails linking 47 cities in the nine Bay Area counties would also be funded, including the 500-mile Bay Trail and the Carquinez Strait Scenic Loop. In San Francisco, a 13-mile corridor along the southeastern waterfront known as the Blue Greenway would bring recreation to an underserved area of the city.

Watersheds along the San Mateo and Santa Clara county coasts, urban parks in Alameda and the 470,000 acres of redwood forests and woodlands in Sonoma County would be protected under the plan.

The goals outlined in the report are to make sure all Bay Area residents have a park within a 10-minute walk of their home, to improve urban parks and to create transit connections.

High-priority lands would either be purchased or placed under conservation easements. Farmers and other land stewards would be given the support and resources needed to take care of the land and sell locally farmed products.

Strong land-use policies would be enacted in every Bay Area city, according to the report. That would mean establishing urban growth boundaries especially in Solano and Contra Costa counties, where suburban sprawl threatens open space.

The Weather Service is forecasting the rain beginning Wednesday night, with two Pacific storms headed our way, reaching the coast Wednesday evening.

Rain looks likely for all of our areas on Thursday with up to half an inch of rain expected in many urban locations and up to an inch possible for higher elevation spots. A secondary system will move across California late Thursday into Friday and bring showers and a slight chance of thundershowers to many locations. Another half of an inch of rain can be expected for lower elevation spots with higher elevation locations south of San Francisco possibly getting more than an additional inch of rainfall.