Night Window Shopping on Westwood

We managed to see a movie and have dinner last night. Then walked along Westwood Blvd. for about ten blocks.

California's Prop 19 to Legalize Marijuana

See what we miss in Alaska by not having billboards?

Actual Billboard

Sunday's front page LA Times article about the marijuana initiative by Shari Roan begins:

"In 1969, Carol McDonald was 28, married and the mother of two young children, out for an evening of fun with a couple who smoked marijuana. By the end of the evening she was on her way to a 19-year addiction."

Then it wanders through research that finds marijuana fairly benign to studies that are more critical.  And it looks at a lot of issues.

• Impact on Mexican drug cartels?
  A:  Make them less powerful or Make them push harder drugs harder. 
  
  
• Impact on addiction? 
  A:  Addicts will be treated rather than jailed or more people will become addicted.
  
  
• Impact on driving? 
  A:  Little or moderate impact, but significant if mixed with alcohol or no lab detectable effects on driving ability.
  
  
• Impact on lungs? 
  A:  Hard to tell "because a large portion of heavy marijuana users also smoke tobacco, which muddies the picture of marijuana's effects."
  
  
• Impact on brain functions?
  A:  "Experts tend to agree that smoking marijuana causes short-term memory loss, they disagree widely on the overall cognitive effects of the drug."
  
  
• Impact on people moving up to harder drugs?
  A:  Not really, but the younger kids are when they start, the more likely to be addicted.
  
  
• Impact on school performance?
  A:  Not as bad as alcohol, but will put you behind.
  
  
• Impact on marijuana use?
  A:  No one knows, but some say use will go up, others say with legal medical marijuana and widespread illegal use, it shouldn't increase by much.

Some things are generally agreed on:

• "that marijuana should be avoided during pregnancy and that it is harmful for people with mental illness or who are at risk for developing a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia." 

•  " Marijuana is addictive for about 9% of adults who use it (compared with about 15% who use alcohol and 15% who use cocaine), according to federal data. Because it is the most widely used illegal substance in the country, marijuana dependence is more common than addiction to either cocaine or heroin despite its lower addiction potential."

"The bottom line is that marijuana is far less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes," Gutwillig added. "It's far less addictive than either of them. People tend to use marijuana in smaller amounts. It does not have alcohol's noxious association with violence and reckless behavior. And you can't overdose."

Then there are some concerns about how the law will be implemented.  Finally it gets back to Carol McDonald.  After chronicling her years of addiction, the article ends

Even after what she went through, McDonald said she would like to see marijuana legalized so that people who have problems with the drug will be steered into treatment.

Even "as someone who has been far down the rabbit hole, I still don't think it's as dangerous as alcohol," she said. "But if I'd had any inkling of what it would do, I would have been more careful."

My take is that marijuana is a symbolic issue.  It goes back to the 60's.  If you were around then and believe the 60's represented a blossoming of freedom, opposition to hypocrisy, and the beginning of a new awareness of human rights and the environment, then you probably lean toward legalizing pot.

If you were around then and think those times began the slow collapse of the family and American tradition, then marijuana is the symbol of all that was wrong back then and you're likely to oppose legalizing pot.  (If you feel that way about the 60's, but weren't around then, you might not make the ideological link between pot and the 60's, especially if you experienced pot as you grew up.)

Alcohol brings a lot of problems to our society and one could argue that marijuana would just add to that.  But it seems to me that marijuana is far more benign than alcohol and we don't ban many things that carry risks (driving cars, owning guns, bungee jumping, etc.)  And banning marijuana (and other drugs) has spawned a huge illegal trade which is having catastrophic impacts on Mexico and the US. 

It seems reasonable to me to try this out in California and see what happens, see if we can't make things work better with legal marijuana than with illegal marijuana.  It won't be without harmful side effects, but we already have huge harmful side effects with it being illegal.

Besides, it's practically legal already according to an LA Times piece by George Skelton:

In California, selling marijuana for non-medicinal use is a felony. But possessing less than one ounce — about a sandwich baggie-full — is a low misdemeanor punishable by a fine.

Starting Jan. 1, pot smoking will be even less of a state crime. Under a bill recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it will be deemed an infraction, equivalent to a traffic ticket.

Since 1996, when voters approved Prop. 215, it has been legal in California to grow, sell and smoke marijuana for medical purposes, subject to local control. A "patient" needs only a doctor's "recommendation," not a prescription.

Merely a quarter of buyers at medicinal pot shops "are truly in need of it because of a medical condition," says attorney George Mull, president of the California Cannabis Assn., which advocates "reasonable regulation of medical marijuana." [emphasis added]

But I haven't studied this proposition in detail and lots of prominent people oppose Prop. 19. 

The LA Times endorses a NO vote.

Their print version on October 10 says that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor (Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown) and for US Senator (Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer) and US Senator Dianne Feinstein oppose Prop 19.

So does the attorney for the California Cannabis Association quoted in the Skelton piece above:

Mull opposes Prop. 19, illustrating a split in the marijuana community.

And it would still be a Federal felony setting up a showdown between the Feds and the State.  Where are all those states' rights conservatives on this issue? 



Ballotmedia also has a lot of information on Prop. 19 including the full text.

A Weed by Any Other Name is Called Green Landscaping

Before we moved to Anchorage 30 some years ago, I checked annual precipitation.  Anchorage and LA, despite what people may think, get just about the same annual precipitation. LA's average is about 14 inches a year and Anchorage's is about 16.  (Note:  different sources offer different numbers, but they're not too different.) But in Anchorage the ground is covered by snow a good part of the year so the water in the soil is not used up.  What also sets them apart is that Anchorage gets its precipitation in relatively low amounts over many more days than LA. 

Here are a couple of lawn alternatives I saw as I ran today.  This is still not the majority of yards by a long shot.  But it's happening.

HGTV's post on lawn alternatives says in part:

Why plant a lawn that needs to be mowed 40 times a year when you could have a type of lawn that needs to be mowed four times a year, says alternative grass guru John Greenlee. "You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that then you've got more time to do other things--like gardening."

. . .

Save money, time and resources
Meadow lawns are more expensive to plant than sod initially because many native grasses are difficult to grow from seed and thus potted plants are necessary. "Lawn is the cheapest thing to plant but it becomes the most expensive thing in the garden to maintain. So once you've planted a meadow, you'll get your money back--usually within the first year--from reduced maintenance, reduced water, fertilizer and all of those other things that a lawn requires."

The Freelibrary offers this:

No logic explains why most homeowners insist on a green lawn in this semi-arid region. We know our water has to be brought to us at great cost to the environment. And the water problem isn't likely to improve in the future, as more people crowd into the Los Angeles basin The Los Angeles Basin is the coastal sediment-filled plain located between the peninsular and transverse ranges in southern California in the United States containing the central part of the city of Los Angeles as well as its southern and southeastern suburbs (both in Los Angeles
..... Click the link for more information..

Some changes in our wasteful pattern of cultivating velvety vel·vet·y 
adj. vel·vet·i·er, vel·vet·i·est
1. Suggestive of the texture of velvet; soft and smooth: velvety skin.

2.
..... Click the link for more information., picture-perfect lawns are sure to come when water gets more expensive and California's rhythm of drought returns. Get a head start and begin planning a garden instead of a grass carpet that needs constant mowing, watering and fertilizing. Here are 10 alternatives to growing turf on your property. Each one requires less water than grass. [You can get those ten here.]

 And the Sonoma County Master Gardeners tells us that some cities are encouraging the move to green landscaping:

Cities and water agencies around the county are firmly on the bandwagon to help with the cost of water conservation and lawn replacement. Sonoma City and Valley of the Moon Water District both have "cash for grass" lawn replacement subsidy programs and the City of Santa Rosa also has a rainwater harvesting rebate program. Several other cities offer rebates or programs, and the Sonoma County Water Agency may again offer a low-cost loan or other program--stay tuned.

One important big weather difference between Los Angeles and Anchorage is that Anchorage is in the Top 10 Clean Air Cities and LA is in the Top 10 Dirty Air Cities.

The California Budget Deadline and Human Capabilities

Article IV, Section 12 c(3) of the California Constitution says:

The Legislature shall pass the budget bill by midnight on June 15 of each year. 

This past Friday, October 8,  the legislature finally passed the budget - more than100 days after the fiscal year began. 
How can this happen?  How can the legislature be in violation of the State Constitution - 23 times out of the last 24 years it seems.

If your boss told you to jump over the building you work at, you'd laugh.
But if your boss told you do some report that was as impossible as jumping over the building, odds are you'd start scrambling to do it. 

We understand our physical limits better than we understand the limits of the more subjective aspects of our lives.  Is the

In addition to the June 15 deadline, the budget has to be passed by a 2/3 majority, a requirement added in 1933.  Given that the Republicans and Democrats ideologically disagree about how the world works and how human beings work, and given that each legislator has control only of his or her own vote - I suspect the deadline and the 2/3 majority requirement is like asking the Legislature to jump over the Capitol Building. 

The Constitution is a piece of paper created and recreated by human beings.  It's real to the extent that people believe in it. 

The California Constitution requires the budget to be passed by June 15, but if everyone looks the other way, it doesn't matter. 

To add one more hurdle to getting to the deadline on time, in 1978, as part of Prop 13, a 2/3 vote requirement was added for increasing revenues. 

[from Wyoming Legislature]

A California State Senate document on the History of the Budget from Fiscal Year 1965-66  to FY 2009 - 2010 shows that of the budgets between 1965-66 and 1978-79 (Prop 13 passed in this Fiscal Year I believe),  six of the 15 years, the budget was 'chaptered' after the beginning of the July 1 fiscal year.  All but two of those were done within a few days of the deadline (by July 4.)  One was July 6 and the worst was July 13.  (The deadline to pass the budget was missed 14/15 times, but only six times late enough to miss the July 1 beginning of the Fiscal Year.)

Since FY 1978-79, the budget was chaptered by July 1 nine times out of 31.  (I'm not completely sure I'm reading it right since FY 2009-10 says they passed the legislation in February which isn't the case.)  The delays are much longer - this year over 100 days.

Does this mean that Prop 13 made it worse? There's a correlation, but we don't know for sure that's the cause.  It could be that the political divisions got too fractious. 

Proposition 25 on California's November ballot would eliminate the requirement for a 2/3 majority to pass the budget.  It also adds a consequence for legislators by, according to Sunday's LA Times Voter Guide, "causing them to forfeit their salaries and expenses for every day they fail to settle on a spending plan."    (In Alaska, State judges have their salary withheld if they fail to submit an affidavit that they have no pending decisions or opinions over six months old.)

Remembering that some things we expect others to do, or others expect us to do are impossible, is useful.  Actually knowing when something is impossible is a lot harder.  

Pew Poll: Religious Ignorance

Nicholas Kristof, in today's NY Times, has a column about the Pew Research Center poll on religion.  He writes,

Almost half of Catholics didn’t understand Communion. Most Protestants didn’t know that Martin Luther started the Reformation. Almost half of Jews didn’t realize Maimonides was Jewish. And atheists were among the best informed about religion.

 Looking at the questions he samples in his article, I can see why people failed the test.  He picked 13 that he characterized as dealing with extremism and fundamentalism.  Here are the first three:

1. Which holy book stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death?

• >ddd
a. Koran b. Old Testament c. (Hindu) Upanishads

2. Which holy text declares: “Let there be no compulsion in religion”?

• >x
a. Koran b. Gospel of Matthew c. Letter of Paul to the Romans

3. The terrorists who pioneered the suicide vest in modern times, and the use of women in terror attacks, were affiliated with which major religion?

a. Islam b. Christianity c. Hinduism

 You can find the other ten questions and the answers in Kristof's editorial.  (The NY Times online is still free, but you may have to register to read it.)

I bring this up only because I just put up three posts (Part I: Snowy Plover, Part II: Beach Hoppers, Part III: Kelp Flies) about how complicated the world is and the need to recognize how little we know instead of making bombastic  authoritative statements about things we don't understand.    He says the same thing this way:

. . . the point of this little quiz is that religion is more complicated than it sometimes seems, and that we should be wary of rushing to inflammatory conclusions about any faith, especially based on cherry-picking texts.

LA Shots

Here are some photos from the last few days.


Bright Santa Monica house, not quite finished.

Italian Stone Pine Bark

 

OK, I get the Karma/Carma pun, but it wouldn't seem that Chevron (I guess their branding works, or is it someone else?) would pay to remind us we're all going to get screwed for polluting the earth with our cars. 

At Hurry Curry - Venice and Beethoven.  Delicious and ridiculously cheap.

 

After those rainy first days here.  

And today it was pushing hot.

Car or mobile storage bin?

 

There was a small arts and crafts fair at Moorpark and Laurel Canyon near where we were visiting.  I was impressed with the quality of the work.  Young people, but also retired folks.  One guy was a National Geographic photographer.  This guy was a pathologist and does really interesting work with paints and collages.  While we were talking, there was a loud crunching sound.

Ah, California.  Who says you can't meet others while driving?   We met Deano. Not driving.  I was admiring his neat shadow boxes with my camera and he didn't like that.  But I apologized and we had a good talk.  He's got a blue thumbnail.  I have pictures but he made it clear posting them would not be appreciated.  So go to his website. 

Another hospital visit.  (My mom's doing fine, this is someone else.)

And the ride home on the freeway.  Don't worry, we were going less than 10/mph at this point.  Six lanes southbound.  I'm no longer used to driving 60 mph with so many cars all around me making sudden moves.  At night.  So crawling along was fine. 

Damn This World Is Complicated Part III: Kelp Flies and Gulls [UPDATED]

 [UPDATE Aug 9, 2021: See this LA Times section on Recovering California Beach Dunes.]

So, we have the endangered Pacific Snowy Plovers (Part I) that live above the wrack line feeding on beach hoppers (Part II) and kelp flies that live in the kelp on the wrack line.  This is a whole world that most people miss completely.  The snowy plovers camouflage nicely on the sand, so nicely, that when they freeze thinking they can't be seen, they are right.  And people going to enjoy the beach can step on them.

People generally see the kelp as smelly garbage left by the surf.  And if they get closer, they see bugs and keep their distance.  But this is all a neat ecosystem and if you look closely at the 'bugs' there are a number of different kind.  And biologists have discovered the lives are pretty complex.

And we learned that humans' love for the beach has caused snowy plovers to find other places to lay their eggs - like the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

So Part III doesn't have that much to add, but here we'll look at the kelp flies that are also part of the plover diet. 

From a Hopkins Marine Science student paper by Joel D. Hyatt in 1972

The beach wrack flies Fucellia rufitibia, Coelopa vanduzeei, and Leptocera johnsoni occupy successive vertical levels inside banks of mixed wrack found low on California beaches. When the wrack is washed away, Coelopa are then found at the sand-wrack flake interface with Leptocera; Fucellia in a black band of flies above the highest waterline. Fucellia range widely up and down the beach. Movement to higher beach positions at night seems to be associated with temperature, but some Fucellia remain in the warmer surface layers of the lower wrack banks at night. Coelopa are usually only found at lower beach positions where they inhabit the moist intertior of wrack banks. Moisture and tide level are the important factors in Coelopa behavior. Mark and release experiments show that F. rufitibia do not disperse widely but constitute more or less fixed communities on the beach. C. vanduzeei are gregarious. In wrack preference experiments in the field, Fucellia and Coelopa exhibit strong preference for the surf grass Phykllospadix, probably as a source of shelter. Brown algae and mixed wrack are preferred to the same degree; red algae very little.

So, now there are three different kinds of kelp fly.  See, it always gets more complicated.  But that's true about learning anything.  Some people recognize classical music as "boring."  Others recognize it as "classical."  Some can recognize the period it was composed, and others the composers.  And some the specific title of the piece.

The same with rock music, or birds.  And now we're looking at kelp flies.   So are the ones I caught in the camera 

• Coelopa vanduzeei  
• Fucellia rufitibia or
  
• Leptocera Johnsoni?

What do these names mean and where do they come from?

If the spelling of genus and species terms sounds like Greek to you . . . then you’re on track in many cases. Every species can be unambiguously identified with just two words. The genus name and species name may come from any source whatsoever. Often they are Latin words, but they may also come from Ancient Greek, from a place, from a person, a name from a local language, etc. In fact, taxonomists come up with specific descriptors from a variety of sources, including inside-jokes and puns.

Scientific names sometimes bear the names of people who were instrumental in discovering or describing the species. Finally, some scientific names often reflect the common names given by people living in the region.  (from a Texas AMU website)

I found this on an Audubon Magazine website:

". . . the Coelopidae, a family of flies found on seaweed-strewn coasts around the world. Larvae develop in piles of rotting seaweed, or wrack.”

What is vanduzeei?  I'm not sure.  I remember talking to my friend about names for monitor lizards and sometimes they would Latinize the discoverer's name.  I did find this reference:

New synonyms are indicated under Squamodera vanduzeei (Van Dyke) as follows: S. fisheri (Cazier), S. fisheri vermiculata (Knull), and S. nanbrownae (Figg-Hoblyn).

It's possible that vanduzeei is taken from Van Dyke.   I don't think it really matters.  What I'm trying to show here is that everything, absolutely everything, has a surface, and as you look under the surface, there's another and another.  So many things to know.

And my point in the first of this series of posts was that in something like the ecology of the snowy plover, which is relatively tangible and finite, it is easy to see this complication and dive into it.

As we do that, we can recognize that this same level of complication lies in all the issues we face in life - from how what we eat affects our health to the effects of plastic bottles on the environment.  And while it is complicated, it isn't that difficult to go beyond the simplistic synopses given by mass media and politicians, at least to the point of having a reasonable feel for the issue.

 So, which of the the three kelp flies is my picture?


Livingworldphotography has a photo of Coelopa vanduzeei and says their hairy legs are a way to identify them.  Mine doesn't have hairy legs.


Natihistoc.bio  has a note with his excellent picture of Fucillia Rufitibia:

Note reddish tibia after which the species is named

And mine isn't reddish. 

And I couldn't find any pictures of Leptocera johnsoni.  And if you are asking, if these are all kelp flies, why don't they have the same genus name, then you are asking the right sort of questions.  I don't know the answer and I've got lots to do.

But along with the kelp, the wrack line, the snowy plovers, and the kelp flies, there were also lots of gulls on the beach.  Gulls are another very familiar part of the landscape that most people can identify as gulls.  But beyond that, it gets hairy.  For adults, it's relatively easy.  The color of their beaks and feet get you a long way.  But gulls are complicated because they look different at each stage of their lives and the bird books show three to five different stages for each type of gull. Just pointing out more complication that I won't go into now.  In any case, here are some gulls that were also out on the beach where the plovers were. 

The Santa Cruz Bird Club has some useful flow charts for identifying gulls.

This is a Heerman Gull at a easy to recognize stage

If anyone is still with me, this isn't to make people give up because everything is so complicated.

Step 1 is to recognize one's ignorance.  There is so much to know, we can only know a little bit of it.

Step 2 is to realize that we can gain some expertise in different areas without all that much work.  We just have to focus and drill down a bit.  Ideally, finding a book which does a good job of giving an overview of the topic, the different main lines of thought, and the key vocabulary.

Step 3 is to stop being caught up by all the trash information out there in the world - junk tv shows, junk news, etc.  Like junk food, it takes the place of serious information and makes our brains fat and lazy with useless data.

Damn This World Is Complicated Part II: Beach Hoppers [UPDATED]

 [UPDATE Aug 9, 2021: See this LA Times section on Recovering California Beach Dunes.]

OK, this one won't be as involved as the last one [Part I: Snowy Plovers.]   But remember, this is one of the main food sources of the threatened Western Snowy Plover, so it extends the discussion.  Our guide yesterday pointed out the beach Hoppers.  I grew up on nearby beaches and so I saw these as a kid, but I never knew their name and never looked at them carefully.  Beach Hoppers are small and much easier for me to capture in my camera so my pictures here will make up for the lack of photos of the Snowy Plover.   In fact, the digital camera makes it relatively easy to see them larger than you can with the naked eye.

So, let's get started with Beach Hoppers.

The Monterrey Aquarium website has a set of cards for kids that you can print out and learn about the beach life.  Here's their beach hopper card.

For more detailed pictures of a beach hopper labeled Orchestoidea californiana see Peter J. Bryant's website.

A 1964 Ecology article by Darl E. Bowers discusses two species of Orchestoidea - O. californiana and O. corniculata.  I'm guessing mine are californiana, but I'm not sure.  Bowers writes, in part:

"Competition for burrows between hoppers of the same species is commonly observed. In the early morning hours, large males may be seen fighting for possession of holes left open the night before. Fighting is presumably less energy-consuming than digging a burrow, but since most pugnacity is shown by mature males, possession of a burrow already occupied by a female is also of prime importance. Skirmishes for food items are likewise to be seen. Beach hoppers are eaten by an array of avian predators, mostly diurnal birds, and there is evidence that raccoons, moles, humans, beetles, and other animals take a toll of the hopper populations."

See?  As I said in the previous post, the more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.  I was only vaguely aware of these critters before yesterday's beach walk and now I know quite a bit.

And it's a helpful reminder that we ought to dig a little deeper into all the important issues of the day.  They are more complex than we think, but a little research on the internet, finding a good book that gives an overview of the issues can help us quite a bit. 

Check the guys peeking from below

Marinebio.net has great pictures of beach hoppers and other animals living on the beach including kelp flies that will be in the next post.


There we learn:

Beach hoppers burrow under seaweed to escape the dryness and heat of the day. They prefer the damp sand under the piles of rotting seaweed. This picture shows what you might see if you pulled up a pile of rotting seaweed ... the beach hoppers will jump (hop) this way and that. It is very easy to identify a beach hopper because it is the only species on the beach that will hop. At night many of the beach hoppers are out of the sand and hopping around the beaches in search of food.

Hopping and digging in the sand require specialized legs as seen in these views [You have to go to marinebio.net to see their great shots] of the beach hopper's segmented body. The hoppers dig head first, inserting their antennae in the sand (left). As they dig their abdomen is the last part seen (right) before the hopper plugs up its hole. Beach hoppers are in the crustacean group whose members are called amphipods. The beach hoppers found on the sandy beaches of Santa Barbara belong to the genus Orchestia or Orchestoidea. Beach hoppers are sometimes called 'sand fleas' but they are not fleas (nor are they even insects) and are not able to bite humans.

Hey, don't get squeamish here.  These are like tiny, shell-less shrimp.  And without the kelp washing up on the beach for these critters to hide and feed in, the snowy plover would have to change how it eats. 

Beach Hoppers is also the name of a musical group, a bicycle, and a boat.

[Update:   Part III:  Kelp Flies]
[Update June 5, 2017:  This post about a study of micro plastics in the environment. The researchers fed beach hoppers micro plastics to see how they affected the food chain.  I found out about this because someone got to this post from a link there.]

Damn This World Is Complicated Part I: Snowy Plovers and the Wrack [Updated]

 [UPDATED Aug 9, 2021: See this LA Times section on Recovering California Beach Dunes.]

The world continues to amaze me and to remind me how little I know.  We went for a walk at Dockweiler Beach yesterday, coordinated by the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors and the LA Audubon Society,  to see Snowy Plovers.  We did see them, but they were too far away and moved too much to get any good pictures.  That's one in the poster to the right. (I made this one bigger so you can double click to enlarge it.) But in addition to the Snowy Plovers we found out about other critters the plovers depend on. 

I'm sure this post goes into far more detail than any of you intended to read.  But I think if you bear with me, you'll see my point.  The more you know about something, the less you know.  I experience that a lot.

So, even though you know more than you did, you realize you know less because the universe of what there is to know has grown faster than the universe of what you know.  And it's even worse for people who know things that are patently wrong. 

I think this is something we should all keep in mind as we try to understand the diverse issues in our life - what causes the common cold, whether the bailout helped and what would have happened without it, the degree to which global warming is caused by humans and whether it can be changed.

It seems that many people want these issues simplified into whether they "support my ideology or not."  It's important to let go of our ideologies and be willing to accept the uncertainty that the complication of the world requires.  Be willing to accept findings that contradict what we want to be true.

Looking just at the ecology of the threatened Snowy Plover - a relatively simple and concrete phenomenon - reminds us of the incredible complexity of the issues our media and politicians manage to boil down into sound bytes.

The Snowy Plover


I took no pictures of the birds.  There were only about 20 birds on the stretch of beach we were at.  But considering the following from Coal Oil Point Reserve, that's a lot.

"The Pacific Coast population of the Western Snowy Plover was listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act in 1993 because of declining populations. The stretch of beach between Isla Vista and Ellwood (including Sands Beach) was designated "Critical Habitat" in December of 1999; at the time of the critical habitat designaton, the population in the entire Pacific Coast of the United States was estimated at less than 1500 individuals. "

The quote above is from a stretch of beach near Santa Barbara.  We were about 120 miles south at the west end of the Los Angeles International airport. 

Our guide at the wrack line

Things get complicated here because the snowy plover lives on the dry part of the beach and eats insects that live in the kelp that is washed on the shore.  One of the words I learned yesterday was "the wrack line."  This is not a place to torture birds.  Rather it is the edge of high tide where the seaweed and other debris sits on the beach after high tide.


 The best short description of the wrack line I found was an infrequently updated blog called The Wrackline:

The wrack line is the area of the shore between the low and high tides. The flotsam and jetsam of the sea come to rest along the wrack line. Who doesn't like to wander along that zone just for the discovery? Wander the wrack line of the modern world and see what washes up.

Local wrack line full of trash

Barbara Hurd wrote a book called Walking the Wrack Line and below you can hear her read on NPR a brief section about driftwood on some Alaskan beach.  

AA

Kelp pile

See what I mean about complications? I grew up at the beach and I'd never heard of the wrack line, but it plays an important part in the life of the snowy plover. This plover lives on the critters that live on the kelp on the wrack line. They nest further up on the dry sand of the beach.

And that's why they are so threatened on the Pacific Coast. People like beaches and coastal habitat has been degraded by humans.  From a report by Westminster College (Salt Lake City) ecology student Egan A. Rowe:

On U.S. coasts this habitat degradation is caused primarily by expanding beach front development. Recreation has also been responsible for a significant decline in the size of breeding populations. The use of beach grass (Ammophila arenaria) to stabilize dunes along the Pacific Coast has also greatly affected these birds. This stabilization has reduced the extent of open nesting habitat. Other impacts include frequent mechanical raking of beaches to remove garbage, seaweed, and other debris which has made beaches in southern California unsuitable for nesting and harms food resources for the snowy plover. These and other human pressures have caused this species to migrate inland to available breeding habitats such as the Great Salt Lake playa margins.

Rowe tells us further:

[T]he population breeding along the Pacific Coast of the U.S. and Baja California is listed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife as a Threatened species. In Washington and Alabama it has been designated an Endangered species by those states.  These designations have given rise to many measures being taken to protect this animal's habitat.  Some states have posted informative signs and roped of areas to reduce disturbance of nesting birds.  In some states such as Oregon, beaches have been closed.  These and other techniques have lead to improved hatching success.  However, there is still research being done to improve snowy plover nesting and hatching success.  For instance, experiments with solar powered electric fences, chick shelters, and artificially elevated nesting substrates at the Great Salt Plain, Oklahoma, show promise for increasing reproductive success.  All measures to protect snowy plovers have been too recent to determine their effect on population size.  [This and the other reports on different parts of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem appear to be from 1999.

What's happening eleven years later?  Well, ten years later, this report from the Daily Sound about snowy plovers at a beach in Goleta near Santa Barbara suggests real conflicts of will:

The drama over the plover stretches back more than three years. As part of a complex land swap agreement to preserve Ellwood Mesa from development, the California Coastal Commission granted a coastal development permit in 2005, that required Goleta to take steps to protect the plover habitat. The plover is listed as threatened with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 Among the requirements were for city to prohibit dogs and horses in some key areas and install permanent signage.

 Singer said that Goleta has taken some steps to protect the plovers, but high costs, opposition from dog owners, and questions about whether plover nesting actually exists along the roughly two-mile stretch of beach within Goleta’s jurisdiction, have slowed the city down.

“We don’t have snowy plovers nesting on our beaches,” he said. “Nesting doesn’t currently exist. Maybe that’s because we have dogs running around. I don’t  know. We don’t exactly have perfect conditions.”

 But the lack of an official habitat management plan is why activists suspect that plovers aren’t obviously nesting in the area. They point to the success of UCSB’s Coal Oil Point Reserve nearby as testimony that a program can work.
 At Coal Oil Point, docents monitor the plover habitat area year-round and the program has become a statewide model for plover preservation and habitat restoration.

Coal Oil Point Reserve was the place in the first quote of this post. 

The walk we went on yesterday is part of the conservation efforts - this being educational part of the efforts- of the Los Angeles Audubon Society  and the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors.

An LA Times article tells more about these efforts:

The birds are federally listed as a threatened species, which means they are at risk of becoming endangered.

The enclosure just north of Imperial Highway is the result of a three-year effort by federal and county officials and the Los Angeles Audubon Society. The Fish and Wildlife Service is committed to spending up to $14,000 on the project, officials said. Passersby may now spot an orange mesh fence surrounding the enclosure, with one side open to the ocean. What they may not see, however, are the Western snowy plovers.

"You can look right at them and think you're looking at sand," said David De Lange, president of the Los Angeles Audubon Society, an experienced bird watcher.

Plovers nest in the dunes by scratching an indentation in the sand, sometimes under a piece of debris, and lay their sand-colored eggs inside. But the camouflage may also make them vulnerable to unwary foot traffic.

"The chicks look like little cotton balls on sticks. They are cute," Hendron said. "But it's very easy to miss them, and if people even let their dogs off the leash, the dogs can step on the eggs. They can kill a chick."

That could be one reason the birds do not feel safe enough to nest at the Dockweiler site. The plovers will roost or hang out, but once the instinct to lay eggs kicks in, they tend to leave for safer areas, bird watchers say.

This has become a problem across Los Angeles County, De Lange said, noting that there has not been a confirmed Western snowy plover nesting on a county beach since 1949. Scientists hope that fencing off the area will discourage people from disturbing the birds, allowing them to relax enough to build nests. Experts have tried this approach at other sites in California, including Huntington Beach, with positive results, Hendron said. .  .

Figures show local conservation efforts may be working. The U.S. population of the species in 1993, when it was first listed as threatened, numbered fewer than 1,400. By 2005, the official head count had grown to 2,300.

I told you this would get complicated and offer my admiration to those of you who made it this far.  I want to do one or two more posts covering beach jumpers and kelp flies that live in the kelp on the wrack line and are major dining delicacies of the snowy plover.  And I also have pictures of the trash that came to rest on the wrack line.

But the point of all this is not simply that snowy plovers are threatened and minor human adjustments seem like they could help a lot.  Though that is important.  The point of this and the following posts on the topic is to remind people that this tiny little issue is vastly complicated so that we all remember the other issues our states and countries are facing are also that complicated and more so.

But just as I have gained a huge amount of knowledge in two days about this (and a growing awareness of how much else there is to know) I think the other issues we face are not impossible to grasp - at least at the level necessary to make reasonable decisions to resolve them.

We do have to stop spending our time on trivia and a little more time on getting more depth than the media offer us on Iran, immigration, the backgrounds of political candidates, etc.

And we have to drop our ideological "us" v. "them" mentality and work together to make this a better world for humans and all the other living things we share it with.

[UPDATE:  Part II: Beach Hoppers, Part III:  Kelp Flies] 

Cliff Groh Has Lengthy Background Post on Nicholas Marsh

There was an internet problem here at my mom's last night through this morning and the sun is shining beautifully so I had to go run and I do have to talk to and do things with and for my mom while I'm here, so this is just a quick link to Cliff's post at the blog Alaska Political Corruption which fills in a lot more details on Nick Marsh based on various reports he gathered.

Here's the link:

Notes on the Life, Death, and Mental State of Nicholas Marsh

(Marsh is the young federal prosecutor in the Alaska corruption cases who committed suicide last week.)