Build a Wetland, Save the Frogs … If You Can Figure Out Where to Build It

here are three kinds of federally listed frogs in California, and they are simply endangered by modern life.

“Factors associated with declining populations of the frog,” says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s red-legged frog recovery plan, “include degradation and loss of its habitat through agriculture, urbanization, mining, overgrazing, recreation, timber harvesting, non-native plants, impoundments, water diversions, degraded water quality, use of pesticides, and introduced predators.”

Habitat destruction, spurred by a human need to dredge and dry out low-lying wetlands, is probably the biggest problem. Amphibians are found on every continent except Antarctica, but 90 percent of their habitat is gone, says Kathlyn Franco, a wetlands coordinator with Save the Frogs. Frogs need water to breed, so the many centuries people spent diverting water have exacted an enormous toll. In most places there is just no longer enough water to support healthy amphibian populations. “It’s pretty amazing how much water we’ve moved and gotten rid of,” Franco says. “We need to build wetlands everywhere, because they were everywhere.”

Save the Frogs is trying to change the status quo. In 2014, the group launched a wetland-building campaign it calls “Re-frogging America.” Kerry Kriger, the founder and executive director of Save the Frogs, says the goal is to add 1,000 wetlands in the United States in the next decade. Save the Frogs wants to build half of those wetlands, with caring citizens nationwide supplying the rest. (The group offers wetland construction workshops.)

The challenge is: where to build these wetlands? It’s one thing to identify moved water as the cause of amphibian decline, quite another to identify a place to move that water back. Kriger has identified more or less three options. One is to create wetlands in existing parks, such as the Eldorado National Forest, where Save the Frogs built six wetlands in 2014. Another option is to build wetlands on private land, with the permission of the landowner. (The Re-frogging America mailing list includes the question “Do you want a wetland?”)

In the Bay Area, the preferred option has turned out to be school property – convenient, and arguably a place where the wetlands will have the most educational influence on the people around them. Sometimes this is a relatively easy process, and sometimes a very hard one, but always it is an illustration of the challenges in attempting to improve conditions for wildlife in a human setting.

At San Lorenzo Valley Charter School in Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz Mountains, for example, the school and nonprofit worked together easily to fill in a former pond. Administrators and students alike watched for rains to fill it in and for frogs to return.

At Manor Elementary School in Fairfax, bureaucratic roadblocks and administrative concerns about permit compliance and accessibility have stalled a similar project.

Working school district by school district (each with its own rules), figuring out local permits and presenting to school boards, not to mention constructing wetlands, means a significant effort for a small outfit like Save the Frogs. But, says U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service frog biologist Jane Hendron, “every bit helps.” Hendron told the story of the recovery of the mountain yellow-legged frog, which was down to 100 individuals before agencies and conservation groups worked together to start a captive breeding program and eventually wild reintroduction — a venture that saved the species.

“Gotta do it. Gotta go down fighting,” said California Fish and Wildlife biologist Chris Nagano. “Can’t just throw up your hands… [If you] think about the whole world it makes you crazy. Focus on one species or wetland.”

The federal recovery plan for the California red-legged frog set a target for delisting it in 2025 — also the 10-year mark for Save the Frogs’ plan to build 1,000 wetlands. Both are ambitious, but every project brings them closer.

Clifford School in Redwood City is one of the success stories. First-grade teacher Gwen Minor saw students smashing Pacific chorus frogs in a drainage ditch near the school a few years ago and proposed a wetland in place of the drainage ditch to help inspire and educate. The school board approved the project unanimously last May, and the wetlands were constructed this winter.

Teachers have taught kids at the side of the drainage ditch for 20 years, she said, but “now it can be a real classroom,” Minor said. “This is an amazing resource for the community.”

On the first day of construction, the former drainage ditch behind the field at Clifford School was swarming with students who were helping convert it into a wetland with six separate pools. Kriger observed the progress from the Frog Pond Observation Deck next to the ditch.

“The teachers are super happy about it,” he said. “We’ve had hundreds of kids out here today, and they went straight to the shovels.”

In the thick of what will soon be wetlands, wetland construction expert Tom Biebighauser stood in the center of a group of students, explaining the concept of “slope” as they dug the wetlands and spread the dirt on the hillside behind

For many of the kids, it is the “first time they’ve used shovels or rakes,” Biebighauser said. “Today we’ve taught them about slope and aquatic plants.” Mosquitoes will probably move in, Biebighauser said – but as the bottom of a food web that will also include salamanders, frogs, toads, water striders, dragonflies, and damselflies. Bringing a wetland back includes the whole picture, healthy ecosystem and all.

Clifford School is situated on what was once a much larger wetland, Biebighauser said. The scene was a reminder of the way people have moved water around, to the detriment of frogs – and the way some people are now moving it back to the frogs’ benefit. Biebighauser directed me to a hill behind the field and asked what I thought the landscape looked like before the school was built. The flat top of the hill meant it had been cut off to supply dirt to something else — “and where do you think they put that dirt?”

Biebighauser’s face brightened as I slowly made the connection: that hill had filled in this wetland. Water out, frogs out except for the drainage ditch where the amphibians remained, waiting.

At Mountain Lake, One Last Chance to See the Turtles Off

If you remember the Presidio’s Mountain Lake of 15 years ago, you remember the algae blooms in summer and the dead fish floating in the lake. To see the lake a few weeks ago, as over 50 people did at a triumphant restoration event at the outdoor classroom, is to see something else entirely: a restored place clean enough to host Western pond turtles. Which is what the spectators were there to see: the second and final release of turtles into the lake, a last chance to see the turtles off, and perhaps a last chance to see a Western Pond turtle up close outside of a zoo.

The only time the turtles can really be seen in the now healthy lake is when they’re basking, said Jessie Bushell, the director of conservation at the San Francisco Zoo, but there is one female turtle who likes to bask on the floaters near the beach on the south shore of the lake on sunny days.

“This turtle release is symbolic of so much transformation,” said Michael Boland, chief of planning, projects, and programs at the Presidio Trust. Mountain Lake, he said, is not just about Mountain Lake, it’s about how the environment is managed: “Nature survives in cities because of people.”

Which, said Sonoma State lecturer Wendy St. John, is one reason the project has succeeded. People around the lake have rallied to its restoration. “This is their neighborhood, not just a touristy area,” St. John said. “It’s been a community effort.”

A young turtle fan pets one of the Western pond turtles before its release into Mountain Lake. (Photo by Charity Vargas Photography, courtesy Presidio Trust)

Along Mountain Lake Trail, adjoining the outdoor classroom, were booths from the National Park Service, the Presidio Trust, and the San Francisco Zoo, many with activities for children, ranging from reptile trivia to paper shell coloring. The zoo table had empty turtle shells to touch, and one not-empty turtle shell containing Blondie, the oldest Western Pond turtle in the United States, who has lived at the San Francisco Zoo since 1969.

The restoration at Mountain Lake has a kid-friendly component, but it has also been a living laboratory for the scientists. When Dana Terry of Sonoma State released Western Pond turtles into the lake two months ago, he was experimenting with different methods of releasing turtles back into the environment, and whether or not one way or another is more stressful for the turtles. Some turtles were released directly into the lake with no restrictions on movement, and some turtles were released after a period of acclimation in an enclosed area of the lake.

The results after two months: turtles that had a couple weeks to acclimate tended to disperse throughout the lake. Turtles released with no period of acclimation tended to clump in the area in which they were released.

The second turtle release at Mountain Lake was a repeat of the experiment.

St. John said it wasn’t necessarily a problem that some of the turtles didn’t disperse, but it could become an issue from a competition standpoint. She suspects that the turtles released with no acclimation period will eventually acclimatize and use the whole lake.

The crowd was directed by Jason Lisenby of the Presidio to head from the outdoor classroom to the eastern shore where the turtles would be departing. From behind the wooden railings, the south beach was also visible with spectators lining the lake or standing on the stairs leading down to the beach. Children were gently urged to the front, and one grandmother pointed out the white mesh enclosure on the West Shore buffer to her young granddaughter, who was straining to peer over the fence.

“Do you see that cage? That’s where they are,” she said. The 15 turtles in the cage had been acclimating for three weeks, while another group of 15 turtles made its way through the crowd on the east shore in a large plastic container. The gate leading to the lake was opened, and the turtles disappeared through the trees on their way to the canoe that would take them across the lake. As the canoe appeared from behind the trees, people yelled, “Bon voyage,” and the two men wearing orange lifejackets in the boat turned and waved. A murmur went through the crowd as Terry, waiting in the hip-high water next to the cage, lifted the white mesh lid of the enclosure as the canoe approached.

Sonoma State graduate student Dana Terry prepares to release caged turtles into Mountain Lake. (Photo by Charity Vargas Photography, courtesy Presidio Trust)

Although alerted by Lisenby that “science isn’t always a spectator sport,” and that once the turtles were in the boat, it would be difficult to see what was going on, numerous people did stick around to watch the canoe reach the other side of the lake.

One man joked, “They should hold signs up saying ‘We are now weighing turtles, we are now releasing turtles.’”

Despite the drought and the recent scorching weather – neither one good for turtles — there is hope for the Western Pond turtles because of the potential for El Nino rains, said Bushell. St. John agreed.

“El Nino, bring it on!” St. John said as people began to disperse on the east shore.

“But bring it on gently,” Lisenby added. “Over many days.”

When the turtles were recaptured using their telemetry devices to see how they were doing, they had gained weight. And the zoo and its partners have just received a grant through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums to extend the project at Mountain Lake — meaning that in the future, the turtles can be tracked by GPS. Bushell said she hopes that the Mountain Lake project will work as a “model or reference for future projects.”

But it’s really only the beginning. As more turtles begin using more of the lake, they can determine which areas are better for food and help provide better habitat, Bushell said. St. John also hopes that in three to five years, the females will be nesting, which would provide an opportunity to study nesting behavior.

The Mountain Lake restoration is making a huge difference for the community and for the Western Pond turtle; there will be turtles in the lake for the next generation. “A world without turtles is like a world without elephants and tigers,” Bushell said.

Basking Sharks Appear, Briefly, In Monterey Bay — But Don’t Call It a Comeback

“Basking sharks,” Sean Van Sommeran says repeatedly, “are the most endangered large shark in the Pacific Ocean.”

And, as if to emphasize the point, we can’t find them. Monterey-based squid fisherman Kevin Reynolds reported seeing a huge school recently, the Monterey Herald reported in July, but Pelagic Shark Research Foundation Executive Director Van Sommeran, his research assistant Curtis Craver, and I are on the search to see them with our own eyes. Gray water chops against the sides of Craver’s boat, the Sea Gayle, as we motor through the fog in Monterey Bay. The Santa Cruz Mountains long since disappeared into the clouds, and while there’s plenty of life in Monterey Bay today – sea otters, molas, and egg jellyfish – there’s nothing at all like a school of 20-foot-long fish, mouths agape, enormous gill slits flared, basking at the surface. Craver pilots the boat as Van Sommeran scans the horizon with a pair of binoculars. “Any radio traffic you heard of?” he asks Craver, “Anything good?”

Nothing.

The sharks were once common off Monterey, so it’s not entirely surprising that they might appear here, says NOAA Fisheries Research Biologist Heidi Dewar. They’ll come inshore, particularly when the coastal upwelling is strong and their krill prey is abundant in the nutrient-rich waters. But it’s nonetheless rare, Dewar says, to see as many sharks in one place as were reported in July. And what that sighting might mean is tough to say: there’s almost no information about basking shark population size in the Eastern Pacific. According to a detailed NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service fact sheet the Northeastern Pacific has one source population of basking sharks that moves north and south between Canada and Baja. The rest is surprisingly mysterious for such a large animal; “most basic demographic and life history parameters are poorly understood or unknown,” the fact sheet states, adding, “the limited information that is available on their basic biology tends to be either anecdotal or imprecise.”

So a report of 50 off the coast of Big Sur is not just unusual, it’s a potentially important chance to learn something for a shark researcher like Van Sommeran. Van Sommeran has tagged 83 basking sharks in 20 years, he says, illustrating both the rareness of the opportunity and the difficulty in capitalizing on it. Craver saw a basking shark a few days before our expedition, off the coast of Natural Bridges State Beach, so that’s where we’re heading — but Van Sommeran says it’s difficult to get to a sighted shark in time; you only have a couple hours to get to where a shark was reported, and they could be gone again by the time you get there.

The problem, Van Sommeran says, is that despite being huge, basking sharks were once common. So common their carcasses were carted inland for use as fertilizer in the Salinas Valley in the 1920s and 1930s. Basking shark liver oil was used for Vitamin A, and briefly as lubrication for the piston engines of airplanes. Fishermen re-enacted whaling expeditions using basking sharks as prey. Heavy commercial and recreational fishing continued into the 1950s. “They were so abundant that they were considered to be hindering boat traffic,” Van Sommeran says. “Men were back from the war, fishing sardines, and the basking sharks would interfere with the nets, creating log jams. They were big enough to damage the boats.”

The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) instituted a government eradication program; using boats outfitted with shears, the sharks were simply rammed. Because the sharks migrate up and down the entire West Coast, as far north as British Columbia and Alaska in the summer and as far south as Southern California and Mexico in the winter, the program had a population ripple effect that extended to California. The sharks were “commercially extinct by the 1970s,” Van Sommeran says.

The sharks’ slow growth, longevity, and low reproductive rates mean the population has never recovered. Only six have been sighted in the Canadian Pacific since 1996, according to a fact sheet from the Canadian DFO. Population estimates for the Northeastern Pacific range from the low hundreds to perhaps 1,000, NOAA says. “Basking sharks are big and rare, but there’s not a fuss about them,” Van Sommeran says. “There are over 500 species of sharks in the world and few that fit the bill as a menacing super-predator. Basking sharks don’t hurt anything, so people aren’t interested.”

“There are over 500 species of sharks in the world and few that fit the bill as a menacing super-predator. Basking sharks don’t hurt anything, so people aren’t interested.”

Van Sommeran says it’s not easy to get people interested. Growing to more than 20 feet long — oftentimes much more — the ocean’s second-largest fish is not fluffy and cute, and unlike the squeal-inducing sea otters that we see from the Sea Gayle, basking sharks can’t look into the camera with sad eyes and a furry face to beg for habitat preservation.

“Poor Eeyore-basking sharks,” as Van Sommeran calls them, don’t hold nearly the fascination that great white sharks do, because basking sharks are harmless to humans. They don’t spark our imagination or our fear, and it seems they never have.

In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck’s famous 1951 account of his expedition with marine biologist Ed Ricketts to collect marine animals in the Gulf of California, Steinbeck wrote about the remains of a “sea-serpent” washed up at Moss Landing in Monterey Bay. When a reporter went to investigate, “There was a note pinned to its head which said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s a basking shark. [Signed] Dr. Rolph Bolin of the Hopkins Marine Station.’ No doubt that Dr. Bolin acted kindly, for he loves true things; but his kindness was a blow to the people of Monterey. They so wanted it to be a sea-serpent. Even we hoped it would be…. Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans.”

While protection has been slower to arrive than it has with white sharks, the basking shark fishery was declared closed by NOAA in 2000, and a 2012 state ban on the sale of shark fins prevents basking shark fins from being sold in California. In 2010, basking sharks were listed as a “species of concern” by the NMFS. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) lists basking sharks under its “Appendix II,” meaning that unregulated trade could cause extinction.

Marine conservation groups have unsuccessfully petitioned to have the North Pacific population of basking sharks recognized as a distinct population segment and listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. In November 2013, NOAA denied a petition by Wild Earth Guardians on the grounds that there’s little difference, genetically or morphologically, between basking sharks in the Pacific and Atlantic, and that at least some research indicates the sharks are capable of long-distance migrations from ocean to ocean.

Still, Dewar says, even if there isn’t compelling evidence that the Pacific population is distinct, the drastically reduced numbers do send up a red flag. “There is reason to be concerned about their population,” she says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a new petition to list them.”

Van Sommeran says the basking sharks need the protections. Listing would further restrict trade in shark fins, he says, and require reports – and a lot more paperwork — for boat collisions.

Fittingly, perhaps, our day on the water netted no basking sharks. Van Sommeran had me return a few days later to try motoring around in a skiff out of the Capitola Wharf, and that, too, came up empty. As he steered the skiff back to the harbor, he talked about going up in a plane. “They need me to look after them until someone else does,” he said.

After Decades Away, Western Pond Turtles Come Home to Mountain Lake

t had been a long time since Mountain Lake was the kind of place where a western pond turtle could live happily.

For decades, the Presidio’s natural freshwater lake suffered environmental insults: runoff from Highway 1, sediment pollution, invasive species, voracious released goldfish. Mountain Lake had been “a cesspool since the ‘70s and ‘80s,” says Jonathan Young, a wildlife ecologist with the Presidio Trust. “It was a soupy, green, algae-scummy sort of lake.”

Not anymore. On Saturday, a few dozen people sat on a grassy slope overlooking the green, reflective surface of the almost completely restored lake, and waited for one of the final pieces: the return of the native turtles. They had to wait, however, for a few extra minutes. Some of the turtles intended for the lake, crammed into travel containers to make their way triumphantly from their previous home at the San Francisco Zoo, were stuck in traffic.

Jason Lisenby, who has overseen the restoration since 2012, stepped in with a short speech about the lengthy history of the habitat revitalization: the first removal, 14 years ago, of nonnative plants, the discovery that the bottom of the lake was so polluted with metals from Highway 1 runoff that the entire lake had to be dredged, the gradual post-dredging cleanup and eventual reintroduction of native underwater plants, the release earlier this year of Pacific chorus frogs and three-spine sticklebacks. While the project has been overseen by the Presidio Trust, thousands of volunteers have put in 20,000 hours of restoration work, Lisenby said, and they continue to meet every second Saturday of the month.

Presidio Trust biologist Jason Lisenby addresses a few dozen people as they wait for turtles to arrive at the restored Mountain Lake. (Photo courtesy Presidio Trust)

uring the hard years of restoration and cleanup, the Oakland and San Francisco Zoos, Presidio Trust, and Sonoma State were plotting to bring back the turtles. They started three years ago, harvesting eggs from a research site in Lake County and bringing the eggs to the San Francisco Zoo. The turtles had different mothers to promote genetic biodiversity, said Jesse Bushell, the director of conservation at the Zoo, who oversaw the turtle’s upbringing, and Bushell said she also tried to keep human interaction with the baby turtles to a minimum. They didn’t even give them names, she said — just numbers. “At the Zoo, they eat worms, crickets, mouse pieces, and fish, but they have not been hand fed,” she said. “They have to hunt for their food.”

So finally, after a decade of hard restoration work, three years of turtle-care, and 30 minutes of traffic on Presidio Parkway, on July 18 at 1 p.m. the turtles returned to Mountain Lake.

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Lisenby had just finished answering questions when the van pulled up. A murmur passed through the crowd. Two uniformed Zoo employees opened the van doors and took out two large crates. The containers were carried through the crowd and placed behind the spectators, and as Lisenby handed the microphone over to Bushell, the turtles confronted their paparazzi.

The turtles were two to three years old and four to five inches long, about the size of western pond turtles twice their age because of their captive upbringing. Antennas fixed to the back of their shells will allow their locations to be tracked for two years, and Bushell said she hopes to someday get GPS monitoring for the turtles.

After a short speech, the turtles were loaded into a rowboat helmed by Presidio Trust Conservation Director Terri Thomas, who rowed to the release site. Members of the Zoo’s conservation staff and Sonoma State researcher Dana Terry, who has led the scientific study of the turtle release, waded around the edge of the lake.

Sonoma State researcher Dana Terry releases a Western pond turtle into Mountain Lake. (Photo by Lauren McNulty)

hree weeks earlier, Terry had placed 14 turtles in a container in the lake on the west shore near the highway, to give them a chance to acclimate before their release. Those turtles would go first, and then the rowboat turtles would make the plunge straight from Zoo to lake as part of an experiment in restoration and reintroduction.

In waterproof overalls and waders, Terry edged slowly around the lake, gently pushing willow branches out of the way until he arrived at the release site. He and members of the Zoo’s conservation staff popped the lid off the container, and Zoo biologist Morgan Pyeha dipped a large, long-handled net into the container to fetch the first turtle. She handed it to Terry for final measurements.

The turtles will be recaptured in the coming months to determine their stress levels — measured by cortisol levels in the blood — which will help determine whether the period of acclimation helped. “We want to see how they use the lake,” Bushell said. “We want to see how they survive with snakes and raccoons.”

Young and Terry both said they think that a soft release method will be easier on the turtles. But they’ll find out, and then, based on the results, release another round of turtles at Mountain Lake on Sept. 12. As restoration continues, Young said he hopes to learn enough about amphibian health in the lake that he can also release a species of Pacific newt, as well as the California red-legged frog. There’s plenty to learn, and Mountain Lake isn’t the only experiment site. The Zoo is continuing work in Lake County, and has partnered with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to pursue future projects.

“Urban aquatic restoration is still a new 21st-century idea,” Young said. As the field continues to grow, other projects could turn to Terry’s results as a model for work in their own lakes.

But before they will next be observed by humans, the turtles have a new audience in the lake itself. As Terry conducted his measurements, a mother mallard and her five ducklings swam into the willows nearby to see what was going on. With the ducklings watching, Terry waded a few feet away from the shore and one by one, slid the turtles into the water.

“This one’s number 324,” he called out, and gently placed a wriggling turtle into the murky water, where it quickly swam out of his hand and out of sight. Number 324 was followed by turtle number 409 and then a turtle significantly smaller than the others. It stretched its neck towards the water, legs already windmilling as Terry brought it to the surface of the lake.

“This one’s our runt,” Terry said. “If he makes it, it’ll be a real success story.”