Dawn on the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Reserve revealed little, its inhabitants still sleepy, concealed in the multicolored pickleweed that sweeps across this 230-acre wetland.
As shadows retreated and the pickleweed glowed in reds, greens and yellows, a throng of waterfowl, songbirds, waders and raptors came to life, feasting and preening along muddy banks and tattered snags.
A majestic gadwall swam elegantly through the shallows, white-crowned sparrows fluttered about in saltbushes and great blue herons and egrets stood motionless, waiting patiently for something to skewer with their sword-like beaks.
A Healthy Marsh is a Teeming Marsh
The Carpinteria Salt Marsh Reserve is one of the healthiest coastal wetlands around, and it has become a place of scientific research and discovery. It’s owned by the University of California’s Natural Reserve System.
“From Point Conception to San Diego, it’s one of the more healthier marshes in Southern California,” said reserve manager Andrew Brooks.
Brooks pointed toward several factors contributing to a healthy marsh. The mouth of the marsh flowing out west of Carpinteria Beach is a nursery for halibut and other fish species. The Carpinteria Salt Marsh is also useful for filtering out excessive nutrients from neighborhoods and nurseries before reaching the ocean.
“Traditionally, we’d go in and count plant and bird species to determine the health of the marsh,” Brooks continued. “Now we use these types of measures instead to tell how well the marsh is functioning.”
Marsh Restoration
From 1998 to 2001, the area east of the reserve located on Ash Avenue was renovated from a wasteland of tangled weeds and garbage to a thriving network of channels and native flora, now an extension of the reserve system.
Originally slated for development, the city of Carpinteria, the California Coastal Conservancy, the UCNRS and the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County took matters into their own hands. Today that property is the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Park, a prime example of a community and environmental agencies working together to create an interpretive area for the public and to restore a region of the marsh to what it once was.
As part of the restoration process, debris and overgrown, non-native vegetation was cleared away from the upland portion of the marsh park and replaced with native flora such as willows, California poppies, wild roses, saltbushes and pickleweed. Work was completed in 2001, but it has taken six years for the restored portion to flourish with species of mussels, snails, clams, fish and more than 200 recorded bird species.
“We didn’t mimic nature perfectly,” Brooks said. “It took time for the renovated part to mature and attract all the birds and other species. Now that the land trust property has been restored, we’re moving into the university’s portion of the property to remove non-natives.”
Outdoor Classroom
Over the years the reserve has largely been a site for graduate students working on their advanced degrees, with very little funding or scientists working alone. Over the last decade, however, the reserve has attracted multicampus, multiagency research groups funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
“Because the Carpinteria Marsh is recognized as a pretty pristine coastal salt marsh,” Brooks explained, “it’s now serving as a reference and study site for all aspects affecting watersheds, offshore kelp beds and anything else surrounding the marsh.”
Recent and current projects include looking at historical tsunami activity and how much flooding occurred in the past. Another interesting study focuses on infectious diseases and how they spread from individual to individual in mud snails and parasites that thrive in the marsh.
For the casual observer, the results of these studies aren’t visible within the reserve but the diversity of birdlife is evident, a strong indicator of how well the marsh is functioning. I mentioned to Brooks that I couldn’t remember seeing so many different birds in the marsh (I lived on the marsh for 25 years). He told me I wasn’t imagining the array of avian diversity.
“There’s more food, the water quality is good and the overall health of the marsh is allowing birds to be supported,” he said.
Standing on the banks of a serpent-like channel, tranquility was interrupted by a belted kingfisher, its loud rattling calls heard halfway across the reserve. The sudden commotion startled several blue and green-winged teal that vacated the silt-filled channel in a blur of feathers flying toward the western fringe of the marsh. Maybe it was the lone gray fox peering over the pickleweed that started this tumult, another moment in the cycle of life within the Carpinteria Salt Marsh Reserve.