All in a week’s work at Bolsa Chica Mesa

Vic knows I’ve been having fun when he comes home to an entryway slick with mud and finds me picking sticks and weeds out of my hair. That was the case each day last week after my daily restora-

tion work at Bolsa Chica.

I couldn’t figure out why I was so tired by the end of the week. I swore to Vic I hadn’t done anything other than supervise the weeding and planting at the corner of Warner Avenue and PCH.

But I guess during the course of the week, I ended up lifting heavy wheelbarrows off the stack in the tool shed, filling them with pot after gallon pot of native plants -- 200 in all -- hauling them out to the wetlands, then putting the wheelbarrows away at the end of the day.

For the first four days, I had Casey Collins and a work crew from the Orange County Conservation Corps with me. Those kids can weed with the skill of surgeons.

They hacked out iceplant, wild radish and yellow starthistle, hauling over a ton of it away to the dumpster. They left behind the very few native plants growing there, mainly salt grass and goldenbush. After weeding, they expertly planted 190 beautiful native plants.

Education is an important part of the work, and whenever we found something new or unusual, we had “school” in the great outdoors. For example, the boys found a nest of mice while weeding. The nest was destroyed, but the baby mice were still alive.

The best I could do on identification was the genus -- Peromyscus -- most likely California deer mice. Since these were desirable critters and an important component of the food chain, we carefully rebuilt the nest and put the babies back in it.

The next morning, the babies were gone, so we would like to think the mother moved her baby mice to a new nest.

There was an alternate explan-

ation, though, as the mice weren’t the only animals we found in our little project area: I almost stepped on a two-striped garter snake. It was a delightful find because we had long assumed this species had been extirpated locally.

The corps crew didn’t get to see that snake, but they found a gopher snake. None of us saw the rattlesnake that had been reported a week earlier.

The boys’ next discovery was a pencil-sized California legless lizard, a very rare find. These beautiful lizards are silvery gray on the back with a black stripe down each side and a bright yellow belly. Legless lizards spend their lives burrowing into soft, loose soil or sand in search of insect larvae and spiders. They are supposed to particularly relish black widow spiders.

So why wasn’t the lizard a snake, the boys wanted to know. “Because I say so” wasn’t a good enough answer, so I asked Vic.

He told me legless lizards have movable eyelids, a characteristic of lizards, not snakes. They have internal organs and skeletal features that are like those of lizards, not snakes.

Unfortunately, our silvery legless lizard subspecies that lives in the sand dunes has been lumped with the California legless lizard, so there is probably no chance now of having it listed as threatened.

Science aside, these lizards are darn cute. They have sweet faces for a reptile, and they don’t bite. Those characteristics would make them good pets, except for two things. They spend almost no time above ground, and it’s illegal to remove them from the wild.

Our next find was a huge female black widow spider guarding a nest with two egg cases in it. The black widow was hanging upside down from her disorganized web, showing off the red hourglass marking on her belly.

Unlike orb-weaving spiders, black widows make three-dimensional webs with seemingly random silk strands. They aren’t often seen because they generally hide in dark places during the day, coming out at night to see what might be caught in their webs.

On Friday, my corps crew was in the classroom, so I worked with Laura Bandy and a small group of kids that ranged from preschool to early teens. With this young crew, we managed to get only 10 sea lavenders planted, but we also planted about 20 bladderpods from seed. It seemed that Laura and I spent most of our time reminding them not to step on the pickleweed and making sure that the tiniest ones didn’t eat too much dirt.

Laura got the kids utterly filthy by having them make mud balls with bladderpod seeds in them. The kids “planted” the seeds by slamming the mud balls at the ground.

After our planting was finished, we walked along the wetlands at low tide, spotting some California sea hares grazing on algae and laying eggs, plus a half-dozen cloudy bubble snails and a predatory striped sea hare in hot pursuit of the bubble snails.

We were surprised by all the neat biology going on in such a small area of the Bolsa Chica.

Right now, the area we restored looks denuded. The new goldenbush, quailbush, coyote bush, mule fat, spiny rush, sea lavender, California boxthorn, bigpod ceanothus and buckwheat haven’t had a chance to grow up yet.

Think how great that little strip of habitat will be when those plants mature.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].

20051020gzerw1ke(LA)