NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:Strange tales from the Bolsa Chica, 2006

I baked several dozen Christmas cookies last week. I had hoped to not gain weight over the holidays, but you know how baking cookies goes. Whoops, that cookie is broken, I’d better eat it. Whoops, those are burned, I’d better eat them. Whoops, I gained another pound.

The cookies were mainly for the small crew from the Orange County Conservation Corps who worked with me at Bolsa Chica last Thursday. The kids were very appreciative.

We spent the morning chopping out a large Brazilian pepper tree and tossing debris overhead into the dumpster.

Then, Vic called and said that the Bolsa Chica Conservancy folks had invited us all to join them for their Christmas luncheon at West Bay Cafe.

With sticks in our hair and dirt under our nails, the crew and I were a sight. We cleaned up enough to make ourselves presentable and joined Vic, Grace Adams and several conservancy docents at the restaurant.

Corps members always surprise me. I’m used to the idea that in any given corps crew someone will have lived in Orange County all his or her life and never have seen the ocean. This time, one of the crew said she had never been to a restaurant before. Another had never seen green beans and didn’t know what they were. These kids are in their late teens or early 20s but tend to come from poor families whose cuisine and culture differ from ours. Part of what I love about my job is being able to expose these kids to new experiences to broaden their horizons.

After lunch, we continued with restoration work. While this crew was small, they had hearts of lions. Peter and Andrew were not deterred by the huge size of the Brazilian pepper tree stump. With supervisor Ralph Jimenez, they hacked and chopped at it for hours, finally digging out the 150-pound stump by the roots. Jenna and Tara cut small pepper trees and planted 15 new mulefat bushes.

That evening, Vic and I went to a party of Bolsa Chica enthusiasts who do hard-core, down-in-the-mud work.

Biologists tend to be strange. As in all good gatherings of biologists, talk eventually degenerated into “name that specimen,” where we try to identify strange stains on our clothing, odd bones that we’ve found lying around or, in this case, dead animals stored in the hostess’ freezer.

The little critters, which were being saved for taxidermy and educational display, were taken out of plastic bags, passed around and eventually identified. The scary thing is that everyone there had dead animals at home in their freezers. Please note that this is done with permits that allow us to collect “carnage.”

We shared our favorite stories of run-ins with people who operate model cars, ride dirt bikes and walk their dogs at Bolsa Chica. These activities are not permitted in the ecological reserve, yet some people feel entitled to do whatever they want.

Then we got onto the topic of homeless people living at Bolsa Chica. I’ve called the sheriff about several of them. They had solar showers, lawn chairs, sleeping bags, coolers and loads of plastic trash under the myoporum trees along Pacific Coast Highway in the ecological reserve.

You wouldn’t believe all of the liquor bottles, drug paraphernalia and used prophylactics various people at the party had found at Bolsa Chica.

Two of the women at the party told a tale of being approached by a homeless guy who lived under the eucalyptus trees by the bean field. He asked if they were there to swap sex for drugs. Of course, that led to stories of discovering a group of people filming a pornographic movie under the eucalyptus along the flood control channel and various other risque encounters that have been witnessed at Bolsa Chica over the years.

That, in turn, led to the story of a homeless woman who was carrying on an animated, but very one-sided, conversation with a wooden post at the ecological reserve north parking lot. A homeless man joined her in talking to the post. Eventually they began talking to each other, and that led to a disturbing romance.

Another great story was of two drunk men who brought in a seriously injured coot. It expired almost immediately, but the two drunks carried on, crying and pleading for someone to save it.

This tale segued to hysterical tales of various injuries sustained while rescuing injured wildlife.

However, I thought that stories of striking snakes and biting opossums paled in comparison with my story of an injured grebe. When I stupidly released its beak to secure a wing that had flopped free, it grabbed my left breast and shook it vigorously, leaving me bruised for weeks.

We’re sure the new year will bring us many more stories as we work in places that are wilder than most folks realize. We look forward to sharing them with you.