Bolsa Chica Wetlands: Preservation Takes Flight
November 4, 2009 by Melanie
Filed under California, Huntington Beach, Southern California, Southwest, The Americas, USA
Huntington Beach is now celebrating its centennial, and city planners have been hard at work carving a whole new world out of this oil industry town. The result is an impressively clean and quiet ocean community of shops, restaurants and a few nice hotels…bordered by derricks and refineries.
One of its greatest achievements, though, was actually created over 30 years ago: the Bolsa Chica Wetlands, one of the largest untouched coastal ecosystems in Southern California.
The Bolsa Chica are vibrant, living proof that, in a region renowned for gated developments and endless strip malls (read: Orange County), there are a lot of local folks who view preservation as progress.
The Bolsa Chica Wetlands are a 1200-acre ecological reserve beside the Pacific Coast Highway, with walking paths, ocean views, and more birds than you can reasonably imagine. Across the street is the surfer’s paradise of Bolsa Chica State Beach, one of the most popular destinations in town. Huntington Beach itself is known as Surf City USA ™, and an almost uniform local passion for ocean health means that, despite being nestled in the conservative, pro-industry bosom of Orange County, environmental preservation is good PR here.
The other side of Huntington Beach: Big Oil and housing sprawl
For our private tour of the Bolsa (as it’s locally known), we were greeted by the incomparable Shirley Detloff, a founding member of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica. White-haired and twinkly-smiled, it’s not immediately apparent that Shirley is not someone with whom to trifle. She’ll be the first to tell you she can’t tell a heron from an egret, but she’ll sure as heck fight for this hallowed ground.
According to Shirley, the Bolsa owes its initial existence to a gun club. As far back as 1900, starchy business leaders from L.A. and Pasadena dammed off this area to funnel in fish, attract a wide array of birds, don monocles and go a-shooting. Just about every other acre of coastal wetland along PCH, erroneously regarded as wasteland, was eventually purchased for a song and either drilled for oil or filled in with concrete.
For decades afterward, the Bolsa remained largely unsullied while the Bolsa Chica Gun Club and Standard Oil waffled between a desire for the profits of drilling and the joy of the strolling kill. However, it wasn’t until the 1960s, when the wetlands were purchased by a private developer who envisioned 5,000 homes and a marina, that state legislators began to worry over the plight of this fragile ecosystem.
Though the developer made a peace offering of a 300-acre reserve, the people of Huntington Beach were still unsatisfied: In 1976, members of the local League of Women Voters would form the Amigos and throw down in a 30-year battle to save the Bolsa Chica.
By 2006, with the Bolsa reserve then four times its original size (thanks to L.A. and Long Beach port-expansion mitigations), a legislatively-whittled development of 379 McMansions broke ground just above the most valuable bird nesting habitat. Most were finished by 2008…just in time for the housing market to collapse.
Oil and houses perch at the Bolsa's edges, and some ground has proved challenging to revive
Today, the Bolsa are a birders’ paradise. More specifically, they’re a bird photographer’s paradise. When Adam and I arrived here on a Sunday morning, the entrance bridge was packed on either side with medium-sized people wielding absolutely massive cameras. These are lenses we equate with the 30 yard line at an NFL game, or a celebrity wedding, yet these folks were here to nab pelicans for posterity.
Bolsa bird photographers - Photo by Hung Tran
(There are few things more technologically humbling than strolling into such a fray with a travel-light Canon Power Shot with 12x zoom. But as always, we had each other for comfort.)
Most of the photogs here are amateurs, but many of their photos are pure pro. The Bolsa Chica Land Trust puts out a spectacular calendar with the year’s best shots; to help fund the Land Trust’s restoration and maintenance of the reserve, you can purchase the latest one for $11 on the Trust’s website.
You can visit the Bolsa seven days a week to take a leisurely stroll by yourselves, or arrange for one of several guided tours through the Amigos de Bolsa Chica website.
