Snow-white pelicans, speckled brown California clapper rail birds and light green, cactus-like pickleweed are among the species that have flourished on Redwood City’s Bair Island since efforts to restore its 3,000 acres of tidal marsh land began some three years ago.
Gail Raabe, co-chair of the Citizens Committee to Complete the Refuge, a group dedicated to protecting the Bay’s remaining wetlands, said there has been an explosion of wildlife on the island since the last of the levees managing the island’s water flow were breached in late 2015.
“Already the transformation is breathtaking,” she said.
Tucked between Redwood Shores to the north and the Port of Redwood City to the south, the island’s three sections, once home to salt ponds, were devoid of vegetation and waterways that make the area inhabitable to native species not long ago, said Raabe.
And as migratory shorebirds, yellow flowers and salt marsh harvest mice returned to their native land, so have Peninsula residents looking for an open space and to learn more about the nature that surrounds them.
Raabe said visitors of all ages gathered earlier this month to walk a 1.7-mile trail and learn more about the 35-year effort to preserve and restore a small fraction of the quickly-disappearing San Francisco tidal marsh.
“We had people of all ages,” she said, adding that the group included several families eager to learn how the island was restored.
Jared Underwood, refuge manager with the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, a division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the process to breach the levees involved filling in some of the ponds surrounding the islands with clean fill from nearby construction projects and dredging material from the Port of Redwood City. Raising the level of the ponds would create a foundation for the marsh plain where native plants could root and animals and birds could take shelter instead of allowing the subsided ponds to fill with Bay water once the levees were breached, he said.
Underwood said the effort to restore the tidal marsh land was one of the first of several phases of a larger effort to restore native marsh land ringing the San Francisco Bay, dubbed the South Bay salt pond restoration project. The restored lands are also expected to better protect land that constitutes a Bay shoreline from sea level rise, said Underwood.
Underwood said most of the restoration efforts since the levees were breached have been passive, including monitoring of the species finding a home there and planting a few native species in the mud surrounding the islands.
Though the efforts have created a lifeline for species that wouldn’t otherwise inhabit the former salt ponds, they have also created a rare opportunity for residents to enjoy the native species and open space available on the Peninsula, he said.
“For the species and for the surrounding community it also provides … an open space area where people can come and be exposed to nature,” said Underwood.
Raabe is pleased Bair Island has been host to hundreds of visitors since the public access to inner Bair Island — the westernmost section of the island closest to Highway 101 — has opened in the last two years. But she said the road to bringing native species back to the island, including efforts to protect the land from developments in the ’80s and create a plan for its restoration in the ’90s, has been a long one.
“You don’t just simply restore things back to a working, healthy tidal marsh,” she said.
Raabe said a citizen referendum reversing the Redwood City Council’s decision to approve a development on the island saved it in 1982. In an effort led by Redwood City residents Carolyn and the late Ralph Nobles, a Japanese businessman who purchased the land soon after was convinced by citizens group called the Friends of Redwood City to preserve it for the public and wildlife instead of developing on it in the ’90s.
As a 45-year resident of Redwood City, Raabe and her husband, Matt Leddy, have been involved with efforts to restore the tidal marshes native to the Bay for decades, which began when Leddy collected signatures for the citizens referendum in 1982.
Raabe believes that after decades of polluting the Bay, residents have slowly turned their attention to the need for preserving what’s left of the native species and marshlands.
“I think that people understand now that there’s all kinds of services that that Bay is providing to us and to wildlife,” she said.
She said her organization has been working toward restoring one-fourth, or close to 100,000, of the 400,000 acres of tidal marsh that once lined the Bay.
“What that means is that almost every acre is precious because we’ve lost so much,” she said. “So when you have that opportunity to add 3,000 acres, that’s significant.”
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