San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune April 27, 1991

Quiet renewal at Carrizo

By Jan Greene
Today, the 150,000-acre Carrizo Plain Natural Area is being dedicated. The long, complex effort to put together the huge preserve is nearing an end, but it is just the beginning for the plain's regeneration after decades of agricultural use. Carrizo is home to the highest concentration of federally protected plant and wildlife species in the continental United States, and it's all in San Luis Obispo County.

The first thing you notice is the silence.
Sure, late in the afternoon the crickets will start to chirp. And sometimes an airplane's lazy drone will drift over the desolate flatlands.
But most of the day the Carrizo Plain is mute, a big sound vacuum, a black hole on the eastern edge of the county.
That emptiness can be deceiving. It makes the casual visitor believe there's nothing going on out here, and that's not true at all. You just have to know where to look.

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Although it's part of San Luis Obispo County, Carrizo Plain - known as Carrisa Plains to locals - doesn't look like anything else in the county.
Located an hour east of Santa margarita - take Highway 58 - the plain has been compared to the surface of the moon. It's big and flat and the sparse vegetation hugs the ground. Soda Lake, spread out in the middle, is usually just a big salt flat, a gleaming white stretch amid a pallid brown sea.
The land rises up to rolling hills to the west and spiky peaks to the east. Soda Lake Road snakes through it; along the road is the occasional - very occasional - farmhouse, often with a junk car or truck parked nearby.
The March rains have provided a brief respite from all this flat brownness, but it won't last long. The water filling Soda Lake will likely evaporate by the middle of May, and the purple, orange and yellow wildflowers will lose their brilliance by spring's end.
Even though you an see for miles, there isn't much to see, at least much connected with people. Every once in a while a pickup truck will pass by on the road.

For a century this land has provided a living for cattle ranchers and dryland grain farmers. Slowly, as their breed has dwindled and the area's environmental significance became clear, it has been converted to a preserve.
That conversion has been called the largest cooperative habitat preservation project in the country. It involved four federal and state agencies, a couple of environmental groups, a pair of counties and a handful of oil, mining and energy companies.
The preserve's acreage is now at 145,000, with two parcels under negotiation that would bring the total to about 190,000. Some other smaller pieces may be added later.
Those acres now stretch 35 miles in length, 12 miles wide.
The Carrizo Plain is the largest existing tract of Central Valley grasslands; California once has 22 million acres of them, but only 1 percent remain - the rest marred by homes or intensive agriculture.
The major rationale for preserving the area is to save a piece of this unique habitat.
The most prominent endangered and threatened species - the area has the nation's largest concentration of federally protected plants and animals - are the San Joaquin kit fox, the giant kangaroo rate, the blunt-nosed leopard lizard and the greater sandhill crane.
During certain seasons, such raptors as the peregrine falcon and golden eagle can be seen hovering above.
Also, there are herds of Tule elk and pronghorn antelope eon the plain, relocated by the state Department of Fish and Game.
It is hoped that the California condor, nearly extinct, may be able to come back someday to its former home in Carrizo.
Several protected plants live on the plain, including the California jewel flower, which had disappeared for 40 years until its rediscovery about three years ago.


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Because of the bounty of rare plants and animals it supports, the Carrizo Plain is fertile ground for research.
Along with an international team removing graffiti from the Indian paintings at Painted Rock, there are dozens of researchers at work here. About 15 Fish and Game botanists are out counting plants species, Nature Conservancy researchers are trying to regenerate native grasses, a University of Minnesota doctoral candidate is following kit foxes and, in a field near Soda Lake, a Bakersfield research is tracking giant kangaroo rates.
On this particular day, that kangaroo rate tracker is doing his monthly check of the animals he has followed by the past two years. His name is David Germano.
Actually, giant kangaroo rates aren't all that big Germano catches them in small metal boxes about 4 inches wide and 18 inches long.
He's working on a project to get the small animals re-established in this area, where they used to thrive but seemed to disappear in the early 1980s, possibly because of cattle grazing.
Germano, a jovial young man, is happy to explain his project.
He comes out here once a month to trap the animals and find out how they're living and breeding.
He tracks them with an interesting device, something akin to the electronic check-out system at the grocery store. He uses a big needle-like device to insert a tiny plastic chip - called a passive integrated transponder - under the animal's skin It is coded with a special number.
Then when he catches one, Germano runs a gun-shaped microwave reader over the kangaroo rat's body, kind of like a checkout clerk scanning bar codes at the grocery. It reads the rat's identification number.
The project is going well, Germano says; the 30 animals released in the field two years ago have produced at least 23 young, despite the impact of the drought on everything that lives out here.
"They've been reproducing almost continually," he said. "It looks real good."


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One recent day the Nature Conservancy's research station - an old farmhouse on the dirt road to Painted Rock - was brimming with biologists. They filled all the bunks, most of the floor, and one even pitched a tent outside.
P.J. White isn't used to this much company. He has lived in this house alone for much of the past two years that he has been studying the San Joaquin kit fox, following their comings and goings via radio collars.
He got involved in the project as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, which is coordinating the project with help from the Smithsonian Institution and Friends of the National Zoo.
White, a rather shy young man with a Midwestern drawl and sharp wit, is used to solitude; his last project was somewhere in the middle of North Dakota.
During the past two years he's watched both kit foxes and coyotes suffer through the drought; during one recent winter, all he found in the coyote droppings were juniper berries.
"They seem to be taking a beating from the drought," he said. "I don't know what the hell they're eating out there."
He spends his days checking out the kit fox dens to see who's living where. They move around a lot; some foxes have used 80 different dens in the past couple of years, and they don't use change-of-address cards.
A few nights a week, depending on the season, White gets in his truck and tracks the nocturnal animals electronically. He just gets close enough to see without alarmed the animals.
"They look like they're beak if you pick them up," White said.
Some have gotten used to his presence-and to being caught every so often by a researcher.
"They're not exactly friendly, but they're docile to handle. As soon as you cover their eyes, they relax," White said.
But he doesn't handle them any more than necessary.
"We don't want them to get used to people," he said.


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While the endangered animals need help, so do the plants they live among.
There is a major push to re-establish the native needlegrass and salt bush that was taken over when man introduced European annual grasses. The interloping plants have taken over 90 percent of the 300-square-mile plain.
Why is that bad?
For one thing, native needlegrass is tall and sparse, perfect for the small endangered beasties that like to scoot around in private.
It also has a very large root system that holds the topsoil together.
The European grasses are hardy and competitive, but they don't provide an ideal habitat for denizens of Carrizo.
"They lie close to the ground and it's hard for kit foxes and kangaroo rates to get a foothold and run on them," explained Roy Van de Hoek, a wildlife biologist for the Bureau of Land Management.
But then there's just the value of nativeness itself.
"I tend to be a proponent of the native plants for their own sake," said Chuck Warner, preserve manager for the Nature Conservancy.
A range management specialist, Warner is trying out a revegetation hypothesis that involves the very beasts that are credited with denuding much of the area.
Between overgrazing by cattle and sheep, and years of raising dryland grain crops, the Carrizo's topsoil has been shorn of nutrients.
However, Warner believes that by allowing cows to forage early in the season, when the introduced grasses first come out, he can use the bovines as volunteer weed killers. They would be moved elsewhere when the native grass comes out.
But range management is a complex and sometimes controversial business. The Nature Conservancy project has its critics.
Darrell Twisselman, whose family has raised cattle just north of the preserve for generations, predicted the native grass revegetation effort would fail, especially if there's no abundant rain.
"I think they're dreaming," the curmudgeonly rancher opened. "Within two years, the clover and filaree will take over."
But then Twisselman has doubts about the whole project.
"If the government gave me $16 million, I could flood the state of California with kit foxes," Twisselman said.
Despite such doubts, the conservancy is placing native plant regeneration at the top of its Carrizo Plain agenda.


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The Carrizo Plain remains a relatively undiscovered spot for tourists despite its many attractions. A new visitors center being built by the Nature Conservancy may draw more people.
The center will have displays on the biology and geology of the area, and volunteers to explain this desolate and wondrous place.
Most of the Carrizo's visitors come in the fall to see the sandhill cranes and in the spring for the wildflower display.
Painted Rock is also a big draw.
People interested in geology go to the eastern side of the preserve, to the foot of the Temblor Range, to look at the San Andreas fault.
The plain is a little large for hiking, so most people drive through or camp.
And stargazing is a popular nighttime sport.
"A lot of people come up from the Los Angeles area to get away from people," Nancy Warner said.
But the Warners hop the basic solitude of the Carrizo Plain won't ever change.
"We want everything to be low-key," Chuck Warner said. "We don't want it to be too obvious there are major changes going on here."