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Wildcat Revival

Restoring a creek like Wildcat from top to bottom - a creek whose banks host everything from cows to car wrecks and whose nine-mile course takes in freeflowing rapids, reservoirs, concrete culverts and storm drain outfalls - may seem like a daunting task. But it's the very tangibility of a single creek in the much more daunting scope of an entire estuary that makes Wildcat's restoration such a workable model of how watershed protection efforts can reweave the relationship between humans and landscape for the benefit of the Estuary.

As old-style species- and pollutant-specific environmental management grow less tenable, managers of the Bay-Delta system have been actively experimenting with alternatives in places like Wildcat Creek. The land and water, people and fish, source to mouth approach being taken along the creek is a micro-level model of a nationwide trend toward watershed management and a California proposal to do this via the establishment of Aquatic Diversity Management Areas (ADMAs).

"There's been a lot of talk about ADMAs," says the Estuary Project's Tim Vendlinski. "What we'd like to do is provide an on-the-ground model to help people put this conceptual approach into reality."

Wildcat seems a perfect place to demonstrate how an ADMA could work and, with the leadership and financial support of the Estuary Project and the initiative of local agencies and citizens on the ground, Wildcat is now showcasing a variety of restoration techniques in a variety of creek settings.

Wildcat Creek's headwaters spring from a green cleft between Grizzly and Vollmer Peaks in the near wilderness of Tilden Park's East Bay ridges. From Tilden, the creek trickles down into Wildcat Canyon through the kind of golden hills author Edward Abbey once called "lion colored." Ironically, this characteristic California color is a pale interloper introduced by European ranchers over a century ago. Native grasses - long overrun - stay greener year-round.

It is in this canyon that the first major restoration effort along the creek's path to the Estuary is now underway. Here, the Project is helping the East Bay Regional Park District and a rancher who leases some district parklands to reduce cattle grazing impacts, such as bank erosion, sedimentation, polluted runoff and non-native species dominance.

The project will stagger what was previously a year-round grazing schedule through more intensive cropping of introduced grasses at certain times of year and removal of cattle during the germination season of purple needle-grass, blue wild rye, California oat grass and other natives. In addition, the project will fence off the creek's Havey Canyon tributary to keep erosive hoofs and cow manure off the banks and out of the water. Even the plumbing system that hooks up creekshed seeps and springs to cattle drinking troughs is getting an overhaul.

According to Vendlinski, this grazing project shows that economics and the environment don't have to be in conflict. "We've found that if you channel where the cattle go you can actually improve forage and water sources," he says. "This land was always grazed; what we're doing is using cattle to mimic the grazing of pronghorn antelope and tule elk."

A bit farther downstream, urban homes and pavement creep up on the creek as it runs through Alvarado Park - once an Ohlone village site but more recently a gang hangout. This July, heavy machinery rolled into the park to begin a $350,000 state-of-the-art restoration of a 900-foot section of creek masterminded by national expert David Rosgen.

Rosgen is tearing up concrete channels, removing old weirs, recreating meanders, replanting banks and using all natural materials, including boulders and wads of tree roots, to restore a stretch of stream plagued by sedimentation and fish migration problems. The weirs are the creek's last remaining barriers to migration. "It's the furthest I've ever seen restoration taken," says the S.F. Regional Board's Leslie Ferguson. "The scale is unprecedented in the East Bay."

The project is getting a $100,000 grant under a Clean Water Act nonpoint source pollution program administered by the Regional Board. "With all the restoration and runoff control work going on up and down the creek, this bottleneck had to be addressed," says the Board's Tom Mumley. "It doesn't do any good to put clean water and fish into a bad system."

The creek's setting gets even more urban as it flows through low-income, industrial North Richmond where many African Americans settled in the 1940s to work in nearby shipyards. Starting in the 1970s, activists worked for ten years to involve the community in flood protection planning. At that time, disastrous floods over the creek banks hit the area about every three years. The Army Corps proposed a basic concrete solution, but the community came up with a consensus plan for a more environmentally sensitive approach. Their plan won local approval in the late 1980s.

This early model of community involvement in restoration has a new incarnation in the 1990s. Now the California Natural Resources Foundation, the EPA and the Estuary Project are working to get North Richmond residents and schoolkids out on the creek on a regular basis to monitor pollution and stormwater runoff. These locals will do what agencies lack the people and dollarpower to do - basic field tests like checking water quality factors, such as pH, dissolved oxygen and temperature or color abnormalities and the presence of aquatic organisms as indicators of the creek's overall health.

The creek spills out into the Bay near the spires and tanks of the Chevron oil refinery at Castro Cove. Even here at the creek mouth changes have been made to improve the environment. Chevron moved their wastewater outfall from the cove into deeper water in 1987 and plans to move a cooling water outfall by 1995. Both moves should sweeten the cove for migrating fish.

Officials are confident the steelhead will return to Wildcat Creek once the restoration is complete. If they do, it will help meet the Miller-Bradley bill requirement for a doubling of naturally occurring aquatic species in the Estuary. Small as it is in the overall Bay-Delta system, Wildcat's restoration can significantly enhance biodiversity by providing a genetic pool more adaptable and resilient than that produced by hatcheries.

"If we can go in and restore a wild fishery, so it's an estuary making fish instead of humans making fish, then we're really beginning to put the Estuary back together," says Vendlinski.

Contact: Tim Vendlinski, SFEP (415)744-1989; Beth Levine, California Natural Resources Foundation (510)286-0656; and Pete Alexander, East Bay Regional Parks (510)635-0138

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