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WITH HOPE AS STRONG AS CERTAINTY

Dave WielengaWed. March 26
 

While people decide the fate of Long Beach’s hidden wilderness, a coyote keeps hunting the wetlands


PHOTO by JENNY STOCKDALE

Not far away, a coyote with a coat as dense and red-brown as the marshland brush was sprinting silently across a wide tidal flat toward unsuspecting seabirds, his footprints dissolving into the water-logged sand the instant he lifted each paw to take another hungry stride. But I didn’t know that yet.

All I could see of the Los Cerritos Wetlands was the view from the other side of Second Street, the south side, at the edge of the Trader Joe’s parking lot, outside an open chain-link gate with a No Trespassing sign. I might as well have been on the other side of the world.

The land is graded flat, shaved to stubble, crisscrossed by pipes and incongruously dotted with desert palms and repugnant pools of shopping-center runoff. If there were seabirds out there poking their bills into that earth—and incredibly, there were; I didn’t know that yet, either—they were overshadowed by the bobbing heads and flapping wings of oil wells doing the very same thing.

This is part of what passes for wilderness in Long Beach, some of the 66 acres the Los Cerritos Wetlands Trust purchased in 2006, hoping to save them after nearly a century of murder and plunder. Only 500 acres of open space remain from an ecosystem that not long ago covered 2,400 acres.

On March 31, the city of Long Beach will conclude its public-opinion survey before rewriting the master plan—known as SEADIP (Southeast Area Development and Improvement Plan)—that will govern the development of this waterfront area for decades to come.

But in a part of town where driving a trendy red hybrid to Trader Joe’s for low-sodium organic butternut squash soup is considered a significant act of environmentalism, I wasn’t feeling too optimistic.

“The area is in rough shape,” acknowledged 26-year-old Eric Zahn as he arrived to take me on a walk through the Los Cerritos Wetlands. He wasn’t just spouting off: He lectures on urban wetlands ecology at Long Beach State. And he was dressed for more than a stroll through the park: shorts and T-shirt, sturdy shoes, ball cap, day pack, binoculars, clipboard and a yellow pencil behind his right ear. “The land’s been filled in, leveled, totally manipulated and degraded to the point that it doesn’t look much like it’s supposed to,” Zahn continued. “But surprisingly, it is functioning at a wetlands level.”

The problem is that almost nobody who will be answering the survey questions has ever really seen the Los Cerritos Wetlands. Most of it is off-limits to the public. The land north of Second Street is being bought up by developer Tom Dean, who has posted signs promising to prosecute all trespassers. The land on the south side is owned by the Wetlands Trust, which is still trying to figure out its next step. And from the street, just about all of it looks like a giant, junky vacant lot.

“Right now, this wouldn’t be a very exciting nature walk,” said Zahn, leading me out onto the Wetlands Trust land anyway. “It would probably be pretty depressing for the kids.”

Ditto that, right here.

But as Zahn traipsed across the pillaged landscape, his attitude was as realistically upbeat as the sun and breeze of the late afternoon. I didn’t get it.

“That grass right there—it’s salt grass,” he explained, pointing out a few undistinguished clumps of yellow-flowered greenery. “It’s actually the only plant where a threatened species of butterfly—the wandering skipper—lays its eggs.”

That seemed even sadder.

“If you have this grass on your property,” Zahn said, smiling persistently, “it makes the land very hard to develop. The California Coastal Commission won’t allow it.”

Now I understood. Now I smiled, too. As we continued walking the hard-packed land, Zahn continued to show me its softer sides, those wide expanses of mud that we kept avoiding and the soaring snowy egrets, great blue herons, red-tailed hawks and northern shoveler ducks that inexplicably like it here.

“After all the rain this winter, everything filled up with water again,” Zahn said, “and lots more of the birds and plants and animals returned, too.”

Wildlife tries to use the Los Cerritos Wetlands no matter what its condition.

“Most of the time—since it was cut off from the ocean and dried out by drought—urban runoff is the only water this land gets,” said Zahn. “It’s horrible that great migrations of birds land in our polluted water, but they make the best of it. Sometimes, when it’s hard to find a place to get your feet wet, you wonder whether this can still be called a wetland. But this year we see the evidence that it is.”

We’d nearly circled back to the parking lot when Zahn suggested a detour—a walk across the wetlands on the north side of Second Street. I hedged, and not only because of those Keep Out signs. From the curb, it looked like more of the same.

“Oh, no,” said Zahn. “Back in there it’s completely different. It’s a place people rarely see. It’s the place that inspires me. Back in there, it’s pristine.”

And so we determinedly trudged up and along the weedy artificial ridge that rises along Studebaker Road, a berm created many decades ago to accommodate oil operations. Now it seals off a dramatic view of Long Beach’s greatest natural wonder—the still-thriving 50-acre core of the Los Cerritos Wetlands.

As we descended the ridge, we gradually encountered a sweeping and mushy valley that swirled with constant movement, the birds and animals and plants reacting to the subtle changes in the landscape that occur with each day’s tides. Here, the ocean still flushes in and out via the Los Cerritos Channel and Alamitos Bay.

“That’s the trick—the tidal flow,” said Zahn. “That’s why this is healthy and pristine. That’s why you see all the sandpipers dotting the mud flats. That’s why you see the flocks of waterfowl that migrate from the polar tundras. That why almost every single salt-marsh plant you can imagine is down there. That’s what we want to do with all the remaining wetlands.”

With the traffic on Studebaker Road rumbling from over the berm behind him, Zahn pulled out his binoculars and swept them across the wetland wilderness.

“Oh! A coyote!” he yelped suddenly. “Ahhhhh, what a beauty. Check it out.”

Zahn started to hand me the binoculars, but couldn’t let them go yet.

“He’s running now. Wow, he’s good-sized. Look at him working the salt marsh, just hunting the birds in the marsh right now. That’s so natural. It’s beautiful to see that.”

I didn’t need the binoculars. I could see the coyote now, too—not skinny or skulking at all, but healthy and strong and picking up speed as he zeroed in on the birds, a few of which had begun to stir as they noticed him.

“Oh, my god! He’s on the mud flat!” Zahn said excitedly. “You and I couldn’t walk across these mud flats. We’d sink up to our waists right away. But look at him go! He’s going in the water! Swimming! That gull has no idea he’s coming up, either. That’s nature! That’s nature! Get it! Get it!”

The coyote didn’t get the gull. But watching the bird fly away didn’t seem to disappoint him. He never stopped, never even slowed. He swam across the waterway, and by the time he came out the other side he’d apparently spotted another bird, off somewhere we couldn’t see. He’d already run a long way, so far all for nothing. But he kept going, as if propelled by a hope so strong that it felt like certainty. He didn’t look tired at all.

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