By Founder and President Kurt Lieber
After you read this encouraging article, be sure to check out the photo gallery - we have a ton of photos of gorgeous birds we saw there!
ODA volunteers once again headed to the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR) on Wednesday, June 24th. We go into the Refuge once a month to locate and remove as much debris as possible before it makes its way to the open ocean , which in this case is about 1,000 yards away.
I arrived the day before and drove/walked around the wetlands looking for places with high concentrations of garbage that we could reasonably expect to reach. When I got there, I was surprised to see so much water. It turned out that there was an unusually high tide.
That tide carried a LOT more debris than normal. When I looked at a few of the potential sites I was stunned by how much trash there was. We had just been here about a month ago and removed 1,300 pounds of stuff, and it looked significantly healthier at that time.
I'll share pictures of the beautiful birds I saw as we go along...
Great blue heron
But whoa, what those tides brought in was just overwhelming. I called the Refuge biologist, Chloe, and she said there was a king tide that came up and just inundated the place.
Looking at it from one perspective, it’s great that the wetlands do such a good job of “catching” all that debris before it gets to the open ocean. On the other hand, it just revealed how much of this stuff is in our waters to begin with.
As I was scouting around, I was treated to some things I don’t normally see. High tides come twice a day and most of the critters in a wetland have adapted to being in water for short periods of time. But in the case of these king tides, they are forced to scramble to higher ground. Otherwise, they’d drown.
Red-tailed hawk
The predatory birds know this, and I saw several different species hunting around those edges.
Crabs seem to be especially on the move in such a situation. I saw many of them go down the gullets of great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, and great egrets.
Great egret
I even saw a juvenile yellow-crowned get in on the “dinner” action.
Yellow-crowned night heron
Once I completed my survey, I was driving out of the refuge when I spotted a coyote about 200 feet ahead of me. I stopped my car and let the cool guy get comfortable with my presence. It took a while but after trotting away from me he turned back and reversed course.
It was then that I saw another one was with him. They both appeared to be young to me, as they were only 4 feet or so long. After a few minutes of looking around for something to eat, they both headed to another area.
I’ve been doing this for 4 years now and this was only the 3rd time I can recall seeing coyotes here. It was quite the thrill for me and left me in awe of how wildlife can thrive if we just give them space and a healthy environment.
Wednesday morning 9am.
We had quite the turnout of volunteers. In addition to our normal crew, we had 9 people from a local cable company participate. Austin Quesada works for COX Communications and contacted me asking if some of his co-workers could join us for a cleanup. YES!
With so many people for this event, we were able to break up into teams of 4 and cover 5 different locations of the 960-acre wetlands.
Volunteers this day were: Christian Alvarez, Ricardo Avila, Lucas Fernandez, Frank Garcia, Pearla Gerges, Joseph Hurtado, Jon Lumell, Dave and Jean Merrill, Kent Morris, Linda Nicholes, Austin Quesada, Fred Reed, Blake Storie, Emmitt and Lisa Taylor, Steve Tyler and Jose Zamorano. 18 folks in all!
Thanks to all who spent 3 hours in the blazing sun, to get this special place as clean as possible for all the critters that call this home.
As the sites were so spread out, I couldn’t take a picture of all the combined trash we removed, but it was significant. I estimate that it was about 1,050 pounds.
Instead of one picture with all the debris in one place, I have several photos to share of our ODA volunteer crews with their "catch of the day"!
Here's another team:
And another one!
Thanks to ODA volunteer Lisa Taylor for recruiting her son Emmitt and his friend Pearla. Emmitt just graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cal State University, Long Beach. His degree is in biology and has a special interest in birds. He’s only 24 years old and already has an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide variety of bird species. I have a feeling that our feathered friends are going to be in good hands with him out there in the world!
Emmit and Pearla with their "catch of the day"!
If you can, take a look our volunteer spotlight on team member Kent Morris featured in our Crew Chronicles series this month.
Special thanks to Austin and the officials at COX Communications for letting 9 of your employees take time off work to help our environment. What a great example of a company that cares and has wonderful employees who are willing to roll up their sleeves and help their local environment!
Half a ton of toxic debris is now out of harm’s way thanks to these 18 people!
