on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Fish In The City

After years in the woods, Fish and Game has come to town with a mission to change urban planning

(March 27, 2008) On a half-overcast day in early spring, environmental scientists Scott Bauer and Gordon Leppig get into a big, white, double-cab pickup with the California Department of Fish and Game logo on its door. Bauer starts the engine and steers the truck out of the parking lot of the DFG’s Eureka offices in Old Town, and picks a path away from the waterfront.

The truck turns onto Myrtle Avenue, which rises and dips as it crosses several major gulches that thread through the city. Bauer slows at the first dip and points off to the right — southwest — into a deep, broad, mysterious thicket of trees and brush, shadows and light, nudged by a tame stretch of city park.

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“That’s Cooper Gulch, that line of trees,” says Bauer. “To me, it’s pretty obvious that Cooper was moved over when they built the ball fields. Around the turn of the century they just moved the creek over.”

“They want to put a building right there,” says Leppig, pointing to a cleared area not far from the gulch. Bauer drives out of the dip, then down another. At a strip of grass next to the Tea Garden cafe, he pulls over and parks.

“This is actually a city park right here,” Bauer says of the unmarked grassy strip, then points at the field beyond it that leads into a thicket where, somewhere, a creeks flows. “This is Second Slough, and it’s got coastal cutthroat trout. If you look at the old aerial photos, you can see this was pasture. See the old fence down there? They probably drained the creek to create the pasture. Now it’s gone feral, riparian. It’s recovering.”

“It’s got nice brackish water,” adds Leppig. “There’s leakage from the tidal gate.”

“We hope some day to make [the tidal gate] more fish friendly,” says Bauer. “It’d be great coho habitat.”

Driving again, Bauer takes a side road and stops next to a ravaged wetland. Half of it has been filled in over the decades by people dumping unwanted dirt; the other half’s recently been partially cleared, its trees cut to the ground. Houses and condos border it on high banks. A stream bends around the cleared area and into an untouched spot where birds — Wilson’s warblers, perhaps — sing in the remaining red alder and Hooker’s willows. The sound of a siren on Myrtle Avenue punctuates the spring-like lull.

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