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Sonoma Land Trust honored by Supervisors
In this photo: Front row: Supervisor Valerie Brown, Sonoma Land Trust acquisitions director Wendy Eliot and executive director Ralph Benson. Back row: Sonoma County Water Agency general manager Grant Davis, Ag Preservation and Open Space District general manager Bill Keene, Supervisors Mike McGuire, David Rabbit, Shirlee Zane and Efren Carrillo. Click here to read the resolution Saving wildlife by capping poles
Seizing opportunities that may not come again
Please renew or become a member now. Thank you. Pitkin Marsh — an outdoor laboratory
Tolay Creek — a landscape scarred by tragedy
Coyote at the Jenner Headlands
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August 2012
DISCOVER Historical Ecology!
Annual Report to the Community
Public notice of accreditation
Sonoma Land Trust is participating in a rigorous, voluntary accreditation program operated by the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, which recognizes land conservation organizations that meet national quality standards for protecting important natural places and working lands. The Accreditation Commission invites public input on pending applications that relate to how Sonoma Land Trust complies with national quality standards. To learn more about the accreditation program and to submit a comment by October 31, please visit
Optics Fair and
State Parks' found money Help ensure all the heretofore hidden millions will stay with State Parks. Please contact your legislators and let them know how important it is to put ALL our money back into the parks! Udall Scholar Stearns
Trails at your fingertips
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Questions or comments? Email Sheri Cardo, managing editor. Copyright 2012 Sonoma Land Trust. All Rights Reserved. Newsletter produced by Athena Design. |
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At Sears Point and on many other Sonoma Land Trust properties, we use cattle as a management tool to help control non-native weeds. This means fences. Fences mean gates and gates are braced by steel poles, many of which are hollow. This year, we learned that throughout the western U.S., such hollow poles or pipes can be death traps for birds, reptiles and small mammals, but mostly birds. Birds perch on top and sometimes investigate inside from which they are unable to escape. Although we've found no evidence of this on our properties, we are not taking chances. Over the summer, Land Trust interns Ellen Gavazza and Devyn Friedfel walked more than 15 miles of fencing looking for such poles. They identified nearly 30 and are in the process of capping the tops. We appreciate their hard work and problem-solving skills.
Sonoma Land Trust's 27-acre Lower Pitkin Marsh property is one of the most valuable complexes of mixed riparian woodland and thicket, freshwater marsh, wet meadow, oak woodland and grassland in Sonoma County — and, lately, it has become a hotspot for workshops on wetlands and sedge. Over the past summer, the property hosted four workshop tours for classes offered through Pepperwood Preserve, the Jepson Herbarium and San Francisco State University's Wetland Science Series. Students studied the plants in the field, used dissecting scopes in the lab, and used the new identification keys in the second edition of The Jepson Manual to learn how to distinguish sedges and rushes.
Earlier this month, Sonoma Land Trust's Wendy Eliot and Bob Neale accompanied George Burk of Arizona, along with friends and neighbors, to a remote corner of Tolay Creek Ranch to remember and pay respects to 13 young men who died there in 1970 in the crash of a U.S. Air Force transport plane. George, then a 25-year-old Air Force captain and Vietnam veteran, was the only person to survive the crash. He contacted Sonoma Land Trust recently to ask our permission to revisit the site. We had been unaware of the events of that day, but George was able to contact neighbors and eyewitnesses to determine the crash site, which is still marked by dead trees that were sheared off by the aircraft. As George recounted his memory of the tragedy — the few minutes of flight; the fire, smoke and chaos of the crash; and his long recovery from his injuries — the air was still and quiet. And though a big battle did not rage here and no large statues have been erected, Bob explains that George's presence and story made this small chapter of history very real and personal. "It was a reminder that people have often lived and died unknown to us on lands that we may cross on a daily basis. It was a humbling day and a new reason to meditate on the sacredness of our lands. Thank you, George." 
