A pipeline apparently broken by tree roots caused a small sewage spill into the ocean at Dillon Beach Monday, North Marin Water District manager Chris DeGabriel announced today.

“It’s estimated that over 250 gallons of sewage surfaced from a broken pipeline on a steep hillside in the vicinity of Kailua Way,” he said, adding that the leak “was likely caused by tree roots damaging a pipe joint.”

Seen from Elephant Rock, Dillon Beach looks tranquil with Lawson’s Landing resort and the mouth of Tomales Bay in the distance. In the town’s Oceana Marin subdivision, however, a sewage spill caused a bit of a commotion yesterday.

Kailua Way is within the Oceana Marin subdivision, where North Marin operates the sewer system. “District crews responded, and Roto Rooter Sewer Service was dispatched to the area,” DeGabriele reported. “The spill was contained and initial pipe repair made within four hours of the district’s response.

“During that time, raw sewage flowed over land and ultimately into a drainage swale and storm drain that flows to the ocean…. The affected drainage swale and beach has been taped off and signed to keep people away from the area.

“Water samples upstream and downstream from the spill are being tested, and the results will be made available as soon as possible. Cleanup of the sewage discharged onto the area has begun, and the district is pursuing permanent repair of the pipeline.”

DeGabriele said a Dillon Beach resident first alerted North Marin to the spill and that “Marin County Health Department, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, and California Department of Fish and Game were notified of the incident.”

North Marin’s quick notification of regulatory agencies contrasts with the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin’s slowness to report two sewage spills totaling 5.2 million gallons into Richardson Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, on Jan. 25 and 31.

A herd of up to nine blacktail deer have taken to spending their days on this hill, here joining the horses of Point Reyes Arabians for a late-afternoon snack.

California’s Department of Fish and Game has estimated that well over half the roughly 560,000 deer in California are Columbian blacktails, the deer native to West Marin and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mutual friends. Two blacktail does licking each other’s coats.

For years many people believed (and many websites still say) that blacktails are a subspecies of mule deer, a species found from the Northwest to the deserts of the Southwest and as far east as the Dakotas. DNA tests, however, have now found mule deer to be a hybrid of female whitetail deer and blacktail bucks. Or so says author Valerius Geist in Mule Deer Country.

Whitetails first appeared on the East Coast about 3.5 million years ago, as this blog previously noted. DNA evidence suggests they spread south and then west, arriving in California about 1.5 million years ago.

In moving up the coast, whitetails evolved into blacktails, which resemble them in appearance and temperament. Blacktails eventually extended their range eastward, meeting up with more whitetails coming from the east. Apparently the blacktail bucks were able to horn in on the harems of their parent species. The result: mule deer.

Mule deer as seen on the website of Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills. The deer are so named because of their long ears.

And for an amazing look at a whitetail deer, check this YouTube clip of one running into the path of a motorcycle on a mountain highway, but avoiding a collision by jumping over the biker as he ducks.

What is there to say about the American turkey that hasn’t recently been said? In the last 20 years, wild turkeys have spread throughout West Marin. I grew up in Berkeley and six weeks ago attended a New Year’s Eve party there; to my surprise, residents of my old neighborhood were likewise talking about wild turkeys moving in on them.

Well, how about this curiosity? Why does the bird have the same name as the country? As it happens, Turkey was the talk of the world’s chattering classes this past week after Turks voted that henceforth women can wear headscarves in universities. But getting back to the coincidence of names:

Here’s an explanation from an educational website, Kidzone, for younger students; it’s consistent with the etymology given by The American Heritage Dictionary:

“When the Spanish first found the bird in the Americas more than 400 years ago they brought it back to Europe. The English mistakenly thought it was a bird they called a “turkey” so they gave it the same name. This other bird was actually from Africa, but came to England by way of Turkey (lots of shipping went through Turkey at the time). The name stuck even when they realized the birds weren’t the same.”

The African bird which the English confused with the American turkey was the guinea fowl, The American Heritage Dictionary notes. As it happens, for the past two months that bird has been the talk of Point Reyes Station’s chattering classes, such as we are, because a representative of the alien species has been walking the streets of town.

The first report of that streetwalking was published in this blog Dec. 16. Yesterday, The Point Reyes Light reported that after two months of hunting and pecking throughout Point Reyes Station, the bird has now been caught by Station House Café employee Armando Gonzalez.

A word of warning. If guinea fowl is the dinner special some night at the café, remember the caution of Inverness Park biologist Russell Ridge: “You better like dark meat.”

A fascinating article in Wednesday’s Marin Independent Journal reveals a “second massive sewage spill” at the same Mill Valley treatment plant discussed in the last posting here. The total amount of sewage spilled in one week is now put at 5.2 million gallons.

Because of a bureaucratic snafu, the Jan. 25 spill of 2.45 million gallons into Richardson Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, didn’t come to light until after last Thursday’s spill of 2.75 million gallons. As the article by reporter Mark Prado explained, the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin (which owns the treatment plant) should have immediately notified the Regional Water Quality Control Board after the first spill but instead emailed notification to the regional board’s parent body, the State Water Resources Control Board.

A typo in the email resulted in the date of the spill being given as Jan. 15 instead of 25. Seeing the date, a state employee put the email aside, assuming it dealt with a two-week-old event, the newspaper reported. When the regional board finally learned of the earlier spill, The IJ added, they too were confused by the typo, until yesterday.

“Health officials posted signs at beaches and waterfronts along Richardson Bay warning people of the contamination last week after the second spill was disclosed,” The IJ noted and showed such a sign, which was photographed by Jeff Vendsel.

Why the sign looks almost as serious as the one below that health officials posted many months ago next to the Green Bridge! The Marin Environmental Health Department in early January told me this sign should have been taken down in October and would be right away. It’s still there.

So why was this sign along Papermill/Lagunitas Creek posted in the first place? Did millions of gallons of sewage also spill into the creek? Did any sewage spill into the creek?

Not according to North Marin Water District. North Marin monitors water quality in the creek because it draws the drinking water for Point Reyes Station, Olema, and Inverness Park from creekside wells.

As was noted here in Posting 94, North Marin’s tests of Papermill Creek’s water have found only normal amounts of bacteria, including e-coli bacteria, NMWD senior chemist Stacie Goodpaster told me. After a rain, of course, the amount of bacteria in the creek goes up temporarily, Stacie noted, because bacteria get washed into the creek.

However, she added, North Marin’s current testing cannot determine the source of the bacteria; they come from soil, decaying plants, or animal waste. She felt reasonably sure there has not been any sewage leak into the creek, for that would cause there to be at least 50 times as much e-coli in the water.

Marin Environmental Health later confirmed there was no indication of a sewage spill into Papermill Creek.

Supervising health inspector David Smail told me that under state standards for Recreation 1 (swimming) freshwater, the maximum number of enterococcus bacteria per milliliter is 61 in a single day’s sample (104 for saltwater). The last sampling at the Green Bridge, which followed unusually heavy rains in October, resulted in an enterococcus count of 63 (only two over the limit), but under established “protocol,” that requires a sign, David said.

And despite the “avoid contact with water” line in the county sign, Papermill Creek did not test unsafe for boating (Recreation 2). So the “avoid contact” part wasn’t accurate even at the time the sign first went up.

But who’s to care? Runoff from heavy rain carries apparently normal amounts of soil, plant debris, and wildlife waste from forested parkland into Papermill Creek; doesn’t that warrant posting warnings at least as dire as those for a 5.2-million-gallon sewage spill?

Needlessly alarming West Marin’s tourists and local residents doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s just bureaucracy fubar. Or crying wolf.

Before we forget the wrecks that never happened near Dogtown a week ago, when half the southbound lane in a 55-mph section of Highway 1 dropped away….

You may recall that storm water pouring off the roadbank at left undercut a 20-foot stretch of highway about 5:30 p.m. Jan. 25. Fortunately, a Caltrans supervisor “proceeding slowly” (in the words of his boss) found the gap in time to warn motorists before any fell through it. He was also able to keep motorists from having to swerve around it at the last second, possibly resulting in head-on collisions.

Eve Breckenridge of St. Helena looks down the steep slope below the missing roadway.

Prompting this retrospective on the event was the news about a hapless sewage-treatment-plant operator in Mill Valley. From what I read, he didn’t leave enough pumps on when he went home last Thursday night (apparently not anticipating how heavy the rain would be), and this caused the plant to overflow into San Francisco Bay. The result, of course, has been an environmental and public-health headache.

By way of contrast: Caltrans spokesman Bob Haus yesterday got for me the name of the road-crew supervisor who was keeping an eye on the condition of Highway 1 thoroughly enough to be proceeding slowly. When supervisor Eamonn Dymer rounded a curve and discovered half the lane ahead of him ending abruptly in a high dropoff, he was able to stop in time and then alert others.

Most people would have expected any storm damage that dangerous to be more visible from a distance, but the supervisor, who is based at the Manzanita Maintenance Yard, was properly observant and thus careful. In today’s sense of the word, supervisor Dymer wasn’t heroic. Nowadays that term is usually reserved for the player who scores the winning touchdown. But because supervisor Dymer went about his job the way he was supposed to, he was able to avert some horrible crashes.

The two incidents should be a reminder that despite the attention we give politicians and celebrity CEOs, it’s our too-often-forgotten working people who mostly determine whether our country is safe and functioning. But unless they screw up, we seldom talk about them.

It makes me wonder whatever became of society’s admiration for diligent workers. These days it’s little more than perfunctory speeches on Labor Day and employee-of-the-month photos on retail-chain walls. We may be in the 21st century, but we need to remember that the real heroes are still hardworking people going about their daily jobs.

Author and political activist Jack Herer showed up at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station Monday evening to publicize the “California Cannabis Hemp & Health Initiative 2008” signature drive.

Herer signs a copy of one of his books, Grass, for Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness. Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park (at left) helped organize Monday’s meeting. Attendance was light, probably because in West Marin Herer was preaching to the choir.

Monday’s event began with a movie, Emperor of Hemp (narrated by actor Peter Coyote), about Herer’s 50-year campaign throughout the United States to legalize cannabis sativa, both the smokable and non-smokable varieties. In the film, Herer is seen evolving from a conservative military policeman in Korea after the war to an advocate for growing hemp for fiber, food, and fuel.

Herer loves to rant, although the effects of a stroke have slowed his speech in recent years, and is seen from New York to Oregon ranting against marijuana laws and haranguing enthusiastic crowds with, “Hemp will save the world.”

Appropriately, Herer says his interest in cannabis sativa occurred after a girlfriend convinced him to try smoking pot. Not only did the euphoria make him see the world differently, he became a different person. Herer went from a Goldwater Republican to an advocate for legalizing cannabis, both for enjoyment and medical purposes. Equally significant, he became an advocate for growing industrial-grade cannabis to replace wood in paper, for use as fuel and lubricants, for cooking oil etc.

As Herer pointed out in his repeatedly reissued 1985 book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, hemp was used for thousands of years to make paper, cloth, oil (from its seeds), and innumerable other products. In 1937, however, the US government outlawed personal use of pot and outlawed even the growing of industrial-quality hemp despite outcries from the medical community, among others.

The absurdity of banning a valuable crop became evident a decade later when, as Emperor of Hemp shows, a US Department of Agriculture film described hemp farming as a patriotic part of the war effort, even though it remained illegal.

The federal government continues to ban hemp farming (although industrial-grade hemp contains too little tetrahydrocannabinol to create the effects associated with pot), and hemp products sold in this country are all made with imported hemp. Emperor of Hemp quotes the government’s argument for banning a valuable crop as being that police would have trouble determining which cannabis was legal and which was illegal, so allowing industrial-grade hemp growing in the US “would send the wrong message to our children.” Huh?

Emperor of Hemp contains interviews with people from the medical community, academia, and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, all saying that what Herer preaches is on target despite his bombast. Even NORML, who for years didn’t want to associate itself with Herer’s “Hemp-will-save-the-world” rhetoric, now recognizes the aging activist’s writings have made the public understand the false premises behind the government’s war against cannabis, the group’s executive director says in the film.

Herer has now authored the Hemp Initiative in an attempt to make California law reflect reality. As Herer said Monday, signatures are being collected for the state initiative, with 434,000 valid signatures needed by April 5 to qualify for the November ballot. In any initiative drive, a large number of signatures are invalidated, so organizers of this campaign hope to reach three million signatures in the next two months.

The initiative would legalize the growing and selling industrial hemp, would bar state law enforcement officers from helping federal agents enforce federal anti-marijuana laws in California, would legalize marijuana smoking for religious purposes, would legalize adult use of marijuana for euphoria as well as medicine, and would set standards for non-commercial cultivation of marijuana.

To publicize the initiative drive, three-day “Hip Hop for Hemp” festivals will be held in Northern and Southern California. Seeva Cherms (left), the daughter of Linda Sturdivant, is handling publicity, and Wednesday she told me 24 bands and several internationally known reggae and rock stars have already agreed to participate.

For the moment, Seeva added, the identities of the biggest names cannot be announced, pending arrangements with their recording companies. People who want to keep up with festival plans will soon be able to check a new Hip Hop for Hemp website.

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An operation aimed at eliminating a herd of axis deer near Marshall Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore was abruptly halted Monday morning after numerous news organizations learned of the killing and showed up to report on it.

The killing was being carried out by riflemen from a firm called White Buffalo, which the National Seashore hired last year. White Buffalo had planned on using helicopters to herd the axis herd into ravines where they could be gunned down en masse. However, the shooting stopped after 18 deer out of a herd of 80 were killed.

Axis deer on L Ranch in the Point Reyes National Seashore just before the killing began. (Photo by Trish Carney of San Rafael.)

“It looks like we might have successfully stopped the axis-deer slaughter that was scheduled for early this morning,” a pleased Trinka Marris of Inverness Park said later Monday. Trinka had organized protests this morning on Marshall Road and at the Bear Valley headquarters of the park.

Approximately 20 protesters took part, including representatives of WildCare and In Defense of Animals.

“The park had blocked the roads, and the White Buffalo helicopters were launched, but when our protest showed up at the roadblock [not far from Marshall Beach], with camera and reporter in tow, the word got back to park headquarters,” Trinka recounted.

Hired with grant money, a company called Full Court Press has been getting publicity for the axis and fallow deer’s plight in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Monday evening Trinka told fellow protesters, “Thanks to the remarkable firm that has been hired to help with this campaign, by 10 a.m. the park was crawling with new crews from ABC, NBC, CBS, KTVU, and The Independent Journal.

“By 11 a.m. the helicopters had been put away, the all-terrain vehicles that carry the carcasses were back at maintenance, and the mission had been aborted.”

Today’s protest began at daybreak, and Trinka thanked “the 20 or so dedicated people” who showed up. “It was not easy getting up at 4:30 on a stormy Monday morning, but we did, and I think we bought these beautiful creatures at least one more day of sweet life.”

Earlier today Trinka reminded me that the park has consistently refused to let the public see how the killing is done.

Despite what the park has claimed, “it’s not one bullet to the brain,” Trinka said. If the public could see how brutal the killing actually is, “no one would stand for it.” Indeed, deer hunters in West Marin have complained that many of the deer shot by White Buffalo suffer long, agonizing deaths from “gut wounds.”

White Buffalo is under contract to kill fallow and axis deer in the park through June, at which time the eradication program must be reviewed and a new, one-year contract signed, Trinka said.

Members of Congress and the California Legislature have asked the Bush Administration’s Department of the Interior to at least temporarily stop the killing until it can be thought through better. The National Seashore, however, has responded that under the government’s contract with White Buffalo, it can’t afford to stop.

On Monday, Dr. Elliot Katz, president of In Defense of Animals, countered by offering to pay the rest of this year’s contract with White Buffalo. The veterinarian made the offer directly to both White Buffalo during the protest on Marshall Road and to National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher during the protest at park headquarters.

The Neubacher administration has told the public that the main reason for killing off non-native deer in the park is so they won’t compete with the native blacktail deer for forage. Pressed by the press today, however, the park superintendent conceded that White Buffalo’s riflemen sometimes shoot a few native blacktails that are hanging out with the fallow and axis herds.

The park’s claim that there would be more native blacktail deer in the park if the axis and fallow were not eating so much forage is, of course, sheer propaganda. The buildup of brush and dry grass is annually such a problem that the National Seashore regularly conducts controlled burns to reduce the risk of wildfires.

Providing the biggest check on the blacktail population of federal parkland here, as can be seen along Highway 1 from Muir Beach to Marshall, are motorists. Fresh carcasses of deer struck in traffic are daily sights in West Marin. This is hardly surprising now that the National Seashore attracts more than 2.2 million visitors annually, and neighboring Golden Gate National Recreation Area lands, hundreds of thousands more.

Update as of Wednesday evening: Demonstrator Saskia Achilles, who has continued to track the axis-herd eradication, just reported, “All road access is blocked by park rangers in trucks when the hunting is going on, so I have only been able to get close on foot, and not at night, but I see their helicopters in the deer’s valley, and I see nets with a heavy load getting carried by the helicopter….

“Today they stopped again when a media helicopter flew over,” she added, “and resumed right after [it left].”

“It looks to us from the field that they are killing 20 to 30 every night [and] … and that their aim is to have wiped out the entire axis herd by the end of Thursday.”

Where tragedy was narrowly averted:
Rainwater pouring off the embankment at right created such a torrent across a 20-foot-long stretch of Highway 1 between Thirteen Turns and Dogtown Friday, that half the southbound lane dropped away.

The washout occurred around 5:30 p.m. on a winding, 55-mph section of the highway. Luckily, one of the first motorists, if not the first, to come upon the break in the roadway was a Caltrans supervisor. The supervisor was “proceeding slowly” in a pickup truck, a coworker told me, and stopped when he saw water rushing across Highway 1.

The supervisor, who was later identified as Eamonn Dymer from Caltrans’ Manzanita Maintenance Yard, then discovered that half the lane he was driving in had fallen away, and he was able to put out flares and traffic cones before any other vehicles got there.

In doing so, he probably saved someone’s life because any highway-speed motorist who failed to see the gap in time would have dropped 75 to 100 feet after sailing off the roadway.

By Saturday afternoon, Caltrans had erected a concrete barrier around the break, and Highway 1 was reduced to one lane in the area. Stop signs were erected at both ends of the one-lane section, and a road crew had painted “STOP” on the pavement in both directions.

Elsewhere, Friday’s storm flooded low-lying areas in Muir Beach and Stinson Beach, as well as parts of Highway 1 between Stinson Beach and Bolinas, between Olema and Point Reyes Station, between Point Reyes Station and Marshall, and between Marshall and Tomales.

Papermill/Lagunitas Creek crested its northern levee in Point Reyes Station about 3 a.m. Saturday and flooded much of the former Giacomini Ranch, Jack Long of Point Reyes Station told me. Long, who lives on the southern levee, took this photo and the one below.

After buying the Giacomini Ranch with the intention of turning much of it into marshland, the National Park Service last year scraped away sections the northern levee.

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The flooded pasture of the former Giacomini Dairy Ranch, as seen from Inverness Park. Perry’s Inverness Park Store and the Busy Bee Bakery are in the foreground. Black Mountain is in the distance. Photo by Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park.

The surge of water onto the ranch from the break in the levee was not enough, however, to prevent the confluence of Papermill Creek and Olema Creek from cresting the southern levee too. Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, which is known as “the levee road” where it travels atop the southern levee, flooded Saturday and was briefly closed.

The rainstorm also blacked out much of West Marin for roughly two hours Friday evening.

Bad as Friday’s storm problems were, they weren’t as severe as those that occurred during an even fiercer storm three weeks to the day earlier.

Fallen utility pole in a marsh at Millerton Point.

In fact, some in West Marin are still cleaning up from the earlier heavy rainstorm, which was accompanied by hurricane-force wind.

Shoreline School District, it now turns out, is facing extensive repairs at Inverness School where the Jan. 4 storm sent a river of water down Forres Way and into the administration office.

With water having been well over a foot deep in the office, carpeting and other fixtures must be replaced.

But the real storm news is what didn’t happen: no motorists plunged to their deaths last Friday evening when a major gap opened up in Highway 1 north of Dogtown.

A female Bufflehead swims across the Giacomini family’s stockpond next to my pasture last Friday.

A male Greater Scaup paddles up Papermill Creek at White House Pool on Jan. 13.

West Marin’s waters provide winter havens for many thousands of ducks that summer further north. Ornithologist Rich Stallcup of Point Reyes Station, who helped identify these ducks, this week told me the “Greater Scaup does not nest in California, and only a few Buffleheads do.”

Buffleheads and Greater Scaups, Rich noted, “begin to arrive in West Marin in early October, and each species numbers well into the thousands on Tomales Bay during herring runs in late December and early January, at least 6,000 each. Most are gone by early April….

“Buffleheads are cavity-nesters and are expanding their breeding range aligned with the increased human interest in Wood Duck boxes, which Buffleheads will [likewise] occupy.

“Hooded Mergansers are similarly expanding their range,” Rich added. “It’s one of the ‘side perks’ of Wood Duck-nestbox programs.”

Since 1955, the California Department of Fish and Game has annually made estimates, based on counts from the air, of how many breeding-age ducks are in their primary hangouts: “wetland and agricultural areas in northeastern California, throughout the Central Valley, the Suisun Marsh, and some coastal valleys.”

Weather greatly affects how many ducks nest in California. Two years ago, Fish and Game reported there were 615,000 ducks in their main nesting grounds, nearly a 50 percent increase from the year before, thanks to abundant spring rains that year. Approximately half the wild ducks in the state were mallards.

Fish and Game uses such estimates in regulating how many ducks hunters can bag in California each hunting season.

Last year, hunters nationwide shot approximately 16.6 million wild ducks, the Fund for Animals reports. That total is actually up slightly from figures half a century ago, as reported in The Encyclopedia Americana.

While Buffleheads and Greater Scaups are both hunted, roughly half the wild ducks shot in the US annually are mallards.

Most people probably think of Bambi’s friendship with Thumper as merely a fantasy dreamed up for children. But I suspect that Felix Salten was working from direct observation when he authored Bambi, ein Leben im Walde in 1923. (Walt Disney’s 1942 animated feature Bambi was taken from Salten’s book.)

While I watched from my deck last Friday, a blacktail doe spotted a housecat near neighbor Dan and Mary Huntsman’s fence.

The doe took great interest in the cat’s crawling under a gate.

Deer and cats, as this blog has noted previously, seem to get along well, as evidenced by the doe below watching a housecat wash itself on a woodpile.

It’s an inter-species attraction that folks around the country have noticed. If you want to watch a deer and cat flirt with each other, two videos on YouTube are particularly fun. The first is made all the more humorous by the chatter, as well as, a radio broadcast, in the background. The second is notable for the persistence of both the cat and deer in bussing each other.

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I’ve also witnessed similar behavior in my fields between a fawn and a jackrabbit. When a curious fawn spotted the rabbit, it began slowly walking up to it. The rabbit stayed put until the fawn started sniffing around it and then hopped under a nearby bush.

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I didn’t manage to photograph that encounter, but many of us have seen a series of photos depicting the friendship between another fawn and a rabbit. Here’s one from the series, which was shot by German photographer Tanja Askani in Alberta, Canada.

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