Enjoy, Don’t Destroy, Our Public Parks – More Visitors Put Native Wildlife and Habitat at Risk
The pandemic gave Californians a new appreciation of being in nature. With the onset of pandemic restrictions in 2020, the public parks drew record numbers of visitors and continue to do so. Nowhere is this more evident than in EBRPD parks where some parks saw a five-fold increase in 2020 and 2021.
While the growing popularity attests that parks are essential to our mental and physical health, the increased visitations bring growing risks to the habitat and wildlife that live in these parks. An Ethnic Media Services briefing, held Oct. 18, explored what happens when people stray off the hiking trails, trample the grasslands, inadvertently cause toxin build up in lakes, release turtles, birds and fish often for ceremonial purposes, feed coyotes and feral cats – and what visitors need to do to balance the human impacts of recreation with the natural environment.
Experts from East Bay Regional Park District – Dee Rosario, Ward 2 Board Member; Becky Tuden, Ecological Services Manager; Joe Sullivan, Fisheries Program Manager; and Doug Bell, Wildlife Program Manager – focused on the challenges faced by California’s public parks.
Dee Rosario gave an overview of how parks are faring across the state.
“The incredible influx of people coming to our parks as our only venue of getting out and about, and we bring without all of our cultural heritage, our cultural resources, and our biases, and that’s something that the park district, all state parks, and national parks, as well I have to learn – how to deal with each culture as it brings its own interpretation of what it is to enjoy nature.”
“We need to understand the history, the sensitivity, that’s brought into this culture, embrace that culture of beauty, nature, and how sensitive it is to our intrusions,” said Rosario.
Becky Tuden talked about the increased visitation and its impacts.
“As we’ve gotten more complicated as a society, our presence in the world has become not just one factory with one outfall into a creek, our impacts are very diffuse and spread. We have cars that drive, petrochemicals and metals on the tires, tracks that we drop, that can get into the stream, so our impacts are much more diffuse. Our presence on the landscape is much bigger,” said Tuden.
She talked about what her team does in the park districts to try to minimize that and made a distinction between more intensively used parks and wildlands.
“The East Bay Park District is spread in two counties, 125,000 acres. We have coastal areas, Woodlands that have Bobcats, and grasslands that have coyotes and snakes, and many of our ponds are home to amphibians.
“The Parklands have a lot of edge which means they have a lot of exterior lands that come right up against lands that are not Parklands and that’s where we are encroaching and impacting those lands.
“Some of our parks are bigger and wilder, and some are more recreational, where there’s picnic areas or swimming lagoons or interpretive centers where we want a lot of people to gather. The Park District has intentionally designed them that way. Our Gateway parks have a lot of turf and there’s volleyball fields and you can be there with the animals, and the trees, but it’s not as much of a habitat to the wildlife as if you were in those wildlands.
“Overall Regional Park District’s mission is to acquire, preserve, protect, and operate Regional Parklands in perpetuity for public,” said Tuden.
“We want these lands to be resilient and interconnected. We want them to sustain diverse communities, and in terms of our involvement with the public, we wanted these lands to be meaningful to the public.
“We don’t want them to be consumed, we want them to be meaningful to present and future generations.
“If you release your pets, or your turtles, or your walking stick insects into the environment, those are invasive and they take up the habitat that would be used by those native plants and animals, so you have a loss of biodiversity and also when you’re increasing plants that have come from all around the world you’re bringing those insects and those pathogens that came from those that weren’t meant to be here, and they don’t have natural predators, and again you have an increased risk for fire if these plants grow unchecked.
“If you’re not managing your animals properly, if you’re feeding them, then you end up having aggressive animals and that’s when you have an unsafe park.
“We do a lot of work with our cattle for grazing. They help manage the fuel loading to the parts, and they also mimic the historic disturbance that we’ve had on the landscape, so they are providing a service, and without them we would have fuel loading and a loss of biodiversity.
“We can survey these species to help us see how well we’re doing.
“Every time we’re in the wildlands we’re in some native habitat, we are taking away that time and that space for that animal to be there, because they’re going to leave when they see us for the most part. Doing that that means they have less time to eat, and feed, take care of their young, and there’s potential loss of habitat, and loss of food for them.
“We have a lot of challenges, stricter regulatory requirements, but more importantly, we have changing climate, so we’re seeing warmer weather, changes in precipitation, which is a stress on the environment, and by responding to that stress that environment is becoming more threatened.
“We have increased park usage. More people in more places, more infrastructure, PG&E towers, spread throughout. There’s a lot of impacts that are happening to these parts and we don’t want we want to minimize our impact, we want to enjoy the parks, take care, safeguard, and protect them.
“Some of our messaging has been very scary. There are rattlesnakes, mountain lions, and some of it is, ‘Hey! other animals live here, like coyotes, they live in these parks, you’re in their house,’” ended Tuden.
Doug Bell, wildlife program manager, talked about the creatures in the parks including those some of us unwittingly release, or leave behind.
“Enjoy, don’t disturb. Try not to disturb wildlife. Enjoy, don’t feed. Don’t feed the animals in the park, as tempting as that is. Don’t release. Don’t release animals into the park thinking you can’t take care of your kitten anymore, it’ll be better off in the park, where it can be free and enjoying life,” warned Bell.
Enjoy, don’t disturb. “Along the shorelines, we have four critically threatened and endangered species that use these habitats, right next to the urban edge, with picnickers right behind them in the picnic areas.
“Our Shoreline Parks provide islands of habitat for these species and in some cases it’s the only places where they breed. One of these species is the Western Snowy Plover, it’s federally threatened. The park district has been involved in habitat restoration and that is trying to create new habitat, little islands of habitat, in those areas where we can restore.
“We’re trying to balance public use with protection of resources. People may not even realize what’s going on. We have very sensitive species like Golden Eagles that nest in our inland parks. This is away from the shoreline, closer to Del Val Regional Shore or Sunol Regional Wilderness. You might think you’re in the wilderness but lo and behold, especially with the pandemic, we’ve had 100 percent full increase in human use of areas in these regional wildernesses and other Parkland areas.
“There are trails that people can use to enjoy the park and the environment and based on cell phone coverages where cell phone tracks were basically captured anonymously, our GIS department mapped where people were going, using bootleg trails that hundreds of people have been using over the course of a couple years.
“Some of these trails go close to like a Golden Eagle nest and these birds are so sensitive that it can result in the destruction of the nest. If there’s too many people walking past the nest it will scare the eagles off it, expose the eggs to cold weather, to too much sun, and they can potentially die or cause the birds to abandon the nest. Just the mere act of hiking across the terrain disturbs the wildlife.
“We’re trying to direct where people can go in a safe manner to enjoy the park and yet not disturb wildlife.
“We have a few Bald Eagle nests in our Parklands. There is a Bald Eagle nest in Ardenwood which is the Ardenwood family farm where thousands of people visit. We had a park user, unbeknownst to us, who flew a drone into the nest and destroyed it. The Bald Eagles abandoned it and it either caused the eggs to die or get eaten by a raven and or if there were young chicks they succumbed because the eagles were suffering. The drones are not allowed to be fly flown in the East Bay Resort Park District but with seven to eight million people living in the greater Bay Area, there’s always going to be folks who just either don’t understand the rules or don’t obey the rules and cause disturbance with drastic consequences such as the destruction of our national bird the Bald Eagle,” said Bell.
Feeding the animals. Enjoy, don’t feed. “We try to keep our garbage cans closed to prevent animals like raccoons from going in there, but they’ll show up at a picnic area and somebody might feed it. One of the consequences of that is suddenly you get many more animals concentrating in the area. Concentrating animals and feeding them like that, can increase diseases among the animals and causes behavioral problems with the animals themselves in that they get so used to people that they can start climbing on them and that just leads to bad outcomes.
“People have been feeding coyotes in their neighborhoods nearby. We do not allow feeding of any wild animals in the Parklands, but an animal like a coyote can get very accustomed to humans by being fed and then become essentially very aggressive and then once they become aggressive, they can and lose their fear of humans. They can wind up biting children, biting adults, and at that point a fed animal is a dead animal.
Enjoy, don’t release. “At the beginning with the pandemic unfortunately, people lost their jobs. Many couldn’t even feed their families much less their pets. The incidence of people releasing their pet cats into the Parklands really did increase through the pandemic where people would dump them thinking they’ll be okay in the wild, but again that leads to problems, and that is overpopulation of feral cats free roaming in the parks. Even if they are being partially fed, they still predate all the animals. That can threaten Shoreline species like the Snowing Plover. There are animal shelters where feral animals can be taken to and taken care of,” said Bell.
Joe Sullivan, Fisheries program manager, talked about the aquatic life of the East Bay Parks.
Enjoy, but don’t destroy. “We operate 10 fishing reservoirs in the East Bay and four Shoreline. Fishing piers where you can fish in the San Francisco Bay, and there’s number of aquatic resources we offer fishing.
“We want people to go out and enjoy these reservoirs but there are instances, in reservoirs, and streams, and ponds, that have sensitive species. People release their goldfish, or they’ll release a turtle that they don’t want to take care of anymore. These have consequences and they have impacts on the aquatic life in our Park District.
“There are sensitive species such as the California Red-legged Frog, California Tiger Salamander, both are federally endangered species that we are protecting in the East Bay.
The Native Rainbow Trout that resides in streams in the East Bay, the Steelhead which is a Rainbow Trout that migrates out to the ocean to get very big and then they come back into the streams to reproduce, are Federally threatened species that we’re protecting in the bay.
“We’ve have caught people that release pets, number of religious communities that release fish as part of their faith, and then there’s also members of a community that want to release a fish or an animal into the wild if they lose a family member, it’s a display of releasing a spirit, in ceremony for their lost member.
“There’s number of reasons why we do not want people to do this. It’s mainly that the fish that people are releasing come from a pet store or from a market place that could carry disease or a parasite and that disease or parasite could spread to the native aquatic life.
“There are ways to do it responsibly. We stock fish in all our fishing lakes and the fish come from a hatchery that’s licensed and accredited from the state of California. These fish are tested regularly, we know they’re clean, they’re free of disease, and parasites.
“We want to promote these ceremonial releases, but we want to do it in a responsible way. We want to encourage these community members to work with us to practice their religion, practice their ceremonial releases, but in a responsible way, and one way that we can offer, is to have these fish, that are tested, and we know they’re clean. We can use these to put them in the lake, to do, whatever these communities wish to do.
