Hello! Welcome to the Slough Cast, the Elkhorn Slough Foundation podcast. Elkhorn Slough is one of California's last great coastal wetlands. We see Elkhorn Slough in its watershed protected forever, a working landscape where people, farming, industry, and nature thrive together. Here on the Slough Cast, we'll explore Elkhorn Slough together, build community, and share stories of the special place. Welcome! Be a many of those everyone! This is our first episode in 2024.
Happy year here with us. We're in for a good one. I want you to do a little bit of imagining with me. I want you to imagine driving down Highway 1 towards Santa Cruz. Just past the mouth of the slew. You see the ocean on the left. See the birds flying. Maybe you saw some otters from the bridge. And you continue driving for a couple minutes. You start seeing some fields. Maybe they got some
strawberries. You've been seeing some Brussels sprouts in the fields. Now before you get to Sleenas Road, you notice now that there are a lot more ag fields on both your left and right hand side. Between the ocean, the ag fields, and the slew, there's a property that the foundation owns. It's called the Cowl property. This episode, we're going to be talking and learning from Cameron Chow, our newest stewardship specialist at the foundation. And in this episode, we're going
to be moving like water. Starting from the top, when you first enter that property, and we make our way down all the way to the slew, we're going to be learning about what a goal he is. Erosion has a big impact, not only on the water quality of the Elkorn slew, but what happens on the land. Obviously erosion is the same issue we dealt with at San Hill farm. If you remember that episode, that had huge impact on the water quality of Elkorn slew.
It's the gradual process that happens when water or wind, but in this case, it's water. When water is present, and it's removing soil and causing the soil to deteriorate. As you'll learn, this is a problem for the whole ecosystem. For all the different species, for habitats, and Cameron's going to show us how we fix it. At the same time, we're going to learn a lot about Cameron. Listo's, I'm an awesome. Hello everyone. My name is Cameron Chow.
I'm the Stewardship Specialist for the Elkorn slew foundation. I've been a land steward here for eight months. I'm pretty new to the land here, but learning a lot so far. The land is just, as humble to me, has made me feel like a piece of a bigger puzzle pretty much. It's not all about what's going on in the human world. There's a lot more going on other than that. We are at the cowl property. This is a property that we worked on a lot this fall. It's a situated
very close to the slew, just upslope for him, some salt marsh. We are standing at the top of the property right now, looking out over the road. There's also a sort of channel that has been incised by water runoff above the property. We're looking down into it. It's a steep drop off. It's where we've been doing a lot of work. As you can hear around us, there's a lot of wildlife here. Definitely a lot of birds. We've heard coyotes here at night. It's pretty densely
vegetated, aside from the road. The road is where we've done a lot of work. It needed some love. We'll keep walking down right now. It's a pretty majestic entrance, getting to walk around and be able. It just feels like a grand entrance. But gosh, we came on a good day. So many birds chirping so much wildlife to see. That was Paola. If you remember from the last episode, I mentioned that Paola was going to be
helping out with producing the podcast. Well, that's her. Now, the cow property is very different from the first time I saw it. I actually saw it probably the first week that Cameron was on the job. And I mean, just the difference of what it is now. It's pretty dramatic. So you're going to learn a lot more about that. This is pretty dramatic in front of us right now. So we're looking at this, this eroding goalie. And I guess even just to say what an eroding goalie is, it's a channel
in the land. So think of not a flat surface, but a surface that's incised. So maybe more of a V shape, like a cut, like a cut. Totally. It's cutting through the ground. And that is caused by surface water moving through at a rapid pace and pulling sediment with it. And the more water that comes through, it's going fast. It's at an angle. It's downslope. And yeah, it has been actively eroding for very long time now. And what we have in front of us is like very, very logical. It's
probably two school buses wide. And maybe like maybe two school buses tall. We'll say that. Like it's very large. It's very dramatic. What tree is this? So this tree right here, we have a little clump of their alm trees. They're not a native tree, but they're also not super invasive. So they are important in the school because they're holding the roots of the trees, hold sediment together. Our grand plan for this is hopefully to have oaks doing that same job.
We do have some oaks lining the skull. I mean, they're on the edge. They're roots are exposed. They're holding the soil there. Yeah, it's pretty dramatic. It's so dramatic. It's a harsh environment for these oaks. I mean, it's pretty impressive. They're holding it together. And I think without them, the skull would probably be significantly wider. Oaks holding it together. Love it. That's why I love native plants. And you know, oaks have adapted to the land for
thousands of years. So they they're able to survive harsh environments. So like an oak, who's a person in your life that holds you in hard times? Just a question to think about. Well, back to the story. You know, a lot of people believe it or not don't fully know what land stewardship is. So what is land stewardship? And what does it mean to you? Totally. That's a great
question. So land stewardship is a whole host of different things and it depends on a lot. So for us at Elkorn's slew foundation, it depends on things like what property we're at. What time of year it is, what the weather is like that time of year. So seasons. And yeah, for us stewardship is sort of taking care of the land. We work a lot on the hills surrounding the Elkorn slew and we do things like vegetation management that can entail removing invasive.
We do restoration work, which could be planting native plants. We do things like trying to improve amphibian habitat. And we're also responsible for general maintenance of the properties, such as maintaining roads, maintaining infrastructure, and maintaining property boundaries. And I guess yeah, another good example of what stewardship is, especially in the Elkorn slew is erosion controls. Another big thing that we try to take care of. Yeah. So down what we're looking
at from up here down into the goalie, we're seeing a whole lot of woody debris. And it kind of looks like a mess. But that's sort of the purpose. And underneath that mess, there is a sort of true structure, a what has been called level log. This is something that our Lenserd Ken Collins has done in the past at Porter Ranch. We had a smaller sized goalie there. And yeah, it's pretty much, we dig out some of the sides of the channel to key in a sort of as wide as diameter log as we
can find. In this case, you could lip this putting them in flesh using a laser level so that they're fully level with the with the surface. And from there, we're stacking more logs on top of that, consolidating it pretty much just given the water as hard of a time as possible to pass through. And some of the goals are that of that is to slow down the water, slow down the runoff of the water
and the sediment. And we're hoping that over time it builds up sediment as it's trapping it and making the goalie less deep, raise the surface of the land, more surface area for the water is more space for it to spread out. And we'll train to the soil, give water to plants that need it. So we're seeing a fallen eucalyptus that fall on its own there. So yeah, let's get a good look at that one. There were some eucalyptus,
they're really tall trees, right? So when we have storms and stuff, they fall. And this one right here did fall. It was already falling down. So you can sort of see that one next to it. You can see a cut in it. That one is now and the goalie is a level log. So that one was really, really close by. Didn't have to travel too far at all for that one was able to make some cuts up
there. I've used an excavator pulling it down into the goalie. Really interesting, I mean, like comparison, you see the roots exposed just up the goalie of the oaks holding it down and then you see this giant eucalyptus down. But you get to use the resources that are here, right? Totally. To kind of help the land or this particular issue. Problem. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up too. That's huge. Just using the resources that are already on
the land. It's sort of been coined this movement, I guess, of people doing restoration, process-based restoration. A lot of it is taking natural materials locally sourced from the land. And using that to do things like this, like build sort of structures to stop erosion, pond water, like we'll see down there. And this right here, we can actually, this is where we sort of enter the goalie. If you can sort of get a closer look at it. So let's do it.
We can see sort of some of the action that's been happening. And going back to, I guess, that term process-based restoration. We're trying to do restoration by restoring processes. So in this case, we are trying to flood the land, spread the water out. And I guess a natural process for that. One particular animal that does that is beavers.
They build dams to flood the land. And that's a process that has many great functions. As far as recharging groundwater, creating wetland buffers, which can be great for things such as wildfire. And yeah, that's just a little, a little more on process-based restoration than what the purpose of that is. Beavers are amazing. They used to be all throughout California. Recently, there's been some movement
around beavers. You know, you got the slow beaver brigade. It's a group that's advocating for beavers. And locally, you know, we have beavers in the Seleness River. Our students at Hall actually recently did an activity around beavers. They learned about how they are ecosystem engineers. They themselves build a prototype of a dam. And obviously, they learn about all their impact and how they help. So hopefully, we have some movement locally and help some beavers out.
Bueno, back to the story. We're looking right now. It's like, this is kind of crazy to me already. You can sort of see, you see these piles of sediment in between the log jam structures. A lot of that sediment is new. We haven't had a ton of rain, so I suspect it's going to be more dramatic as more rain keeps coming. Which will be soon. Yeah, tonight, even. But there's also that influence from surface runoff. We have agriculture runoff coming through here. So I'm sure
some water's been coming from that. But yeah, it looks like sediment has been building up already. These logs have been making sure that catching that sediment, holding some of it back versus it that run in straight through the channel into the, into the Elkorn slew. It's very cool to see the fruits of your labor, Cameron and Lanty. I ask Cameron, what makes this place special? What we have in front of us right now is an incredible view of Elkorn slew. It's sort of this
cathedral setting with coast live oak, creating arches around the slew. It's very beautiful. Now at this point, we're walking down towards the bottom of the property towards the slew. And Cameron sees something he was not expecting. So check out his reaction. This is, this is a huge change. So what we're looking at right now is pretty much a pond of water.
It looks like it's maybe two and a half to three feet deep. There's one of our log jam structures at the top over the pond starts and also at the bottom of where the pond starts. And what this looked like before was pretty much just an incised channel that takes a turn that way and continues going down hill towards the slew. And this is exactly what we're hoping for. Ponding water, it's not, it's like hardly moving
at all right here. It's made in a very slow pace of anything and it's spread out super wide surface area allows it to percolate into that aquifer and also water plants along the way. And it, yeah, it looks really beautiful. Hopefully, hopefully the amphibians and insects think the same. And we'll, we'll start hanging out here. Critical wildlife habitat just because it's being flanked on the top by, you know, highway one is really close, close by to this property. So it's an important
sort of refuge for them. And just around the slew. Yeah, it's a good wildlife buffer. I was just curious like, again, what brought you to Elcorn slew? The Elcorn slew, it's, it is a community. There's a lot of really amazing people here. I first got my start here working for California Department of Fish and Wildlife helping with education programs. So that was, yeah, it's a lot of fun and got to me to really, really cool people
and see what the community is like. And yeah, I'm just super glad I can be a part of it and help and feel super lucky to be out on this beautiful land almost every day at this plan. It hasn't been super long, you know, and I could see down the line just it continues to blossom. I feel like I'm like a student in a way of this land. Like there's so much to learn from it. And also the people who work here, you know, my colleagues have taught me so much in such a short span of time. It seems
like and pretty, pretty grateful for that. I feel the same way, Cameron. Everybody here is willing to share so much of their knowledge and experience with anybody that wants to learn. So that includes you, Cameron. So thank you. Here's more. Yeah, this is actually at the foot of what we were calling the plunge pool to our left here. It's very deep and this was another part of the
restoration of the goalie was to stack some woody debris. Here we have some really some of our largest eucalyptus sort of cuttings like this is that from the trunk of a fallen eucalyptus that's probably four to five feet in diameter. It's really big. Tree could be over a hundred years old. And it was falling down and we were able to cut it and move it here sort of stack it up sort of
like a staircase. But like it's a circular head cut. So it's we tried to sort of hug the walls of it so that when the water comes out instead of creating like a waterfall and scouring all the sediment making the head cut larger, it would hit the woody debris and sort of trickle it down, let it down easy. Just above us here is the pond. We were discussing earlier where water is spread out and ponding. And as we look below us here, the water is continuing to flow. There's a slow
trickle coming through. It's overflowing the pond and then flowing to the large plunge pool where we've stacked woody debris to dissipate some of that energy. And yeah, you can actually hear some water flowing down there. We can see it too. And yeah, it's making its way towards the Alcorns Zoo. With all of you, we got some looping. Yeah, that's awesome. That's amazing. Wow, this was not here. This was a blackberry and poison oak thicket before. So there's looping somewhere in
the seed bank here. That's incredible. That's awesome. Well now there's more sunlight coming in, right? So much more sunlight and looping loves disturbed areas with full exposure to sun. So that's really cool. I gotta take some photos of that and send it on. But what people now, yeah. I love these little moments of joy because that's hope. Thank you all for listening. Thank you all for your continued support. For all of you who signed up for our spring events, I'm so looking
forward to seeing you soon. More events to come if you didn't get a chance to sign up for one. Don't worry. We'll have more events coming up. Thank you Cameron for joining us and sharing this story to the land team for all your hard work and dedication. Well, we'll see you guys. Bye.