Giacomini Wetlands is getting back to natural
A $10-million project undertaken by the National Park Service aims to fully restore the Marin County wetlands, which had been turned into pastureland more than 60 years ago.
Reporting from Point Reyes Station — Conservationists often speak of restoring landscapes as erasing the "hand of man." But sometimes the job of undoing decades of human manipulation requires wielding an even heavier hand.
It took eight years of planning, of which two were spent bulldozing and excavating to knock down levees and redirect creeks, to re-create the "naturalness" of the Giacomini Wetlands, one of the most extensive restoration projects of its kind undertaken by the National Park Service.
The project comes more than 60 years after one of the largest estuary systems on the Central Coast was obliterated to make way for dairy cattle providing milk and butter during World War II.
On Sunday, after the last levee is breached and high high tide is restored to most of the 560 acres of former pastureland, the Giacomini Wetlands at Point Reyes National Seashore will begin to perform their natural function: restoring the health of Tomales Bay.
Wetlands restoration: In Sunday's California section, a caption with a story about the restoration of Marin County wetlands suggested that a bird shown in the photograph was a red-necked phalarope. The bird in the picture was an egret.
Wetlands restoration: In the California section on Oct. 26, a caption with an article about the restoration of Marin County wetlands suggested that a bird shown in the photograph was a red-necked phalarope. The bird in the photo was an egret.
As some water has seeped in during the last months, park rangers have reported rare sightings: rays and leopard sharks gliding into the shallows of the former pasture.
"We couldn't get it back to what it looked like in 1860, and that's OK," said Park Service hydrologist Brannon Ketcham, standing atop an 8-foot-high berm that was about to be scraped away. "The idea is to return the natural hydraulics, and the habitat will come back. In a year, no one will know we did anything."
The new wetlands are at the south end of Tomales Bay, a shallow 12-mile-long finger slicing inland from the Pacific, much of it over the San Andreas fault. The wetlands were first squeezed at the turn of the century when a levee was built at the south end to allow a road. Then the system was blocked off from the bay and drained in 1946 to accommodate west Marin County's burgeoning dairy industry.
Over the years, farmers have created a network of channels and ditches that redirected and managed the freshwater flow. Without the flushing action from the exchange of freshwater and saltwater, the bay stagnated, became heavy with sediment and ran afoul of the federal Clean Water Act. Much of the wildlife abandoned the site.
After the restoration began in 2000, cattle were gradually phased out of the property. By the beginning of last year, they were mostly gone.
