Yesterday’s 350 Day of Action was marked across Berkeley by numerous work parties. Volunteers of all ages pulled weeds, cleared out trash, hacked away at overgrown foliage, cycled, walked, and planted on a wide variety of projects. Berkeleyside invites you to send us your photos and accounts of the day.
Susan Schwartz, president of the Friends of Five Creeks (above), sent the following report on what 89 volunteers did at Codornices Creek:
We thinned exuberant willows planted as sticks in 2004 — the harvested overgrowth will be used in a newly restored reach where water was just left into the channel on Friday. Folks also removed a mountain of trash west of the railroad tracks, to keep it from washing to the Bay when winter rains come. Younger volunteers worked on smaller invasives that could cover everything else, choking out biodiversity.
Volunteers also toured restorations from 1994, 2004, and 2007.
By the way, these rainbow trout/steelhead are authentic urban pioneers. Until the 1960s, this area was industrial — uses included a slaughterhouse, scrap-metal yard, and gas plant. The trout didn’t make it upstream until the 1980s at the earliest, after industry was gone and the 1970s federal Clean Water Act started to work its magic on US waterways. (Steelhead and rainbow trout are the same species. If they go to sea and get big, they are steelhead.)
Let us hear what you did.
