California Spotted Owl. Photo by Rick Kuyper / USFWS. 

American Bird Conservancy and the California Central Coast Joint Venture

By Linda Ewing

In August of 2020, a rainless thunderstorm hurled thousands of bolts of lightning at the drought-stricken landscape of central California. The effect was like tossing one lit match after another onto paper soaked in lighter fluid. Fires erupted in multiple locations, and then, driven by changing winds, joined together. The flames of the combined blaze tore through small towns and state parks, raced along scenic highways, destroyed homes, businesses and historic structures, and menaced the city of Santa Cruz.

What came to be known as the CZU complex fire burned out of control for more than a month. By the time it was declared contained, more than 86,000 acres had burned – an area roughly the size of Detroit.

Even after the fire was contained, sections of the devastated landscape continued smoldering into the winter.

CZU Lighting Complex wildfire burns through a redwood forest in Big Basin Redwood State Park, CA. Photo by Zenstratus.

Flashback to the beginning of that year: in January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the American Bird Conservancy, and California Polytechnic State University formally launched the California Central Coast Joint Venture (C3JV), stretching from San Mateo County in the north to Ventura County in the south. It represented the final geographic piece in a loose network of conservation partnerships spanning the United States and extending into Canada and Mexico.

The partners knew their region’s diverse habitats, from foggy coastal forests to arid chaparral, from ocean waters and tidal estuaries to agricultural valleys, faced multiple challenges. What they didn’t know was just how soon – and how dramatically – they’d be confronting the challenge of catastrophic fire in a changing climate.

The CZU complex fire burned almost a third of the region’s coastal redwood forest habitat, where California Spotted Owls roost, hunt, and nest. It destroyed 60 percent of the breeding habitat of the Marbled Murrelet, a chubby mini-auk with a unique life cycle: like other seabirds, it courts and feeds in ocean waters; unlike other seabirds, murrelet pairs nest on branches in coastal old growth forests.

It was, in a very real sense, a baptism by fire for the new project.

Juvenile Marbled Murrelet. Photo by R. Macintosh / USFWS.

Connor Jandreau is the C3JV’s conservation coordinator. In conversation, he ranges easily over the region’s landscape, wildlife, and people, emphasizing their interconnectedness. Ask Jandreau about the birds of the coastal forest, and he’s likely to start talking about trees: the uniqueness of Monterey pines and cypress, the fact that some Douglas firs are 2,000 years old, the complexity of a coastal redwood forest. “Each tree,” Jandreau explains, “is an incredibly rich micro-ecological community.”

That’s not an exaggeration. A redwood’s broad, lofty branches are aerial gardens; mosses, ferns, shrubs, and even other trees grow in the rich soil formed by leaves falling, accumulating, and decaying over the course of decades. Cavities – think of them as scars from the tree’s long, eventful life – provide nesting spaces for birds. Within a redwood grove, the trees’ horizontally spreading roots intertwine with one another in a kind of mutual support system.

Santa Cruz Mountains' redwood forest. Photo by Philip.

These trees, the forests they form, and the flora and fauna they support are adapted to fire, which has shaped the California landscape for millennia. The ultra-thick bark of redwoods and Douglas firs protects them from blazes that would destroy other trees. Redwoods self-prune – shedding their lower limbs as they grow – which makes it harder for flames to reach their canopy. And fire can be a regenerative as well as a destructive force. Some pines cannot reproduce without it – their seed-containing cones remain tightly closed until the heat of a forest fire forces them open. Periodic fire plays an important role in the maintenance of a healthy understory, revitalizing the habitat. Spotted Owls, Vaux’s Swifts, and other wildlife move into the snags and holes it leaves behind.

The CZU complex fire was something new and different. “Unique habitats developed under specific fire regimes,” Jandreau explains. “Climate change throws all that open.”

The CZU complex fire, in that sense, was not an aberration. It was a harbinger.

Regrowth after the fire in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Photo by Pierre Jean C.

But climate change isn’t the whole story. Human culture and history also play important roles; the “fire regimes” of which Jandreau speaks are shaped by land use, forest management practices, and cultural attitudes toward fire. Decades of aggressive fire suppression have created tinderboxes, primed to ignite. The Indigenous people of coastal California, in contrast, have long understood the importance of fire to the region’s landscape, plants, and wildlife. Their cultural practices recognize fire’s benefits as well as its dangers. The dispossession of Indigenous Californians, and the suppression of their cultures, went hand in hand with the shift to a more destructive fire regime.

From its inception, the C3JV has made a point of elevating the knowledge and leadership of Indigenous peoples. “One of the really incredible things Jandreau has been working on,” says the American Bird Conservancy’s Jordan Rutter, “is building authentic relationships with Indigenous people in the region.”

That’s grounded, in part, in Jandreau’s biography – from childhood summers spent in Sonora, Mexico, living among the Comcáac-Seri people, to a stint working in rural Kenya that drove home the importance and complexity of relationships between people and nature. But it’s also grounded in practical necessity. As Jandreau points out: “The bottom line is that Indigenous people know stuff.”

Jandreau is the first to acknowledge that this focus on Indigenous knowledge isn’t unique to his personal work, or to the C3JV as a partnership. There’s growing recognition within the conservation movement of the importance of engaging with Indigenous communities.

Left: Connor Jandreau in the field. Photo by Connor Jandreau.
Right: Jandreau handling a gopher snake while working on a restoration site. Photo by Jasmine Ruvalcaba.

Getting there, though, still requires pushing and prodding. As Jandreau explains, “It’s easy to nod and say ‘sure.’ On the ground, though, it means relinquishing power and decision-making control. It looks like stepping back and taking a back seat, and in a practical sense, that can be threatening and challenging. Well-funded approaches that worked in the past may need to be rethought.”

As Jandreau describes it, the slow, complicated work of strengthening Indigenous decision-making and supporting sovereignty doesn’t always look like “conservation.” It’s not about monitoring nests or planting native species or acquiring tracts of land to preserve in perpetuity. It might look like paying someone to take minutes or funding a tribal representative’s attendance at an advisory panel meeting.

It might look, in other words, like the nitty-gritty of participation, voice, and democracy.

Without a doubt, there’s a strong moral imperative propelling the C3JV’s commitment to Indigenous sovereignty – the story of Indigenous Californians is long and painful and full of wrongs that demand to be righted. But there’s also a conservation imperative. As the scorched landscapes left by the CZU complex fire make clear, current approaches to fire threaten both wildlife and people. In the search for alternatives, conservationists have much to learn from the cultural burning tools of Indigenous people. That kind of exchange of knowledge happens most successfully among equals.

Success here matters beyond the region. Although the C3JV’s geographic area is relatively small, the region’s astounding diversity of habitats and its role as a bridge between southern and northern California make it a bellwether. Some of the flora and fauna found here – like coastal redwoods and Marbled Murrelets – are at the southernmost limits of their ranges. With climate change, the challenges they face in central California today will extend north tomorrow.

Or to put it more positively: acting creatively and effectively here potentially offers a model for other regions.

California Spotted Owl. Photo by Rick Kuyper / USFWS.

That model would be based on understanding the relationships between habitats and species, among bird species, and between humans and nature. It’s telling that the C3JV’s implementation plan highlights “indicator species” as well as species of focal conservation concern. Indicator species may not be in peril themselves – they may in fact be common – but they provide a good sense of the overall health of a particular habitat. Within coastal forests, Black-throated Gray Warblers and Vaux’s Swifts play that role. Think of the fast, chattering flight of Vaux’s Swifts as a good sign that Spotted Owls will continue to hunt silently among the redwoods.

In a very real sense, birds are indicator species for human beings. Their health and survival speak to our own future in the landscape we share – a landscape buffeted by a changing climate, scarred by history and riven by inequality, but also illuminated with hope.

“Birds are a window,” says Jandreau, summing up the C3JV’s work. “But our mission is so much bigger.”

To learn more about American Bird Conservancy, as well as to contribute directly, please visit their website.

American Bird Conservancy is a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving wild birds and their habitats throughout the Americas.