Sea to the Skyline

A story by Chris Berry.

As Watershed Compliance Manager for the City of Santa Cruz, Chris juggles providing quality water for the City, while protecting the natural environment. It’s clear that Chris loves his work, and he takes us on a real adventure exploring a watersupply watershed that empties into the Monterey Bay Sanctuary. Whales, rare and endangered fish and frogs, beetles and even human bodies populate Chris’ somewhat spooky tale.

CHRIS BERRY is the Watershed Compliance Manager for the City of Santa Cruz Water Department. He’s involved primarily with environmental regulatory compliance work for the Department, but he’s also involved with Drinking Water Source Protection. Chris notes this is what the rest of the world knows as watershed protection, but in the context of the Safe Drinking Water Act, there’s actually an emphasis on protecting the watersheds for the sake of drinking water quality.

Chris was born in Putnam, CT. He grew up in northeastern Connecticut and central/northern central New Hampshire. Chris wasn’t sure what he wanted to do when he grew up, though he thought he’d like to be some kind of conservationist and knew he didn’t want to work in an office; that is he didn’t want to work a traditional kind of job. Chris wanted to do something with social and environmental importance.

His brother, who was a real influence on him as a kid, is now an environmental attorney who runs a non-profit land-trust back East. Chris thought that might be a neat path to go down. At least, it looked like a good excuse to get out of his little hometown and come to Santa Barbara, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of California.

Chris came to Monterey Bay as a 22-year old looking for a graduate school with surfable waves that were better than those in Santa Barbara. Chris landed at UC Santa Cruz, though he admits his first priority was to locate somewhere where the waves were good.

Chris started studying aquatic biology in Santa Barbara. But by the time he was ready for grad school, there was a critical mass of people doing ocean-related things in the Santa Cruz area, and it was a time when watershed science was really starting to take off, too. Freshwater ecology and watershed science, as well as marine ecology, were both starting to pick up then. So Santa Cruz had terrestrial and marine draws for Chris. He feels fortunate to have landed a non-traditional job that allows him to work outside and do something with social and environmental importance.

You can watch the interview with Chris Berry on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffA-TThoXHk

SEA TO THE SKYLINE

Welcome to Laguna Creek. I chose this spot, both as a private person and as a professional, I’ve had a lot of experiences here over the last 25 years or so that have drawn me to all that Monterey Bay has to offer. And my story is “Sea to the Skyline”, and I say “Sea to the Skyline” as opposed to “Skyline to the Sea” which is what most people say, because my story started in the surf.

I was surfing here long before I had to work here for the City of Santa Cruz, or I should say, ‘got to work here’, because when I found out I got to work here, it was like (arm pump), “Sweet!!” This is why I don’t worry about how much I earn really, because I get to go to a place like this and work.

My first story with wildlife in the Bay happened when I was surfing here. It’s actually a pretty sketchy beach when the surf is up. It’s not really up today. It drops off very steeply from the beach, and you can tell there’s a lot of marine life, and the water’s moving, and it’s kind of one of those spots that you can say is sort of spooky.

So one day I was surfing by myself, trying to amp up the spooky factor, and a whale popped up next to me about as far away as you are, which is, you know, six feet. It was probably about a thirty-foot whale, that I’m assuming was a gray whale, given how close it was to the shore. And, you know, at first I gasped, and then I went, “Thank God, it’s a whale!” because otherwise I probably would have never seen it, since it would have been a white shark. And it would have come up from beneath me and bounced me out of the water and chewed my leg off.

So it’s just one of those momentary brushes with wildlife that kinda makes you snap out of your everyday mundane ‘I’m driving down the road’, and ‘I’m gonna go to the bank, and I’m gonna go to work’, and you’re just not paying attention to the world around you. It makes you appreciate your relatively small place in the food chain in the span of the universe, and also appreciate that there’s incredibly beautiful things happening all around you. And sometimes you have to be slapped in the face a little bit just to notice that.

Again, the encounter probably took ten seconds to happen, but it’s one of the most vivid memories of my life. I had that happen to me once again up at Ocean Beach, in San Francisco, and the second time, of course, it wasn’t quite as startling, but it was still inspiring, especially with San Francisco right there, and an urban beach like that, and, “Oh there’s whales right here.” It’s pretty amazing!

So the whale was kind of my first, “Oh my God, I love Laguna Watershed, I love Laguna Beach”. You know, it started me on that path. And then when I got to work for the City in the ‘90s, my job involved implementing the Safe Drinking Water Act, which focused on watershed protection. The City had prioritized the use of the water from Laguna Creek, because it’s the cleanest, cheapest water we have, so my work focused on one of my favorite watersheds.

But the Safe Drinking Water Act exacerbated all of our problems with environmental regulatory compliance. In the mid-90s, coho salmon and steelhead got listed under the Endangered Species Act. We were drying up the creek every summer. In fact, I remember the first time I drove up to the diversion and saw the stream totally dewatered below the diversion. I just couldn’t believe it, and knowing where that water was going – this beautiful habitat down here – was a little challenging to make all that fit in my ah….. like this is – you need to work a job, you need to do the right thing.

On the other hand, there are these greater values that you have, these environmental values at work. And it’s not like the City is some evil environmental villain. They’re serving water to the customers of the City of Santa Cruz, who, by and large, have an environmental ethic. So that’s how I kind of compartmentalized all that, and figured I’d take the long view. Perhaps over time things will change.

I did bring a couple of pictures to tell that story. In a nutshell, here we have the Laguna lagoon in 2004, which I believe was an average water year. You can see the creek flow doesn’t make it to the ocean, and there’s very little wetted habitat back here on the back beach. In 2013, which was a historically dry year, we have a full lagoon, lots of inland wet habitat in the back. We now have had coho spawning here in the last two years. Coho are on the verge of extinction south of the Golden Gate. They are nearly extirpated now, so having them spawn here is kind of a big deal.

Things have improved since the early days. We’ve done a lot of work in the last ten years or so. Here’s my other picture. Here’s the day we started turning out water on Laguna Creek, in 2007. This was a pivotal moment in the City’s history, believe it or not. It was as simple as turning a valve. The amount of work that went into that though was pretty huge. So that’s our former Production Supervisor, Jim Bentley, releasing the first water out of the diversion from Laguna Creek.

You know, to a lot of folks that was a hard thing to do. We’d been diverting out of Laguna Creek for maybe a hundred years. But I think people are starting to see now that release of water has benefits, and we’re planning around providing water for fisheries in the creek now, rather than trying to shoehorn fisheries into all of our other obligations.

Fisheries and natural resource protection have become a co-equal goal in our mission statement along with providing water to the City of Santa Cruz. That’s been kind of a nice story there, though it still has its challenges. We have water rights issues from other users upstream that are challenging the fishery, as well as challenging the City water rights. And, of course, that affects the habitat in the stream, and that affects the Bay. The coho are anadromous, so they are going in and out of the creek.

We have a very healthy population of tidewater goby here as well, one that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expects to use to reseed other adjacent creeks nearby, because this population is so robust just by virtue of the quality of this habitat here in the lagoon.

One of the other things about this watershed that I think is sort of fascinating and neat is in Santa Cruz County we have sandhills, which are old marine deposits where there’s very unique biota. This watershed not only has sandhills at the headwaters, but it also has karst, which is metamorphosed limestone. So it’s geologically a very unique and interesting watershed. It does have good flows during drought years because of that geology.

You know it’s got the redwood forest that Jodi’s so aware of. It’s got the maritime chaparral. It’s got badgers up in some of the grasslands further up the canyon, so it’s just a really neat watershed.

Here’s another little wildlife story I have, also in this watershed. The first time I was doing fish habitat typing on this creek, I had not only never seen an adult steelhead, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a California red-legged frog. Low and behold. Somehow, right behind, I’m talking about a mile up there, I came across an adult steelhead right there in a pool with a red-legged frog about six inches from its face sitting in the same pool. To me that was kind of like, ‘you hit pay dirt there.’ Again it just sort of added to the rich tapestry of interesting features, just the biodiversity and the story of Laguna Watershed, and, of course, its connectivity to the Bay out here.

We have Mount Hermon June Beetle living up in the sandhills in the headwaters. We have snowy plovers out here on the beach. I’ve seen golden eagles out here, peregrine falcons, and western pond turtles in the lagoon as well.

In 2005, one of my favorite employees ever, Matt Baldzikowski, was out here and found a spawned out coho salmon carcass. Coho hadn’t been seen out here. In fact, I don’t think there was a record of a coho out here before then. Matt came back really excited. And he had the carcass in his hand, and said, “What do we do with this?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, let’s take it down to the (NOAA) Science Center at Terrace Point and see what they say.” So that was kind of cool.

The next summer NOAA was doing some fish surveys and found a bunch of juvenile coho, but after that we didn’t see coho juveniles for another ten years until 2015. It’s been pretty hard for the coho with the numbers being so low, and then we had the historic drought, but we did have spawning again in 2015 and 2016. 2015 was a super dry year. I don’t think those fish would have survived if we hadn’t been releasing the water we’ve been releasing for coho the last couple of years.

Do you want to hear any more stories about Laguna? I can always get into the dead body stories.

I showed you a newspaper from the Lagoon in 2004. Because we were diverting so much water, a lot of that habitat back there was dried up and Matt (who found the coho carcass) was walking back there and found bones in the middle of that wetland. I guess someone dumped a body when they thought…you know when the water was deeper…and this is a pretty sad, dark thing because obviously the body was a murder victim and they were dumped, but there is a slightly dark, comedic element to this as well.

Matt, who used to work for the County and knows the County process very well, called the coroner and the coroner said, “How do you know it’s not a cow?” and Matt (and I don’t even know if he meant to be funny or not, but…), he said sort of deadpan, “because cows don’t have fillings.”

I think about a half hour later a line of sheriff’s cars and news media came out here. And I was watching it on the news that night, and I saw Matt walk by the camera with his hood over his head. He didn’t want to be identified on camera as being the person that found the body.

Later on I found a body up closer to Jodi’s house off of Smith Grade, another murder victim, dumped in the creek, off the side of the road. So to me how that relates to the Monterey Bay and wildlife in the Bay is the Monterey Bay manages to have this incredible biodiversity and all these great natural resources, but there is this human element too and there’s both positive sides of that human element – like people like you guys doing this great work- but there is also this sort of seamy underbelly of being close to an urban area.

We also have this sort of rural crime of illegal water diversion and cannabis cultivation and other stuff like that, but we also (because we’re the backyard for the Bay Area) we do have stuff like murder victims getting dumped in our wetlands.

When I was thinking about a theme for this interview I was thinking that there is a bit of a Chinatown theme here – there’s the water diversions, the small town politics, there’s the big city crime, but there is this great biodiversity and all these great natural resources that draw people like me here. (At that moment, a kestrel flies by overhead.)

Whales & Dolphins & Marine Protected Areas, Oh My!