Park News 9/13/2024
Equinox celebration Sunday Sep. 22
Vivian White, astronomy whisperer and spirit guide of solar celebrations at Chavez Park, has issued a welcome to all to “Join us on Sunday, September 22nd for a sunset observance marking the changing of the seasons and celebrating the balance of our days.”
Autumn Equinox
Sunday, September 22nd
6:15 to 7:15 pm
Sunset @ 7:05 pm
Chávez / Huerta Tribute Site (The Solar Calendar) https://solarcalendar.org/
César Chávez Park, Berkeley CA
Led By Rabbi David Cooper
Says Vivian: “Finding Ourselves in Space and Time. Our ancestors’ understanding of what are solstice, equinox and (yes) sunset was turned upside down pretty recently by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. We forget how radical a change it was. We will get to see how frightening it was to be the first person to see the world differently. And of course we will watch the ‘sun set’ over our equinox markers and feel where we are in the annual cycle.”
Rabbi David Cooper is celebrated, among other powers, for blowing the shofar at the Autumn Equinox in the past. Perhaps he will do it again this year. Be there!
Upcoming Radiation Survey
At the end of this month, the city will close off portions of Chavez Park from 7 am to about 10 am for five days to allow a drone to carry a Geiger counter in a sweep of the park, looking for possible radioactivity above normal background levels. The operation is being done to comply with a mandate from the State Water Board. This was the takeaway from a meeting in the basement of the city staff building at 1847 Center Street on Tuesday, Sept. 10. Wahid Amiri, Deputy Public Works Director for the City of Berkeley, and Mary Skramstad, Environmental Compliance Specialist, gave presentations. No one representing the Water Board was present. About 25 people, including a few journalists, attended.
The Water Board, in a written statement, said that currently there is no information to suggest that there is a risk to water quality or human health. The Board could have said, more strongly, that there is no reason to believe that any industrial wastes dumped here 50 years ago show radioactivity levels above normal background. That was the specific conclusion of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, after evaluating the same industrial wastes dumped at the Blair landfill in Richmond. There is, in other words, no real reason to believe that above-normal radiation exists here, and there is no probable cause to mount a special radiation survey. But the Water Board wants it done anyway, and Berkeley must obey.
The radiation detector will be suspended about ten feet (3m) above the ground. A battery-operated drone will carry it in a programmed tight grid pattern. The device has a built-in GPS. In the event a high reading occurs, the device will record its exact location. For park locations with trees, notably the Native Plant Area, surveyors will walk, using a handheld device. If radiation hot spots are encountered, other detectors will be plunged into the soil, and soil samples taken.
If buried radioactive materials are found, a biological assessment would be in order, according to Roger Herried, a longtime nuclear safety activist with the former Abalone Alliance. Squirrels, gophers, voles, snakes, possibly even Burrowing Owls might be exposed and would need to be tested, he said.
The online noise about radiation in the park has got at least a few people so worried that they aren’t taking their dogs to the park, according to off-leash dog activist Claudia Kawczynska, who attended the Sep. 10 meeting.
Whether the upcoming survey will calm fears remains to be seen. In June, I walked the park with an economical Geiger counter and found no areas with above-normal readings. See “Geiger Hike,” Jun 14 2024. Will the new survey, with much more expensive equipment, make a difference? Well, the drone rig will hover 10 feet above the surface, whereas my economy rig measured levels at human height. Hardcore radiation skeptics will insist that an airborne scan is a scam; only a ground-level survey is meaningful. Wait and see.
The Water Board mandate requires the City to report the results 90 days after the survey is concluded. The scan is scheduled to start Sept. 30 and conclude on Oct. 4. That means we probably won’t have the results until 2025. If I didn’t know that the Blair wastes were low level and if I hadn’t walked the park with a Geiger counter myself, I might be worried. But I’m not worried. I’m going to keep enjoying the park as I have been for the past 12 years.
Details about the survey are due to be posted on the city’s website at this link. In concluding remarks, Amiri said that the City was paying the costs of this survey, without stating the amount, but that pursuing the successors of Stauffer Chemical, the corporation that deposited the industrial waste 50 years ago, to recover the costs, was an option for the future.
Ferry Feedback Meeting
It’s a busy season for park-related meetings. Next on the agenda is a Zoom meeting pitched in general terms to gather comments on the City’s latest draft Waterfront Specific Plan. That’s scheduled for Monday Sep. 30 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm. The City promises to post the latest draft of the plan on this website by Sep. 27. That website, it turns out, is dedicated to the ferry project. That gives the game away. The Sep 30 meeting is not about the waterfront in general. It will be mainly about the ferry project. The city has worked hard to manufacture a consensus in favor of this project. Everyone wants the pier repaired, but there is strong opposition to the ferry, and it’s been made clear that the ferry project will delay pier repair for another five years at least. If you are concerned with pier and ferry issues, you will want to attend this meeting.
Consideration of the Waterfront Specific Plan as a whole is calendared for a City Council meeting on Oct. 22. However, given the impending election and the diverse opinions that are out there, there’s a good chance it will be pushed until after the Nov. 4 voting.
Last November, I commented at length on the third and current Waterfront Specific Plan draft published Oct. 30 last year. Read it here. My review is not complimentary. Let’s see if the next draft, due Sep. 27, will show improvements, or if unflattering feedback gets ignored.
Hawk on Bench
I meet the nicest, most talented people walking in the park. Last week on the north side I met Max Newton. It turns out that just a couple of weeks earlier he had seen a hawk sitting on a bench on the west side of the park. The bird basically ignored him and let him get within a few feet of the bench before it saw something in the distance and flew off. Did Max happen to get a picture? Not only a picture, but a video! Here it is, above, taken with the cell phone upright, portrait orientation. A frame pulled from the video shows the bird starting its flight.
This bird is almost certainly a Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii). The loose brown stripes on its breast, the dark cap on its head, the broad dark stripes on its tail, together with its moderate size, point that way. Cooper’s Hawks are very similar to the smaller Sharp-shinned Hawks, but the latter have rarely been spotted in the park. We have more than 15 posts about Cooper’s Hawks on this website; check them out at this link.
Thank you, Max Newton, for taking and sharing this video.
Historic Owl Photos
For years I’ve been buttonholing old timers in the park, asking whether they had photos of Burrowing Owls in the park in the early days. No luck. Then this week I met Roger Herried at the city’s radiation meeting (see item above) and struck gold. Roger not only had photos, he had videos, of owls, other wildlife, and park scenery during 2004-2011. and he’s willing to share them. Here’s a video of Burrowing Owls excerpted from footage Roger shot of a variety of subjects in the park.
The video above contains footage from two different years, but only one of those dates, March 2009, is recorded; the other segment is from an unknown earlier year. Back then, the equipment didn’t necessarily record time stamps, and with the media being transferred from one storage drive to another over the years, the dates when the images were taken are sometimes lost. Roger started walking the park in 2002 and invested in a video camera in 2004, when they cost a lot of money. The still images below which don’t have dates on them were taken some time between 2004 and 2009.
Roger was particularly sharp in capturing photos of the owls together with Ground Squirrels. I love these photos, especially the third one down, where it looks like owls and squirrels were part of the same family.
Developments at Schoolhouse Creek
The valuable and informative newsletter of the Friends of Five Creeks organization says that the East Bay Regional Parks District this fall will begin planning for the strip of McLaughlin East Shore State Park between the piped mouth of Schoolhouse Creek and the Gilman Ballfields.
The newsletter continues, “F5C began work in this pre-World-War-II garbage landfill before it was park, removing a dense cover of invasive yellow star thistle and a forest of French broom, and opening ‘windows’ in tall weeds that hid shoreline views.”
That’s a very modest statement. Actually, F5C volunteers over the course of hundreds of hours of volunteer manual work completely reshaped the landside surroundings of the creek’s outfall. When I first saw it, it was an almost impenetrable jungle of weeds. Now it’s a picture postcard. Let’s hope that the EBRPD staff respects this achievement and replicates it where it’s needed in the larger strip of land north of the creek.
Schoolhouse Creek isn’t technically in Cesar Chavez park, but I can see the birds there from the park with my long lens, so it’s within my definition of the park’s photosphere. Many a bird photo and video on this website was captured on the spreading tidal flats of the creek’s delta in this scenic location.
Parks Tax Ballot Measure
With the election coming up in November, politics is in the air, and this year the park system is part of it. On the ballot as Measure Y will be a proposal to raise the existing parks tax by about a nickel per square foot, aiming to raise an additional $3.6 million. Among listed authors of the measure are Jesse Arreguin, the mayor, and city council members from districts 2, 6, and 8 (Terry Taplin, Susan Wengraf, Mark Humbert). The measure does not spell out how the additional money will be spent. It needs two thirds of the voters voting on it to pass. The text of the measure with the arguments in favor is attached here as a PDF. No arguments against it are included in this early edition of the ballot pamphlet, provided to me courtesy of Terry Taplin’s office.
The Chavez Park Conservancy is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization and does not take positions on candidates or ballot measures, even ones directly affecting parks. I’m going to write up my personal views on Measure Y and submit them to the Berkeley Daily Planet within the next week or ten days. We can publish reader comments for or against in the Comments section below.
Summer Schedule
With so much new material this week, I’m holding off some topics announced last week until the post after this one. That includes the new native pollinator planning, the landfill gas rework review, and a journal article on our Burrowing Owls. Coming soon.
Although this post drops on Friday, which is the regular year-round schedule, I’m going to switch to Summer Schedule year round from now on. That means posts will drop whenever there’s material and motivation, which may be more or less often than the usual regular Friday at 5 pm publication schedule.
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Thanks for the thorough story about the upcoming testing at the park. And wow! Thanks to you and Roger Herried for getting together and taking and posting these pictures and video of our dear owls and squirrels. I’ve been coming to this park for at least that many years, but I didn’t know about the owls there way back then. Just wonderful to see these.
I tend to agree with you, Marty, about the radiation danger at the park. I come from a spot on earth that had a LOT of radioactive pollution. I knew folks all my life who used equipment for testing for it, and I am grateful to you for trying to allay yours and others’ (including my) fears by carefully walking and documenting using your radiation tester. I wish some of the Berkeley Parks Commissioners were as careful and thoughtful as you are. Unfortunately, I don’t think some of them read your valuable newsletters.
Thank you, Marty, for encouraging and supporting the community of folks who love, play in, and photograph Cesar Chavez Park.