Vaux swifts swoop over the river

…and hole up for the night in groovy downtown digs.

Creekfreaks! Friday Audubon will be docents for interested viewers of the Vaux Swifts who LA Times reports are hanging out in an abandoned chimney in downtown LA. They feed on insects above the LA River and then make their dramatic descent into the chimney for the night.  Recent articles note that they used to use other chimneys but those have been disappearing from the city.  The chimneys themselves are an urban adaptation for a bird that would normally use the hollows on old growth trees.  This is one of the largest west coast migrations of swifts, so having a rest stop and our humble LA River here is extremely important for the species!  (And readers, does anyone know if this mean that future downtown LA development would have to consider impacts to migratory birds, if a developer wanted to remove a chimney?)

Here’s Audubons’s announcement for the gathering:

On April 30, join the Audubon Center at Debs Park and the Los Angeles Audubon Society in Downtown LA to witness an urban natural phenomenon: A “swoop” of Vaux’s swifts. Stopping by LA on migration from points south, like Guatemala and southern Mexico, to points north like Canada and Alaska, these visiting swifts will roost in an old chimney in Downtown LA for the next few weeks.

This Friday gather with your fellow Angelinos on the top floor of the parking lot at 440 Broadway. Bring a picnic, binoculars, and something to sit on. Best viewing between 6:30 pm and 8:00 pm If driving, please park below the top level of the parking structure, so that there will be safe viewing from the top level (parking costs $3 on weekdays, $6 weekends). From the Red Line, you can access the parking lot from the Pershing Square Station by walking to Fifth and Broadway.

Staff from the Audubon Center at Debs Park will meet interested participants at the Highland Park Gold Line Station at 6:15 pm on April 30. Please bring your TAP card, or purchase a day pass.

More info here:
http://www.audubondebspark.org/debs_swifts.php

Sixth Street Bridge L.A. Times Editorial

The central span of Downtown L.A.'s 3600-foot-long 1932 Sixth Street Bridge - during the 2008 LA River Kayak expedition. Photo: High Country News

Lewis MacAdams and Alex Ward have written a very good L.A. Times editorial on replacing the ailing 1932 Sixth Street Viaduct – one of downtown L.A.’s most iconic historic bridges. The piece is entitled Beauty and the bridge and here’s an excerpt:

Currently, $200 million from the city’s Prop. 1B bond — about half what it will take to replace the bridge — has been set aside for the project. A draft environmental impact report has been completed, and a final report is expected soon. The Bureau of Engineering and its consultants have introduced five design alternatives, most of which attempt to replicate the current bridge’s signature arches. But not one of them comes close to equaling the current bridge’s singular drama. None of the designs has drawn much enthusiasm from the Bureau of Engineering’s neighborhood advisory committee, from the American Institute of Architects or from the Los Angeles Conservancy. None of the designs has stirred anybody’s blood or grabbed anybody’s imagination.

All over the Earth, bridges are important symbols of their metropolises. Everyone knows the Rialto Bridge in Venice, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate. Bridges rightfully come to symbolize a city’s aspirations, its hopes and dreams.

Ours is an age of magnificent new bridges. In the past decade a new era of artistry and technical mastery has yielded a new generation of brilliant structures. The next time you’re trolling the Internet, check out Ben van Berkel’s Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, Christian Menn’s Bunker Hill Bridge over the Charles River in Boston and Santiago Calatrava’s Sundial Bridge that spans the Sacramento River, the newest tourist attraction in Redding. Look at L.A.-based Buro Happold’s Mobius Bridge in Bristol, in Britain. All are different, all are amazing. The specific style of the replacement bridge is less important than assuring that the design be unique, appropriate and iconic.

To promote the highest level of design, Los Angeles should hold an international design competition juried by bridge design experts with strong local participation.

I think that the design competition idea is a good one. During her recent trip to Los Angeles, New York City’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan spoke of the sucesses that NYC has had with these sorts of competitions – not only do they produce excellent designs, but they foster a broader civic dialogue about the project.

Water talk at Olvera Street

Saturday the 24th is Olvera Street’s 80th Anniversary and Earth Day festival, and I’ll be there talking about LA & water sustainability. If you went to the Farmlab talk, you’ve heard it – but you’re welcome to come again! I’ll be in the Pico House at 11 AM.

Come on down!  Lots of other great events at the celebration. More details on the event on Facebook.

Ending the dysfunctional relationship between you and your landscape

Cape Ivy wiping out native habitats. Photo courtesy Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences. Image originally posted at calphotos.berkeley.edu.

Caught in a dysfunctional relationship with your environment? Awareness is the first step to recovery and moving on.

Readers who are ready to break up with the invasive species in their lives are in luck.  While we at Creekfreak enjoy lavender, fruit trees, and other innocuous non-natives as much as anyone, we also get more than a little grumpy when we are trying to hike a nice SoCal creek and end up wading through forests of palm, arundo, fountain grass, sticky eupatorium (which I call Sticky Yoopy), nasturtium, and fennel, or mustard, and cape ivy, or vinca, and himalayan blackberry and… anyway, you get the picture. “Dear Washingtonia felifera, It’s not that you don’t have wonderful qualities, but you proliferate, you hang around, you catch fire so easily… This is it, we’re through. I’m sorry.”

You may already be familiar with my invasive species mini-rants (for example: 1, 2), but maybe not. You may be thinking “who? what?” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, writer Ilsa Setziol’s LA Times series on specific weedy plants that harm habitat is for you. Check out her series, Gardening Hangovers.  There’s also Cal-IPC (California Invasive Plants Council) which brings science and policy together to address the issue at the governmental level.

Many of these invaders are garden escapees. Which is why Emily Green’s recent posts about the LA Arboretum’s interest in rethinking its mission is so exciting. As an institution that shapes how we landscape, the Arboretum has the potential to bring us to a new awareness of how to live in support of our native habitat – and end the bad habits of these gnarly invasives and water consumption. But the new director needs to hear from you as he did from Emily, so go forth…

Soccer at Hahamongna?

Aerial view of Hahamongna. Photo from (and linked to) Arroyo Seco Foundation website.

Once again, active recreation and our dwindling natural resources are being pitted against each other.  This time, it’s at Hahamongna, a basin on the Arroyo Seco next to JPL.  Devil’s Gate Dam holds back the Arroyo’s flows, infiltrating some of them into the Raymond Basin, the aquifer that supplies a lot of Pasadena’s water.  Above ground, wetlands and oak woodlands abound, a rare finger of habitat extending down from the San Gabriel Mountains.

Should soccer be carved out of this?

Receiving a County Green Leadership Award

The hand-lettered certificate to prove it!

This morning I had the pleasure of receiving a Green Leadership Award from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. There were five honorees; my award was the chair’s award – selected by County Supervisors’ Chair Gloria Molina. I was happy to see my notification letter addressed to “Joe Linton, LA Creek Freak”!

News and Events – 19 April 2010

Round-up of Creek Freak News:

>In an exclusive, dated April 1st 2010, the L.A. Eastside blog reports on a highly secretive plan underway for the Army Corps of Engineers to radically alter the course of the Los Angeles River. The project will once-and-for-all settle the question of whether Echo Park is located in L.A.’s “eastside.”  

>The San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports on weed abatement and progress on the new 24-acre San Gabriel River park at the Duck Farm property – along the 605 Freeway between the 10 Freeway and 60 Freeways – across the river from South El Monte.  

>Harvesting rainwater is happening all over. Read accounts by Sherri Akers and Andy Lipkis about their home rainwater harvesting experiences. Did you know that rainwater makes for better homebrew beer, too?

Historic Creeks of San Francisco - via SF Streetsblog and the Oakland Museum of California

>San Francisco Streetsblog ran an excellent three-part series (links: one, two, three) on daylighting urban creeks, focused on quite a bit of the history of what’s been done in the bay area, and throughout the world. It also covers some exciting daylighting projects underway and proposed for San Francisco. Maybe L.A. Streetsblog (one of my favorite local blogs) will do some coverage here too? 

>Los Angeles State Historic Park hosted an Earth Day tree planting last Saturday (s0rry I didn’t get to promoting this event in advance.) The planting plans look extensive – focused at the north end of the park. Overall, though, it seems like we’re enhancing the temporary park and retreating from the bigger master planning process – on hold due to state budget crises. Maybe that’s a good thing, for now?

>Bid for your chance to have lunch with movie star Daphne Zuniga and support the cause of the Los Angeles River Revitalizaion Corportation (RRC.)

> We’ve added two new creeky blogs to our blogroll. Check out Peter Bennet’s photography (which we’ve run before) at Citizen of the Planet, and track the Friends of Ballona Wetlands via their new Ballona Blog. 

>The L.A. County Board of Supervisors is honoring me, Joe Linton, one-third of L.A. Creek Freak, with its Green Leadership Award. They’re also honoring the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council for work on their Elmer Avenue watershed management project in Sun Valley (which we’ll cover one of these days.) Read the county’s press release, and if you want, come the supervisor’s meeting tomorrow morning where they’ll be giving out the awards.

Upcoming Events of Interest to Creek Freaks:

>Urban Photo Adventures photographer Ken Haber’s L.A. River photos are featured in the Annenberg Space for Photography’s exhbition Water: Our Thirsty World – open now through June 13th.

>The Army Corps of Engineers is hosting a community input workshop this Saturday April 24th for feedback on future plans for habitat and recreation in the Sepulveda Basin. The meeting will be from 10am to 12:30pm at the Sepulveda Garden Center at 16633 Magnolia Blvd. in Encino 91406.

>The L.A. River boating expedition documentary Rock the Boat will screen at Los Angeles Eco-Village on Saturday May 8th 2010. Basic info here, more details coming soon.

>Friends of the Los Angeles River’s annual Great Los Angeles River Clean-up takes place Saturday May 8th!

Asphalt to Waterway at Enviromental Charter HS

Former asphalt area at Environmental Charter High School - Photo: La Loma Development Company

This week I got a chance to briefly visit a small constructed-creek project at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale. The ~400-student school worked with some friends of mine at La Loma Development Comany to remove large swaths of asphalt and create natural landscapes and food orchards. The school has done a lot to use nature and natural/recycled materials to soften the somewhat institutional edges of a typical Southern California campus.

Last Week’s L.A. River Brush Fire

Most of the in-channel vegetation burned was palm trees - a non-native invasive plant

The Eastsider, L.A. Times and ABC 7 scooped L.A. Creek Freak on this one. The Eastsider features an excellent blazing flames photo by Nicole Antebi – and there was apparently TV news footage aired, but I couldn’t find it online (if you find it, post the link in comments, please.) Last Wednesday April 7th, there was a brush fire that burned about a half-acre of vegetation in and along the Los Angeles River at Taylor Yard. My friend Jason and I saw the smoke while we were exploring the 7th Street Bridge.

The burn area is right near the end of the access road that goes to the Metrolink maintenance yards at Taylor Yard. (That unnamed road is off San Fernando Road at the downstream end of Rio de Los Angeles State Park.) Most of the fire was in the channel itself, mostly burning palm trees. It appears that it started buring in-channel vegetation, then spread to the vegetation along the access road along the top of the channel.

Journey into the Seventh Street Bridge

My drawing of the double-deck Seventh Street Bridge from my 2005 book Down by the Los Angeles River

My friend Jason Neville was asking me some questions about possibly accessing the interior space of the Seventh Street Bridge… so I responded that we should just go and explore.

I’d never actually been inside the Seventh Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River in downtown Los Angeles. Many bridges don’t actually have an inside, but 7th does.