Article

Editor’s Note: Dr. Stuart Weiss worked for over fifteen years at the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, and is founder and chief scientist at Creekside Center for Earth Observation. His work studying the endangered Bay checkerspot butterfly helped lead to the protection of what is now the Máyyan 'Ooyákma-Coyote Ridge Open Space Preserve. This article is excerpted from a conversation between Dr. Weiss and Michael Hawk on the Nature's Archive Podcast. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dr. Stu Weiss: Coyote Ridge lies in Southeast San Jose. It's one of the largest serpentine outcrops in the Bay Area. It's on the frontier of the suburban sprawl, especially the north end of it. And it's just this wonderland.

It doesn't look like anything when you're driving by on Highway 101—it's just kind of a barren-looking ridge. If you look closely in a good spring, you'll see there's patches of yellow and purple up there. But until you get out and get on the ground, you don't realize that it's got more wildflowers than you ever could have imagined in one place.

And it just goes on and on, for miles, up and down canyons. And the diversity and the colors are just absolutely mindblowing. And the way it changes, through the course of a season, and from year to year and from slope to slope—every year, I'm just absolutely, transported at some point by the beauty of the flowers out there.

There are different flowers coming into bloom on different slopes. You get these amazing combinations of colors. And it's what I call the “coefficient of beauty”—being very scientific about this—which is that kind of buzz you get in your visual system when you're in a place that is just overwhelmingly colorful and beautiful. We actually came up with some scientific terminology for it; we call it “Eye sub B,” because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Michael Hawk: That works.

Stu: If you read some of John Muir, you know, when he gets into these kinds of places, he just starts describing it, and I know exactly what he's going through. We actually have a couple of John Muir quotes about walking along Coyote Ridge back in 1868.

As a place to conserve, it's just such a no brainer. You get people out there and it’s—of course we have to protect this. Because it’s got the most beautiful wildflowers I've ever seen, and it's like right here in our backyard, and there's thousands of acres of it.

Michael: I know. And it's unfortunate, as you describe, when you drive by on US 101, which is a highly trafficked road, you can't really see this. It just looks like grassy hills, and it's so amazing when you get up there.

Stu: I had a hint of it, I think it was in 1983. I was on the way back from a botany field trip to the Pacific Grove Museum—they were having their wildflower show. And I'm looking over there and thinking “Is that really purple and yellow I'm seeing over there. And I thought “no, I must be tired.” And then the following year when I got up there, it's “yeah—it really is.”

Michael: So you described that this is on the edge of urban sprawl in San Jose, which is a pretty sprawly city. And San Jose is also part of Silicon Valley as well. So you have this dichotomy of nature next to technology. Coyote Ridge is also interesting because of its proximity to Coyote Valley and the Santa Cruz Mountains. Can you tell me a little bit about what you've learned and discovered over the years in that respect?

Stu: So Coyote Ridge is at the edge of this massive open space in the Mount Hamilton range [aka the Diablo Range]. So if you go east there's hundreds of thousands of acres of open ranch land, a lot of which is now conserved. And it goes right up to Highway 101, and then we have Coyote Valley down below it. And over on the west side, the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. So it's one of the few places where there's a chance for wildlife to get from the Mount Hamilton range into the Santa Cruz Mountains. It's not an easy journey—you have to go through culverts and risk being on roads, but it's really one of the last wildlife linkages.

There were all these development proposals in Coyote Valley back in the 1980s. Then Apple and Tandem Computer wanted to put in a huge development in the late ‘90s. Cisco wanted to put their world headquarters right down there as part of a Coyote Valley Research Park. And then in the mid-2000s, people were pushing to have a city the size of Mountain View developed on the valley floor. And one of the things I noticed is that every time a Coyote Valley development started getting some momentum, the economy would crash or there'd be a tech crash, and the plans would go away for a few years.

# # #

Michael: To this day, cattle grazing is an important part of Coyote Ridge. I'm wondering if cattle grazing was occurring back at that point.

Stu: Back when we were getting going, the land was grazed. We got to know the ranchers a bit and we realized that they were absolutely essential to conserving this place.

Some Stanford scientists had fenced off an area to do a nutrient-addition experiment in 1985. And the area that they had fenced off, in two years, was this incredibly dense sward of Italian ryegrass that wasn’t supposed to be there on these serpentine soils. The simple empirical fact came to us: we’ve got to keep the cows here. So that became like the major conservation management recommendation. When it grows that dense, Italian ryegrass forms a really dense mat that smothers out all the little wildflowers—it out-competes the wildflowers.

Michael: So you observed that where the cattle were grazing the rye grass was not growing as thick. The thatch wasn't forming; it was thus allowing the Plantago erecta to sustain. [Plantago erecta, also known as California plantain, is an important host plant for the endangered Checkerspot butterflies that call Coyote Ridge home.]

Stu: Yes—and all the wildflowers. The contrast is really quite striking, and the reason for that is cows eat grass. That's what they do. And the Italian rye grass is like the best forage grass out there. I learned that the ranchers’ goal was to remove as much of the grass in a given year as possible without trashing the place, which was exactly our goal.

Know before you go: Access to the Máyyan 'Ooyákma-Coyote Ridge Open Space Preserve, especially to the sensitive Habitat Protection Area, is limited. On weekends March through May, all visitors must sign-up for a docent led tour to access the trails inside the Habitat Protection Area. Find more information at the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority website.

Thank you to the Nature's Archive Podcast and Jumpstart Nature for this interview excerpt.