From: Stanley Moore <stangabboon@...>
Subject: [CA_BUOW_FORUM] An open letter to the Tejon Ranch and the Tejon Ranch Conservancy
To: raptor-conservation@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 1:37 PM

Dear Sirs --   First of all, I would like to thank the Tejon Ranch for recently issuing me a permit to access the ranch in order to view planned development and protected lands from my perspective as a citizen conservationist, with Pete Bloom giving me a guided tour for parts of three days.  I was very impressed by the overall condition of the ranch, its pristine habitats and huge scale.  I agree with anyone and everyone who wants to "save the Tejon Ranch" by keeping it intact and not fragmenting it into parcels that could harm its usefulness as a conservation paradise in its protected areas.   But having seen the areas planned for development, I feel comfortable that California Condors and all other sensitive species are adequately cared for in the habitat conservation plans you commissioned from Dudek and others.   That being said, I would like to offer some perspectives of how I think you can do even more to do right by the land and by your neighbors moving forward.   Certainly there can be no dispute that even limited development can impact the region.  Thousands of new cars on the highway will affect local residents, and other impacts are well-understood.  I urge the Tejon Ranch to consider how you might not only mitigate the impacts of your development on endangered species and sensitive species, but also consider how you might be able to mitigate your impacts on people who love wildlife.  I encourage, even urge you to go even beyond the necessary as required by law or by contractual agreements with environmentalistst.   I am a huge admirer of the late ecologist and conservationist Aldo Leopold, and his "land ethic" is essentially a mantra of mine.  Leopold said:  "A thing is right when it tends to promote the integrity, the stability and the beauty of the biotic community.  A thing is wrong when it tends otherwise."  I  believe that the mitigation plans for condors and conservation plans for all endangered species will prevent harm to  biodiversity.   But more can be done, and I urge you to work with the Tejon Ranch Conservancy in some specific ways to do so, and to make an even expanded conservation of biodiversity a point of public pride for the Tejon Ranch itself in the years ahead.  A good philosophy would be to keep common species common.   For instance, while I enjoyed and admired the bountiful expanses of native oaks on the entire ranch, I could not help but notice that oak regeneration is minimal.   This could be in part due to feral pigs and their harmful impacts.  I realize that pig hunting brings income to the ranch and also provides food for condors.   I encourage you to expand pig control efforts by engaging in a serious pig eradication program.  Work with botanists and ecologists to understand what is needed to make the ranch more hospitable to natural oak regeneration.  Perhaps you could work with local universities and graduate students to allow research on the ranch habitats and even to fund some research in that regard.  Think ahead five hundred years!  We want the Tejon Ranch to be healthy in perpetuity and oak woodlands and oak savannahs are very important in this regard.  Make it a point of pride to see to it that oak regeneration becomes a normal feature of healthy habitats.   Aldo Leopold wrote in the 1930's about cheatgrass in an essay called "Cheat Takes Over".  Cheatgrass is an invasive plant from Central Asia and it has affected large areas of the Tejon Ranch grasslands.  It is bad for livestock and bad for wild nature.  Perhaps areas of the ranch could be used as experimental research areas to help determine how cheatgrass can be controlled.   When Pete Bloom and I viewed vast areas of grassland on the ranch, we saw tons of ground squirrels, but no burrowing owls.  I believe that the Tejon Ranch could be a major regional home for an almost unlimited number of breeding burrowing owls.  Why not work with the State Fish and Game Department and with raptor biologists such as Pete Bloom to research the differences between occupied habitat and potential habitat for burrowing owls?  Perhaps burrowing owls could be released in controlled settings and then monitored at different elevations to see how they react to habitat variables and how they respond to various management techniques over time.  I feel very confident that Pete Bloom could conduct such research, perhaps advising graduate students and working with a goal to expand the Tejon Ranch population of breeding burrowing owls and increasing our understanding of the nuiasances of burrowing owl conservation and management.   One of the interesting prospects that could emerge from your planned development of the Tejon Ranch relates to the large Centennial Project.   Even the large-scale alteration of native grassland habitat in that location is not totally without some conservation pluses.  I predict that Centennial will result in an actual expansion of biodiversity by virtue of its landscaping, installment of parks and gardens, and addition of edge habitats.  I predict that even some raptor species will become more numerous as the trees in the new development mature.  It has been found repeatedly in North America, for instance, that some of the densest populations of Cooper's Hawks are in mature suburban forests in parks and neighborhoods that were planted decades earlier.  You have the opportunity to work with landscape architects and ecologists to design parks and produce plantings that will increase biodiversity and which can be very hospitible to native fauna and avifauna.  Make this a point of pride as well!   As I have mentioned in a previous communication, I think it would be a great idea for the Tejon Ranch to erect and maintain a small museum of the Tejon Ranch' and the California Condor.  You should celebrate your role in condor conservation.  Perhaps you could display a replica of a pit trap used by Pete Bloom to capture condors on the ranch.  You could display research hardware, such as radio transmitters and perhaps even have an operational radio receiver connected to a good antenna and allow visitors to the museum to detect by radio signal condors that are flying in real time above the vicinity of the Tejon Ranch.  You could even commission a full size statue of a perched condor or of Pete Bloom holding a Condor and put it on display in the museum.  You might look up Hubert Quade of Idaho for a commission of such a statue in bronze.    I think that the Tejon Ranch can reap some great publicity in the future by working proactively to promote conservation values and public education.   I saw Pete Bloom wearing a teeshirt not long ago with a drawing of a flying condor with the inscription along the lines of "AC-9 Returns to Sespe".  Make a similar one relating one or more condors to Tejon Ranch and sell it at a gift shop!  Take a part of the proceeds and put it towards the purchase of some radio transmitters!   Be proactive!   Thanks for considering my comments and join with me and many others in cherishing and living by the Aldo Leopold land ethic.     Stan Moore P.O. Box 341 San Geronimo, CA    94963 hawkman11@hotmail. com, or stangabboon@ sbcglobal. net