It was sleek-headed and yellow, the riotous yellow of a foreign object. It flared its wings, preened and swooped, a flashy commotion in my passionfruit vines. A rare bird sighting, surely. Even the animal kingdom had quit its patterns!
Since my office expelled me in March 2020, and I’d been home all day, I’d witnessed the most curious phenomena around my yard. Waterfowl, for instance, splashing in a sagging gutter, their breasts ballooning, rotund, ridiculous. Hummingbirds careening wildly into the spray of the sprinkler. The same brown-gray bird with intelligent eyes seemed to want to chat with me whenever I sat on my deck. Sudden shadows the size of dragons would float across the yard, outriders of high-flying hunters.
I looked things up. The yellow exotic turned out to be a hooded oriole, not at all out of place in Los Angeles during its breeding season. The bloated bathers were but white-crowned sparrows, endemic to a drainpipe as mud. The hummingbirds were Allens and Annas, my wise companion a California towhee, and the dragons red-tailed hawks.
As the birds became my friends, I realized just how lonely I’d been here. The pandemic had isolated me in my new neighborhood, and I’d never felt at home in its dusty, scrubby hills.
In a surge of commitment I signed up for a program called California Naturalist — its name brought to mind a Stetson hat, which appealed to me. I logged into a Zoom classroom, and there, for over 40 hours, I learned where I lived.
I learned how to keep a field notebook, how to notice caterpillars in the leaf litter, and why eucalyptus groves were so quiet. I learned my local watersheds and the adaptations of redwoods to fire. I collected live oak acorns in my cup holder. I logged live observations on iNaturalist, an app for identifying and mapping biodiversity, staking digital pins throughout my neighborhood.
To complete the course I had to present a “capstone project,” hands-on volunteer work promoting stewardship. There was an urban park by my house that I thought could use a steward. It was partly wild and untamed — once I’d had to pull my dog away from a coyote on that trail. But much of the park looked ugly, gray and barren. Oil derricks bobbed away in the lot next door.
I needed a sponsor, and through the Audubon Society, I met Eleanor. She was small-boned, with a cowlicked silver bowl cut and a car trunk full of trowels. She worked with a small oxygen tank on her back, but with a dauntless vigor.
Eleanor had run a weeding group at the park for years, though I’d never seen her before. I understood why once she led me to the work site, through a tunnel in the Coyote brush, past a propped palm frond that marked the spot. The work happened away from public paths, in a place not for people but for birds.
This year’s nemesis was invasive black mustard, Brassica nigra, which was turning the coastal sage scrub into an ashen monoculture. I’d liked mustard when I’d seen it spraying hillsides yellow in the spring. But come summer it gave way to a brittle gray forest, tempting wildfire and blighting the landscape.
Moreover, mustard outcompeted native plants, which, by contrast, supported a vast network of species that had coevolved together. Some, like the Monarch butterfly, depended on a single native host plant for survival. So when that plant disappeared, engulfed by mustard, so did the butterfly, and the birds and lizards that fed on them, and up and up the food chain.
Every Friday morning we snapped the dead mustard, sometimes taller than us, down into twigs. Stem by stem we dug under the root node, from which it could resprout, and severed it there. The dead stalks scattered tiny living seeds, which we raked to remove. After a rain we scraped up new seedlings, a carpet of green dots. There were always more, and the work went maddeningly slowly.
Now that I’d started seeing mustard, I saw it everywhere. In a park of 400 mustard-strewn acres, our site measured one. A restoration ecologist admitted in the LA Times that mustard was so widespread, it didn’t meet the criteria for something manageable on a large scale. In other words, it was futile.
Despairing, I confronted Eleanor. “How can you stand it?” I asked. “How can you work this tiny patch of earth, while mustard swallows the globe?”
Eleanor did not flinch. “Well,” she said.
“When we work this land, every week for years, we gradually deplete the mustard seed bank. We re-seed with native plants, give them a head start before the rainy season, and water them extra. They have a chance to grow. And then it happens. Birds passing down from the mountains have a soft place to land here. For them, we build a corridor.”
We build a corridor. Her words cracked light into my soul.
We can't eradicate mustard. No more can we bring grizzly bears back to California, or stop the drilling. We can’t stop ponderosa pines from retreating up the mountains. We can’t make it rain.
But we can look down and weed the earth at our feet. We can clear a narrow path, step by step. And one day, we’ll look up and see we’ve built a corridor.
Eleanor died recently. She texted me from the hospital: “All of us together might actually conquer the mustard by the end of spring!” But come summer, she was gone.
Still every week I work her acre. My fingernails are black with soil. A coastal goldenbush has taken root. Native wildflowers — California everlasting, cliff aster, wire lettuce, and clustered tarweed — are making a bid. At dusk, the light settles pink against the mountains’ flanks, and I know the length and angle of the shadows at this time in this season. That in the folds, the dark purple creases where evening falls first, birds are bedding down. And that tomorrow, they might rest here.