Left to right: Elzas Ranch, Porter Ranch, and El Chamisal Ranch.

The Elkhorn Slough Foundation (ESF) currently owns or manages 3000 acres in the slough watershed, and plans to double that acreage in three years. In August 2002, ESF made another acquisition, adding the 200-acre El Chamisal Ranch to its other holdings, including Blohm Ranch (336 acres), Elzas Ranch (134 acres), and the Porter Ranch and Preserve (225 acres).

To help ESF with the stewardship of all our lands, Kim Hayes joined the Elkhorn Slough Foundation as Land Manager in July, 2002. We sat down to talk to her just before Labor Day.

What does the term stewardship mean to you?
Caring for a place in a comprehensive way. This means looking at the land and all the life forms that interact with it -- the plants, animals, soil, water, air, everything. Because of the history of this area, land stewardship means paying a lot of attention to soil erosion. It's very exciting to restore degraded areas. What's here is really incredible. There are beautiful nooks and crannies on all our lands, and our job is to protect and expand them.

Stewardship is basically having a positive relationship with the land. There is so much beauty here and we have a very dynamic landscape. There are many ongoing negative impacts to deal with, as well. It's a big job.

You've only been on the job a short while. What's been the biggest surprise?
All those little nooks and crannies of unchanged land. I just drove by Blohm Ranch and there's oak woodland and maritime chaparral still there. I was out at Porter Ranch the other day and saw native California Milkweed. These things surprise me. I expect to see the yucky things. The beautiful, untouched things surprise me.

The Elkhorn Slough Foundation has managed lands since 1986 with our first acquisition in Moro Cojo Slough. That expanded in 1992 when we took over stewardship of 800 acres owned by The Nature Conservancy. What has the Foundation done as good stewards during that time?
Take Blohm Ranch, which is probably the single property where we've done the most work. We've arrested some major gully formation, which resulted from previous management. We're continuing to stabilize steep slopes and to restore habitat. I see native bunch grasses there. The diversity of plant life is naturally restoring itself -- scrubs, oak trees. Now we're at an advanced stage in gully restoration. We're installing new sediment basins -- adding two more and maintaining an existing one. We are farming in a sustainable way.

The Foundation is working hard to keep viable farmland in production, and one way we do that is to take out of production farmlad that is unsustainable and on steep slopes. We did that at Blohm Ranch.
That's right. I'd say, just looking at the aerial maps, that we're farming about a third of the land once farmed there. We reduced cultivation on the steepest, most erosion-prone slopes and maintained farming on slopes that could sustain productive cultivation. That means a lot less erosion.

How much less?
Gobs and gobs (laughs). Not a very scientific way of putting it. The average rate of soil erosion is 33 tons per acre per year on steep slopes in the watershed -- a very high rate. On large gullies in these sandy hills, up to 1200 tons an acre has been lost in a year. It varies, of course, from site to site, but certainly we're talking about hundreds of tons of soil that isn't going into Elkhorn Slough because of what we've done at Blohm Ranch. We measured 5000 tons of sediment kept on Blohm Ranch because of the sediment basin we built. There will be equally dramatic results at El Chamisal Ranch, which we recently acquired. Erosion on the steep slopes there just flooded the hillsides and Carneros Creek with sediment.

What's your top priority over the next few months, during the winter especially?
Erosion control, that's absolutely number one. We have to keep the sediment out of the Slough -- especially this winter with the predicted El Niño. We've committed $20,000 for work this fall, building sediment basins and doing restoration, mostly on ranches in the Upper Slough.

How is that $20,000 being spent?
Heavy equipment rental for some of the work we can do ourselves, cleaning out the sediment basins we have in place. We'll contract out construction of new basins. We'll buy straw, grass seed, some irrigation equipment. And this is just for four sites, for one season, preparing for El Nino.

Erosion control is certainly our top priority right now, but number two is following up on the habitat restoration projects already underway, at Blohm, Azevedo, Long Valley, and Porter Preserve. You can't let a season pass in restoration work without following up or you can lose what you've accomplished. So we have ongoing weed abatement and we've expanded our greenhouse work, propagating plants for various properties. We have 10,000 of plants for restoration work this fall and winter. It's exciting to figure out where they're going to go once the rainy season begins.

Do you plan to use more volunteers for some of this work?
Oh yes, yes, yes! I can see volunteers helping in the greenhouse, helping with on-site plantings and restoration maintenance, as well as doing monitoring on our lands. I think we want to expand volunteer opportunities through the Elkhorn Slough Reserve to other wonderful habitats.

What are your favorite places around here?
Well, it's really kind of odd. There's something about Moro Cojo Slough that appeals to me. It's just the life blood for so many organisms -- it's Life Central. The watershed relations there strike me. I just bow down in respect to it and to what it does. It is so heavily impacted, yet still it is doing its work.

I also really like the little maritime chaparral knolls. Being there is like going back in time. Thankfully, islands of this habitat still exist. The historic range has mostly been converted to other uses.

For a lot of people, the landscapes that touch them most deeply are those where they grew up, where they made their first connection with the natural world. Is that true for you?
Yes. I grew up in Northwestern Michigan where there are huge sand dunes. When I'm in dunes it feels like I'm getting a hug from the Big Mother. The Pajaro Dune system, running from Sunset State Beach south to the Salinas River, the dunes from Marina South to Monterey, and the Ano Nuevo dunes -- all feel like home to me.