Grazing for Restoration @ Pepperwood Preserve

Walking the untilled field

Joe Broberg helps identify a grass

Participants learned to key grasses

Botanists Claire Brown & Joe Broberg discuss grass identificaiton

Participant logging grasses seen on hike

Michael Gillogly, preserve manager, discusses the history of the preserve

Calochortus luteus

Ariel Greenwood discusses grazing practices

Aaron Lucich discusses Holistic Ag

Aaron Lucich showing the difference between grazing strategies

A difference in grazing patterns

On the left is the neighbor's pasture that gets continual grazing and on the right is the Holistic Ag approach of intense but brief grazing

Harding Grass, Wild Oats, and a lot more

Aaron Lucich leading through the grass

Aaron Lucich talking about grazing's role in soil composition and moisture retention

Max's wonderful sprouting oak find

Festuca californica - grazed and healthy looking

Angus cattle grazing on Pepperwood Preserve

Behind these cows is an alluvial fan that previously had large collapsed areas in it where no plants were growing, but now the entire area is covered in grasses.

Silene laciniata

Aaron discusses the harvest

At an old weather beaten barn we met preserve manager Michael Gilogly. He gave us the conservation biology view of how cattle grazing helps meet the reserves' goals of managing noxious weeds and protecting endemic species. Participants peppered him with questions. He also spoke of their phytolith study which confirmed that these rolling hills have indeed been grasslands for hundreds of years and not forests that were cut down by European settlers.

Botanists Claire Brown and Joe Broberg then led us across a lush meadow where we identified no fewer than ten species of native grasses. Everyone hemmed and hawed about anthers and awns.

Over lunch we gazed upon a neighbors conventional "set-stock" grazed pasture and pondered its relative barrenness. We were joined by herders Aaron Lucich and Ariel Greenwood who regaled us with the complexities of grazing with an ecological mindset. It was easy to see how a herd that is moved through a few acres every day or two can be nimbly moved around a lush display of wildflowers or a family of breeding amphibians vs the set-stock mentality where you release a herd to graze on huge pastures for months at a time. It was also neat to see how the trampling of excrement and thatch into a intensively grazed area really stimulated grass growth. In one field we saw an explosion of Stipa pulchra, our official state grass, in an area once dominated by noxious medusa-head.

A few people left at 4pm, the planned ending time but most of us were eager to march on. We hiked past ponds, through forests and finally ended in a sea of perennial California Fescue in the dappled shade of a live oak forest.

It is said we evolved in savannas. Sitting in that balmy oak grassland there was definitely a familiar comfort.

-Nik Bertulis, photography Damon Tighe

In this iNaturalist project you can see some of the organisms observed on the hike

http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/california-center-for-natural-history