Editor’s Note: This is the 24th chapter in Volume 3 of Publisher and Editor Donald H. Harrison’s 2022 trilogy, “Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5.” All three books as well as others written by Harrison may be purchased from Amazon.com.
Schlepping and Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5, Volume 3, Exit 51C (Vista Way) Buena Vista Audubon Nature Center.
From the Northbound Interstate 5, take the Vista Way exit, and turn left to South Coast Highway/ County Highway S21. The nature center is located at 2202 S. Coast Highway, Oceanside.
OCEANSIDE, California – Needing a more healthful climate, Natalie Shapiro’s parents settled in bucolic Santa Cruz, California, right across the street from an apple orchard where Natalie spent her girlhood climbing trees and developing a lifelong love for nature.
Her father, Moshe Shapiro, had made his way from Ukraine to Palestine prior to Israeli independence. After fighting for the British Army during World War II, he became a member off the underground Irgun Zwei Leumi (National Military Organization), declared by the British to be a terrorist group. Once Israel gained its independence, Jews in many Arab countries became targets of persecution. The condition of Iraqi Jews was especially dire. The Israeli government worked out a deal with Iran by which Iraqi Jews could transit Iran en route to Israel. The Israeli government put Moshe in charge of setting up a camp to facilitate this movement.
Natalie’s mother, Lee (Green) Shapiro, grew up in London and served as a codebreaker for British intelligence during World War II. After the war, she worked for ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation and Training) in the former Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in Germany to help Holocaust survivors waiting for the opportunity to immigrate to a friendly country. Moshe and Lee met through a conference of agencies helping displaced Jews.
“I think fighting for what you know is right was passed on to me,” Natalie Shapiro commented during a May 2022 interview.
Her parents had lived in Ramat Gan, Israel, until Lee became very ill with amoebic dysentery. Doctors told her she needed to move to a country with a better climate. Lee’s former supervisor at ORT, then living in Santa Cruz, sponsored their move to the United States in the late 1950s. Moshe got into the real estate business while Lee, after Natalie’s birth in 1962, concentrated on being a homemaker. The family joined Temple Beth El, which was the center of Jewish life in Santa Cruz.
“My mother’s family had been more religious than my father’s,” Shapiro said. “My father was an ardent Zionist but not religious. I grew up in a household where we had occasional Friday night services. We would celebrate Passover and Yom Kippur to a certain degree. I didn’t fast, neither did my parents. Still, it was amazing to be connected to being a Jew, whatever that is – Zionist, cultural community, religious, whatever. I loved keeping that connection.” She said her Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) precluded her from having a bat mitzvah, but that one Jewish teaching that made an indelible impression was tikkun olam – the responsibility of a Jew to help repair the world.
Santa Cruz is redwood country and “as a very small child I would walk with my parents, friends or relatives through the redwoods,” recalled Shapiro, who today is the executive director of the Buena Vista Audubon Nature Center located at the Buena Vista Lagoon.
She recalled being small enough as a child to climb inside some of the hollows of the trees, created by forest fires. “For me, it was like a little house,” Shapiro said. ‘I think at that point I began to connect with trees. Then I went to summer camp, which is always out in nature, and that was another way I connected with nature.”
While Natalie was still of elementary school age, the family moved to Caracas, Venezuela, to assist low-income people in starting small businesses. Before returning to the U.S., the family traveled extensively in Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala.
Shapiro went first to Cabrillo Community College in Aptos, California, and on to graduation in biology from UC Santa Cruz. At that point, her parents moved to San Diego, where Shapiro took some additional classes at San Diego State University. Then she visited a friend who had moved to Boise, Idaho, and met a friend of her friend who was working for the U.S. Forest Service.
Through the friend, Shapiro obtained part-time work as a U.S. Forest Service crew member to measure the impact of logging and forest fires on rivers and streams in Idaho.
“When there is logging, a lot of the soil gets moved around because of erosion,” she said. “The soil ends up in the stream and that is bad for the fish because it covers up the bottom of the streams. They have gravel or cobble or small stones in the streams and the salmon spawns in those areas. If you cover them up with layers of silt and sand, it smothers the salmon eggs.’
Shapiro helped to measure the streams’ turbidity, pH, temperature, flow rate, width, and depth. Additionally, she volunteered with Earth First! – a group of conservationists whose motto is “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.”
While she wasn’t among demonstrators who chained themselves to trees or sat in front of bulldozers to prevent logging, she wrote news releases for the group opposing building roads through pristine swaths of forests and cutting down trees that provided habitat for rare species of wildlife such as the wolverine, northern goshawk, and pine marten. “We received a lot of media coverage – people sitting in trees and blocking logging trucks in the middle of very conservative, rural Idaho attention,” she recounted.
Additionally, ‘I taught people how to monitor timber sales, study the land to see what condition it was in, watch for an illegal activities done by timber companies, and to monitor biological surveys,” she said. “I taught people how to monitor the streams and look if there were any sediment coming into the streams from road building and logging. We organized groups to conduct protests, demonstrations and letter-writing to the agencies that could stop the timber sales.”
The conservation movement had a powerful ally in President Bill Clinton who “said there shouldn’t be any more road building in these roadless areas,” she said.
For a time, Shapiro worked for an environmental law firm in Boise but subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon, and later to Missoula, Montana, where she took a master’s degree at the University of Montana in environmental studies with an emphasis on water management. She deepened her knowledge of streams and rivers, studying the Blackstone River, Milk River, Box Elder Creek, and Cherry Creek, among others. Thereafter she worked for the State of Montana doing water quality monitoring as well as at a laboratory at the university “analyzing samples for the amount of chlorophyl which was a way of measuring the amount of nutrients in streams.”
When her father took ill, she began spending more time in San Diego. After he passed away, she decided to move back to be closer to her mother who was then living in a retirement home. Shapiro also worked seasonally for the U.S. Forest Service, accepting assignments in South Dakota and in Northern California.
“Also in 2012, I started volunteering with the group I am with now,” the Buena Vista Audubon Society. In 2018, she became its first paid executive director.
Unlike other lagoons that a northbound driver on Interstate 5 may pass – among them, San Dieguito, San Elijo, Penasquitos, Bataquitos, and Agua Hedionda – the 220-acre Buena Vista Lagoon is harder to see from the freeway. This is because it has become clogged with cattails.
“You can see part of the lagoon, but there are all these cattails, so there is not much open water,” Shapiro told me. “That is because in the 1970s, a weir – a small dam – was built across the mouth and at that time it was for flood control. But after a while the water quality got really bad because it trapped all the river runoff in the lagoon, rather than having tides come in and flushing it out. By virtue of being fresh water – because the weir blocked the salt of the ocean from coming in – it became a great place for cattails to flourish and take over. One of the things that we have been working on is building momentum for a restoration project to remove the weir, dredge out the cattails and return the lagoon to being open to the ocean. SANDAG (San Diego Association of Governments) recently approved a plan to do just that – and is currently working through the final engineering plans for a huge, multimillion dollar project, the Buena Vista Lagoon Enhancement Project.”
Buena Vista Lagoon is crossed by the weir, the railroad, Carlsbad Boulevard, and Interstate 5, essentially breaking it up into four narrow sections. Homeowners near the weir were concerned that eliminating the weir would result in the creation of odorous mud flats near their Tudor-style homes during times of low tide. “So,” said Shapiro, “the agreement was to keep the weir basin full of water year-round.” Engineers devised a plan to build a concrete structure that “will keep water in that basin, while allowing the tides to come in around it.”
One reason the homeowners dropped their opposition, she said, “was that everyone was noticing that the lagoon was slowly filling up and nobody wants that. All the people who live around the lagoon, they like it being a lagoon. Also with sea level rise happening, with this option there will be better dispersion” of sea waters that might otherwise flood some homes.
The Buena Vista Audubon Society owns a 2,100 square-foot nature center in south Oceanside, leasing the land under the center from the City of Oceanside. The adjacent land by the nature center is owned by the State Fish and Wildlife Department. The Society has an agreement with the state agency to use and maintain the area for educational purposes. BVAS built a trail and created a native garden on this land, which is enjoyed by residents and tourists alike. The nature center is adjacent to the Buena Vista Lagoon, the state’s first ecological reserve.
The Society was able to purchase a 3.5-acre piece of land across the street from the nature center. There had been a proposal to build a hotel on that parcel, but the California Coastal Commission found much of the land was jurisdictional wetlands; thus the developer withdrew the project application. Subsequently the Audubon Society raised $150,000 from individuals and conservation groups – enough to trigger a 9-1 matching grant from the California Fish and Wildlife Department to purchase the property.
“At the same time, we bought another piece of land, just south of Camp Pendleton, that is 31 acres, in partnership with the military,” Shapiro said. “It is five miles northeast of our center.” The Marines paid half the cost to buy the land, “along with a healthy budget for restoration and management,” she added. The 31-acre parcel is the Andy Mauro Nature Preserve named for the Audubon Society’s previous conservation director, and the 3.5-acre parcel across from the Nature Center is now known as the Wetlands Reserve.
The Buena Vista Audubon Society has more than 100 active volunteers who conduct nature tours for school groups, give birding and plant tours, help maintain the nature center and native plant garden, and assist with events. “Our school group tours are vital to kids’ wellbeing,” Shapiro stated. “Many kids don’t get out in nature for whatever reason,” Shapiro said. “A lot of the schools we work with are in very urban areas and a large percentage of the kids qualify for the free-lunch programs. A lot of the time both parents work, and they don’t live near nature. There is a short trail by the nature center. We take the kids out on that. A lot of them are excited, saying things like ‘This is the most exciting thing I have ever done!’ and ‘I love it here; I want to come back.’”
To help facilitate the school group tours, BVAS provides school bus grants to schools that might not be able to afford the transportation costs to bring the children to the nature center. “Some of the schools have a very small field-trip budget,” Shapiro noted. “We want to help as we can to bring kids to nature.”
Inside the nature center “We have all these amazing exhibits, including an incredible taxidermy collection” Shapiro said. “The nature center was built in 1988 with funds from the Clean Water Act, which was a state ballot proposition. At that time, we had our own taxidermist. She recently retired, but she had done all our taxidermy. People bring in animals that have died of natural causes or hit by car or disease, and if they are in good condition, we put them in a freezer and our taxidermist would come by and take the and conduct taxidermy on them.”
Stuffed animals on display include a bald eagle, hawks, songbirds, shore birds, ducks, a brown pelican, and a white pelican. Mammals include a racoon, fox, coyote, and bobcat. All of these species either visit lands around the lagoon, or can be found in nearby foothills, although Shapiro said, “the fox is a little but stretching it. We haven’t seen any foxes in the area.”
There are five regularly scheduled birding tours and watches each month that are led by birding experts, Shapiro said. While most people think of birds when they recall the name of 19th-century artist and ornithologist John James Audubon, the mission of the society named for him includes “conservation through education, land monitoring, management and advocacy,” Shapiro said.
“Education – that is important for people to understand why birds and their habitat are important,” Shapiro said. “We have a big emphasis on plants because obviously birds need plants to survive. Pollinators—birds and insects—need native plants because that is how they evolve. Having plants that co-evolve with local birds and insects is important. Advocacy – we need to make sure that land management in the area doesn’t decimate wildlife in the area. So, we get involved in controversial projects. If there is a development that is going to impact wildlife, we try to stop it, and if we can’t do that, we try to mitigate it.”
The nature center sponsors a botany walk featuring native plants of riparian, coastal sage scrub, and chaparral habitats. “For years we had signs identifying the plants, but the signs would get damaged, or the plants would die, and we had to replace them. We are in the process of installing signs with QR codes” so that visitors can take pictures of the plaques and the code will redirect them via Internet to the CalScape website with comprehensive descriptions of the plants. “When they are walking, people don’t want to read a book. But for those who want more, they can get it, once these signs are installed.”
Lectures are given at the nature center about the indigenous Payómkawichum people, more popularly known as Luiseños, with advice from the Rincon Band located in Valley Center.
COVID-19 forced the closure of the nature center for two years, so in-person presentations were replaced with those via Zoom. In May 2022, Shapiro said, “We’re coming back to what is normal. Right now, were still doing Zoom but we are cautiously optimistic. Ideally, we could do both because there are a lot of people who are happy with Zoom. One of our 1,300 members lives in Canada and loves to attend the meetings.”
As an environmentalist, Shapiro avoids driving a car whenever she can. She bicycles to and from work, a distance of five miles. “If I can’t take my bike, maybe I shouldn’t go,” she said.
Although she retains an interest in Jewish organizations – in particular the Coastal Roots Farm at Leichtag Commons, where she finds ‘my kind of people” – it’s just too far by bike from her home to drop by with any regularity.
Her life revolves around the lagoon and the property adjacent to Camp Pendleton, she said. “Nature is my calling.”
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via sdheritage@cox.net