Yolo Bypass Wildlife Preserve: An Environmental Success

by Willie Vergara
 

The Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area is widely hailed as a national model for environmental restoration as well as lifting standards of living. It is primarily useful as a floodway, thereby controlling the intermittent floods in Sacramento especially in years of extraordinary rainfall. It is one of the least known parks in Northern California in spite of the many things that it can offer.

This is located within the Yolo Bypass in Yolo County, California. The Wildlife Area is managed by the California Department of Fish and Game with the intent of restoring and managing a variety of wildlife habitats in the Yolo Basin, a natural basin in the north part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. My daughter Ria has passed this place about a hundred times when she was having her Pathology fellowship at the UC San Francisco, oblivious to the beauty of this wildlife preserve. The same is true for my wife Tess and I, like many residents in Sacramento and Yolo counties and vicinity cities and towns. We were not aware about this nature park until the early part of this year. It had to take one of my engineer-officemates, an avid photography hobbyist, to lead us to this place “in order to watch the Sand Crane Festival”.

Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area is the perfect spot to escape urban life in nearby Sacramento. Hunters, birders and schoolchildren all come to the area to experience wildlife up-close in nature. One needs to arrive several minutes before sunrise in order to enjoy the changing colors of the sky.

It is one of the largest public/private restoration projects, and such restoration is ongoing. Covering 25 square miles and home to 200 species of birds, the Yolo Wildlife area is located between the cities of Davis and Sacramento – 35 minutes from our home in Rocklin, California.

This place is becoming to be widely popular as a recreational area for naturists, photography hobbyists, and hunters. Annual field trips and and on-site workshops that include waterfowl drawing, duck calling, tule decoys, and trout fishing. Hunting is regulated and hunters have to register each time. This past hunting season of November and December 2012, hunters have had their fill of several mallards, American wigeons, pintails, teals, shoveler, buffle-heads, goldeneye, and gadwall.
 

For one to enjoy what this place has to offer, an early arrival at the place is suggested. The gate would not open until sunrise but there is a temporary parking area where one can begin to behold the break of dawn. In my case, I left home before daybreak, arrived at the Yolo Wetlands minutes before sunrise. Thousands of Canadian geese playing on the swamps.

As I captured the magnificent rising of the sun, I was overcome by the synchronized and sudden take off tens of thousands of birds that darkened the sky, and was pleasantly deafened by the flapping sound of geese. As in the old adage, "The best things in life are free!"

The pictures above are a usual sight where one can behold several groups of thousands upon thousands of birds in flight - way before sunrise. We would later find out that this beautiful sight would be seen each morning during the bird migration season every February and March of each year. A minute before the sun starts to show itself in the horizon, you shall have seen TEN THOUSAND BIRDS in the sky.
 

Since 1997, this 16,000 acre wetlands saw significant increases in waterfowl and other bird populations. The area has been carefully designed and constructed to avoid impacts on the flood carrying capacity of the Yolo bypass, hazardous levels of mosquitos without impacting surrounding farming operations.

Great egrets were decimated by plume hunters who supplied purveyors of the latest ladies' fashions. Their populations plunged by some 95 percent. Today, the birds have enjoyed legal protection over the last century, and their numbers have increased substantially and are found in many swamps and wetlands in California and perhaps the rest of North America.

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