Calhoun Cut and Lindsey Slough

West Lindsey Slough

A travel blog theme this year has been the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Because I work on behalf of the natural resources in this area, I go on some cool field trips to places I'm not sure the public is authorized to go. Lately the purpose of these field trips has been to witness restoration in action--the act of converting compromised and degraded habitats to as near historical condition as possible so the area can once again thrive as a natural community supporting diverse native plants and wildlife. One of California Department of Fish and Wildlife's drought-related projects was to restore tidal flow back into Lindsey Slough in the Calhoun Cut Ecological Reserve.

Lindsey Slough is in Solano County, California. It was historically a dendritic channel that received tidal flow from the Sacramento River, just about 5 miles north of where the freshwater of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers mixes with the salt water of Suisun Bay.  It had arms that stretched to the west, north, and south of its main channel, with many small finger channels extending from the arms. These channels and their adjacent wetlands supported a wide variety of fish and wildlife species that depended on the tidal marsh ecosystem.

In the early 1900s, a self-proclaimed entrepreneur named Patrick Calhoun was at the forefront of developing Solano City, an idea for a grandiose river town. The city would have extended from Highway 113 down to Highway 12 and Suisun Marsh, just east of where Fairfield, California, exists today. Plans were made and property was acquired by 1913 for a city that would support up to 75,000 residents and have fancy accommodations for tourists. To provide easy transportation for boats and ships on the Sacramento River, Calhoun and his partners dredged a straight channel from the western arm of Lindsey Slough at Highway 113, where the city was to be built, to its confluence with Barker Slough, where Lindsey Slough's main channel was wide enough to connect mariners to the Sacramento River. In doing so, they created large berms to cut off what were once the north and south arms of Lindsey Slough, and to channel the tidal flow into their new watery super highway. The channel was aptly named Calhoun Cut. As the story goes, these shady developers wound up spending all of the money too soon, defaulted on debts, and went bankrupt. Solano City was never developed and the idea died. Along with Solano City, the tidal flow into the historical north and south channels of Lindsey Slough also died, and the blockage dried up the channels and surrounding marshes.

Today, the Department of Fish and Wildlife and two family ranchers own the land that surrounds Calhoun Cut and Lindsey Slough. With cooperation between CDFW and the landowners, the Lindsey Slough restoration project was developed and implemented in 2014. Levee breaches at the berms blocking the northern and southern arms of Lindsey Slough brought the historical tidal flow back to where it belonged. The marsh vegetation returned, and so did its wildlife.

Restored southern arm creates a marsh in dried-out land

In the grassland looking towards Calhoun Cut

On two occasions I was lucky to witness this first hand. On the first trip out to the Calhoun Cut Ecological Reserve, accessed from Highway 113, I went with Department staff down what was barely a road to the location of the south berm levee breach, which opened the main southern channel of Lindsey Slough, south of Calhoun Cut, to tidal action. It was in the late afternoon on a rather chilly day in April, and the goal of this trip was to take a couple of kayaks down the restored channel and listen for the rare and secretive California black rail, a State Threatened species. This was a case of the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy of restoration--in many cases it doesn't work, but in this case it was successful. The black rail had been detected in the restored wetland. The black rail is a tiny marsh bird that is rarely seen, even by the biologists who study them. They are mostly identified by sound. I had never seen or heard one before, but the biologists I was with had and they recognized its call. We parked the kayaks on some high ground and listened closely. Through the distracting shrill of red-winged blackbirds claiming breeding territory and other noisy neighbors, the soft squeaks and growly purr (Ki ki Kerr) of the black rail could barely be heard. But I heard it and that was a thrill of a lifetime. As late afternoon started to turn towards early evening, we quickly paddled our kayaks back to the truck so we wouldn't get caught in the rapidly approaching darkness of night. We spotted a river otter who swam well ahead of us almost the whole way back to Calhoun Cut. We made it before dark, but the cold had set in and I was wet, and my feet were a bit scratched and cut from wearing Tevas in the tall vegetation. But a little cold and a little pain is just a small part of an exhilarating field visit.

My next visit to Calhoun Cut Ecological Reserve was with a larger group of people on another restoration field trip. This visit was in the middle of the afternoon on a very hot day in the middle of June in 2015. On this day, we hiked from Highway 113 along the part of Lindsey Slough that had been turned into Calhoun Cut. We enjoyed levee-top views in bright daylight of the newly watered and vegetated channels that were starting to make a comeback. The destination of the hike was the same south berm levee breach that our kayaking trip started from a month earlier; but in broad daylight from a different vantage point. We stood at the head of the newly created channel, where our friend the river otter frolicked to the delight of the onlookers.

Breached levee between Calhoun Cut and Lindsey Slough

New dredged channel restores Lindsey Slough

Though the last trip was a little cold, I had the opposite field mishap of a mild case of heat stroke. I laid down with my head on my pack while much discussion about the restoration project continued, and my friend and colleague nurtured me with her ice cold bottle of water. As my friend and I started to slowly trudge back to the highway under the hot sun, our host rescued us in her truck and took us back to the air-conditioned van.

I started this blog by saying how fortunate I am to go places where the public doesn't or cannot ordinarily go. However, the Calhoun Cut Ecological Reserve is not completely closed to the public. Through boat access from Calhoun Cut, waterfowl hunting and fishing is allowed. A boater that reaches the breach site may be lucky enough to be greeted by the friendly resident river otter, and if very quiet during the early touches of twilight, hear the faint but distinct call of the rare and secretive black rail.