Of all the various forms that water takes on the Earth, the one most pleasing to the human spirit may well be the creek. What is more delightful than the sight and sound of flowing water, the smell of damp earth, the heady fragrance of bay trees—and the songs of birds who are always attracted to the presence of water.
Especially in our coastal region, creeks are the arteries of the often-dry land carrying life-supporting fluids. Even the most modest and seasonal of creeks carves its own bed over time. Rising in the hills, fed by winter rains, the East Bay creeks flow downhill carrying a cargo of sediments. Where the creeks slowed down in the lowlands, the deposited soils formed the flood plains upon which our cities were later built.
We happen to be located in the watershed of one of the East Bay’s most important streams, one that runs year-round and in earlier times supported salmon and steelhead runs. Strawberry Creek, along with other streams that rise in the hills, flows westward emptying into the Bay. We can define our place on the Earth by our watershed. Identifying one’s watershed is an important way to feel ‘grounded’ even where most of the land is buried under streets and buildings.
Lawrence Hall of Science and its environs drain both into the South Fork of Strawberry Creek in the Canyon and into the North Fork below the building. The forks join at the west end of the Campus before ducking into a culvert. The landscape around the Hall was extensively reshaped and the upper reaches of the North Fork filled to accommodate the building and the new road up the hill.
Once, creeks often acted as boundaries defining Spanish Land Grant holdings. Earlier, the Huchiun-Ohlone group of Native Americans lived along local streams like Strawberry Creek. They maintained a seasonal camp on site of the present day stadium. As hunter-gatherers, they caught fish, hunted game, and harvested acorns, tubers and wild seeds. They practiced a rudimentary form of agriculture by burning off grass and brush to improve foraging. Where streams entered the Bay, they built their villages. The mudflats supplied a bounty of shellfish. The discarded shells created mounds that were part of the shoreline landscape before they were leveled for industrial sites. There was once a shell mound where Strawberry Creek entered the Bay near the foot of present-day University Avenue.
Mouth of Strawberry Creek, near the foot of University Avenue
Strawberry Creek as a reliable source of water (flowing at the rate of 100,000 gallons an hour even in dry years) influenced the founders of the fledgling University to choose the present site in 1860 (the view out through the Golden Gate didn’t hurt). Even before the establishment of the city of Berkeley, the community of Ocean View thrived at the base of the creek, their grist mill using the water for power. This workingmen’s community of mostly immigrants resented the University and its neighborhood taking “their” water upstream, which led to one of California’s innumerable water wars. It didn’t help matters that University students regularly descended on the Ocean View saloons for a good time.
Ultimately, Strawberry Creek couldn’t fulfill its promise of unlimited water and a few local water companies were formed to build reservoirs. But the swelling East Bay population, the Berkeley fire of 1923, and periodic droughts led to the formation of the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD). EBMUD impounded reliable Sierra Nevada water in foothill reservoirs and piped the water across the Central Valley to the East Bay.
Strawberry Creek has had a hard time of it, and since the earliest days has been polluted and degraded. The dairy cows which preceded the UC Botanical Garden in the Canyon before the 1920s, did what cows do—wallowed in the water, breaking down banks and destroying streamside vegetation.
Before the UC Memorial Stadium was built on the Hayward Fault in 1923 and Strawberry Creek was captured by a pipe, the creek crossed the fault in several cascades. It was remembered as a place of uncommon beauty with the stream, the sound and sight of falling water, a meadow, and the spreading live oaks.
Kolber postcard ca. 1908: A Section of Strawberry Creek with
waterfalls wound its way through the site of the present stadium.
Strawberry Creek, like most urban streams, was considered a nuisance. It was captured by two culverts (the “Little Inch” and the “Big Inch”) above the campus and by another culvert at the western edge of the Campus for the two-mile trip underground through Berkeley to the Bay. Even where the stream was allowed to flow above ground through the Campus, and for a short distance where it was “daylighted” in the 1980s at Strawberry Creek Park in southwest Berkeley, being confined in culverts was hardly a recipe for an ecological, healthy stream.
But Strawberry Creek is a lot cleaner than it was in the early days of the University when it functioned as an open sewer. In the 1980s the University got serious about cleaning up the creek. Leaking sewers were repaired, creek banks replanted, and crib walls built to help prevent bank erosion. Once the pollution was controlled, native fish were re-introduced—not the noble salmon and steelhead but modest fish like two species of minnows. If you watch closely in the deeper pools you can see small schools of the diminutive fish, their presence often revealed by their shadows cast on the pebbles below.
Urban creeks, including Strawberry Creek, have the habit of flooding. Rainfall, rather than seeping into the soil, pours off roofs and races down pavement, overwhelming the creek which becomes an unruly surge prone to flood and erode its banks. When surfaces are permeable, rainwater seeping into the soil replenishes groundwater which continues to water a creek long after the seasonal rains have ceased.
In a few places in the Canyon (in the California section of the Botanical Garden and near the earthen retention dam where walkers often park) the creek retains some of the natural harmony of a healthy stream. Beginning in the high hills as seep springs and seasonal creeklets, the well-aerated water flows over shallow rocks, pausing as cool, deeper pools. Newts, salamanders, and frogs use the banks and the stream itself for the different stages of their life cycle. The stream is rich in both aquatic and terrestrial insects which in turn attract a variety of birds.
By the end of April most of the breeding birds have arrived to set up their territories along the creek. Nothing compares with a stream corridor for bird life. The dawn chorus is memorable with songs overlapping songs. Even during the day, its seems every tree has a singing bird—dueting Warbling Vireos, Wilson’s Warblers, brilliant yellow with jaunty black caps. The big brilliant Hooded Orioles in the UC Botanical Garden bring with them some of the exotic beauty of the tropics where they winter. Using palm fibers, they weave their basket nest.
The next ‘story’ will describe birds that nest in the Strawberry Canyon watershed.
--Phila Rogers
Phila Rogers
Phila Rogers is a Lawrence Hall of Science neighbor who has lived on the hill for 58 years. Until retiring, she was a science writer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she also wrote “Nature Note” for the weekly publication. As a volunteer with the UC Botanical Garden she co-leads quarterly bird walks. She is also one of the founding members of Save Strawberry Canyon.
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