Here is my contribution to the ongoing story of the cutting of eucalyptus trees in Los Osos:

The Audubon Society woodchippers are mercifully silent for now, here in Cuesta by the Sea, opposite Baywood Park. The Sweet Springs and Lupine Wetlands have been assaulted and denuded of a portion of their “tall trees.” Many of those that remain are “skeletons” of their former selves.

I took my grandchildren to see
The Lorax recently, a story about other “attackers of trees” and their fate. Lacking any adequate understanding of “why,” I am forced to imagine that the older men and women of the Audubon Society need boardwalks with railings and have vision and hearing problems preventing them from seeing or hearing birds in tall trees, and are more comfortable with occasional,
short “native” bushes and shrubs. Perhaps their “ideal” park has more in common with the “proper English garden” than nature, despite her glory, can provide. Perhaps it is their portion of the almost universal desire to “improve” on nature.

In the meantime, the raptors who used to perch on the denuded and missing eucalyptus trees in the Lupine Wetlands are mostly gone. Two hawks, from perches on telephone poles, do survey the landfilled part of Lupine Wetlands, looking for mice. Like the famous horror movie, I fear the Audubon Society will be “baaaa—ck” to harvest more trees. If only, and this is way too much to ask, the birds themselves had individual votes in the society named after a beloved painter of birds.