America's Largest Weed

Eventually we heard a single ruby-crowned kinglet. Native birds do use eucalyptus groves, though the Point Reyes observatory has found that species diversity there drops by at least 70 percent. Eucs flower in winter, attracting insects and insectivorous birds. To deal with the sticky gum, Australian honeyeaters and leaf gleaners have evolved long bills. North American leaf gleaners such as kinglets, vireos, and wood warblers have not; so the gum clogs their faces, bills, and nares, eventually suffocating them or causing them to starve.

Bird carcasses last only a few hours in the wild; if you find a few, it probably means that lots of others died, too. One local bird author I talked to—Rich Stallcup, who writes for the PRBO—told me that over the years he has found about 300 moribund warblers "with eucalyptus glue all over their faces." Says Stallcup, "We see a large number of gummed-up Townsend's warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets, Anna's and Allen's hummingbirds, and a few Bullock's orioles. Anyone who birds around eucalyptus trees sees it all the time."

Bird artist and birder Keith Hansen, who illustrates some of Stallcup's work, has found about 200 victims. "The worst one was last year--a yellow-rump," he says. "At first I thought it was deformed, because there was such a dome of gum over its beak that it made a horn. The bird was hunched forward, breathing very heavily." If you try to remove the gum, the upper mandible will break off in your fingers.

Gum isn't the only danger. Eucs give nesting birds a false sense of security, creating population sinks. For example, the PRBO has found that in eucs, 50 percent of the Anna's hummingbird nests are shaken out by the wind. In native vegetation the figure is 10 percent. "Birds will use these trees year after year, nesting but producing almost no young, until the population crashes," says Geupel. Somehow the public isn't getting the message about America's largest weed. After the PRBO published a Stallcup-Hansen article entitled "Deadly Eucalyptus," the group got a call from a woman asking what kind of eucs she could plant that were good for birds.

"I kill eucalyptus,” is what Russ Riviere, a dapper Bolinas arborist who wears a vest to work, told me when I asked him what he did. But Riviere is more than a euc euthanizer; he is a champion of native ecosystems. When he finishes a job he frequently turns the site over to his friend Ann Young, an energetic and upbeat restoration ecologist who spends her life planting everything that Bolinas and its vanishing wildlife are running out of. Riviere met me outside my room at the 151-year-old Smiley's Schooner Saloon, and we drove to the current job site, where, among crashing eucalyptus trunks and limbs, he introduced me to his crew. The streets on this "mesa," as the local plateaus are called, were named by easterners for trees that don't belong here. This site was on Elm Street.

From Elm Street we moved down to Pine Gulch Creek—also eroded and dewatered by eucs, to the peril of its few remaining coho salmon and steelhead (both threatened). On another creek—where eucs are protected because they're wrongly said to provide sanctuary to monarch butterflies—we encountered invading eucs, some being hauled down by Cape ivy. On both creeks the eucs have completely clogged the corridor to the sea, important habitat for all sorts of birds, including shorebirds that need to move up into creeks when the tide covers mudflats.

Monarch butterflies do roost on certain eucalyptus trees in winter, a fact used to full advantage by those who believe that all trees are always good no matter where they came from or where they were planted. When the eucs weren't there, neither, apparently, were monarchs—at least not in noticeable numbers. Perhaps they migrated down the coast until they encountered native trees like Monterey pines. Geupel believes that eucs may create monarch sinks the way they create bird sinks—that is, monarchs are attracted to them, then get blown out by storms, perishing by the tens of thousands. "Monarchs are declining, and I would argue that eucs may be the reason," he says.

One day last summer Riviere was driving past the Bolinas cemetery when he saw Josiah Thompson, vice-president of the cemetery board, slashing away at euc saplings. The place was rank with eucs of all ages, a Little Shop of Horrors with serpentine roots hauling down gravestones. No cadaverous feet were sticking through the dirt yet, but that probably wasn't far off. "You can do better than that," declared Riviere. The board didn't have much money, but he agreed to be paid in part by grave sites.

Riviere's crew had barely cranked up their chainsaws when Madeline Muir appeared. "Eucalyptus has a right to be here, too," she later informed me. Muir doesn't buy any of the stuff about fire hazards, eucalyptus desolation, swamping of native ecosystems, or suffocating birds: It's all "hysteria built up to make a lot of money." In a poem, published in the October 5, 2001, Bolinas Hearsay News, she compared the razing of alien trees to the razing of the World Trade Center: "Terrorism, in all its forms, is not for me. Stop the violence. Stop the violence."

As Riviere worked, Muir leveled a video camera at him and started asking hostile questions. "She got hostile answers," recalls Thompson, who provided them before Riviere could speak. Shortly after Muir turned the tape over to the Marin County Community Development Agency, the deputy sheriff appeared and ordered Riviere to stop work. In letters to the public and to the cemetery board, the county announced (falsely) that these eucs might be important to monarch butterflies, which it claimed (falsely) "are listed as an endangered species by the federal government." Therefore the cemetery needed a "coastal permit" of the sort traditionally required of developers. Cost of the application: $1,400. Thompson drove to the development agency and asked to see the map of important monarch roosts the agency used to make its determination. Nobody could produce one. Finally, he got a lepidopterist to inform the development agency that the cemetery eucs had never been used by monarchs, and it backed off. Meanwhile, however, it has been warning property owners who desperately desire to cut their eucs that they may need to file $1,400 coastal-permit applications.