It was a sorry sight for the official bird of California and San Francisco: Ishi, the last known California quail in San Francisco, wandering near Golden Gate Park’s handball courts, crying out for company in 2017. Armed with new data that habitat restoration might support quail again, local scientists and other experts hope to rewrite that sad chapter.
But adding another species to a jam-packed urban landscape will require more than science and data. It will require empathy and reimagining what’s possible for a 21st-century San Francisco.
The good news is, with the pandemic, some of that work has already begun, as slow streets, “shared space” parklets, and other COVID silver linings have gained traction.
Although restoring quail in San Francisco has long been considered, a paper published last week in the Journal of Applied Ecology argues that a changing city now makes it possible.
“This is a feasibility study to see if the parks could support quail,” said the paper’s lead author, Kelly Iknayan of the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI). If they return, the charismatic birds — the males sport jiggly top plumage, a chestnut belly patch and a signature “Chi-CA-go” cry — would be riding on the tails, if not the coattails, of perhaps SF’s most successful wildlife reintroduction story: the coyote.
The study found that the presence of coyotes in other California urban parks increased the presence of quail by an astounding 73 percent.
“Coyotes create top-down control,” says Lew Stringer, associate director of natural resources at the Presidio Trust, where the first quail reintroduction could take place. “They eat rats, raccoons, feral cats, and open up the ability for quail to exist.”
No more Meow Mix
Abundant feral cat colonies in the bushes of Golden Gate Park and other city green spaces, regularly fed by feline friends, contributed to the local quail demise. But those colonies are harder to find these days, and plans for quail could hasten the removal of the ones that remain, as the study makes clear: “Promoting the presence of coyotes or controlling free-ranging cats will likely have a substantial positive impact on a park’s ability to support quail.”
(Don’t expect official cat-culling anytime soon. “Our agency is not able to control free-ranging cats, but we are here to help animals in need if a feral cat is sick [or] injured,” Deb Campbell of San Francisco Animal Care and Control said via email.)
The bigger the patch of land, the better their survival.
Jonathan Young, Presidio Trust ecologist
Like Iknayan, Stringer emphasizes that this is only a feasibility study for quail, but he’s heartened by San Francisco’s changing relationship with wildlife. He remembers when police would be called out to shoot coyotes in the parks. (It would only happen these days if a coyote were exhibiting dangerous behavior.)
While quail reintroduction, as with the coyotes, the checkerspot butterfly, and the Olympia oyster, would likely start in the Presidio, the park’s wildlife ecologist Jonathan Young is already thinking about the entire city, or, as he puts it, “enhancing regional connectivity.”
“The bigger the patch of land, the better their survival,” Young says of the quail.
Sunset Boulevard, with a makeover already underway, could become not just a byway for rushed motorists desperately trying to time an alphabetical string of lights, but a wildlife corridor to allow quail to move back and forth between Golden Gate Park and Lake Merced.
Other corridors, according to Young, could be Lake Merced to Fort Funston, or the Great Highway, which “has potential, especially with the yards on 48th Avenue,” he says. “The public has a crucial role to play.”
Edge habitat around golf courses could also be enhanced, turning quail into an ambassador species to “the golf crowd.”
“Imagine seeing a covey of quail wander across the course,” Young adds. “And if you restore habitat for quail, you’re going to benefit other species like butterflies, bees and rare plants.”
Progress is fragile
In her book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, the Bay Area’s own Mary Roach directly addresses the human-animal conflict, tracing our uneven relationship back to times when animals could be sued, such as in 1659 when city fathers in Northern Italy posted legal summons for caterpillars to appear in court for the transgression of eating crops. (The caterpillars did not show; pupation was their getaway.)
We’ve made strides since then, especially in SF. But eco-friendly progress is fragile, as evidenced a few years ago when dog owners forced the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to abandon stricter beach rules for dogs meant to protect snowy plovers; or earlier this year when Mayor London Breed, with the backing of some supervisors and a vocal minority of residents, reopened the Great Highway to cars during weekdays.
What’s more, the attraction of a quail is general; the personality of a family pet is specific and personal. It might be a tough sell for some humans if quail sensitivity shuts down Fido’s favorite Presidio or Golden Gate Park trail for a week.
There’s no denying that wild animals were here first (even pigeons were rock doves before we surrounded them with garbage), but that hasn’t stopped their eradication, like the 19th-century gold miners slurping Western pond turtles out of Mountain Lake and crawling the craggy sides of the Farallon Islands to pilfer bird’s eggs. (The approach of the original inhabitants, the Ohlone, who lived alongside quail by keeping their habitat healthy, may be the best model for sustainability.)
For the Lyft driver exasperated by street closures or the dog owner inconvenienced by coyote pupping season, there are studies that show benefits to humans who are willing to make concessions and connections to nature in their urban landscape.
“There’s a relationship between green space availability and COVID-19 exposure,” Iknayan says. “Communities with limited green space access got the double-whammy of COVID-19.”
“A lot of what needs to happen is restoring health and function to our ecosystem that produces clean water and clean air, with natural checks and balances that benefit humans,” Young says. “Projects like this help us understand bigger implications.”
Because of those checks and balances, “quail have a lot to do with climate change.”
For experts like Young, this isn’t simply about a lone quail wandering around Golden Gate Park crying out for a mate. If the restoration of California quail is part of saving ourselves, that moaning for connection — which some linguists believe was the birth of language — could bookend our own existence.
