Wildlife at San Vicente Redwoods

Our team is busy building trails out at the top of the San Vicente property, but there are lots of local residents who also deserve their time in the spotlight. The public access and trails plans for the San Vicente property are some of the most extensively-researched plans that our team has ever contributed to. As a contractor under the land's conservation partners, we designed trails to work with the San Vicente Redwoods property and minimize effects on sensitive species through thoughtful trail design, strict construction guidelines, and carefully placed habitat buffers.

Check out some of the critters that have been caught by wildlife cameras out on the SVR property. We'll share new species every month.

Mountain lions are apex predators and are at the peak of the food chain in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Mountain lions foster biodiversity by regulating deer and other herbivore populations, reducing overgrazing and browsing, and increasing plant diversity and population numbers. They also supply other predators and scavengers (such as bobcats and coyotes) with a steady stream of food. Mountain lions tend to leave larger pieces of meat behind, which allows them to fill a critical role in the ecosystem. After vertebrates consume what they will, invertebrates like flies and beetles will process the rest of the carcass providing food for various wildlife.

Fact about deer and their relationship with fire: deer thrive on early successional vegetation in forested communities. There is a period encompassing about 2-30 years following major disturbances such as fire (or logging) when herbaceous and shrub vegetation are abundant, available, and highest quality.

The move to more regulated and intensive forest management and improved fire suppression has led to a decline in disturbances that perpetuate early successional habitats and the beginning of a reversal as far as deer habitat quality is concerned. The relationship between understory forage (herbaceous and shrub) and overstory canopy is typical of California's forested ranges; as canopy increases, forage decreases.

Coyotes are incredibly adaptable to diverse environments and provide many ecological benefits. They limit the populations of other mesopredators (skunks, raccoons, foxes, and even cats), which impact bird populations primarily through competitive exclusion. Coyotes help regulate rodent and rabbit populations since these small mammals comprise a large portion of their diets. They also exert a top-down regulation of other species, which helps to maintain the balance in the food web below them.

Our local deer are black-tailed deer, a subspecies of mule deer. Black-tailed deer are considered a "keystone" species in the native California coastal ecosystem because fluctuations in their population numbers have the potential for repercussions throughout the ecosystem. They prefer ecotones at the edge of the forest, where they have access to food and easy escape routes from predators. Importantly, they provide food for large predators (mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes).

The gray fox is an omnivore that eats many different things such as berries, nuts, birds, insects, rabbits, and other rodents. Gray foxes influence small rodent populations through their feeding habits and help to disperse nuts and seeds throughout wildlands after eating them. They are adept at climbing trees which allows them to escape larger predators. Gray foxes are primarily active at night and sleep during the day in dense vegetation and rocky places, and they prefer woodland and woodland-brush ecotones over open habitat.

Bobcats are generalist predators with a diverse range of prey species. Due to the size of a bobcat, they are large enough to take down a small deer and small and agile enough to capture smaller prey. Bobcats (like many predators) exert significant influence on lower levels of the food chain. As predators higher up on the food chain, bobcats exert "top-down control" on ecosystems keeping consumer populations in check. Bobcats help to retain this check and balance by keeping overbrowsing in check and retaining healthy biomass levels for certain plant species. Without this top-down pressure, prey species can rapidly increase their populations' size and negatively impact their ecosystems.

All images are courtesy of Sempervirens Fund, and all captions are courtesy of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. Conservation partners of San Vicente Redwoods include Peninsula Open Space Trust, Save the Redwoods League, Sempervirens Fund, and Land Trust of Santa Cruz County.