Excerpted from an interview of Dr. Richard Bailey, Executive Director of the Lake Merritt Institute. The interview was conducted October 18, 2002 by Jennifer Myronuk as part of the Mills College Oakland Living History Program. The complete interview is available at the Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room. For more information on the Oakland Living History Program, contact olhpinfo@mills.edu. © Mills College 2002.

DR RICHARD BAILEY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE LAKE MERRITT INSTITUTE DISCUSSES WILDLIFE ON LAKE MERRITT.

JM So you have the watershed inhabitants and that includes people, but aside from that you also have the wildlife and the inhabitants that live at the lake. What types of inhabitants, aside from people, live at the lake?

RB Lake Merritt is known as the first waterfowl refuge in the United States dating back to 1869 or 1870 I think it was. It predates Yosemite in that regard. It’s still a spot for migratory waterfowl to congregate, rest and feed. There are thousands of birds in the winter. And then in the summer we have a resident bird population. Mallard ducks, geese, black-crowned night herons, um, snowy egrets, common egrets… We have a Canadian goose population that rises dramatically during the molting season. We’ve had over 1,800 birds last June and July.

And a number of aquatic species: a dozen different kinds of fish including some small sharks, an occasional striped bass or bat ray in the Lake. Usually small fish. The County has bars across the channel leading to the Bay so the larger ones typically can’t get in. But you find most things you find in marine environments. We have sea squirts, mussels, barnacles, things like that that are commonly found in marine environments. Like at this time of the year when the water is warm you can see orange colored sponges. We have sea slugs that lay eggs out there at this time of the year. It’s quite a variety of life out there.

JM And you find that the lake has definitive seasons aside from the ones that mark the urban runoff, but that between the summertime when the geese show up and then they leave… What patterns have you seen over the last ten years with respect to Canadian geese?

RB Well some people say all the geese were here before we were. But that’s not really true. Although there probably were some geese at the lake, but the resident population started with a number of injured birds that were dropped off and has grown rapidly so that at any one time, even during the fall or winter, you’ll find several hundred birds–three to six hundred birds–around the lake, geese rather. But in terms of seasons winter and the runoff season is a time for plankton growth in the lake, that’s why the water is murky.

About May and especially through June and early July the Widgen grass grows, this is a rooted plant that grows from the bottom, a sea plant that grows up five, six, eight feet tall from the bottom, chokes off part of the lake, uses up all of the nitrogen, apparently, we don’t know that for sure, but at that time the lake clears up and the water visibility, the clarity of the lake increases to five, six, seven, eight feet or more. Before the widgen grass gets growing, oh probably April, there’s a bloom of algae. That will continue on until the widgen grass takes over, typically in June. And the widgen grass dies off, typically oh in mid- to late-July, it dies, it just breaks off, floats to the shore and rots. Which is the source of one of our odors in the summertime.

By mid-August it’s pretty well gone; the City harvester boat removes quite a bit of it, but it’s like mowing a lawn, it just grows back from the bottom. And in late August and September through early October if there’s no rain, the water is clear. We’re not getting a lot of nutrients coming down the creeks, there’s not much runoff, and you can see the bottom all the way down to 10 feet.