Friends of Sausal Creek
Excerpt from The Sausal Creek Watershed: A Cultural and Natural History

by Lisa Owens-Viani

During the past century, the Sausal Creek watershed the land that surrounds and drains into Sausal Creek has undergone many changes. As land use in the watershed has become more urbanized, the creek itself has been physically altered through culverting, channelization, and sedimentation. The willow thickets at the mouth of the creek are gone now, and the creek finishes its journey to the Bay in a culvert (a large underground pipe), from which it empties into the channel near the Fruitvale Bridge between Oakland and Alameda. The creek has been culverted in many other sections too, but nonetheless, it still flows above ground for about half of its length.

Today, rock doves from France and European starlings live in the watershed alongside native scrub jays and western flycatchers. On the hillsides, nonnative Himalaya blackberry intertwines with California blackberry, and German ivy competes with native manroot. European white birches grow alongside native alders, and fox squirrels compete with native western gray squirrels. While following the trail alongside the creek in Joaquin Miller Park and Dimond Canyon, it can be easy to forget you are in the middle of urban Oakland. The delicious smells of the forest floor, of mosses and decaying leaves, pervade the air. Enormous bay trees bow out over the creek in wide arches, echoing the lines of the Leimert Avenue Bridge. Black phoebes call to each other and fly low over the water, catching insects. Down in the water, backswimmers make tiny ripples in the water. Damselflies glint bright blue in the filtered sunlight, and cliff swallows playfully circle and swoop above the creek in Dimond Park. Brown towhees hop through the leaf litter just as they have done since before the first humans lived here.

Like its watershed, Sausal Creek has been transformed and altered, but its integrity remains intact. Whether welcomed as a babbling brook or feared and fought as a raging, unruly torrent, the creek continues to flow through the geographic center of Oakland and carve its path into the land and into history. With a little help from its human neighbors and groups like the Friends of Sausal Creek, it will do so for centuries to come.

The Friends of Sausal Creek, a citizens' group of creek supporters, meets monthly to discuss plans to preserve and restore the creek. The next meeting is Wednesday, April 21, 7 to 9 p.m., at the Dimond Library. The next restoration workday is Saturday, April 25, 9 a.m. to noon, at Dimond Park. For more information on the Friends of Sausal Creek, please contact Anne Hayes of the Aquatic Outreach Institute at (510) 231-9566.