California: Christmas Tree Farmers’ destruction of rare species habitat is starting to end

“I’ve kind of got mixed feelings on it. It’s really saddening for us
to not be able to utilize that acreage as part of the Christmas tree
farm,” said Hans Johsens of Los Gatos, who owns Skyline Tree Farm with
his wife, Donna Ducca-Johsens. “We were never consulted about whether
we wanted to relinquish any acreage, and every acre we lose reduces
the amount of acreage we have to provide to our customers.

” The
Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, based in Los Altos, is
converting 14 acres of a former commercial Christmas tree farm on its
Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve to an oak forest. The idea is to
turn the clock back 50 years and provide better habitat and food for
deer, hawks and other wildlife. District officials also want to stop
erosion they say is silting up an adjacent lake. They note that they
continue to allow the trees’ former owner, Skyline Tree Farm, to grow
and sell Christmas trees on 63 acres nearby in the same preserve,
which sits on a scenic ridgetop in San Mateo County. The site is about
a mile south of the Page Mill Road-Skyline Boulevard intersection. In
September, work crews removed about 850 mature Christmas trees on two
acres. The trees, many of which were nonnative species like Scotch
pine, were ground up into mulch and spread over the area. The district
regraded the landscape with a bulldozer and installed a new culvert
and erosion control devices. Another two acres of Christmas trees are
scheduled to be removed next summer, with four more set for 2010. Four
other acres were restored in 2003 and earlier. The point of the
$195,000 job is to stop mud from running down the rows of trees and
flowing into Horseshoe Lake, which provides a home to endangered
species such as the California red-legged frog and San Francisco
garter snake, along with the struggling western? pond turtle, Maze
said. “The rain was just eroding the soil and filling the lake with
sediment,” she said while walking the lake’s banks on a recent
afternoon as mallard ducks and coots squawked.
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