Sepulveda Dam Wildlife Reserve is an artificial Eden within earshot of the San Diego and Ventura freeways. Here you can sit quietly by the man-made lake and see not just ducks and shorebirds but flickers, horned larks, blue grosbeaks, hummingbirds and hawks. Hartman says 6 million gallons of treated water flow into the lake each day from the nearby Tillman sewage treatment plant, and living things love the nutrient-rich soup. According to Muriel Kotin of the San Fernando Valley Audubon Society, more than 200 bird species have been identified in the area. If you're lucky, you'll see a snow-white great egret move at a regal pace through this oasis only 20 yards from the growl of traffic.
Birds are high on the list of living things people want to save.
Gangly, grayish indigenous plants are not. But Hartman is proud of what he and other members of the California Native Plant Society have accomplished in the name of preservation. With the help of volunteers and licensed plant exterminators, they have undertaken the painstaking task of ridding the reserve of such botanical interlopers as fennel and poison hemlock. And they are making progress, keeping the exotics at bay, if not actually eliminating them. Volunteers and city employees pull out such unwanted imports by hand so the natives can spread and flourish.