Goleta Slough Goes Tidal

It’s taken a quarter-century of wrangling and research, but the ocean’s tides are once again washing through parts of the Goleta Slough, making the formerly stagnant coastal habitat healthier for native plants and animals while simultaneously making the Santa Barbara Airport a safer place to fly.

“We’re just putting back what we took away,” said airport planner Andrew Bermond, who’s been working on the project for about five years now and is happy to see birds like killdeer, black-necked stilt, and sandpiper from his office window, as well as pickleweed, witch hazel, coyote brush, and Coulter’s goldfields once again growing on the site. The latter plant, said Bermond, “is endemic of tidal wetlands in Southern California, of which few are remaining. It’s thriving here.”

The idea, which was first hatched in the mid 1980s but was officially proposed in the early 2000s, initially made the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bristle, as they feared that more water all the time — rather than the standing pools of water that only accumulated during the wet seasons — would equate to more birds and, therefore, more hazards for pilots. But with experts suggesting that the bird-strike hazard might actually decrease, the FAA was willing to listen and learn, and studies quickly showed what advocates had predicted: Tidal flow attracts smaller shorebirds that fly lower, not the large migratory birds like geese that are much more troublesome for pilots. So the feds approved the project.