LAND APPRECIATION

Neighbors of San Elijo Lagoon Ecological Reserve share their inspirations.

Last year, we sent a survey to landowners living near San Elijo Lagoon Conservancy properties along Escondido Creek. Survey results revealed that 90% of landowners were either satisfied or highly satisfied with living along Escondido Creek for its: natural and open space, scenic views, abundant wildlife, and peace and solitude.

We’d like to give you the opportunity to express your inspirations about living near Escondido Creek and San Elijo Lagoon. Submit your original poems, essays, photos, or other media to inspiration [at] sanelijo [dot] org for consideration of future publication here.

Thanks to Kim Macconnell of Olivenhain for a peek into life along Escondido Creek:

"Living on Escondido Creek has been a constant pleasure over the last thirty years. Given that we live in a fairly dense suburban environment ,the wildness of this small corridor of creek, willow, and wetland can be truly a surprise.  The phrase of a songbird, like a least Bell’s vireo, heard but not seen in the willow thickets. Or, the particular throaty screech and “chuckling” of a green Crowned night heron from its secretive roost by the pond. The overwhelming loudness of the frogs after the first rain; the swallows suddenly filling the sky, the same with the ever growing flock of white-faced Ibis, or the first faint honking of geese returning in December. 

All these things come to punctuate time. In a way, though, it is also comes to be background for the unexpected: all the rattlesnakes that got washed downstream in the 1994 rains; or, the year before, coming across the tracks of the first deer to venture this far west. Now that there are several families and it shouldn’t be a surprise that a mountain lion may follow, but that the tracks of a 140 pound “Lion” just steps from the backdoor can only be described as a SURPRISE.  There are always the muddy paws of raccoons on the white wall where they come through on their way to check out the fish in the cow tanks--now covered with a wire canopy to keep them and the herons, egrets, kingfishers, coyotes, and not a few hawks from eating every last fish.

What a surprise, then, to see what I thought were raccoons climbing up, into, and down from a Himalayan mulberry tree with the long thin berry clusters in their “hands.”  In the faint light of very early morning they looked like lemurs, long and skinny and monkey-like.  And in fact they were—Ring-tailed cats, or Cotamundi—recent migrants from Mexico, now residents with the rest of us here.  Surprise."
-Kim Macconnell, Olivenhain