Tag Archives: Crows

By A Dam Site

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The “Atmospheric River” last week brought our wetlands to raucous life, as see. The water shows how the Valley’s flood control system, designed by the Army Corps, operates.

Here begins Tujunga Wash (behind the Dam, it is Big Tujunga Creek). From this spillway to the LA River, the point is to get the water out as fast as possible. Thus Tujunga water is mostly lost to the Valley, though there has been some late movement towards aquifer diversion.
The View of the Dam looking south. The hills peeking up behind, are the Santa Monica Mountains.
View northwest, over the lake bed, then over Lake View Terrace, to San Fernando Pass (the lowest point, middle-right).

The landscape here is not at all natural; it is what has resulted after 80 years of experimental terra-forming, which only in the last five years, and with much hard work and re-directing failed plans, has turned the place into “beautiful.”

  • The levee holding Tujunga Creek
  • …a mile of rip-rap bound by chain link.
  • The flood plain: the Valley

Much of the former lake-bed turns into a seasonal wetland, and a de-facto riparian wildlife refuge, more or less contiguous with its mountain watershed. For years, drought dried the lake up, and it gave off an unholy chemical stink (not just the Cottonwoods.) TONS of invasive plants choked out everything, and there were more-or-less permanent hobo jungles in the tules. It was a bizarre place to hike. It’s much better now.

The catchment basin is full, forming a vernal pool. It hosts thousands of Corvus brachyrhynchus, American crows.

Throughout the 1930s, when NoHo and Studio City were booming, weeks of rain like we just could send rampaging floods of turbulent mud rushing out of Big Tujunga Canyon, carrying boulders, whole orchards, tree trunks and Valley houses away down the LA River, tearing out bridges and the Pacific Electric tracks. The Hansen Dam changed all that, and gave the Valley something to crow about:

Murder, Incorporated! Thousands and thousands of crows….