President’s Column

Ghosts of the Past: Part Two

Chet Ogan

Three Ogan brothers emigrated by wagon to California in 1852 and 1853, including my great-great-grandfather, and settled in the Santa Clara Valley near San Jose. While crossing the plains before the Rocky Mountains, Alexander Ogan notes that "wild timothy was growing all over the meadow, so there was plenty of feed for the stock."

Grass was cut and tied in bundles to feed the stock before crossing the alkali deserts in Nevada.

After reaching the Berryessa area of Santa Clara Valley northeast of San Jose, Alexander Ogan notes that "the first year the (ground) squirrels were so thick that we tried to scare them and shoot all we could; even then we only got a quarter of a crop. The next spring the water was turned out of Penetencia Creek, and many were drowned. After that we made good at farming. We had fine crops on our land as well as the land we rented."

As a birder it is easy, though perhaps wrong, to guess at why the ground squirrels were so plentiful. Perhaps so many of the birds of prey had been shot in the area that they were no longer able to control the rodent populations.

My great aunt Elizabeth writes about James S. Ogan, my great-great-grandfather, after he settled in Carpinteria, California in 1869. "Grandpa built some boxes, two feet long, 1 1/2 feet deep, with one side open two-thirds of the way from the top, and then put them up in the old oak trees here and the barn owls built their nests in them. Grandpa also had a pet skunk to kill the rats and mice in his barn." So biological controls were practiced even then, flooding fields, building owl nest boxes, and raising predators. The Ogan property in Carpinteria was bounded on the west by Franklin Creek which drains into Carpinteria Slough. The area is now a housing tract; the creek occasionally floods today, but then it was a freshwater marsh. Aunt Elizabeth Ogan Morris continues to recount the birds and animals she recalled in her childhood. She recalls "hawks, hoot owls, screech owls, bats, quail, doves, wild pigeons, ducks, geese, sandhill cranes, heron, bitterns, kingfishers, jack snipes with their erratic flight, bluebirds, meadowlarks, swallows, gulls, bald eagles occasionally, tern, curlews, vultures, lots of woodpeckers and flickers, bee martins [kingbirds], orioles, gold finch, linnets [house finch], brown thrasher, mockingbirds, butcher birds, hummingbirds, crows, blackbirds, ravens, house wrens, and many others."

My grandfather, Rolland Ogan, recalls in an interview "when my grandad came in 1869 the land was all covered with oak trees, except for patches of white sage here and there where it flooded and the oaks wouldn’t grow . . . There were no large creeks then, only small ones, but as the land was cleared and the thick pad of oak leaves turned under, the creeks grew wider and deeper and ran all the way to the sea."

He adds "I remember one moonlit night with a mackerel sky (in 1898) that father woke me up about 10 p.m. saying the ducks were flying everywhere. We got our guns and went down to the slough and shot about 69 sprig ducks (pintails). We stacked them in a pile and the next morning went down with a mule team and hauled them home." Elizabeth adds "We picked the feathers off and made pillows and mattresses with them. The ducks we couldn’t use ourselves we gave to relatives and friends." My grandfather was a member of the hunting party that collected the mule deer which are mounted in the Santa Barbara County Museum of Natural History.

I would have loved to have gone birding with Aunt Elizabeth. Many of those birds are lacking or are very rare on the coast there now. My mom lives on the remaining acre of Ogan land there. In the yard is a very large Torrey pine and many valley oaks, planted from seeds brought in by the scrub jays. The land has not been farmed in 10 years and the birds are returning. I have heard great horned owls and have seen peregrines once on the property.

I guess the point is that in those days there was plenty of game and it was used completely. But we are now suffering from the abuses of farming and urbanization. The creeks have been deepened by increased runoff and are now channelized within dikes. The City of Carpinteria is now restoring the Carpinteria Slough. Light-footed Clapper Rails have returned and Least Terns are now feeding their young there. There are herons and bitterns. But the nearest Bald Eagle I have seen is on Lake Cachuma. Sandhill Cranes are now common on the inland valleys of Santa Barbara County in winter, but are only rarely seen on the coast. In a later installment I will talk about my mother’s great-grandfather, an early explorer of Yosemite.