Dec. 15–If there’s anything Terri Thomas has learned in the nearly 30 years she has been protecting natural resources on Bay Area public lands, it’s that bad habits die hard and good things sometimes have negative consequences.
It was, for instance, a pretty neat thing for wildlife biologists when coyotes crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in 2000 and returned to their old hunting grounds in the Presidio, but it wasn’t such a happy time for local cat fanciers. The wily predators discovered a well-established population of cats, some of which were surviving on bowls of food left in the park by locals. The well-fed kitties did not, it was quickly demonstrated, have nine lives.
“They started eating all the cats,” said Thomas, the director of conservation, stewardship and research for the Presidio Trust, a federal agency created by Congress in 1996 to transform the former U.S. Army post into a financially self-sustaining urban national park. “The cat owners were really upset and wanted us to kill all the coyotes.”
It was one of many prickly situations the Bay Area native has clawed her way out of since 1976, when she began working for the National Park Service. She has spent the last 29 years, first with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and then with the Presidio Trust, helping restore the ecological balance of the long-neglected collection of military bases, beaches and bluffs in and around San Francisco that were cobbled together and turned into the 80,000-acre recreation area.
Thomas, 59, of Sausalito, is now in charge of natural resources for the trust. Her task is to restore the wildly altered Presidio’s ecosystem to as close to its natural state as possible while preserving the outpost’s military heritage.
Balancing act
Her efforts have provoked outbursts essentially from all sides of every issue, including dog walkers, eucalyptus fanciers, bird watchers and history buffs. Many do not like the idea of changing the way they have always used the land.
“It has been a big balancing act,” Thomas said. “Restoration is still a very new field and urban restoration is even newer.”
Thomas’ work is among the most important and scrutinized jobs in the National Park Service, and for good reason. Her department is the caretaker of the inner core of the country’s most recognized urban national park and the site of a historic military base that dates back to 1776, when the original Presidio garrison was established.
A botanist by training, Thomas has overseen the removal of hundreds of invasive trees and weeds, the planting of native species and the restoration of long-lost sand dunes. The trust, under her guidance, has cleaned up sites littered with lead and other toxics. Channeled creeks and ancient underground springs have been brought to the surface.
Thomas has handled the restoration of wetlands and is in charge of an enormous dredging project at Mountain Lake in the Presidio, which is being scoured clean of toxic mud and alien fish in preparation for restoration, which will include the reintroduction of native fish and turtles.
Enabling restoration
Four plants listed as threatened or endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are under the care of Thomas, including two species of San Francisco manzanita that were thought to be extinct until they were rediscovered in the Presidio. The restoration work she has overseen has led to the return of native San Francisco butterflies, bees, hummingbirds, frogs, nesting birds and the aforementioned coyotes, recent surveys show.
It hasn’t been an easy transformation, but colleagues say Thomas has managed to succeed by forming partnerships with nonprofits, expanding the volunteer program and including the public in the decision-making process. Through it all, she has remained largely in the background, regularly giving credit for projects to the trust’s directors, colleagues and employees.
“She is one of the most receptive and thoughtful people I’ve ever worked with,” said Amy Meyer, one of the Bay Area’s most celebrated environmental leaders and a key player in the creation of the GGNRA. “Terri came to the National Park Service as a natural resources person and she very rapidly became a go-to person because she is so thorough. She came to understand the park as a huge mosaic of ecosystems.”
Thomas’ interest in nature began when she was a girl. She was born in Redwood City. Her father, Calvin, was an artist, and her mother, Jerrie, who at 92 is “still going strong,” taught Spanish in the public schools. She has a sister, Sandy Budde, who is five years older.
A girl’s summers
Thomas spent most of her childhood in Palo Alto, where her grandfather, a longtime professor of engineering at Stanford University, had once been mayor.
When she was a teenager, the family moved to Burlingame, where she attended high school. She would spend summers at the family cabin near Fallen Leaf Lake, a mountainous region adjacent to Lake Tahoe. She said she developed her love of nature during summers at the secluded lake, which is home to Stanford Sierra Camp, a 20-acre resort owned and operated by the Stanford University Alumni Association.
“There was never really any doubt in my mind that I wanted to do something with nature,” said Thomas, who would later serve on the lake’s community services board. “I wanted people to forever be able to experience places like Fallen Leaf Lake.”
A father’s advice
Thomas said her father, who died four years ago, was a major influence on her because he decided as a youth to become an artist rather than a civil engineer like his father.
“He told me many times that I should pick a profession that I love because I will be doing it for most of my waking hours,” said the divorced mother of two. “He made that choice and I did too, and it made all the difference.”
In 1976, she earned a bachelor’s degree in forestry from UC Berkeley, where one of her professors was Starker Leopold, a forester, zoologist, author and son of famed conservationist Aldo Leopold.
“I remember he was talking about the National Park Service and its mission and I said to myself, ‘Oh my God. That’s me.’ ”
In 1984, after working as an educator and ranger at Yosemite, the Everglades and Crater Lake national parks, Thomas was hired by the GGNRA as a plant ecologist. At that time, cattle still grazed in much of the park, including Marin County’s Tennessee Valley, and the Presidio was a military base. She started documenting wildlife in the park and infestations of weeds and nonnative plants. She persuaded officials to end the policy of clearing out woody debris from Redwood Creek, which coho salmon need during their annual migration through Muir Woods.
She documented the return of grasslands and wildlife after the cows were removed from Tennessee Valley. Thomas, who eventually became the recreation area’s natural resources division chief, began the effort 20 years ago to restore Big Lagoon, at Muir Beach, to a more natural marshland habitat. The project to transform this foggy, windswept stretch of grass and parking lot into a thriving ecosystem is now nearing completion.
Thomas worked with the Army commanders in the Presidio to remove a motorcycle track and preserve the federally endangered Presidio clarkia plant, which had been trampled to near extinction. The Army was also a partner in preserving the last known specimen of Raven’s manzanita, which was rediscovered in the 1950s by world-renowned botanist Peter Raven after being gone for half a century.
A blueprint for the future
Thomas wrote the GGNRA’s 1990 Natural Resources Management Plan, which has served as a blueprint for restoration throughout the enormous park, which includes mountains, valleys and forests along much of the San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin county coastlines.
She was hired by the Presidio Trust in 2000 and immediately set about establishing a resources management program specifically for the Presidio that included hands-on education programs for children, and volunteer and interpretive programs for the public.
“I came over here to see if I could keep the vision of restoring the natural resource and saving San Francisco’s natural history,” Thomas said. “It was my hope to mix the educational piece with restoring and preserving natural resources and getting it into the hearts of the people.”
The disappearing cats situation was one of the first things she had to deal with when she took over at the trust. She helped develop a “coyote interaction response protocol,” which gave neighbors precise instructions on what to do in a coyote encounter. Thomas and her co-workers informed Realtors about the situation and persuaded homeowners to keep their pets inside and stop leaving out kibble. The coyotes are now thriving and conflicts are rare.
“We really went into an understanding-coyotes mind-set,” she said. “There was a lot of working with the homeowners and the real estate folks.”
Saving Mountain Lake
It wasn’t the first public minefield through which Thomas has had to tiptoe. The restoration of Mountain Lake was probably the most problematic. Plans to clean the 4-acre pond on the southern boundary of the Presidio actually began in 1996. Hundreds of fish were going belly up on the lake at that time as a result of oxygen-sucking algae blooms.
That was just a smidge of the problem. The lake mud was saturated with pesticides and oil that had drained off Park Presidio Boulevard and the adjacent golf course and flowed into the lake through storm drains. Not a single native fish or turtle remained. Instead, the lake had become a dumping ground for nonnative species — mostly pets abandoned by their owners, including goldfish, bullfrogs, invasive turtles and, in 1996, an alligator.
The plan was to dredge the lake, but workers found huge quantities of lead in the mud, apparently from the leaded fuel that was used over the years before the heavy metal was banned. That discovery created a regulatory, legislative and public relations nightmare that Thomas fought and finagled her way through.
“I didn’t think it would happen in the first place because it was going to cost a lot of money, and then when we found lead in the lake I thought, well, that is the end of it,” said Alex Horne, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who specialized in ecological engineering and worked with Thomas on the Mountain Lake plan. “But she managed to pull it together and she eventually found another $10 or $12 million.”
Presidio Trust workers have removed thousands of invasive fish, turtles and other nonnative species. The dredging of 15,600 cubic yards of toxic sludge and silt finally got under way this past fall. The plan is to reintroduce native aquatic plants, fish, turtles and mussels after the dredging is complete. When it is all done, Thomas said, the historic body of water will be as close as possible to the way it was when American Indians roamed its banks.
There has, in fact, been a tenfold increase in the number of native plants in the Presidio since Thomas came on board. That includes rare plants like the Franciscan manzanita, which was believed to be extinct in the wild until a botanist discovered a single specimen in 2009. Cuttings from the ground-hugging shrub were recently planted throughout the park.
Thomas, who has two grown children, lives with her 27-year-old son, Dan, and dog, Thoreau, in a houseboat on Richardson Bay, a place she calls her “Walden Pond.”
“Every day is full,” she said about her personal and professional life. “It’s never dull.”
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @pfimrite