The grove of towering eucalyptus trees that stands at the entrance to Bolinas has for years been at the center of a debate. Should the 700 trees be removed to reduce wildfire risk? Or does the grove deserve protection as a piece of critical habitat for endangered monarch butterflies? When a eucalyptus fell on a truck carrying two residents during the Jan. 4 storm, the debate was re-energized.
“This is an avoidable emergency,” said Jonna Alexander Green, an advocate for the Bolinas Eucalyptus Project. “We’ve had our moment. Now people are beginning to get it. Everybody sees that these trees can be deadly. It’s these moments where we realize just how dangerous it is because we see our friends get hurt.”
The grove at the intersection of Olema-Bolinas and Mesa Roads spans three private properties and land owned by the Bolinas Community Public Utility District. In 2021, the Bolinas Eucalyptus Project, then called Wildfire Safe Bolinas, identified the grove as the worst of 14 problematic stands. Over 400 residents signed a petition to cut down its roughly 700 trees—a project estimated to cost $3 million. During January’s storms, around 30 eucalyptus trees fell around town, including many in the grove.
Complicating the proposed project is the fact that monarch butterflies have dwindled in recent years, and their advocates say the grove is an important element of their habitat. Locals organized as the West Marin Monarchs say the targeted grove serves as a windbreak for nearby wintering monarchs. The two sides say they want to find a compromise, but both feel the stakes are high.
“My feeling is that we could optimize efforts into expanding and assisting other butterfly habitats in Bolinas, of which there are plenty,” said Jon Cozzi, a tree worker who lives across the street from the grove and is a leading member of the project. “This particular stand just presents too much of a safety hazard to hikers, motorists and bikers.”
The grove contains a fraction of the town’s blue gum eucalyptus, which number in the thousands, said Tom Gaman, who is writing a forestry report for the project. It is likely an offshoot of neighboring groves planted around the turn of the last century.
The species was introduced in California in the 1850s by settlers who wanted to produce wood and create windbreaks. Blue gum grows incredibly fast—as much as 100 feet in the first 10 years—and it thrives in California’s climate, which lacks the pathogens that afflict it in its native Tasmania. Settlers were disappointed to find that the lumber cracks when dried, but the stands have multiplied and today there are tens of thousands of eucalyptus trees across the state.
In the past, some residents were opposed to cutting the trees, saying they felt they were part of Bolinas’s culture and natural beauty. But Ms. Alexander Green believes that sentiment has largely subsided as drought and the threat of wildfire loom larger every year.
Annabelle Scott was in the passenger seat of a pickup when a eucalyptus fell from behind as she and her boyfriend, Elias Rose, drove up Mesa Road. The tree crushed the roof of the cab flush against the steering wheel, leaving Mr. Rose unconscious at her side while the truck was still in drive.
“I had to stop the vehicle and I didn’t know if he was alive,” Ms. Scott said. “He came to and crawled out of the truck totally disoriented. He didn’t know where we were or what was going on.”
Mr. Rose’s nearest memory from the incident is waking up at the hospital. He suffered a concussion and fractured C7 vertebra.
At one foot in diameter and around 100 feet tall, the eucalyptus that fell on Mr. Rose’s truck was smaller than most of the trees in the targeted grove, which rise as high as 160 feet. After years of drought, the trees are loose in the ground, and in heavy rainfall, they absorb tons of water. The groves in Bolinas are hit with northern winds year-round; when January’s storms brought gusts from the south, the trees were especially vulnerable.
Blue gums also present a particular fire hazard, as a volatile oil contained in their bark spreads onto the land when the bark is shed. The oily bark also allows flames to shoot up a tree and travel across the canopy. The grove at Olema-Bolinas and Mesa Roads was trimmed in 2011 and again in 2019 as a part of fire resiliency projects led by BCPUD. Although the flammable litter was mostly removed, temporarily making the forest safer, project organizers say the thinning compromised the stand’s integrity. Four years later, the flammable bark now crowds the forest floor.
A 2020 arborist report commissioned by the project recommended the total removal of the grove and the conversion of the land to a native plant community.
“Eucalyptus is not meant to reach a late seral stage of old growth like coast redwood,” the report states. “It is adapted to periodic stand-replacing fires. In the absence of such a fire, the stand enters an unnatural pattern of decline.”
Despite the hazards they pose, Bolinas’s eucalyptus groves also provide shelter for wintering monarch butterflies, which have been recorded in town since the early 20th century. Monarchs have seen precipitous declines since the 1980s, and after a historic low in 2019, they have made a small comeback. Ole Schell, who recently created a monarch sanctuary on his property, said habitat loss, wildfires and pesticides all contribute to population decreases. Mr. Schell said preserving monarchs’ delicate habitat is more important than ever.
“You don’t even have to remove pieces of a site. Just altering aspects of it, like a nearby grove, could destroy it,” he said.
Mr. Schell believes the West Marin Monarchs and the organizers of the project can come to an agreement about the targeted grove.
Mia Monroe, a ranger with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area who has led butterfly counts for over 30 years, said this winter’s counts found between 1,500 and 2,000 monarchs in Bolinas. In the 2021 Thanksgiving count, just 145 monarchs were observed. Less than a decade ago, the count was in the tens of thousands. Bolinas is now the northernmost wintering site for monarchs on the coast.
Though the grove targeted by the eucalyptus project does not tend to host monarchs, advocates say it protects the site near the sewer ponds that had the largest number of butterflies this winter—more than 400. The site’s combination of light, wind-block and temperature are all correlative to the nearby grove, said Audrey Fusco, a wildlife ecologist with the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network who is working with the West Marin Monarchs.
Ms. Monroe believes some work can be done without compromising monarch habitat in town. “Not all eucalyptus needs to be saved,” she said. “My feeling is that eucalyptus is a huge weed with many problems. Most could be removed [after] identifying which are essential to blocking wind and rain. The storms have proven the need for shelter.”
The three property owners to the north side of the grove have already given the project their approval. BCPUD, which owns the land to the south, must also approve the project.
“In principle, we are in support of removing hazardous trees,” said Jennifer Blackman, the district’s general manager. “But there is a lot of work review to come. We will be completely mindful of [butterfly] habitats.”
Reluctant to take sides, George Krakauer, chief of the Bolinas Volunteer Fire Department, said his department’s interests lie in having a safe and reliable way in and out of town.
Though project organizers express a desire to find a compromise, Ms. Alexander Green said she fears there may be no solution that satisfies all parties, as the monarch habitat that some hope to preserve comes at a fundamental cost to the community.
The project’s $3 million price tag is another hurdle. So far, the group has raised $50,000, which has been reserved primarily for consultants. Organizers say they will need a combination of grant funding and local donations to meet their goal.
Besides commissioning Mr. Gaman’s report, the group has hired biologists from the San Rafael-based Wetlands Research Association to study the land, the monarch habitat and the potential impacts of clearing the grove. Project organizers say the county has indicated that the work would require a coastal permit and likely an environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act given the number of trees proposed for removal and the potential presence of special-status species.
This article was amended on Feb. 4, omitting a section about eucalyptus trees’ impacts on birds and soils. Claims that eucalyptus nectar gums bird beaks to the point of injuring or asphyxiating them, that birds that feed on blue gums in their native lands are larger and have thicker beaks, that owl and falcon nests built in the trees easily slide off and result in mortalities, and that the trees leave a layer of dust that chokes out native plants and leaves a biological desert beneath them appear to be exaggerated or untrue. We did not check the scientific basis for these claims before we published them, and we neglected to attribute them to their source, the organizers of the Bolinas Eucalyptus Project. We have since learned that the California Invasive Plant Council revised its assessment of eucalyptus in 2015. The trees’ rating of “invasiveness” was downgraded from “moderate” to “limited,” and the accusation that eucalyptus prevent the germination of an understory by chemical means was removed. The claim that eucalyptus kill birds was also removed and replaced with a description of how birds and other wildlife benefit from eucalyptus. Much of the hype around eucalyptus in fact stems from a single, limited study by birder Rich Stallcup for what was then the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, which later inspired a widely read opinion piece in Audubon Magazine in 2002. We are speaking with experts about that study, and the broader body of research on blue gum eucalyptus, and will revise this correction as needed.