Living alongside wildlife
The animals in this almanac don't stay here by accident. A handful of quiet, long-standing choices — about light, fences, creeks, plants, trees, open land, and the poisons we choose to skip — keep the valley livable for them. None of it is dramatic. Most of it is simply the way things are done here, and has been for a long time.
“…to preserve the beauty of the land.” — among the goals residents set when they incorporated the Town in 1964. Town history ↗
“The town and its residents are the stewards of these natural resources.” — Town of Portola Valley General Plan, Conservation Element. Conservation Element ↗
A single old oak can feed and shelter hundreds of species — woodpeckers storing acorns, gall wasps writing their strange calendars on the leaves, fungi threading through the roots. Portola Valley protects its native oaks, redwoods, bays, madrones, maples, and Douglas firs as “significant trees,” and removing one requires a permit reviewed by the Conservation Committee. As the Town puts it, its habitats “range from natural oak woodland to moist/riparian areas that support a number of native trees that the Town seeks to protect.”
The Town's part: Tree Removal & Protection ↗ · Municipal Code §15.12.275 ↗
Nearly everything in the valley depends on its creeks at some point — herons and egrets hunting the banks, frogs and newts breeding in the shallows, dragonflies born underwater. The Town keeps building and grading set back from its watercourses so these corridors stay intact. The General Plan asks that creek corridors “be designated as sensitive areas which provide important habitat for aquatic and terrestrial wildlife,” maintained “for wildlife who depend on them for food, shelter, migration and breeding.”
The Town's part: Creek Setbacks — Municipal Code Ch. 18.59 ↗
A surprising amount of the valley's life happens after dark. Owls hunt by it; glowworm larvae light the leaf litter with their own faint bioluminescence; and on autumn nights, millions of songbirds pass overhead, navigating by the stars. Artificial light disorients or drowns out all of them. Portola Valley's outdoor-lighting standards are designed to keep the night sky dark — one of the reasons the stars are still worth looking up at here.
The Town's part: Lighting Ordinance & handout ↗
A bobcat's territory, a deer's daily route, a gray fox's rounds — all of them cross many properties in a night. A landscape cut into sealed boxes becomes a landscape animals can't move through. The Town's fencing standards are written with this in mind, keeping the valley permeable so wildlife can travel the way they always have.
The Town's part: Fence Ordinance — Municipal Code Ch. 18.43 ↗
A checkerspot butterfly can only lay its eggs on particular native plants; a hummingbird times its nesting to native blooms; native bees evolved alongside the flowers they pollinate. Ornamental gardens, however lovely, often can't feed them. The Town encourages landscaping drawn from its Native Plant List — the quiet foundation the whole visible food web rests on. As the General Plan puts it, native plants “especially unique, rare or endangered species such as oak woodland and serpentine grasslands, should be protected and preserved.”
The Town's part: Native Plant List & outdoor water conservation ↗
A mountain lion needs miles of connected land; so, in smaller ways, does nearly every animal that ranges to feed, mate, or move with the seasons. Since 1970, Portola Valley has protected close to 1,900 acres of open space on purpose — funded in part by a dedicated tax that residents themselves voted to approve, and renew, again and again. It is the single largest reason the wildlife in this almanac still has somewhere to be.
The Town's part: Open Space in Portola Valley ↗
A barn-owl family eats three to five thousand rodents a year; a hawk, fox, or bobcat clears countless more. But rat poison doesn't stop with the rat — it climbs the food chain into the predators that eat them, which is why dead foxes and bobcats keep turning up in towns that rely on it. Portola Valley chose another path early: in 2017 the Town urged residents toward non-toxic pest control and asked local stores to stop selling rodent poisons, and the Conservation Committee has championed traps, exclusion, and barn-owl boxes ever since — “when we poison rodents,” as one member put it, “we're poisoning the whole food chain.” California now restricts the most hazardous rat poisons, too. But the best protection is still an owl box over a poison box.
The Town's part: Conservation Committee — safer pest control ↗ · California's rodenticide restrictions ↗
None of these ask very much of any one of us — a shielded light, a gap under a fence, a native plant instead of an ornamental one, a little room left along a creek, a trap instead of poison. Together they're the reason a walk here still turns up so much worth noticing. ← Back to this month's Pulse