Goodbye Darkness, Goodbye Quiet

According to the American Bird Conservancy, some owl eyes may be as much as 100x more sensitive in low light than ours. But that’s not all that makes local foothills species like the Great Horned Owl and the Western Screech Owl incredibly effective rodent hunters.

There’s an amazing synergy about how their nocturnal vision combines with slightly offset ears and the shape of their face, allowing them to lock-on to prey and fly stealthily with sound-dampening feathers during their approach.

Combining sound and vision for hunting, owls are truly wonders of natural selection.

In fact, an owl’s biggest issue around here isn’t a lack of prey. Their most serious problem in Pasadena and Altadena is arrogance.

Human arrogance.

See, there’s a K-12 private school in Pasadena for the children of wealth named Polytechnic School. It’s located right across E. California Blvd. from Caltech. And by wealth, we mean 52 percent of the parents of these kids make at minimum $200,000-$300,000 per year.

We don’t begrudge the wealthy the ability to choose socially acceptable school chums for their children. The rich are people, after all, and if they want to spend their money on a Kindergarten tuition of $34,700, it’s not our affair.

But the school became a study in arrogance in 2022 when Poly announced it was planning to purchase 80 acres of an undeveloped wildlife corridor along Altadena’s Chaney Trail to build a 13-acre state-of-the-art sports complex because their current sports facility in Pasadena was simply too cramped.

There are so many issues with this plan it’s almost difficult to pick a starting place.

There’s the removal of seven protected mature coast live oak trees (Quercus agrifolia) and the aggressive pruning of 14 others, including a heritage oak, to construct the sports complex. The site is located in a landslide zone and within a very high fire hazard severity zone. There are field surveys and historical maps identifying the construction site as “positive for older historical resources.” And there’s a post-construction traffic prediction of adding between 250 and 500 vehicle trips per day through the neighborhood.

Let’s stipulate that’s a lot to take in already.

But we know a few things about similar developments. Like every other modern sports complex, once in operation that place will be bright and loud. Poly claims they sorta understand there may be some, you know, technical issues with that.

In the school’s FAQ about the project, Poly states: “We are seeking to meet rural lighting standards and are evaluating lights that have zero spillover for our fields. The results of our lighting analysis will be made public as part of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process. Likewise, the EIR process requires us to study sound impacts. We don’t have those answers today – but we will be studying these impacts thoroughly as part of the EIR process and sharing the results with the community.”

Remember how owls hunt, in darkness and focused on the sound of their prey? Yeah, the big Great Horned Owls and the little Western Screech Owls will be leaving the area when those high-intensity stadium lights illuminate. Field mice will have a field day and likely a population explosion, to the thwack, thwack of racquets and the squeak of new athletic shoes on the half-dozen brightly lit tennis courts.

We also know it’s unlikely a project with these characteristics would earn a construction permit at the school’s location in Pasadena. But there’s no city government in unincorporated Altadena. That area is controlled solely by the LA County Board of Supervisors.

And who, who, whooo in County government would quash a well-funded development project without being motivated to do so by significant community outrage?

Fortunately, a growing coalition of environmentalists, naturalists, hikers and Altadena neighbors organized by AltadenaWILD have taken a stand against the sale of the Nuccio’s Nurseries property to Poly. Over 6,000 area residents, including some Poly alumni, have signed an online petition for the school to abandon the purchase of the property.

In addition, the Chaney Trail Corridor Project (chaney.trail.corridor), Biodiversity_Yes and others on Instagram are tracking the potential environmental impacts of PolyFields. And a citizen science project on iNaturalist is documenting over 600 species at the site for research purposes.

According to AltadenaWILD, very few people other than residents near Chaney Trail are aware of the project let alone the potential impact on hundreds of species.

Well, we’re aware of it. And we’re siding with the owls.

Poly should go be arrogant somewhere else.