Jane Braxton Little, Nature Conservancy Magazine
An hour's drive north of Los Angeles, just east of the vast agricultural fields and sprawling subdivisions of the Central Valley, lies a still-wild sliver of old California. On the edge of one of the nation’s most populous places, the slopes of the Tehachapi Mountains descend in a cascade of grass-covered flanks from almost 8,000 feet.
Rugged and remote, this geological jumble of a mountain range forms a slender neck that links the public lands surrounding Los Angeles with the national forests of the Sierra Nevada to the north, and it joins the remaining grasslands of California’s Central Valley with the Mojave Desert to the southeast. For millennia it has nurtured the seasonal migrations and territorial shifts of wildlife moving up and down canyons in one of the most vital corridors in North America.
Most of the Tehachapi (pronounced tuh-hatch-a-pea) range is owned by ranchers whose families have worked the land for generations, their cattle sharing watering holes with mule deer and bobcats. But with urban sprawl pressing from the south and west and wind power development from the east, wildlife and ranchers alike face an uncertain future.
Over the past four years, a consortium of landowners and conservation groups has worked to protect a vital 50-mile wildlife corridor through the range. And last year, when The Nature Conservancy purchased the 15,000-acre Tollhouse Ranch, the deal secured the final link in a 270,000-acre ecological corridor that joins vast ecosystems to the east, west, north and south.
“This is a linkage of continental significance,” says E.J. Remson, the Conservancy’s project director in Southern California, who struck the Tollhouse Ranch deal.
The scale of this protected corridor would be noteworthy anywhere in the world, says Tom Maloney, executive director of the Tejon Ranch Conservancy, one of the major partners working to protect the range. “But to accomplish this in Southern California is staggering—audacious!” ...
http://magazine.nature.org/features/the-missing-link.xml
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