By Marilee Enge

The historic deal to protect one of California’s oldest, largest and most biologically significant private ranches is a major victory for conservation in the state, but it is a particularly sweet success for Audubon California’s Graham Chisholm, who was at the center of confidential negotiations that concluded with today’s announcement.

Chisholm has logged hundreds of hours in countless meetings since late 2006, when five conservation groups, including Audubon California, joined forces to negotiate an agreement to protect 90 percent of Southern California’s Tejon Ranch. Stretching across 270,000 acres and four distinct eco-regions, the ranch has long been considered one of California’s last best chances for conserving precious wild habitat.

“This is conservation on a staggering scale,” says Chisholm, Audubon California’s conservation director and deputy state director. “Most of us are used to working on projects that are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of acres. This is on a scale that none of us has done before.”

The Tejon Ranch is more than the biggest piece of private property in California. It is a cross-section of Central and Southern California landscapes, where the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, San Joaquin Valley and the south coast regions all meet at one spectacular landscape that rises from desert floor to 7,000-foot mountain peaks.

The announcement also represents a victory for Audubon’s collaborative style, in which the organization works with landowners to accomplish conservation goals that can’t be reached through confrontation.

Chisholm and the other conservation partners believe this agreement is the best outcome for the environment.   

It locks in the protection of 178,000 acres, with an option to purchase another 62,000 acres in the next three years, and opens this previously forbidden land to the public for the first time. A 37-mile stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail will cross the ranch, and the partners have committed to creating a major state park.At the same time, the deal clears the way for the development on about 10 percent of the ranch, along the I-5 corridor, including a planned community of 23,000 homes in Los Angeles County and a posh resort community in the mountains.

Just an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, a visit to the Tejon Ranch gives one the sense of stepping back a century or more. It stretches 67 miles from north to south, 475 square miles in all, and is by and large untouched.

“While there has been human use, it’s remarkable how pristine it feels,” Chisholm says. “It really is old California.”

As negotiations with the Tejon Ranch Company neared a conclusion in recent weeks, a group of Audubon chapter leaders was invited to tour the ranch. Among them was Garry George, chapter network director for Audubon California. George and 15 Audubon chapter members traveled from the Kern County side, starting on the San Joaquin Valley floor and rising through grasslands and oak woodlands into conifer forests high in the Tehachapi Mountains.

“We’ve never been allowed in there,” George said, with a touch of awe in his voice. “I saw habitat I’d never seen. Under a canopy of blue oak was an understory of Ribes speciosa, California currant. I’ve never seen those two species together. It was incredible.”

The group dropped down to the Antelope Valley on the southern side, and passed through Joshua Tree woodlands and multi-hued meadows of wildflowers. “One of our tour participants just cried. She said, ‘This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’”

The Tejon pact is an especially important accomplishment for Audubon because the ranch is a key range for the endangered California Condor, whose survival depends on wide open territory and undeveloped ridges for foraging. Bringing the condor back from the brink of extinction is a signature cause for Audubon, whose biologists first visited the ranch in the early 1980s to document the Condor’s presence.

“It’s an important stronghold,” says Gary Langham, Audubon California’s Director of Bird Conservation. “They need those big open spaces to be a normal Condor. Condors can fly 100 miles a day. There’s not a lot of places they can go 100 miles without encountering development.”

"The prospect of development in the heart of Condor habitat was the greatest threat,” says Chisholm.

“The previous ban on lead ammunition, the pullback of development from four of the five principal foraging ridges and the protection of the vast expanse of the ranch's backcountry are important steps forward in the condor’s recover,." he adds. “Because of the assurances we were able to secure in negotiations, Audubon California and our partners were convinced by condor experts that the agreement addressed potential conflicts between development and the condors."

Besides the condor, Tejon is home to perhaps 20 other birds on Audubon’s Watchlist and state and federal endangered lists, including: Swainson’s Hawk, California Spotted and Burrowing owls, Lewis’ Woodpecker, Tricolored Blackbird, Lawrence’s Goldfinch, Mountain Plover and Long-billed Curlew. Other rare and endangered species on the ranch include kit fox, Tehachapi pocket mouse, Tehachapi slender salamander, and Tejon poppy and Bakersfield cactus. The last two are found nowhere else in the state.

And who knows what else is there?

“There’s certain to be some surprises,” says Langham. “It can only get better as we learn more.”

The ranch’s human history is as rich as its biological resources. Before European contact, five Native American tribes inhabited parts of the property. The largest territory was occupied by the Kitanemuk, who lived in the Tehachapi Mountains and foothills east of Tejon Lake. Later, Kit Carson rode the range scouting for beaver, and Col. John Fremont explored with topographer Edward Kern. The present-day ranch was assembled from four Mexican land grants in the years after the Mexican-American War.

The family of Edward Beale worked the land until the early 20th century, when they sold to a group of businessmen that included Harry Chandler of Los Angeles. Interstate 5 was punched through in 1963 and the state water project pumping plant that sends drinking water over the Tehachapis came a couple of years later. IKEA built its western distribution center on 80 acres near the Grapevine in 2000.

But the ranch remained largely undeveloped, and traditional ranching, farming and hunting have continued to the present. The landscape is so dramatic and diverse, the publicly traded company that operates the ranch markets it to movie companies, pitching vistas that fill in for African savannah, Tuscan countryside and, of course, the Old West. Parts of “Seabiscuit,“ with Jeff Bridges and Tobey McGuire, were filmed there.

Nevertheless, the ranch was subdivided into thousands of legal parcels on paper, and the threat of development was ever-present. An earlier conservation deal would have set aside just 100,000 acres, leaving the majority of the ranch up for grabs. Audubon and its partners, the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Endangered Habitats League and the Planning and Conservation, figured they could do better. The final deal means the conservation community won’t be fighting battle after battle as new parcels open up in the coming years.

“Because of the Tejon Ranch’s uniqueness ecologically, we wanted a comprehensive settlement,” says Chisholm. “The alternative was decades of litigation, potentially the sale to thousands of owners and no ability to hold the ranch together.  This loss would have been tragic.”

While vowing to help chapter members monitor the development closely as it proceeds in Los Angeles County, Garry George says he believes the deal is a good one for the environment.

“Ninety percent is an unbelievable result,” he said. “This is the most pristine and beautiful example of where the South meets the North. It’s our Yosemite.”