Volunteers Turn Out for Coastal Cleanup Day

Common Murre Rescued on Cooks Beach

Credit: Susan E. Moon

With support from the California Coastal Commission, Mendocino Land Trust, and several other organizations, RCLC organized volunteers to clean up three beaches in Southern Mendocino County as part of California Coastal Cleanup Day; Manchester State Beach, Schooner Gulch and Cooks Beach/Bonham Trail on September 19, 2015.

The purpose of California Coastal Cleanup Day is to bring awareness to the problem of marine debris and to take a citizen science snapshot of the state of our beaches and coastal waterways, on the same day annually, all along the California coast.

Beach “captains” greeted volunteers and distributed citizen science materials that volunteers used to quantify all of the items collected. Most local beaches were quite clean and this can be attributed to good stewardship throughout the year. All in all, Mendocino County cleaned up 5,000 pounds of trash on Coastal Cleanup Day.

In past years many pounds of presumed Japanese tsunami debris had been found along Manchester Beach, but none were reported this year. Items of local concern included fishing gear, dog feces bags and human waste at Cooks Beach and hundreds of cigarette butts in the parking lot of Manchester beach. Many wildlife entanglements in fishing gear were reported. A common murre, that was experiencing starvation, was rescued on Manchester beach and transported by volunteers to Santa Rosa for rehabilitation.

With your help we can expand our participation in California Coastal Cleanup Day in future years. Thank you to all our beach captains and volunteers who participated in 2015!