Walk around Quail Hollow Ranch County Park in Felton, and you experience the cultural history of our region. Named Quail Hollow by the Lane family of Sunset Magazine fame, the parcel was originally homesteaded in 1866 and was a working farm and ranch for nearly a century. The original farmhouse was renovated by the Lanes in the manner of a fifties model Sunset home, and the property features barns and hiking trails.
The natural history of Quail Hollow goes hand-in-hand with the cultural history. The parcel weaves together fifteen different natural habitats, with numerous plant and animal species, including a half dozen rare and endangered species. The park includes the Santa Cruz Sandhills ecosystem – found only here at Quail Hollow.
Park Interpreter Lee Summers has run the programs and coordinated volunteers for Quail Hollow for nine years. In that time, she has developed a summer camp, wonderful day classes focused on science and nature—with great titles like Orienteering, Snakes Alive, and Nature Detectives—and a popular after school program.
Lee says her job of getting kids hooked in is pretty easy, given the environment she’s teaching in. “Kids are naturally curious, so they’ll ask questions and I’ll say, that’s a good question: what do you think?” Summers says. “From there I have a jumping off place where I can take information, add to it, correct it a little bit.”
She says it’s important to be flexible and go with what is catching the kids’ interest. “Last week there were a bunch of western toadlets [at the pond],” she remembers. “We were there to study insects and spiders, but we just went with it and caught a bunch of baby frogs.”
Lee downplays her role in inspiring kids, seeing herself as more of a facilitator. Now that she’s been with the program for nine years, she’s starting to see some of her kids grow up and make real contributions to her field of study. “There’s one kid in particular who’s just an excellent birder,” she says. “He keeps me in touch about all the unique birds out here. Now he’s in high school. But I think that interest was already there; he just gets it met where he can come in and feed that need.”
Summers’ other role is working with the many volunteers who keep the park and its programs going. “We have some really great volunteers that have helped the program become what it is,” she explains.
Volunteer Anne Williams was very familiar with the park before she started working there. “Quail Hollow [has been] long my favorite place to take my grandchildren on outings - for picnics, frogging (picking them up and putting them back, of course), lizard chasing (same), birding, hiking, sitting in the shade of the willows,” she says. A former Outdoor Education teacher, she is one of the volunteers that Summers will have to depend on more as budget cuts eat into the program.
“I decided to become a volunteer at QH the night Lee said she needed help with volunteer recruitment and with volunteer facilitation of her many well established children's programs,” Williams explains. “The thought of losing these programs troubled me and I was hooked!”
Summers explains that cutbacks in their programs, starting in September, were not a surprise. “With 20% less money coming in, how are you going to rearrange things?” she explains. But she is pleased with the fact that the County is keeping all of their parks open. “I think that part of it is just the environmental slant of Santa Cruz,” she says, comparing the County’s decision to the governor’s threat to close all State Parks. “When Sacramento is making decisions about what’s being cut, there are different priorities.”
Nevertheless, families who depend on Quail Hollow’s wonderful children’s programs are in for a surprise. Starting in September, Summers will be reassigned to several different parks to cover vacant positions. Quail Hollow’s Interpretive Center will only be open on weekends, the after school program is canceled, and there will be no weekday school fieldtrips.
Remaining are some weekend interpretive programs, when volunteers are available to run them, and birthday parties, which Summers advertises as a great way to support the park. “The cry these days is revenue generation, so it’s going to be up to us to come up with some ideas,” she says.
Anne Williams has lots of ideas of how to keep enjoying the park. “Families can support Quail Hollow by attending the many weekend programs throughout the year. It helps the interpretive center when people who visit the park make notations on the clipboard on the ranch house porch telling of their wildlife sightings (such as how many Western Pond Turtles they saw basking during their stay). During the year, visitors can check out the amazing wildflower displays in spring, visit the endangered sand hills in April and, on weekdays when Lee isn't here and the interpretive center is shuttered, rove the many trails, birdwatching and, perhaps, catching sight of coyotes, bobcats and deer.”
Further, she suggests, you can give the gift of your time. “Interested and experienced teachers and adult or teen group leaders can volunteer to lead natural or cultural history children's programs during the school year, programs already developed and time tested by Lee. Or, they can design their own! Community volunteers can sign up for the broom bashes, master gardening planting days, fly fishing workshop, fiber arts, weekend science programs.”
Lee Summers has some words to keep in mind when you’re paying your taxes, at the ballot box, or contacting your local political representatives. “There’s a tendency to see open space as kind of a luxury,” she points out. “Especially when there’s cuts, parks tend to be cut pretty early on, and at the same time it’s one of these things that open space is not a luxury but a necessity. It provides watershed, for our clean water, it cleans our air for us, it provides open space where we can get away from everybody, reconnect with nature.”
“With our culture going the way it goes, we tend to disconnect. I could be biased, but for people to come in to have a picnic, go for a walk—that’s time to charge your batteries again, gives you time to go back and be more efficient at what you do.”
Also, who doesn’t like catching frogs?
For more information: Visit Quail Hollow's website.
Originally published in Growing Up in Santa Cruz.
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