Everything Fallbrook .org

The fruit and berry plants have been blooming for the last month in Fallbrook and all those plants need to be pollinated. In the last five years, I’ve had to deal with three separate occasions where honeybees made their home in my yard and I was always really reluctant to evict them. But it turns out that local honeybees are European imports and they have been Africanized so they are more aggressive (yep, I’ve gotten stung, more than once!).

The New York Times had a story recently about a woman who got honeybees in her house and her saga to reclaim her home. From the NY Times:

Over the past two decades, fears of a collapsing honeybee population have inspired elegiac journalism and 30 state laws aiming to protect pollinators. … I considered buying a can of Raid, but I felt too guilty. I had a vague sense that honeybees needed saving. … There was little else to do but wait and see…

What I wish I had known then: Honeybees do not need saving.

Just last month, new federal data showed that the number of honeybee colonies has increased by 31 percent since 2007. A vast majority of those insects are used in commercial farming, carted from state to state to pollinate crops.

“Honeybees are not endangered nor at risk of extinction,” noted a 2023 report from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. “The fact that honeybees are domesticated and managed negates the possibility of being endangered.”

Honeybees are an invasive species that were brought to the United States from Europe. Saving one of their colonies can actually hurt native bees, many of which are endangered. A recent study in Montreal found that when the number of honeybee hives rose in part of the city, the number of native bees declined.

“You are not helping a wild species” when you save a honeybee swarm, said Rich Hatfield, a senior conservation biologist at Xerces. “You are introducing 10,000 to 50,000 mouths to feed to an environment that may not have enough resources.”

Click here to read the whole story in the New York Times

Click here to get FREE access to the New York Times through the library

The Washington Post had a similar story:

Mace Vaughan leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an insect-conservation outfit that has grown from five to nearly 80 employees during his 24 years there. Vaughan says it’s not a zero-sum game: For native pollinators to win, honeybees don’t have to lose. If we focus not on tax breaks, but on limiting the use of insecticide and promoting habitats such as meadows, hedgerows and wetlands, all pollinators can come out ahead. The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden.

Click here to read (paywall)

When I dropped by the Spring Flower Faire Extraordinaire sponsored by the Garden Club, it was rockin’! Cars were going in and out of the Historical Society parking lot. There was a great selection of indoor plants and people had carts of outdoor plants (including lots of drought-tolerant succulents) destined for Fallbrook’s gardens. Funds raised went to a good cause — the Garden Club sponsors regular talks to help local gardeners.

In 1891, the first Fallbrook Irrigation District seized the 4,500-acre Palomares Ranch for non-payment of the assessment. The Palomares Ranch had not paid the Fallbrook water bill because it had plenty of water and refused to pay for what it didn’t need.  Many creeks cross the old Rancho Monserate heading for the San Luis Rey River.  The water table is high. 

Fortunately, Maria Lugardo de Jesus Alvarado Palomares had a smart lawyer, Henry Avila, who was also her son-in-law. Avila took it to the U.S. Supreme Court and won.  Dona Palomares had her ranch back, but she wasn’t interested in ranching.  With savvy advice from Los Angeles, she divided her land into tracts to sell.

The developers began digging a reservoir and laying pipes for the Winterwarm development.  Farm tracts and homes needed a steady source of water, without a windmill on every lot and they had no reason to trust the yet-to-be-incorporated Fallbrook district. To that end, Winterwarm Irrigation was formed before or about the same time as FPUD.  Winterwarm Irrigation was independent from the start and was eventually absorbed by something called the Metropolitan Water District.  It is part of FPUD now.

There are lots of things that shouldn’t be put into the trash including paint leftovers and other household/automotive chemicals, fluorescent bulbs, electronics and batteries. Here’s how to dispose of those things responsibly in Fallbrook:

A careful reader chided me about a recent post that it’s free to go for a walk in Fallbrook’s parks. Perhaps I should have been more careful and said that you don’t need a gym membership or special equipment to go for a walk and there’s no usage fee for our parks. So if you want to take a walk in the park, there’s no need to get out your wallet, you just put your shoes on and go.

I did a bit more research though and while it’s true that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, our parks come pretty close.

County parks cost $71 million/year in 2023-2024, out of the county’s budget of $8.17 billion. That’s 0.87% of the budget. So out of every $100 in tax you paid to the county, 87 cents went to parks: Santa Margarita County Preserve, Clemmens Lane Park, Don Dussault County Park, the Community Center and Live Oak County Park (which does have a small parking fee, free for seniors). That will increase to 89 cents in 2024-2025.

Parks maintained by local nonprofits don’t have fees and don’t cost us directly — they’re supported by various grants and private sources and they’re mostly staffed by volunteers. Fallbrook Land Conservancy for example, owns over 3,000 acres of open space.

Note that FPUD administers the Community Benefit Program which is funded by the county (from property taxes) and sometimes gives grants to fund programs at local parks. There are no new fees associated with the Community Benefit Program, our water/sewer bills didn’t increase when FPUD started to manage these funds. The Fallbrook Regional Health District also administers a grant program, as does Supervisor Jim Desmond. These funds are for lots of programs that benefit the community, not just parks.

Yesterday, we published several rumors of wolf sightings and domestication here in Fallbrook. Here’s an update from Diane Kennedy Beeler. The short answer is: there are no wolves in Fallbrook. The longer answer is:

If wolves were here, people would be hunting them again because they are a large predator and would need to take down larger animals. (By contrast, coyotes eat small animals like rabbits, squirrels and gophers, and domestic animals that have been irresponsibly left alone and roaming.) We have no loose wild wolves in Fallbrook. The wolves that have been released and are reappearing are in the northern Yosemite area.

People often think there are wolves and mountain lions and even condors around here. They always mistake coyotes or a loose German Shepherd for wolves; think bobcats or very big tomcats are mountain lions, and confuse turkey vultures with condors.

There are people who have bred wolves with other dogs and make a big profit selling them. They generally do not make good pets. Individuals who have their own ‘rescue’ nonprofits will take in wolf pups and raise them like dogs, never to be reintroduced into the wild and domesticated so that visitors can pay to pet them. If you have visited the wolf center in Julian, or seen wolves in the wild such as in Yellowstone, you would never mistake them for anything else. Wolves are LARGE. Like the difference between a hawk and an eagle.

There are no coywolves in southern California unless someone purposefully bred them and still has them. Wolves kill coyotes. They are enemies and competitors.

There is a wild rehabilitation and rescue site in Ramona and the organization’s fundraising store is in Julian. People can make an appointment to visit the rehabilitated wolves, which are kept undomesticated so that they may be released if possible. You see them at a distance, at the California Wolf Center in Julian, and donate to help them keep these beautiful creatures from going extinct.  

We’ve battled the ‘loose wolves..condors…what-have-you” rumors for decades now. Wolf and bear sightings in LA are in the wild land areas connecting to other wildlife corridors and certainly not anywhere near Fallbrook.

Pico Promenade has been an ongoing problem in the past where homeless encampments are cleared and then reappear as soon as officials are gone. After concerted attempts, the encampments on Pico Promenade were cleared but now homeless people have moved on to other hangouts.

As a result, both Vince Ross Square (Main/Alvarado) and Jackie Heyneman Park (on Mission) have been closed temporarily.

Sure enough, when I went by, there were people sitting on Pico Promenade with their possessions in a grocery cart.

At different times, I’ve seen references to Winterwarm and it’s on maps just south of Fallbrook, labelled as if it’s a separate town. The name Winterwarm appears in various places — Yelp has a page for it, Zillow recognizes it, and there’s a Winterwarm Farms on Winterwarm Drive in south Fallbrook.

From the Fallbrook Historical Society:

Winterwarm, sometimes spelled Winterwurm,  was not imagined to be its own town.  It was always intended as a real estate development, called Winterwarm Farms Tract on the old Palomares Ranch that was subdivided into home plots. 

Everyone did their shopping, and the kids went to school in Fallbrook or Bonsall.  In the late 1920s, it was referred to as the Winterwarm Tract. The Fallbrook post office began delivering mail to Winterwarm in 1928.  The Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce was very interested in the development of Winterwarm, and all of the former Rancho Monserate.

Information/photos courtesy of Fallbrook Historical Society, curators of Fallbrook history since 1976