The Cypress Grove Research Center

The Story:

As children my parents would take us to visit a family friend who had an estate on the Tomales bay called Cypress Grove. Named in part due to the spectacular cypress trees that covered the grounds. Their was a modest main house, several guest cottages each with a different name and each decorated to match that name, a boat house, green houses, gardens, lawns and more. We would go and run wild playing, picking fruit, and doing what kids do – exploring. Our visits were frequently defined by some kind of modest but in fact real culinary delights including lunches on the lawn, dinners, snacks and or lunch in the water front dining room when the weather was cool. The meals were always stunning and it was in fact a period of my youth that got my culinary juices going. I can recall fondly the flavored lemonades and the fantastic meals always presented in such an exciting way.

As the years passed and Cypress Grove’s owners passing, the property was developed into part of the Audubon Canyon Ranch system in Marin and Sonoma County. Our family has been connected to the Audubon Canyon Ranch for over 35 years now. My parents got involved as volunteers in the beginning and as our lives changed and moved on; my father has continued to be directly involved in the development of the ranch and its programs. Now Cypress Grove is known as the Cypress Grove Research Center.

Audubon Canyon Ranch developed the Cypress Grove Research Center as a headquarters for its research and natural resource management programs, and to promote Tomales Bay as a valuable system for ecological study. The Tomales Bay estuary offers extraordinary opportunities for conservation biology, because of its simple shape, intermediate size, biological richness, and undisturbed quality relative to the nearby San Francisco estuary.

Audubon Canyon Ranch has a developing research facility on the east shore of Tomales Bay called Cypress Grove Research Center. Through Cypress Grove Research Center, ACR studies wintering shorebirds, monitors waterbirds on Tomales Bay, investigates processes for restoration of coastal marshes, tracks the reproductive performance of heron and egret colonies throughout the northern San Francisco Bay Area, and analyzes behaviors of Common Ravens. ACR owns and protects almost 500 acres of important and diverse lands on Tomales Bay.

For more information see the website for the Audubon Canyon Ranch: http://www.egret.org/