As a lifelong golfer, I’ve come to appreciate most golf courses as reliable and often remarkable interfaces between humankind and the wild, places that use tiny white balls and manicured lawns to lure city dwellers deep into otherwise untamed surroundings. I’ve seen wild boar and tree-hopping turkeys in the golden hills south of San Jose, flocks of deer at dawn cutting through the thick Monterey Peninsula mist, ferret-like creatures ambling the deserts east of San Diego, dolphins leaping offshore the Big Island of Hawai‘i, and snakes swirling through Arizona sands. I know development displaces more than it protects, and that many links use more chemicals and water than nature should stomach, but I’d still say that some courses offer more frequent encounters with native fauna than even official wilderness areas.
Nowhere has this proved truer for me than at Ocean Meadows, the nine-hole course built nearly 50 years ago in Goleta. Amid sightings of coyotes and crawdads and rumors of black bears, it’s where, as a college student, I learned the differences between green herons and great herons, egrets and snowy egrets, Cooper’s hawks and white-tailed kites, and white-crowned sparrows and purple barn swallows. It’s also where I witnessed the single most exciting nature scene of my life: a red-tailed hawk ripping a three-foot gopher snake out of its burrow, flying to a tree branch overlooking the seventh hole, and then chomping away on the wriggling creature, all the while fending off a pesky crow.
Those days, however, are over, at least with a nine-iron in hand. The Ocean Meadows Golf Course closed for good on Tuesday, March 26, leaving the South Coast golf scene devoid of a relatively flat, affordable, regulation nine-hole course. But in an intriguing twist of fate — and in what may be the first reverse development of a golf course — Ocean Meadows will live on as a nature preserve. Its 63 acres were purchased for $7 million by the Trust for Public Land (which had donor support from various entities), and the trust is conveying the land to UCSB, which will work to restore the course into a functional ecosystem that feeds into the Devereux Slough and Coal Oil Point Reserve, essentially extending the 650-plus-acre Ellwood Bluffs complex all the way to Storke Road, with public access and trails throughout. There’s still much work to be done: Estimated costs for the restoration climb as high as $10 million, and so far, only about $1.7 million has been earmarked for that.