Ask Lookout: Why are there cows in Arana Gulch?

On a sunny day in March, a child passed a handful of freshly picked grass through a wire fence to an enthusiastic cow at Arana Gulch, a 63-acre greenbelt wedged between Seabright and Live Oak, just north of the Santa Cruz Harbor. 

For about 11 years, a handful of cows and their calves have grazed the fields at the city-owned park, and in the process, charmed the hearts of many. Cyclists, runners, people pushing baby strollers and commuters make their way daily through Arana Gulch. For a moment, they’re transported out of the surrounding built-up Santa Cruz neighborhoods into a lush pocket of meadows dotted with cows – or as some call them, the “Midtown Brown.”

“It just makes me feel like I’m living in a more rural place,” said Rena Dubin, who has lived a few blocks from the park for more than 20 years. “It makes living here even better.” 

Dubin emailed Lookout in February to ask about the cows: “Can you tell me more about the beloved cows in Arana Gulch? Where did they come from? Why are they there?”

The answer, according to city officials and ecologists, is to help revive the endangered Santa Cruz tarplant – a yellow, daisylike flower. The tarplant is threatened at the state and federal levels, meaning that under the California Endangered Species Act, it’s prohibited to make cuttings or kill the tarplant as it’s in danger of extinction. Ecologist Grey Hayes says the tarplant thrived in coastal prairie from Contra Costa and Marin counties down to Monterey County before controlled burning by Indigenous populations was stopped, large grazing mammals, like bison, were removed or died out and humans developed the land for housing and agricultural use. 

Since 2013, the City of Santa Cruz has had a group overseeing the preservation of the tarplant. Experts including city officials, scientists, California Department of Fish and Wildlife representatives and ecologists like Hayes have held meetings, published annual reports and experimented with different ways to maintain and grow the tarplant population.

Based on his decades of study, Hayes says cattle grazing is the cheapest and most successful method for restoring the tarplant and preserving the coastal prairie habitat because they eat grasses and plants such as wild oat and ripgut brome that grow tall and shade out the tarplant. According to Hayes, cattle grazed the Arana Gulch prairie previously, from 1795 up until around 1988, when the land was purchased to potentially become an auto mall and the cattle were removed. 

“While it was being grazed back then, there were 100,000 plants every year,” he said, adding that they disappeared within two years of the cattle’s removal.  

Arana Gulch didn’t become an auto mall, Hayes said, after a botanical survey showed the tarplant doing well there. The community and city fought the development. The city acquired the land in 1994 and it became a public park. The following year, the city began working to revive the endangered yellow flower. 

Mike Godsy, the city’s Parks and Recreation superintendent, said conserving the tarplant is more than just taking care of a pretty flower. If the park has a healthy tarplant population, it shows that the soil and the habitat are healthy, and vice versa. 

“It’s a good indicator of best practices for coastal prairie,” he said. “If you have a thriving Santa Cruz tarplant establishment, then your [ecological] approach is working.”

Godsy is one of the city staff representatives on the group that has been managing the tarplant project. Called the Adaptive Management Work Group, the body consists of nine voting members, including Hayes, who are tasked with preserving the tarplant and coastal prairie, as well as the park’s two other ecological zones: the wetland and woodland areas. 

Arana Gulch is home to a range of plants and wild animals that thrive in these ecological zones. California poppies and Himalayan blackberries, skunks, coyotes, red-tailed hawks, dusky-footed woodrats, common yellowthroat birds and bobcats roam the grasslands, shelter in the oak trees and depend on the food in the wetlands across the greenbelt. 

When the city acquired the park, it implemented an Arana Gulch master plan to guide its management of the land. But, because the park lies partially in the state’s designated coastal zone, the city had to get a coastal development permit from the California Coastal Commission. The state agency oversees land use on coastal land. This permit’s conditions led the city to create the work group to maintain and enhance the park’s natural habitat, including the tarplant. 

Based on the group’s meticulous monitoring and experimentation, like controlled burning and mowing, the tarplant population has rebounded but isn’t where the group wants it to be yet, Hayes says. In 2006, records show there were just 267 plants – years before cattle were reintroduced in 2013. But thanks to a variety of factors, including higher levels of rainfall last year, the group counted one of the highest numbers of tarplant in decades in 2024: 4,141. 

The tarplant generally blooms late spring or early summer and the plants are mainly located in the enclosed southern meadow, but the park has three additional smaller patches. The cattle are removed from tarplant areas in spring to prevent the cows from stomping on the seed heads, which prevents them from growing. 

In prior years, the cows were kept at the park seasonally, from about October to June, but this past year they grazed year-round in certain parts of Arana Gulch, and city officials say they’ll likely continue that method to see if it helps grow more tarplant. 

In about 2020, ranchers Teresa and Frank Locatelli took on the grazing job from the previous rancher, Tommy Williams. The program between the ranchers and the city costs neither of the parties any money. 

The Locatellis have their home base at a ranch on Rodeo Gulch Road, where their other 20 or so Hereford cows are kept. They’ve been running their livestock business together for about 20 years, but Frank has worked with cows his whole life. Their cows also graze at a private property with coastal prairie in Bonny Doon. The cows at the UC Santa Cruz’s meadows are managed by Williams, with whom they often partner.

The Locatellis know the cows are there to preserve the tarplant, but they also have their own personal reasoning. 

“The whole purpose of having cows in Arana Gulch is so kids can see cows,” said Teresa. “Because otherwise, if you’re living even in Santa Cruz, you don’t really see cows. They get to see the births – a lady showed me a video on her phone that she’d taken of a cow having her calf.”

In the past month, Teresa said there were four cows with their calves and one heifer – a young female who was pregnant – grazing in the gulch. The cows are recognizable both by their color and patterns as well as the name tags on their ears. 

Jess is red with a white face, Salty is black with a white face (her mom’s name was Pepper), Pete is black with a white face and Stinky has a white stripe across her face, like a skunk. Heidi is the heifer. She’s an all-black half Highland, a Scottish breed. “We’ll bring her home to have her baby,” Teresa Locatelli said about the heifer. The calves aren’t named yet. 

Teresa said the number of cows they keep at the park changes often. The ranchers sometimes have to move the cows to their Rodeo Gulch Road home because there’s not enough grass or food for them in the prairie, they’re pregnant or for another health reason, she said.

“Because [the city] is trying to keep that a coastal prairie, you don’t want to really feed them a lot of hay, because you don’t want to bring in different kinds of seed or grass,” she said. 

She and Frank regularly get phone calls from residents who notice certain cows are gone from Arana Gulch. 

“There’s several people who live around there that keep track of the cows and they’ll text or call,” she said. “When we had taken Jess away, there was a bit of clamoring for her to come back. We had to bring her back.”

Unfortunately for the many locals who enjoy feeding the cows, city officials are discouraging residents from bringing food for them. Godsy said the cows get enough food from their feed stalls and the grazing. Second, he added, if the cows congregate at the fence line where people give them food, they’re not doing the intended grazing and habitat restorative work they’re there to accomplish. 

Teresa Locatelli said she enjoys watching kids and people interacting with the cows, but added that people should be careful with what they feed them because it can cause bloating. She said cows should not be fed eggplant and if people want to feed them apples, cut the apples into smaller pieces so they’re easier for the cows to eat. 

After hearing about the purpose of the cows, Dubin, the Live Oak resident, said it’s great there’s an added benefit to having the cows in Arana Gulch. 

“If the cows help create a better habitat for the tarplants to grow, that’s a wonderful bonus!” she said. “But even if they don’t, it’s charming to have the cows.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.