andimal/Getty Images Ripening Himalayan blackberries hang in a dense thicket — the kind of cover that can double as wildlife habitat along local trails. (Randimal/Getty Images)

At Tuesday night’s Sonoma City Council meeting (Feb. 4), the first public comment was about something most people would walk past without a second thought: a patch of Himalayan blackberry at the 4th Street entrance to the Montini Preserve.

But if you’ve spent any time on that trail, you know exactly what she meant.

Lynn Clary, who said she’s volunteered at Montini for almost 19 years, came to the microphone with a simple complaint: the blackberry thicket is gone, and with it a little pocket of wildlife that made people happy.

She acknowledged what everyone knows about Himalayan blackberry. It’s invasive. It spreads. It’s a pain. She wasn’t arguing that it belongs everywhere. Her point was specific: in that particular spot, at that

particular entrance, the blackberry had become reliable habitat.

Clary told the council the thicket “was wildlife habitat for the California quail that have flourished there safely in that blackberry.” She described hikers watching “several broods a year” and seeing groups of “15 to 20” birds moving around near the trail. She also mentioned a spotted towhee living in the same cover.

Then she described what happened after the removal: “I have watched a few of the stragglers zigzag back and forth in confusion where the former home was. The rest dispersed into the neighborhood or picked off by predators.”

That’s a brutal image. And it’s the kind of thing that lands because it’s so concrete: a thicket gone, a covey scattered, a small loss that feels bigger than it should.

She added one more detail that matters: the removal happened at the 4th Street entrance “which is on state property.”

No one on the dais responded in substance. The mayor reminded the room that this was public comment, and council can’t discuss or act on items that aren’t on the agenda. Then the meeting moved on.

If you want the “why,” this meeting won’t give it to you. Nobody from the City addressed it, nobody from the state spoke, and the agenda was dominated by a long, detailed study session on emergency evacuation routes.

But the blackberry comment matters for a different reason: it’s a clean example of how land management decisions collide with how people actually experience a place.

We talk about “invasive species” like it’s a category that ends the conversation. Remove it. Problem solved.

In the real world, it’s rarely that neat. Even invasive plants can become functional habitat when they’re the only dense cover in a particular spot. That doesn’t mean you keep them forever. It means you think in sequences. If you’re going to take away shelter, what’s going in its place, and when? If the goal is habitat improvement, the replacement has to show up fast enough that animals don’t pay the entire cost of the transition.

Clary wasn’t romanticizing blackberry. She was saying: you removed cover where quail were thriving, and you didn’t have to do it the way it was done.

Her line that hit hardest was this one: “There was no reason for the removal of the blackberry.”

That’s the claim. That’s the accusation. And it leaves a question hanging in the air, unanswered in the room: who decided this, and what were they trying to accomplish?

There’s a larger context in the same meeting that’s hard to ignore. Most of the night focused on wildfire evacuation: roadway pinch points, signal backups, the difference between a traffic signal and a four-way stop when the power is out, coordination between fire and law enforcement, better warning systems, and the reality that Sonoma is a funnel—grid streets in town, then fewer roads out, and then the whole valley squeezing onto a handful of state highways.

The fire chiefs and sheriff’s command staff gave a sober, detailed picture of how evacuation has changed since 2017: zones, staged warnings and orders, unified command, redundant alerts, and the reality that

door-to-door checks still matter because you never assume people got the message.

So yes, fire risk is in the air at every level of local government now. Vegetation management is part of that conversation whether it’s said out loud or not.

But Tuesday night showed the other side of the same coin: people don’t only experience open space as a fuel load. They experience it as a living place. A short walk after dinner. A covey of quail that makes you stop for a minute and smile.

When you remove something like that, even if you have a good reason, you should expect to hear about it.

And you should.

Because this is how a community stays connected to the land it claims to care for: not through slogans, but through specific, local, slightly messy arguments about what belongs, what doesn’t, and what we owe the creatures that live among our decisions.

For now, all we have is what Clary put on the record: blackberry removed at the 4th Street entrance, quail habitat lost, birds displaced, and no public explanation offered in the meeting.

That’s enough to justify a closer look. Even before you know the backstory, it’s a legitimate question: if you’re going to “clean up” an edge of open space that people and wildlife both use, what’s the plan for what comes next?