3 hours Ago
Standing in front of Placerita Canyon Nature Center’s beehive exhibit — what looks like a tall picture frame with glass on both sides and honeycomb in between, swarming with busy bees — Recreation Services Supervisor Frank Hoffman asked, “Were you able to find the queen?” It seemed as easy as finding a needle in the haystack, with hundreds of bees at work in the hive and only one queen somewhere among them. But Hoffman suggested looking in the direction that the bees were facing — they were in a circle formation, pointing inward at the center of this gathering of theirs. And at that center was a slightly larger bee with a longer abdomen, shorter wings and a shiny black back.
“There she is, right there. Sometimes I’m able to just walk right up to it,” Hoffman said, “and sometimes I have to stare for a minute. I was lucky today.
Do you see how they’re all kind of glomming around her? They’re all tending to her, just like musk oxen in the Arctic would put their calves in the middle when the wolves or the bears are coming? What they’re doing is they’re tending to her as her workers, as her young daughters would. They’re cleaning her, they’re grooming her, they’re feeding her. They make sure that she gets everything she needs to be able to fill the cells with live eggs.
” Sixty-four-year-old Hoffman started at the Placerita Canyon Nature Center 30 years ago, though he said he’s done stints in various capacities at other parks like William S. Hart Park in Newhall, Val Verde Community Regional Park, George Lane Park in Quartz Hill and others here and there during that time. Placerita Canyon, however, is like home, he said earlier this month at the center.
Located off Placerita Canyon Road in Newhall, the natural area, according to the Placerita Canyon Nature Center website, features oak groves, a willow and sycamore-lined seasonal stream, the historic “Oak of the Golden Dream” site of California’s original gold discovery in 1842 (before the precious metal was discovered in January 1848 at Sutter’s Mill), and a landmark cabin, among other things. The center also offers wild animal presentations with over 40 birds, reptiles, insects and others that live onsite, nature hikes and self-guided educational trails to over 10,000 visitors a year. Hoffman said he deals with the operations of the facility, coordinates volunteer activities and is responsible for animal care, safety and the permitting processes at the site.
He also makes sure all emergency equipment is in place and ready to go should there be an immediate fire. He and one other employee can evacuate the animals at the center in about 40 minutes — they’ve done it, he said. Additionally, Hoffman is the guy with a wealth of information about wildlife.
He enthusiastically shares what he knows with guests, but he’ll follow that up with a request for them to go out into the world and teach three things they just learned to others they know. Here’s some information Hoffman offered as an example: “There were never bees here in America,” he said, still standing near the bee exhibit. “They were brought here by the European settlers.
Now we’ve got hundreds of different types of bees that have cross-hybridized. Of course, they’re a very key, important component of our environment.” Hoffman became interested in wildlife at an early age when his mother would send him to his room for some kind of mischief he’d caused.
In his room, he’d read from a 1960s 25-book collection called the Life Nature Library series from Time-Life. The books featured titles like “The Forest,” “The Mountains, “The Reptiles” and “The Insects,” the latter two volumes in his possession at the nature center, which he pulled out of his office to show off. “I’d flip the pages, look at the pictures, read the captions over and over and over,” he said.
“I’d learn things from the books that I read growing up in my room. My mom was worried after a while because it was too quiet in there for me. ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’ I was sitting there thumbing through these books.
” Hoffman wrote many reports on those books in elementary school, and in doing so, he picked up the jargon, he said. He also learned much about nature, information he still uses and shares with others to this day. Additionally, Hoffman learned about nature by spending time outdoors.
He said he’s the man he is today “because of my mama.” Hoffman’s mom took him to parks, zoos and natural places in the San Fernando Valley, where he was born and raised. “Back in the ’60s in the Valley,” he said, “there were a lot of ranches — a lot of horse ranches — and there was livestock.
I remember the orchards of grapefruit and oranges and lemons” He was at home with the natural world, going into creeks, bringing lizards, bullfrogs and even little chickens back to the house, learning as much as he could about these critters. He knows, for example, that snake venom doesn’t come out of the tip of the fang. It comes out of the front face of the fang, he said.
After high school, in 1978, Hoffman had the opportunity to study at University of Alaska Anchorage — his sister lived there at the time, so, he was able to stay with her while attending school. “Unfortunately,” he said, “while there, during the summer semester, while Mom and Dad were visiting, Dad was working in my sister’s backyard and had a heart attack. He had a quadruple bypass.
I had to withdraw from school and come home.” Back home, Hoffman picked up a bank teller job through a neighbor, and he did that for some time. Then, one day while at work, his eighth-grade science teacher came through the teller line and recognized him.
The two talked and Hoffman’s former science teacher asked if he was interested in selling real estate. One thing led to another, and before he knew it, Hoffman had earned his real estate license. Hoffman would come to learn that the real estate business was just not for him.
But at that point in his life, he said, what could he do if not that? “I thought, ‘Why don’t I take a wildlife management class and a photography class?’” he said. “Because I had a good eye, I thought I wanted to be a wildlife photographer.” At 35 years old, Hoffman went back to school.
He took two classes at Pierce College in Woodland Hills — a wildlife management class and a photography class. And he trained his eyes on a job at National Geographic magazine. “It was in the wildlife management class that one of my classmates, Crystal, stood up before all of us and told us about this little old place called Placerita Canyon up in the Santa Clarita Valley,” Hoffman said.
“I’d known Placerita Canyon Road from my real estate exploits as a loan officer. I was here the next day to interview with the then-supervisor for a job.” Hoffman said he became a part-time recreation services leader at the center, all the while still attending classes at Pierce.
And when he had questions at work, he often took them to his professors to get the answers. Each semester, Hoffman took two more classes. “I just loved what I was doing,” he said.
“And eventually I ended up with an associate of science degree in natural resource management. Everything I was learning at night in school, I was coming here to work and applying it on the job, and teaching people.” Hoffman enjoys working with people and for the people.
He said it’s because he’s a man of the people. According to Evelyne Vandersande, who Hoffman said is the longest-tenured docent at the Placerita Canyon Nature Center with 38 years under her belt, the people who visit the center love Hoffman, too. “You have somebody like Frank, and every time visitors come, they have questions,” Vandersande said.
“Frank always has an answer because he’s had so much learning experience in this park.” Vandersande added that Hoffman is someone who can communicate with adults and children alike. “Talking with a teenager and talking with an adult is not the same thing,” she said.
“He can do both. That’s not really something you can learn. And it’s very important to people.
They come and they feel they have a friend.” Additionally, Hoffman gets to do what he loved to do as a kid — be out in the natural world. He said he’s been breathing fresh air there for 30 years.
In fact, the Placerita Canyon Nature Center means so much to him that he even got married there. Hoffman met the woman who would become his wife on Oct. 19, 1997 — at 1:23 in the afternoon, to be exact, he said, on the last day of a business expo, which was set up on what was then a dirt lot under a circus tent where Whole Foods and Islands Fine Burgers and Drinks are currently located.
He learned this woman had a 14-year-old daughter. Knowing that, he invited the two of them to the Placerita Canyon Nature Center for a nature walk. “She showed up with her daughter,” Hoffman said, “we did a nature walk, and that was it.
We fell in love right away.” He and Mary Hoffman have been married for 25 years. They tied the knot on Oct.
23, 1999, under an oak tree at the Placerita Canyon Nature Center. As Hoffman talked about other ways the center has become a part of his life, a woman and her young son entered the room to check out the exhibits. The mother pointed out the great horned howl hanging from the ceiling, and Hoffman interrupted himself to make the sound that a great horned owl makes for the child there.
“You ever hear that before, buddy?” he asked the boy. Hoffman made the sound again, then added, “That’s the great horned owl. Different owls make different sounds.
We know what they are from their call, from their cry. A red-tailed hawk is more like, tsee-eeee-arr . It’s like a downward, descending cry.
” When the mother and her son moved on, Hoffman got back to talking about what he gets to do for a living. In the end, he said, it’s quite simple: He just loves his job. Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected] .
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