On any given day of the year, Tecolote Canyon is teeming with life.
Coyotes and Cooper’s hawks call the canyon home. Lemonade berry, laurel sumac and California lilac line its hillsides.
But for Eloise Battle, the king snakes and black phoebes stood out. And the best plant of all was the blue-eyed grass. “That’s the harbinger of spring,” she told the Friends of Tecolote Canyon in 2021.
Battle — who spearheaded efforts to save the canyon from development in the 1970s and maintained a steadfast presence in its preservation for the rest of her life — died March 28 at age 95.
She is survived by her three children, Adrian and Ralph Battle and Claire Daniels, as well as seven grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
For more than 50 years, Battle remained tirelessly committed to the canyon she herself called home, living in a house in Clairemont that overlooked it. Her dedication to the open space was rooted in a respect for its Indigenous history and a deep love of its plants and animals.
Not much shook her bravery. Even a rattlesnake bite well into her 80s was something she shrugged off with a laugh.
“If she was to pick up a critter, she was just very neutral and calm and mild,” recalls Niki Ahrens, a member of the Tecolote Canyon Citizens Advisory Committee and Battle’s friend and neighbor for 10 years.
But her gentle spirit toward wildlife made her a fierce defender of it. In advisory committee meetings over recent years, when the group would discuss potential new development in the canyon, Battle spoke her mind.
“She didn’t hold back,” Ahrens said.
As one half of the “Tecolote Twins,” as one official dubbed Battle and her neighbor Sherlie Miller for their frequent visits to City Hall, Battle spent years urging city leaders to understand that the canyon was a valuable open space to protect.
But preserving it wasn’t an easy task.
First, in the 1950s, the canyon was a proposed site for a landfill, which the community protested. And later, in the 1960s and 70s, even as the environmentalist movement grew nationally, the canyon had to compete with population growth.
San Diego was expanding, and by 1965 it had nearly 640,000 people. To house them, builders proposed a 1,500-home development and a four-lane road through the canyon.
Battle learned of the community’s opposition from a teacher at the Natural History Museum, where she was taking a course of native plants in 1970. It didn’t take long for her to get involved.
“She brought it to the attention of the city and the public that this was a resource worth saving,” said Wilbur Smith, a member of the Tecolote Canyon Citizens Advisory Committee and former open space coordinator for the city.
In 1969, before Battle ed the effort, local neighbors had convinced the San Diego City Council to an ordinance to permit assessment districts, letting residents vote to charge themselves a tax to receive additional city services — in their case, to protect the canyon from future development.
A few years later, in 1971, Battle created the organization Citizens to Save Open Space, and she and her neighbors got to work spreading the word. The assessment district was successfully created in 1974.
“This is it! One last chance to gain a park reserve at what will soon be the population center of San Diego,” Battle wrote in an opinion piece in the San Diego Union in June of that year. “Whose wild idea was it? The city officials? Oh, no! The developers? Heavens, no! Your friends and neighbors? You bet it was!”
Four years later, she helped lead the way to Tecolote Canyon’s dedication as an open space park. She became the first chair of the Tecolote Canyon Citizens Advisory Committee, where she helped write the master plan for the park in the early 1980s.
“Through her whole life, she was able to communicate well and get people to see things and want to be part of what she was doing,” said Miller, who worked with Battle to preserve the canyon and is now president of the Friends of Tecolote Canyon.
Miller met Battle in 1972, when Miller’s family moved in next door. She ed Battle’s efforts right away.
Battle was already a staple in the neighborhood, having moved to the area in 1958. She and her husband Stanley — who she met at Tusculum College in east Tennessee, where she studied biology — had lived briefly in San Diego while he was in the Navy, and they returned after he was discharged.
Battle was a natural teacher, Miller and other friends say, and she started the Friends of Tecolote Canyon’s education program to ensure younger generations developed a love of the canyon that would last for years to come.
Her own devotion to nature was one she nurtured at an early age growing up in upstate New York, surrounded by oak forests and nature of all kinds — brooks, springs, wildflowers and different animals, she recalled in 2021.
As a fourth grader, Battle was fascinated with a yellow beetle she spotted on her way home from school, even going the extra step of visiting her local taxidermist to help identify it. (It was a Goldsmith beetle.)
That curiosity never abated. An avid reader, Battle had a thirst for knowledge. In the senior facility where she lived in her final years, her neighbors nicknamed her “Google,” and she was renowned for her skills in the weekly trivia game.
She loved to catch and mount butterflies, too — an activity she shared with her son, Adrian. She instilled a curious mindset in him as well, he said.
“Her love of nature is well-chronicled, but she also ed that on to me,” he said, adding that some of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are also outdoors-minded. “She spread her seeds far and wide.”
Battle’s ion for wildlife and Tecolote Canyon was infectious, and she had a knack for getting more and more people to her brigade to the canyon.
Smith, the former city employee, worked with Battle to create a master plan for Tecolote Canyon Open Space Park. He later ed the advisory committee at her behest.
David Harpster, a former journalist for the Sentinel, a now-defunct community newspaper in Clairemont, wrote about the canyon and fielded story ideas from Battle. After he left the beat, she convinced him to the committee, too.
The same went for Darrel Madison, who now chairs the advisory committee. He met Battle on a hike in the canyon, and she encouraged him to . Years later, she guided him to take over for her as chair.
“She infected me with the love of Tecolote Canyon,” Madison said.
The advisory committee knows its work isn’t done, though.
Last year, community rallied together to ask the city to change its plans for a sewage pipeline project through the canyon to avoid disturbing longstanding trees. Battle, unsurprisingly, ed the protest.
After all, about five years earlier, when the committee was just learning about the proposal, she was vocal in her opposition. She even threatened to tie herself to a tree to defend the canyon.
“Like, who would do that? Eloise would,” said Ahrens, Battle’s longtime friend and committee member. “So those are the shoes I feel like the rest of us need to fill. And I don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out, but I’ll try.”
