A Wildwings Summer, From Twilight Golf To Bat Flyouts To Tomato Season

Living off Wildwing Drive in July gives you a strange kind of front-row seat. Within a fifteen-minute radius sit an airfield-turned-golf-neighborhood with a century of aviation history, one of the largest urban bat colonies in the state, a Pacific Flyway wetland that flips its script every summer for shorebirds, and the working heart of California's tomato belt. Most of the state drives past all of it on I-80.

This is a note for the people who already turn off the freeway. The next six weeks are the tightest window of the year for stacking those things into an actual routine, and a Wildwings address puts you closer to the payoff than almost anywhere else in Yolo County.

The Airfield Next Door Still Sets The Clock

Wildwings takes its shape from the little airport on County Road 94B, and the airport takes its shape from a group of Woodland pilots who wanted somewhere to land in 1919. That's the origin of the Yolo Fliers Club, a private country club on the far side of the airfield that has been operating on the same land for over a century. It was founded by a group of aviation enthusiasts led by O.W.H. Pratt as a haven for aerial enthusiasts and their families, with a private airfield, a clubhouse, a swimming pool, a golf course, and a bowling alley in the original plan. The airport is still active. The golf course is still there. The bowling alley is not.

The public-facing golf you see from your kitchen window is the newer one. Wild Wings Golf Club is a 9-hole public course of about 3,157 yards with a slope of 126, designed by Todd Eckenrode, ASGCA, with a greens fee around $35. Course notes from the club describe it as the longest and best nine-hole course in Northern California, open since 2005, and it has been voted Best Greens in Yolo County by readers of the Woodland Daily Democrat repeatedly across 2009 through 2017. The routing offers two flags on each hole for an 18-hole experience, which is why a summer twilight round here is genuinely quick. You can be on the tee at 6 p.m. and home before dark, with the reminder from the pro shop that carts have to be back at the cart barn before 7:45 p.m. under summer hours, and no boots or sunflower seeds.

That last rule is not a joke. Sunflower is the crop the fields around you rotate through, and the seeds get everywhere.

A Calendar The Bats And Birds Actually Wrote

If you drive twenty minutes south on County Road 102 and hit the Yolo Bypass, you are standing in the busiest summer wildlife stage in the county. The area is genuinely large. The Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area covers about 16,700 acres and is one of the largest public/private restoration projects in the state, with roughly 6,000 acres of the Yolo Bypass floodway restored to wetlands. In birding terms, it is the top eBird hotspot in the Central Valley and one of the tops in California away from the coast.

Two things are happening there right now that don't happen the rest of the year.

The first is the shorebird program. Each July and August two areas are managed specifically for shorebirds, meaning the water is drawn down on a schedule that concentrates stilts, avocets, and dowitchers in a way winter visitors never see. The bypass itself is a working landscape year round: more than 200 species of birds move through, including hawks, falcons, kites, warblers, tanagers, flycatchers, pheasants, mallards, harriers, stilts, avocets, gadwall, pintail and teal, but late summer is the shorebird slice.

The second is bats. The Yolo Causeway has one of the largest colonies of bats in the state, with thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats and two other species roosting under the I-80 structure that crosses the wildlife area. The colony is on a biological calendar that lines up almost perfectly with your summer weekends. In late June the females give birth to one pup each, nurse for about five to six weeks, and then the pup joins the mother as she flies through the Central Valley eating crop pests and mosquitoes. That means the flyouts you can see from the levee in mid-July through August are the largest of the year, because you're watching two generations leave the bridge at once.

The Yolo Basin Foundation runs the public version of this. Their Bat Talk and Walks are three-hour tours from mid-June through mid-September, where patrons witness bat flyouts at sunset. Register on their site. They fill.

For everything else, entry is easy: unless it's flooding, the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area is open every day, sunrise to sunset, except Christmas, and it's free to enter with no permit or reservation. The layout is designed for a short visit. There are several seasonally maintained loops from 0.78 to 3.3 miles long, bikes and dogs allowed only in the Causeway area between I-80 and the railroad tracks, and a six-mile auto tour loop with places to pull off. Windy in the afternoon. Bring a hat.

What Peak Tomato Season Looks Like Twenty Minutes From Your Driveway

The other summer choreography happens in the fields you actually drive through to get home. Yolo County runs more than 42,000 acres of tomato production worth over $100 million as a cash crop, and from July to October large processing plants slice, dice, crush, and cook the fruit for shelves across the country. When the truck in front of you sheds a few Romas on County Road 98 in August, that is what's happening. Peak is now.

The public-facing version is the Woodland Tomato Festival. It is downtown, it is free, and it is short. The Woodland Tomato Festival runs Saturday in August from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Freeman Park on Main Street in Woodland, roughly a fifteen-minute drive from Wildwing Drive. Expect a salsa competition, roughly thirty different varieties in the tomato tasting, local chefs in a Top Tomato Chef cook-off, plus face painting and a bounce house for kids. It is organized by a steering committee drawn from the Woodland Farmers Market, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Yolo County Master Gardeners, and the City of Woodland, which is why the produce actually tastes like something instead of like a sponsored booth.

If you have kids and August feels crowded, the same week window also brings the Yolo County Fair to town in two runs, on 8/7 to 8/9 and 8/12 to 8/16, both in Woodland. A five-minute drive from home.

The pattern to notice is that all three of these things share the same six-week window. Bat pups fly. Shorebirds concentrate. Tomatoes hit the processors. Somebody a hundred years ago built a golf-and-flying club in the middle of it. That is what Wildwings summer is.

A Six-Week Plan You Can Actually Use

Here is one way to sequence it if you like a plan on the fridge.

1. This week. Book a twilight nine at Wild Wings for a Tuesday or Wednesday. Aim for a 6 p.m. tee time so you can loop the front and still get the cart back by 7:45 p.m. If the group is four, ask about the two-flag routing and play it as an 18.
2. Next Saturday. Register through the Yolo Basin Foundation for a Bat Talk and Walk. Bring a light layer even in August. The flyout is at dusk, and the wind off the bypass drops the temperature faster than people expect.
3. A Sunday morning in late July. Do the six-mile auto tour loop in the Yolo Bypass before it gets hot. Bring binoculars. This is when the shorebird management units are drawn down, and you will not see the same mix in November.
4. A weekday in early August. Yolo County Fair is running twice in Woodland that month. Pick the evening that fits and walk it. Ten minutes from home.
5. The Saturday of the Tomato Festival. Go early. Park north of Main. Do the tasting flight before the chef competition draws the crowd around the demo stage.
6. The Wednesday after. Buy a flat of San Marzanos at the Woodland Farmers Market and put up sauce for winter. This is why you moved somewhere with a garage refrigerator.

None of that requires a freeway drive longer than twenty minutes. Most of it is under ten.

Why It's Worth Noticing All At Once

The temptation, when you live near something famous, is to save it for guests. Wildwings punishes that instinct. The bat colony is only overhead for part of the year. The shorebird management is a July and August posture, not a permanent one. The tomato harvest window closes when the processors do. Even the golf course runs on the summer hours that let you finish a round after dinner. Miss the six weeks and you're waiting until next June.

The thing worth holding onto is that this is not a set of unrelated coincidences. The airfield, the wetland, the tomato acreage, and the golf routing all sit on the same flat Yolo County ground for the same reasons: the soil drains, the flyway crosses overhead, and the bypass built to protect Sacramento from floods happens to be one of the best bird habitats in the state. A Wildwings address is really an address on that geography. Summer is when the geography shows off.

If you're thinking about the house itself this summer — whether the yard is set up for the way you actually use it, whether the acreage next door pencils out, or whether a move-up down the road makes sense before school starts — that's a separate conversation and one worth having in person. Lupe Springer works with owners across Woodland, Davis, and the surrounding Yolo County countryside, and consultations are complimentary. Schedule a free consultation when it's the right week for you.