and egret rookeries in the Bay Area, although most of its acreage is under water.
Together, the four refuges on the Bay itself add up to somewhat more than fifty thousand acres of wetlands and other habitat. This protection represents massive efforts on the part of the local public. When Congress established San Pablo Bay NWR, for example, it comprised 175 acres, and local government had approved a 1,585-acre commercial and residential development nearby. One of the reasons for establishing the refuge was that 80 percent of the canvasback ducks in the Pacific Flyway were known to feed and rest on San Pablo Bay wetlands. Thousands of houses, apartments, and office buildings obviously would have impacted that. Citizens took government to court to force an environmental review and—with the help of then congressional representative Barbara Boxer and the U.S. Land and Water Conservation fund—finally saved the 1,585 acres by buying the land from a Japanese corporation for $7 million.
Yet the refuges don’t represent a massive area considering that hundreds of thousands of wetland acres disappear from the continental United States every year. Of course, state, regional, and local parks also protect Bay Area wetlands, and conservationists led by David Brower, Edgar Wayburn, and Congressman Phillip Burton saved much migratory bird habitat when they pushed the United States to establish Point Reyes National Seashore and Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The restored marshes and riparian woodlands there are a revelation. But, considering the Bay’s international significance as a unique ecological system (UNESCO designated it a biosphere reserve in 1988), one might think that the world’s richest nation could do more.
Whatever the biological significance of Lincoln’s avian nations, it’s hard to get much sense of the Bay as more than a “stop on the flyway” from the National Fish and Wildlife Service refuges here. In the Central Valley refuges, the surrounding farmland’s open horizon gives a certain feeling of integrity, albeit a truncated one. The Bay Area’s refuges can seem like museums because the surrounding artificial environment is so pervasive.
When I visited San Pablo Bay one late spring day in 2014, the lone hiking trail to the marshes at Lower Tubbs Island led past huge hay fields and spoil banks for most of its length. At Tubbs Island, the trail became impassible because a stretch had collapsed into the marsh and the NFWS lacked the money to fix it. This being the off-season, waterbirds were scarce anyway, aside from a few mallards and egrets. As I walked out to where the trail had collapsed, a buzzing roar like a swarm of giant insects erupted from the north. Looking that way, I saw dark objects zipping up a hillside like giant bees scurrying around a hive. It was like a 1950s atomic mutant movie. Then I remembered— it was the Sears Point Raceway.
The South Bay around Don Edwards Refuge is more urbanized than San Pablo Bay, but its marshes seem less constricted because more public facilities exist. When I walked the trails around the visitor center a few days after my San Pablo hike, the warehouses, hotels, and technology parks to the east seemed to fade on the horizon, although they’d looked real enough as I drove in (albeit with surprising numbers of empty parking lots and FOR LEASE signs). I saw more birds than at San Pablo—shoveler ducks as well as mallards, gulls dipping into salt ponds, swallows nesting on an old hunting shack—but the only spectacular sight was a flock of white pelicans, and they weren’t flying over the refuge but over Coyote Hills Regional Park to the north.
A wildlife kiosk on one of the restored Don Edwards marshes referred tersely to the flyway concept: “On the west coast, most birds migrate between their summer and winter homes along a migration corridor known as the Pacific Flyway.” A kiosk on the impassible trailhead at the San Pablo Refuge reflected the concept’s present status more appositely. One panel had a block of biological boilerplate about the flyway superimposed on a color blowup of a black-necked stilt (the only one I saw that day). The type was illegibly sun-bleached—a fading screed of ornithological anachronism.
There would have been more birds if marshes and riparian woodlands, instead of hay fields and buildings, had stretched the horizons. When they did, the Bay must have been more than a way station for many shorebirds and waterfowl. There was a lot more water to produce food for them, and thus more nesting. The restored wetlands at Point Reyes support summering coots, grebes, rails, green herons, blue herons, bitterns, and wood ducks, as well as egrets and mallards.
If Frederick C. Lincoln had conceived his flyways in the sixteenth century instead of the twentieth, they might have been less elegantly tornado shaped.
Still, birds will keep coming if we let them. They are resourceful creatures, like the curlew flocks that forage many miles inland at Round Valley Regional Preserve near Brentwood each fall. In Mount Diablo’s rain shadow, the oak-dotted grassland there hardly seems the place for long-billed shorebirds, but curlews eat grasshoppers as well as marsh worms and snails. Or like a pair of mallards I saw at a tiny cattle pond for a few years.
The pond dried up in summer, so they went elsewhere then, but they were back in the winter and spring. During a wet year, they raised a brood. One day, after seeing the drake on the pond, I found the female leading a troop of ducklings in a creek on the other side of the ridge above it. The next spring was a dry one, and the pond hardly held water, but the mallards still came back. I saw them one day, huddled in a cattail patch as though wondering what to do next.
—2014
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