A restored artificial beach can host diverse shorebirds beside an active port
Evidence
In that modest stretch of mud between the hard edge of the port and an old ferry anchorage were a series of small, moving things. Upon a closer look through my binoculars, those things were avocets, sanderlings, willets, greater yellowlegs, snowy egrets, great egrets, adult and juvenile, western gulls, marbled godwits, least sandpipers, and curlews. Farther out on the rocks were black oystercatchers, cormorants, great blue herons, and even the endangered California least terns, a population actively supported by volunteers in Hayward. Some of these birds you might find at Elkhorn Slough—but this was an active shipping port, not (officially) a wildlife refuge. In other words, the beach wasn’t so much a holdover from the past as a hopeful artifice, an invitation to the birds to return. And return they did. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 679
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- ADDENDUM: This hopeful artificial habitat parallels the living-root-bridge and tamarisk trees in ‘Grafting & Growth’ — built infrastructure intentionally supporting life rather than just resisting it.
- XREF: Concrete instance of manifest dismantling actually working — a made ecosystem, not a holdover.