A working shipping port hosted a rich population of endangered and migrating birds

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

• ADDENDUM: The reclaimed industrial shore hosting wildlife connects to the trees-as-infrastructure article’s theme of living systems recruiting degraded human sites.