Hunters Pt. - March 25, 2012

Walking Distance: 2 miles (estimate)
Walking Time: 1 hour, 6 min. (9:49 - 10:55 a.m.)
Start and End Point: Street parking space on Jennings Street, (Hunters Point), San Francisco, CA

It was a beautiful, but gray morning. The rain had cleared up in time for this walk. Due to construction, I couldn't park near the Heron's Head Park EcoCenter entrance, but close enough -- I found street parking on Jennings St., and then walked up a short sidewalk that was hemmed in by a fence and a long row of sandbags on one side to get to the Park.

The EcoCenter looks more complete than when I passed by here almost two years ago. It was ecologically designed to capture rain water runoff. However, parts of the trail leading out to the Bay were blocked off, and the trail may have been closed altogether. No one was around that I could ask. I walked out to the end of Heron's Head point and back. I'm enclosing an aerial shot of this point from Google Maps. It's not hard to see how this park, extending into the Bay between Lash Lighter and India Basins, got its name.

I then cut over to the packed dirt/sand trail that dead-ended in a fence -- the site of a former power plant site that was being remediated. (De-polluted?)

If this sounds a bit gritty, it was not that bad. I turned around at the fence, and walked back to a bridge that crossed over the channel and walked south to Whale Tail park. I call it that because of the whale's tail that was incorporated into the design of the playground. I followed the trail to its end (a tiny asphalt cul-de-sac with a faded red/pink anchor symbol painted on it, and I turned around to head back the way I came.

On the way back to the car, I walked across the street to the intersection of Jennings St. and Cargo Way, to visit "Bay Natives" -- a nursery specializing in native plants. I bought a few for my upcoming "Walking the Bay" photo exhibit. I may not be able to invite any shorebirds to attend, but plants have no choice; they sit where I haul them -- in this case to Canessa Gallery in San Francisco, for the month of April.


And now, I will proceed to add too much text, just so I can get the large number of pictures I took to load and fit properly on this page. Ever since Google "upgraded" blogger a few years back so that it could accommodate fancier HTML schemas, arranging pictures within a post became somewhat of a nightmare. I'm delighted to have a blogger-based site, but I wish they'd fix this issue.

Wildlife Sightings:
31 ducks; 2 Canada geese; 46 sea gulls; 15 coots; 6 little brown jobs + 8 finches; 3 killdeer; 8 unidentified brownish shorebirds (3 medium, 5 smaller size); 1 Western/Clarks grebe; 1 American avocet; 3 black-necked stilts; 1 snowy egret; 9 cormorants; sound of a clapper rail; 3 pigeons; 1 mockingbird; 2 crows; 2 snails; a few characters.