By Jimmy Tobias, Bay Nature
Marching north along Ocean Beach on the San Francisco coast, Dan Murphy stops and points his binoculars at a clutch of birds that look like cotton balls with beaks.
“There they are,” says Murphy, a veteran bird watcher and volunteer with the Golden Gate Audubon Society. “It’s a scarce flock.”
Four western snowy plovers, small shorebirds listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, trot back and forth across the sand. They leave trails of three-pronged footprints in the wave-swept terrain on this cool September morning. Coastal dunes, like the ones at Ocean Beach, are the birds’ preferred habitat. A handful of the estimated 2,500 breeding adults left on the United States’ Pacific Coast spend the winter here each year.
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