Birds’ paradise a playground for outdoor adventurers
T he birds needed a voice, and Elsie B. Roemer stepped in, speaking up for the thousands of beautiful creatures that fed, nested and raised their young on a marshland at Crown Memorial State Beach in Alameda.
As one of the few remaining salt wetlands on the San Francisco Bay, the ecosystem was extremely valuable as a critical habitat for endangered species like the California clapper rail, plus crabs, fish and plants.
Yet by the 1970s, it was being eyed for development, hot on the tail of a 1950s project when the marshes and mudflats of southern Alameda were filled in to create pads for residential and commercial buildings.
For decades, Roemer, an Alameda resident since 1892, had studied the area and its avian residents, and she gently but firmly demanded the land be protected, finally convincing the East Bay Regional Park District to set aside the mashes as a sanctuary. In 1979, the project was named in her honor.
Today, the east end of the sanctuary is closed to the public during ongoing restoration work, but as visitors hike the beach, park and surrounding wetlands, they admire graceful snowy egrets, great blue herons, willets, American avocets, marbled godwits, brown pelicans, dowitchers, California gulls, Western sandpipers, greater yellowlegs, double-crested cormorants, song sparrows and marsh wrens. California clapper rails now happily strut their olive brown-cinnamon buff-white striped selves in this area that is nearly their exclusive habitat in the world.
It’s a remarkable transformation for a stretch of land that started out in the 1880s as the largest beach on the San Francisco Bay.
From 1917 to 1939, the plot on the southwestern edge was known as the Neptune Beach amusement park. Known as the “Coney Island of the West,” the park hosted bathing beauty contests, concerts, hot air balloon voyages, carnival rides, prizefights and other gaiety.
While there are still plenty of recreational diversions to be enjoyed here, the focus is now on the ecosystem, including Crab Cove, established at the park’s north end as a marine reserve protecting plant and animal life, plus dedicated efforts toward sustainable upkeep.
Operated by the Park District under a cooperative agreement with the state of California and the city of Alameda, Crown Beach underwent a $5.7 million restoration in 2013, with 82,600 cubic yards of sand laid in to fix natural erosion on sections of the partially man-made 2.5-mile beach and its dunes. It was a fix to an earlier prop-up of the engineered beach done in the 1980s, using a heavy-grained sand from Bay Area mining operations. At the same time, rock barricades were built to help protect the wildlife sanctuaries.
PLAYGROUND FOR OUTDOOR ENTHUSIASTS
Abutting the baseball and soccer fields, basketball and tennis courts of adjacent Washington Park, the property now boasts one of the area’s richest playgrounds for windsurfers, kite boarders, fishing, kayaking, and swimming yearround. Naturalist-guided tours explore the nooks and crannies, picnickers sprawl on the lawns with their leashed dogs, bikers traverse the beachfront trails, and each June, crowds converge to celebrate the annual Sand Castle and Sand Sculpture Contest, held in front of the bathhouse on a low-tide Saturday morning.
This 4th of July, the Crab Cove Visitor Center will host its 35th anniversary with free, familyfriendly activities throughout the day, followed through the summer with musical concerts plus events exploring “Butterflies and Bugs,” “Seaweed Science” and discoveries of pond dwellers like bird life, turtles and dragonflies.
Through all the restoration efforts, Crown Beach is now the most heavily used swimming beach in the San Francisco Bay. And it’s not just tourists that find the island destination fascinating.
“Crown Memorial should be a whole day’s adventure in its own, since there is so much to explore,” said Michael Schiess, who founded the Pacific Pinball Museum more than a decade ago on Webster Street in downtown. “But if time is limited, a trip to the Crab Cove Visitors center will give you a quick, rich historical background about Neptune Beach and some of the natural science of Alameda’s waterways and wetlands.”
For Kate Pryor, an Alameda native who owns the landmark 74- year-old Tucker’s Super Creamed Ice Cream on Park Street, the beach is one of the highlights of what she calls “this very special small town surrounded by water.”
She often visits, and brings visitors, to enjoy “great water sports, marinas, youth sailing programs, soccer, baseball, and softball for all ages.”
On any given day, the beach hums with happy activity, as locals stroll the sandy shoreline and dip their toes in the gentle waves.
The park’s paved trail runs parallel to Shoreline Drive, and bustles with dog walkers, parents pushing strollers, and cyclists accompanied by the occasional honking geese that call the area home. Dunes ripple with buckwheat, fuchsia, gum plant, sages, rockrose, primrose, and deep purple California lilac shrubs, dotted with squirrel burrows.
Toward the end of the path, visitors can pause on an elevated overlook, peeking into the marsh, with more views sweeping across the water to San Francisco and San Bruno Mountain.
The birds that Roemer so loved nestle in the aquatic grasses, feed, and raise their young.
For them, this is now their own personal amusement park, a Neptune Beach designed for wildlife.