Blue Heron Lake
Willow-fringed lake ringed by a walking path, surrounding a wooded island where great blue herons nest each spring.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Blue Heron Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park follows a mismatch between a name and a landscape: the water was long called Stow Lake, after a nineteenth-century assemblyman with a troubling record, while the wooded island at its center quietly hosted nesting great blue herons that a lawyer named Nancy DeStefanis started watching in 1993. It traces her two decades of Saturday mornings training teenage volunteers and teaching schoolchildren to read the water, and the question of whose name the lake should really carry.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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