Park
Blue Heron Lake
John F Kennedy Dr & Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA
Willow-fringed lake ringed by a walking path, surrounding a wooded island where great blue herons nest each spring.
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.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.