We all are
even the children.
They see what fills their
questionnaires:
egrets, tides, marshland, mud.
Hard by, commuters pay their tolls
then bridge the Pacific Flyway undistracted.
The students run the old salt pond levy,
embody bird migrations,
human predations on the Bay,
habitats lost,
the tenuous hope of promised restorations.
Behind us rots
a shack built by European men
to hide in overnight,
whose single shot,
come dawn,
could lift ten thousand pair
of migrant Scoter,
Bufflehead,
Merganser,
Scaup.
Across the slough
two homebody mallards swill saline
unremarked,
their nonchalance deceptive, surely.
In neighboring ponds this designated
refuge accommodates yet-extant hides.
And the season still
has two cold months to run.
(Written on the occasion of a third grade field trip to the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.)