The Wildlife
The salt ponds provide a great habitat for lots of wildlife, especially birds. You'll find as many as one million squawking, cawing, peeping birds annually in the salt ponds along the San Francisco Bay.
These birds belong to 70 different species. Some live here year-round (they're called natives); others stop here for food and rest twice a year as they fly south in the winter and north in the summer on their migrations along the Pacific Flyway.
Discover drawings of some salt pond wildlife that you can print out and color.
At the bottom of the salt pond food chain are the algae and microorganisms that live in the salty water. These feed the tiny brine shrimp and brine flies that thrive by the billions in the salt ponds. Fish eat some of the brine shrimp; they're also a favorite food of hundreds of thousands of hungry birds.
In addition, birds also eat the fish and algae. In turn, some of those birds - dabbling ducks or spindly-legged avocets, for instance - are hunted by raptors such as peregrine falcons, hawks and golden eagles. There are mammal predators, too, such as foxes, which hunt along the levees that separate the ponds from each other.
Another important mammal is the tiny salt marsh harvest mouse, which lives in the tidal marshlands that are connected to the salt ponds. The salt marsh harvest mouse is an endangered species, and we work hard to protect its habitat and ensure that it has ample opportunity to live and feed comfortably along the Bay's edge.
Salt pond habitat makes up a significant portion of bird sanctuaries such as the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge - which shows that birds can live in a man-made environment, as they have adapted to the salt pond habitat over the past 150 years.
Kids' Page
