The Story
Salt Marsh Point protects 95 acres of coastal salt marsh at the mouth of Miller Creek, land that a marina development proposal targeted for a 200-slip expansion in the early 2010s. We began negotiating with the landowner in 2014 as that proposal worked through permitting, and closed the acquisition in 2017 after the developer’s permit application was denied on wetland-fill grounds — a rare case where regulatory review and a private acquisition offer reinforced each other rather than one substituting for the other.
The marsh is regionally significant shorebird staging habitat: our fall counts routinely document over 2,000 individual shorebirds — willets, marbled godwits, long-billed curlews, and western sandpipers among them — using the mudflats and marsh edge during migration. The endangered salt marsh harvest mouse, a species found nowhere outside San Francisco Bay-adjacent tidal marsh, was confirmed on-site in our 2019 small-mammal survey, the northernmost confirmed population in the regional monitoring network at the time.
A public boardwalk trail, built in 2018, lets visitors reach marsh-edge viewing platforms without disturbing the interior marsh where the harvest mouse population concentrates — one of the only preserves in our network with unrestricted public access, made possible specifically because the trail was engineered around, not through, the sensitive habitat.
