Основатель программы экопросвещения в Сан-Франциско отстояла гнездовье серых цапель и переименовала озеро в их честь

I met Nancy DeStefanis the way I imagine only San Francisco can deliver a person like Nancy DeStefanis. Last year, I was leaving Flower Piano in Golden Gate Park when I found myself behind a woman at the Botanical Garden exit gate. I gave the turnstile a little push to help her through. Next thing I knew, she asked me if I had a car and could drive her home. How could I say no? This is the power of Nancy. Besides, I’ve never regretted giving a stranger a ride. What followed was not a quick drop-off, but an hour-and-a-half conversation in her driveway with a passionate, opinionated, deeply charming Brooklyn-born force of nature. DeStefanis is the founder and director of San Francisco Nature Education, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. She started it, she later told me over pizza at Gaspare’s (one of her favorite neighborhood spots), “to get the public out into the parks looking at wild birds” — particularly the great blue herons that nest at Blue Heron Lake every year in Golden Gate Park. Like many good San Francisco love stories, hers began through serendipity. “I was walking around the lake, minding my own business, and I looked up, and I saw this humongous bird fly into a nest, and two gigantic chicks stood up,” she said. That was her first encounter with the great blue heron — and, as she tells it, the first nest in San Francisco’s history. “It was love at first sight,” she said. “These birds are so beautiful and so charismatic that I just fell in love with them, and I became obsessed with them.” Her description sounded less like science and more like courtship. “They’re four feet tall,” she said. “They have these beautiful blue and gray feathers, and a razor-sharp 8-inch beak that is bright orange during the breeding season.” The more she watched them, she said, the more she noticed “how elegant and how intricate their courtship rituals with their mates were.” DeStefanis told me the birds actually kiss each other with their beaks and gently comb each other’s feathers. Then there is the stick. The male brings the female a stick. She builds the nest. And after three sticks go in, they mate. “We say, ‘You get a lot for a stick at Blue Heron Lake,’” DeStefanis said. Ex // Top Stories The SF-based band launched its 12th album, ‘Mad Dog in the Fog,’ with a free concert in The City where the band got its start The City and California still boast higher-than-average vax rates, but the numbers have fallen in recent years A rift is growing as powerful women line up in dueling camps, choosing sides in the Chan-versus-Wiener contest for The City’s seat in the House of Representatives From there, she said, her fascination became a mission. Since 1993, she has tracked when the birds arrive, lay eggs and hatch chicks, and when the babies learn to fly. She also became their fierce advocate. When city officials wanted to conduct habitat restoration work on the nesting islands while the birds were present, DeStefanis intervened. “I actually read them the Riot Act,” she told me. “I said, look, these birds have started nesting. You will totally ruin the colony. They will not come back if you go over there.” Now, she works directly with Rec and Parks to make sure the timing is right. But her greatest legacy might be the humans she has brought to the birds. In 2000, she founded San Francisco Nature Education to bring children from underserved public schools into nature. She brought bones, beaks, nests and feathers into classrooms, then took students into Golden Gate Park on two-hour field trips every spring to see the herons and chicks, bringing binoculars, field journals and spotting scopes. Over 25 years, DeStefanis and her team have taken 25,000 San Francisco public-school children into nature. She created the popular Heron Watch program — every spring, volunteers staff spotting scopes and show the public the great blue herons and their chicks in their nests for free. One of her proudest victories was helping rename Stow Lake to Blue Heron Lake in 2024. When The City opened the renaming process, DeStefanis organized her community and campaigned for the birds. “We got hundreds of votes,” she said. “And everybody liked the name, because the birds are nesting there.” DeStefanis said she arrived in San Francisco from Brooklyn in 1970 after graduating from Hunter College with a degree in communications and filmmaking. She joined the farmworkers movement; worked for El Malcriado, the United Farm Workers union newspaper, at the union headquarters in the Tehachapi mountains; went to jail picketing Safeway in Delano; and eventually became a lawyer focused on social justice. She fought for homeless shelters and pushed PBS affiliates to diversify their public-affairs shows with women and people of color. DeStefanis has been organizing her whole life. The herons simply became one more cause worthy of her unbridled devotion. “If we want to save this environment, and control climate change, we’ve got to get the kids out in nature,” she said. “Because once they’ve been in nature, they want to take care of it. And they want to take care of the planet.” That feels like a love letter not just to birds, but to San Francisco itself: a city where one loud New Yorker can stumble upon a nest, fall in love and spend 25 years making sure the rest of us look up. Brian Rashid’s Love Letters to San Francisco tells the stories of the people who keep The City’s spirit alive.