Current Mouth of Temescal Creek Ecology

What once would have seemed a wide, beautiful creek has been shaped, forced underground, routed through tunnels and become a route for run off. Despite stormwater pollution caused by cement and pavement surfaces, efforts to fill the bay with garbage and other human developments, and the eradication of species through mining and overhunting, one can still see a variety of species at the current mouth of Temescal Creek. The creek now enters the San Francisco Bay through a piped culvert on the west side of Highway 580/80. Huge varieties of migrating shorebirds still migrate through on the Pacific Flyway. Beaver were hunted out and salmon eradicated when the creeks were first turned into open sewers and later buried for the same reason. The mouth of the creek tour will lead you through many of the shoreline species still present.