Marin Headlands

The weather from November through February in the Headlands is dominated by periodic rainstorms that blow in from the Pacific, often originating in the Gulf of Alaska, and give the area the majority of its rainfall for the year.

Each autumn, from August into December, tens of thousands of hawks, kites, falcons, eagles, vultures, osprey, and harriers are funneled by the peninsular shape of Marin County into the headlands.

Volunteers with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory count and track this fall migration using bird-banding and radio-tracking techniques, all in cooperation with the National Park Service.

The Marin Headlands are also home to black tail deer, mountain lions, bobcats, two types of foxes, coyotes, wild turkeys, hares, rabbits, raccoons, and skunks.

Large numbers of water birds also migrate through the Headlands, including brown pelicans from May through October; and grebes, egrets, and great blue herons in the spring, summer, and fall.

In the waters surrounding the Headlands, harbor seals can be found year-round, gray whales can be seen in the spring and fall, and seabirds such as common murres and surf scoters swim within sight of shore.

When Richard Henry Dana Jr. visited San Francisco Bay in 1835 he wrote about vast elk (Cervus canadensis) herds on the Marin Headlands on December 27: "...we came to anchor near the mouth of the bay, under a high and beautifully sloping hill, upon which herds of hundreds and hundreds of red deer [note: "red deer" is the European term for "elk"], and the stag, with his high branching antlers, were bounding about..."[3] The Marin Headlands are underlain by geological formations created by the accretion of oceanic sediments from the Pacific Plate onto the North American Plate.

[4] The primary rock types of the Marin Headlands include graywacke sandstone, radiolarian chert, serpentinite, pillow basalts, and shale.

[5] The erosion of the hillsides and construction activities during the military era have exposed some dramatic examples of these rock types for easy viewing, and the folding caused by tectonic action is visually evident in many places throughout the Headlands.

[citation needed] In the 18th century, Spanish and Mexican ranchers occupied the Headlands, eventually giving way to Portuguese immigrant dairy farmers (often from the Azores) during the American period following the U.S. acquisition of California in the Mexican–American War.

The development was to house 30,000 people in 50 apartment towers, vast tracts of single-family homes, a shopping center, and a hotel along the Headlands' pristine shoreline and hills.

The thousands of acres that would have been developed were sold to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, allowing the open space to stay intact as a park.

One of the most common photographs[citation needed] of San Francisco is the view of the city from the Headlands with the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge just reaching out of the fog.

A short distance further on the right, in a grove of Monterey pines, is a bench from which it is possible to view the Golden Gate, ship traffic passing beneath the bridge, and the city just beyond.