Shoreline Park (Mountain View, California)

However, the cost of importing earth to raise it by 20 feet (6.1 m) in order to prevent flooding was too high, so it was instead operated as a landfill accepting garbage from San Francisco.

Meadowlands near the mouth of Permanente Creek in Shoreline Park provide critical remnant habitat for western burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia), a bird that has vanished from many counties in the Bay Area.

In 2008, City of Mountain View evicted a pair of burrowing owls so that it could sell a parcel of land to Google to build a hotel at Shoreline Boulevard and Charleston Road.

Development continued to encroach on the owls' habitat when, in 2010, the City of Mountain View approved Google's plan to build a 6.9-acre (2.8 ha) recreational park for its employees, so that they can play tennis, disc golf, shuffleboard and other activities on Google property that is part of the owls' foraging area.

[5] Although there were hundreds of burrowing owls in Santa Clara County when monitoring began in the 1980s, now there are only 35, with three breeding pairs raising ten eggs at Shoreline in 2011 (less than half the number of young in 2003).