No salary. No pension. No $400,000 nonprofit grant to study its "lived experience." Just a bird, doing bird things, at a lake that was literally named for birds like it. Sometimes the system works.

Golden Gate Park remains one of the genuinely great public goods this city has ever produced — 1,017 acres of green space that costs taxpayers a fraction per square foot of what we spend on, say, a single supervised injection site. The park's wildlife — herons, hawks, coyotes, the occasional bewildered raccoon — is a reminder that when government builds something well and mostly stays out of the way, nature (and people) tend to show up.

The night heron sighting is a small thing, sure. But it's worth pausing on what makes moments like these possible: decades of residents who actually cared about preserving open space. As one SF local put it, "I'm so glad the people of yesteryear fought tooth and nail to shape the city what it is today." That's real civic pride — the kind that doesn't require a consulting firm or a blue-ribbon task force.

Another resident reminded us that people routinely overlook the "six redwood forests we have on the peninsula" — a fair point. San Francisco sits on an embarrassment of natural riches, and most of them didn't require a $4 billion bond measure to exist.

Here's the takeaway: Golden Gate Park works because it was built with intention, maintained with relative discipline, and left alone enough to let wild things thrive. If only City Hall could apply that same philosophy to housing permits, small business licensing, or literally anything else.

Next time you're doom-scrolling budget reports and Board of Supervisors transcripts, do yourself a favor. Walk to Blue Heron Lake. Watch a heron stand perfectly still for twenty minutes. It's free, it's peaceful, and nobody's asking you to fill out a survey about equity afterwards.