Shifting Sands - Sand Dunes

The panel's unintended consequence has a bird attached. European beachgrass, planted from the late 1800s and through the 1930s to keep sand off roads and rails, built steep foredunes and covered the open, sparsely vegetated sand where western snowy plovers nest. By the early 1990s Oregon's plovers were down to about 28 birds, and the species was listed as threatened. Since the mid-1990s the Forest Service has torn the grass out in patches, and a recent project south of Florence aimed to give plovers continuous nesting beach at the Siltcoos for the first time in sixty years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shore Acres State Park — 7.4 mi
  A timber family's clifftop estate whose mansion burned three months after its mistress died, whose larger replacement the state could not keep, and whose gardens it did.
• Bandon — 20 mi
  A town at the mouth of the Coquille built near the site of an 1854 massacre, named for a town in Ireland, and burned in 1936 by the Irish gorse its founder planted.

More markers nearby

• Coos Bay - Explore More — steps away
• The Coos People — steps away
• The Hollering Place — steps away
• Southern Oregon Coast Region — 3.7 mi