Osprey Drive Gets Busy for a Few Weekend Hours. Bodega Harbour's Counts Show Which Ones.

At about 12:30 p.m. on Labor Day Monday, a traffic consultant walked Osprey Drive near the Shorttail Gulch Trailhead and counted 36 cars parked along the street. He estimated that at least as many legal spaces were still open, and he saw no illegal parking.

That was one quick look on one afternoon. The study the Bodega Harbour Homeowners Association published in October treats it the same way. Still, it fits the larger set of numbers in that report. After nearly a year of public access to the Estero Americano Coast Preserve, the counts show that Osprey Drive is not congested all the time. It is a dead-end residential street whose traffic peaks for a few hours around midday on the busiest weekends. The association's new engineering study maps five ways to move trailhead parking off the street and onto preserve land.

The Week on Osprey, by the Numbers

The association counted vehicles on Osprey Drive, just east of Mockingbird Drive, from August 28 through September 15, 2026. Over those 18 full days, daily movements ran from 210 to 526. A movement is one pass by the counter in either direction.

Weekdays stayed in a narrow band, from 210 on Monday, September 14 to 347 on Thursday, September 10. Weekends moved around much more. The Sunday after Labor Day logged 276 movements, fewer than four weekdays in the same study. Labor Day weekend itself was the clear high point.

Most of the traffic came in a short window. On Saturday, September 5, the counter logged 68 movements in the noon hour, about one every 53 seconds. On Sunday, it logged 70 in both the 11 a.m. and noon hours, about one every 51 seconds. Over the four days when both counters were running, vehicle traffic on Osprey and foot traffic at Shorttail Gulch rose and fell together hour by hour, with a reported correlation of 0.86.

Speeding was not the issue. Cars averaged about 18 mph, and the 85th-percentile speed was 21 to 22 mph. The report says the planning issue is cars and people on foot sharing the same residential road during the busiest recreational periods. That points toward where visitor cars get parked, not toward traffic calming.

The study also lists what it cannot show. The counters can't tell which cars belonged to preserve visitors, how long cars stayed parked, or how many visitors will come in the future. Pedestrian passages are not the same as unique visitors. On that Saturday, the 566 passages split almost evenly, 288 one way and 278 the other, which fits people walking out and back.

How a Dead-End Street Became the Front Door

Osprey Drive ended up as the way into the preserve because of an easement older than most of the homes around it. According to a 2024 California Coastal Commission staff report, public access through Shorttail Gulch dates to a 1973 dedication and a June 1, 1977 settlement with the California Coastal Zone Conservation Commission. That settlement created the public trails and beach access that Sonoma County Regional Parks manages today. In December 2015, Sonoma Land Trust finished buying the 547-acre Estero Ranch through a public-private partnership and transferred it to The Wildlands Conservancy.

The Press Democrat reported that limited access ran three days a week for four months before the preserve fully opened in November 2025. Media attention in January brought crowds, and the paper counted nearly 1,200 visitors on one sunny Sunday that month. The preserve has no parking lot of its own, so those visitors parked on Osprey Drive and the narrow streets nearby. NorCal Public Media reported that Supervisor Lynda Hopkins put one peak day at more than 1,700 visitors.

On March 10, 2026, the Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution making one side of several streets no-parking:

• The west side of Osprey Drive, between Sea Eagle Loop and Oyster Catcher Loop
• The west side of Mockingbird Drive, between Heron Drive and Osprey Drive
• A section on the southeast side of Heron Drive
• The inner curb of Oyster Catcher Loop

Sonoma County Public Infrastructure worked with the Sonoma County Fire District on the recommendation, to keep room for fire engines and ambulances where overflow parking happens. By early April, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that dozens of no-parking posts were up. The Wildlands Conservancy told the paper the early surge had settled into "a more manageable drumbeat of visitors."

The September counts were taken with those restrictions already in place. The report notes that the red curbs protect emergency access but add no visitor parking, so they don't answer the longer-term question of where visitor cars should go.

Five Routes to Estero Ranch Road

At the Bodega Bay town hall on February 25, association president Tracy Amiral presented a framework called "A Community in Alignment." Bodega Harbour resident Jeff Burke played a leading role in building it. According to the Press Democrat, it concluded that all the groups involved were pointing toward "designated preserve-site parking that moves visitors off residential streets and into purpose-built infrastructure." Other ideas were also on the table. The paper reported that three proposals had visitors parking outside the preserve and hiking in, and Hopkins suggested a shuttle from a remote staging area.

"We're ready to help build the solution, not just describe the problem," Amiral said at the meeting, as reported by the Press Democrat.

The association's feasibility study turns the preserve-parking idea into routes on a map. Santa Rosa engineering firm Adobe Associates dated it September 30, 2026. The study lays out five possible 20-foot-wide roads that would start at Mockingbird or Osprey Drive and cross the Wildlands Conservancy parcel toward Estero Ranch Road, which is now unpaved. Each road ends at one of four possible parking areas.

1. Mockingbird Drive to Lot 1. At 300 feet, this is the shortest road. It leads to a 26,000-square-foot lot, the one closest to the community, next to a mapped wetland setback.
2. Mockingbird Drive to Lot 2. This 550-foot road uses part of an existing golf course road and ends at a 23,000-square-foot lot.
3. Mockingbird Drive to Lot 3. This 1,150-foot road leads to a shared 20,000-square-foot lot to the east, also near a wetland setback.
4. Osprey Drive to Lot 3. At 950 feet, this road reaches the same lot from Osprey. Its entrance would sit in front of an existing home, and its 16% maximum grade is the steepest of the five.
5. Mockingbird Drive to Lot 4. At 2,850 feet, this road is the longest. It would cross the riparian corridor and two eroding drainages and would require 36,650 cubic yards of cut. The next-largest cut among the options is 2,560 cubic yards.

The engineers found that Options 1 through 4 look physically achievable at a planning level. Option 5 faces significant grading problems. The study approves nothing. Before any option can move forward, it would need a survey, geotechnical work, wetland and cultural resource studies, drainage design, and agency review. The site is in the California Coastal Zone. Hopkins told the Press Democrat that a parking lot inside the preserve would need a Coastal Commission development permit and called it "a multi-month, if not a multi-year process."

For now, the association's Estero Collaborative Workgroup is in charge of this work. Its FY 2026-27 committee list names Amiral as chair and board liaison.

Walking It on a Weekday

The same counts that matter to the workgroup also show when the preserve is quietest. On weekdays in the study, Osprey traffic stayed between 210 and 347 movements a day, well below the 524 to 526 of the Labor Day weekend peak. Bay Nature's guide gives the same advice, noting that the preserve has been crowded on weekends since it opened and suggesting a weekday visit.

The Wildlands Conservancy's preserve page lists the preserve as free and open daily from sunrise to sunset. Visitors enter through a pedestrian gate off the Shorttail Gulch Trailhead at 20345 Osprey Drive. Leashed dogs are allowed. Bikes, e-bikes, fires, alcohol and smoking are not. The preserve has restrooms but no drinking water, so bring your own.

From the trailhead, Bay Nature describes three connected trails:

• Access Trail: 0.9 miles from Shorttail Gulch to the two longer trails
• Ridge Trail: 1.9 miles, moderate, climbing to a 600-foot crest with views from Valley Ford to Point Reyes
• Bluff Trail: 1.6 miles, dropping to the beach at the mouth of the estero, where black oystercatchers and whimbrels feed

Winter changes the walk. When the estero breaks through to the ocean, the beach gets much smaller and the tide moves very fast in both directions. Luke Farmer, the conservancy's Sonoma Coast regional director, describes daily public access to the estero as the first of its kind. Before the preserve opened, people could reach that beach only at low tide, by way of the Shorttail Gulch or Pinnacle Gulch trails. The conservancy lists whale watching among the preserve's activities.

Thanksgiving weekend arrives at the end of the month. Over Labor Day, the counter's busiest hours ran from late morning through early afternoon. An early start on a weekday is the quietest way to walk from Osprey Drive out to the Ridge Trail.

Questions about how the trailhead and these parking options might affect a home on Osprey, Mockingbird or the loops around them often come up for Bodega Harbour owners and buyers. Kris Lepore follows the Estero Collaborative Workgroup's progress and is happy to talk through what it means for a specific street. Let's Connect.