"All the early-morning pickleweed planting, all the garbage bags full of fast-food wrappers, and all the endless volunteer hours have finally paid off: San Francisco's gritty southeastern waterfront is so clean a family of rare raptors has moved in and set up house. A pair of osprey, a species never before reported in San Francisco, has built a nest atop a 150-foot crane at Pier 80. While cement trucks and America's Cup workers rumble along the shoreline, the striking black-and-white birds with 6-foot wingspans swoop and dive across the water, snagging fish for their growing family. "If there's any symbol of the health of our water, it's an osprey," said Allen Fish, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory. "The fact they've chosen a place as dinged as the piers in Bayview-Hunters Point is a great, uplifting ecological story." The birds were first spotted six weeks ago by Noreen Weeden, conservation manager at the Golden Gate Audubon Society, when she was at the adjacent Pier 94 working on a wetland clean-up project. "I saw something large, and it was picking up something large," she said. "I thought, 'My god. It's an osprey.' "" - Anne Bouey from Bookmarklet