text: But the empty eight-lane boulevards are deserted, as are the newly constructed business and residential neighborhoods of Lingang Port City. But, in ways big and small, Dishui Lake and its neighboring bird sanctuary also represent the big strides that Shanghai, China’s largest city, has taken to leverage natural landscapes and to clean up its freshwater resources, thereby enhancing the metropolitan region’s impressive prosperity and building a healthier quality of urban life.
  This is especially true, explains Yong Yi — a 33-year-old environmental scientist and the senior program officer for the Shanghai office of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund) — for a low-lying coastal city in an era of warming temperatures, rising seas, and more violent storms.
  In 2003, during the construction of Dishui Lake, which was formed from sediments and was connected to the East China Sea, a baby blue whale swam into one area of the reclamation project and got stranded. Construction workers guided the 10-foot baby whale back to the sea and reported that as it swam away it rose out of the water three times, as if to say thank you. A steel monument in the shape of a baby blue whale commemorates the event.
  Yong was part of a group of environmental leaders and city officials who helped establish the sanctuary in 2007. The area, she says, has a certain magical attraction for people in an urban center, where big natural spaces are scarce.
  Very clearly the rain-fed sanctuary is achieving much of what Yong and her colleagues anticipated. It is attracting so many birds that 11 conservation officers are needed — most of whom spend the bulk of their time preventing poaching.
  In 2003, as both the manmade marsh and Dishui Lake emerged from the coastal mudflats, bounded by the East China Sea, a 3-meter (10-foot) baby blue whale drifted into the construction site and was stranded. Construction workers discovered the stray and coaxed it back to the sea.
  As it swam away, workers reported that the whale lifted from the water three times, as if to say, “Thanks.” The Chinese interpreted this behavior as a good omen for the new area’s success.
  Qing Wang, a conservation officer in the Nanhui Dongtan Wildlife Sanctuary since 2008, tells how he and his colleagues sometimes spend winter nights hiding in the marsh grass to catch poachers. On one particularly grim day in September 2009, conservation officers discovered illegal hunting had netted 3,000 small birds, which were destined to be sold for food. A poster showing those 3,000 birds — lined up in a room, in neat rows — now hangs on the wall of a sanctuary building as a reminder.
  Early on this still and overcast September morning, Wang frowns, pointing at the poster on the wall, and makes it clear that the event from two years ago hurt him.
  Over his shoulder and through the doorway, the heavy equipment of Shanghai’s emergence as a global capital is readily event. Big jumbo jets coast north on the landing flight path to Pudong Airport, the city’s international gateway. Ocean-going ships make their way upstream to Shanghai’s docks. The tops of Lingang Port City’s tallest buildings, where city officials say they want to install green roofs, are visible.
  Yong peers into the dark water of one of the sanctuary’s shallow ponds. In the distance, about two kilometers (one mile) to the west, the tops of the buildings around Dishui Lake are visible. A flock of ducks, the vanguard of the thousands that will begin their winter layover next month, pass by overhead. In front of Yong rest the unrippled, gray-metal waters of the East China Sea, held back by a big concrete and earthen dike.
  “You can see the city. You can see the sea,” Yong says. “Here are wetlands, nature, birds, fish — people and nature can live together — that’s what you see when you come here. Shanghai is an estuary city. These are the kinds of places the city must see as valuable to protect itself.”