The council supported creating a land-use master plan for the county's shorelands. Once the plan was in place, the nine Davis cities that adjoin the Great Salt Lake each had a specific role in carrying it out through zoning and community planning.

The county plan includes existing preserves and calls for farmland to stay zoned that way. Any development on available land should only extend to a flood line established by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the plan states. Rural cluster housing, which groups homes together on smaller lots, should be used on any developable land.

The county has three preserves and two duck clubs along the shoreline. In North Salt Lake, Woods Cross and West Bountiful, the Legacy Nature Preserve and the New State Duck Club make up a significant portion of the wetlands.

Moving north, Centerville and Farmington are the home of the Farmington Bay Waterfowl Management Area, owned by the state's Division of Wildlife Resources. The bay area is an 18,000-acre system of dikes, ponds and diverse habitat, said manager Rich Hansen.

From Farmington to Syracuse, the plan calls for agricultural land to be maintained as a buffer between wetlands and any development. And much of the shoreline in Kaysville and Layton is already protected by The Nature Conservancy.

West Point, the northernmost Davis city along the Great Salt Lake, has zoned land near the shoreline as agricultural or recreational. The Bayview Duck Club, which owns about 220 acres in West Point, takes care of some of that recreational land.

The plan is not a panacea. Some factors are decidedly out of the plan's scope. For example, the nine cities along the lake signed onto the plan and have already rezoned some of the land, but if they don't rezone the rest of it quickly enough, developers could build farther west.

Lush habitat

In 1983, The Nature Conservancy had begun buying land west of Kaysville, Layton and Syracuse with the aim of creating a wetlands preserve. The conservancy's 5,000-acre preserve opened to the public in 2003.

The one-mile walk around the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, maintained by the conservancy, is an experience for all of your senses minus one, because there's not much to taste unless you're a bird.

For the feathered types, there are insects and all sorts of plant life. But the shorelands in the western part of Layton feed humans' other four senses.

On approach, the grinding sound of the dirt road transforms itself into the soft clomp of human feet on the boardwalk. Some birds twitter while others warble or cackle. The preserve smells alive, though both life and death are happening in a constant cycle.