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January 10, 2011 by Bay Nature Staff
Butterflies fluttering through the Mission, mice nibbling their way down Sansome, pelicans gliding up Geary. Starting today and tomorrow, four MUNI buses will make a splash with Endangered Species, an art project that has redesigned buses with photographic murals of endangered or threatened species who live around San Francisco.
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December 23, 2010 by Bay Nature Staff
Reptile expert Robert Stebbins calls the San Francisco garter snake “one of the most beautiful serpents in North America.” The snake’s dazzling patterns of color serve as camouflage in its native habitat: the open marshes, stream banks, grasslands, and vernal pools of the San Francisco Peninsula. But the best camouflage is little help if your home territory gets built over.
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December 23, 2010 by Bay Nature Staff
Though California brown pelicans are the smallest of all pelicans, they are still very impressive birds, with wingspans occasionally as big as eight feet. Nearly driven to extinction by DDT, they’ve made a comeback but are now threatened by mysterious harmful algae blooms.
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December 23, 2010 by Bay Nature Staff
Along the coast of Northern California, nearly every stream and creek once had its own migratory population of coho salmon. Their return each winter, once as reliable as the next train or bus, now happens in fewer and fewer places each year. Where the fish do return, it’s often thanks to dedicated volunteers working to keep creeks healthy enough for our region’s most charismatic nomads.
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December 23, 2010 by Bay Nature Staff
If you’re lucky some spring day in a few small patches of land near San Francisco, you may catch the glint of a male mission blue butterfly’s iridescent wings. If you are so fortunate, thank the determined conservationists who’ve been working to protect a small butterfly from big threats.
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December 23, 2010 by Bay Nature Staff
Imagine a time when buses and streetcars and trains are everywhere in San Francisco, when everyone takes transit and almost no one owns a private car. This was close to reality just 70 years ago. Since then the urban ecosystem has changed, and buses were outcompeted by private cars. Today, though, that urban ecosystem might be changing again.
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December 23, 2010 by Bay Nature Staff
Every once in a while, a small and unremarkable animal makes a huge impact on a landscape. So it is with the salt marsh harvest mouse around the edges of the San Francisco Bay. The endangered species status of the harvest mouse, along with that of the California clapper rail, has been a prime mover in the restoration of thousands of acres of tidal marshes around the region.
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