Behold, the annual retrospective!
Here is the best from Bay Nature’s newsroom this year: the stories that delighted us, enraged us, got us outside, got us thinking. Great writing, short or long. Stories capturing the tumult of our time—and ones that looked decidedly elsewhere (in a hole, under a tule mat, on the water).
Real talk about restoration
Often we write about our region’s special natural places at inflection points—moments when there is a chance to create a better future. Stories about a sinking Highway 37, an invasive-infested Lake Tahoe, a post-cattle Point Reyes, and especially the post-Dixie-Fire Plumas National Forest fall into that category. These are often the stories we labor over the longest. “Unburned,” our Plumas investigation, began in 2023, and we reported it largely without the help of the U.S. Forest Service thanks to dozens of sources.
Now and then we get to tell a yarn about a great success, like Alameda Creek’s liberation—three decades in the making.
And sometimes we are just asking the simple question of why on earth it took nine years to clean up one little shipwreck.
Nature, wow
A classic Bay Nature subgenre is the “overlooked nature thing that is wildly fascinating,” which I think of as the “nature, wow” stories. Some of the best writing lives here—Ken-Ichi Ueda’s erudite and funny piece on summer blooms, H.R. Smith’s tale of a physicist out of his lane on spider stuff, Sonya Bennett-Brandt’s very serious investigation of the grebe mysteries, and Eric Simon’s bizarro journey from under the docks into pharma research.
A new sub-subgenre of nature-wow stories in 2025 is: “Animals that gave birth under our very eyes.” Photographer Jacob Saffarian collected jumping spiders to photograph, caring for them for weeks. Two of the spiders swaddled themselves in silk and laid some eggs. Saffarian spent hours waiting for the right moments to photograph them at key developmental stages.
A world in turmoil
It was a strange, hectic year to be an environmental journalist, as we all scrambled to cover President Trump’s second term. With such a tiny newsroom, we focused our efforts: on tangible impacts, contextualizing the news, and pointing to solutions.
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And sometimes the news is good!
‘Flittest’ is also the best headline, right? (Send screeds to pun-ishment@baynature.org—just kidding!)
Nature stories that are people stories
Here, we offer a piece by Vincent Medina on the making of the first-ever Ohlone planetarium show. It’s meant “to teach that the East Bay is an ancient place and that the Ohlone people have always been right here in our beloved, gorgeous homeland.” We have two stories from our “It Gets Me Out” series, which is about seeing nature from the perspective of people who work outside, and an article on a remarkable collaboration between Indigenous ecological practitioners and ecologists. Reporter Tanvi Dutta Gupta calls it “a fun, intimate look at slime and also a lovely human story!”
Finally, “Home Lands” features profiles of immigrant gardeners. Explore editor Kathleen Richards says this: “It reminded me how creative, resourceful, and resilient people are; how plants root us to a place and a sense of home; and how healing being in touch with nature can be, both physically and mentally.”
The most fervent letters
We knew what we were getting into when we published Endria Richardson’s piece on community cats—people have strong feelings about cats and birds! Fortunately, this Human Animal column inspired a very thoughtful response. More civil disagreements in 2026, please!
Stories that got us out of the house
Finally, but not least, while we beefed up our events program this year, we also assigned more stories about getting outside. Our Summer 2025 magazine was dubbed the Explore Issue. It featured a new column about swimming in the Bay that will continue for a full year (including winter—brr!), and 25 trail stories from Bay Nature’s first quarter-century. Publisher and executive director Wes Radez says the trails package was his favorite from the year. “It inspires the sense that whatever we’re seeking in nature—adventure, transcendence, beauty, solitude, spirituality—lies just around the next bend in the trail,” he says.
