Explore 20 miles of new trails and over 2,800 acres of serene hills and woodlands, now added to the East Bay’s Pleasanton Ridge Regional Park.
Wildflower Lands Now Open in the East Bay Hills
March 22, 2023 •
You searched for the flying pansy
Butterflies are More than Party Favors
July 23, 2019 •
I once spit my dinner across a room. I was watching the local news in the fall of 2008, and the story showed the opening day of the new California Academy of Sciences building. My brains left my body as … Read more
Journal of A Robberfly in Mexico
June 12, 2019 •
Bay Area lepidopterist Liam O’Brien spent the 2019 City Nature Challenge surveying the biodiversity of Mazatlan at the invitation of Mexican naturalists.
In the Shadow of the Xerces Blue
March 14, 2019 •
San Francisco tries to change the conditions that once made it famous for butterfly extinction
Sex and the Single Butterfly
February 12, 2019 •
What most of us call “butterflies” are in fact just the fleeting last life stage of a creature with only one remaining purpose.
Give Your Kids a Butterfly Net
January 9, 2019 •
Dramatic insect declines argue for more time outdoors with a collector’s net, not less, writes lepidopterist Liam O’Brien.
Above the Tropopause: in Search of a High-Altitude Butterfly
November 26, 2018 •
Butterfly experts guard their secret spots like fishermen. When a friend takes Liam O’Brien to his “spot,” the writer finds himself in a scene from Nabokov.
On Butterflies, Parasites, and Viruses
October 3, 2018 •
How does a Broadway actor become San Francisco’s go-to lepidopterist? Liam O’Brien explains.
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Coe Kaleidoscope
April 1, 2005 •
When it comes to wildflowers, you can’t do any better than a visit to Henry Coe, Northern California’s largest state park. Winslow Briggs, who wrote the book on the park’s trails, walks us through a year of blooms, taking us from season to season in a wild but accessible landscape.