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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now's the time to help save our California state parks from imminent closure under Governor Schwarzenegger's budget plan!
Download our updated map showing transit connections to protected parks and open spaces all over the San Francisco Bay Area.
The East Bay Regional Park District and other parks agencies own and operate an impressive array of shoreline parks in the East Bay. Visit a different one every week, and you’d still be busy for at least four months. Here’s … Read more
On October 3, 1995, a wildfire erupted on Mount Vision at Point Reyes National Seashore. Before the flames were extinguished a week later, 12,000 acres of this popular park had been scorched, and 45 nearby homes burned to the ground. A decade later, we return to Point Reyes for a lesson in local fire ecology to see how the landscape—and the community—were reshaped and renewed by the blaze.
We tend to take the ground beneath our feet for granted, but soil is a defining feature of the landscape around us, in the garden and on the trail.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
