Imagine a landmark so prominent that anyone looking south from San Francisco or north from San Jose could spot it. Spanish missionary Padre Pedro Font wrote in his diary in March 1776: “I beheld in the distance a tree of … Read more

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Imagine a landmark so prominent that anyone looking south from San Francisco or north from San Jose could spot it. Spanish missionary Padre Pedro Font wrote in his diary in March 1776: “I beheld in the distance a tree of … Read more
A little standing water is all it takes for mosquitoes to get going, so it’s no wonder they’ve been making evolutionary hay for over 30 million years—and acting as efficient disease transporters along the way, even here in the temperate Bay Area.
Where can you find more than 80,000 acres of wildlands with hundreds of miles of trails only 36 miles from San Jose? In Henry W. Coe State Park, the adventurer can hike for days without seeing any signs of urban … Read more
Although solidly rooted in California’s natural and cultural history, our native oaks are disappearing at an alarming rate. The loss of these magnificent trees to urbanization and Sudden Oak Death has been widely publicized, but there is another threat that … Read more
Hikers and equestrians can find a new swath of accessible open space in the bucolic eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The 2,428-acre Rancho Cañada del Oro was the site of walnut orchards at a time when Silicon Valley, … Read more
In the January-March 2004 issue of Bay Nature, Ear to the Ground covered the deaths of hundreds of raptors each year at the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in Livermore. In response to the large numbers of bird kills in … Read more
Land management changes are also on the table for the Bolinas Lagoon in Marin County. Beginning in the 1880s, logging, road-building, and grazing around this 1,100-acre tidal estuary introduced tremendous amounts of silt to the lagoon’s mudflats and marshlands. The … Read more
In May of 2002, Magna Entertainment Corporation, owner of the Golden Gate Fields racetrack, adjacent to Berkeley and Albany, proposed a development project totaling more than 1 million square feet, in place of the existing racetrack. In February of 2004, … Read more
The Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association is also encouraging folks from coastal California to participate in several last-chance review planning sessions for the Gulf of the Farallones, Monterey Bay, and the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuaries. Since 2001, the sanctuaries have … Read more
Rush Ranch Open Space features the largest intact brackish tidal marsh in the San Francisco Estuary. That’s why it has been designated, along with China Camp State Park, as California’s newest and largest National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR). The NERR … Read more