Exploring Nature in the San Francisco Bay Area
On an unseasonably warm November day in a rural neighborhood in the western Sierra Nevada, men with chainsaws patrol a tree thicket that burned three years ago. One man, whose chaps have torn on his right thigh and whose shirt is stained with ash, squints at a dead pine through mesh goggles. He is surrounded…
What is this weird belt-like growth on poison oak? Fasciated plants have fascinated humans for thousands of years due to their gnarled and belt-like growth patterns on stems or bizarrely elongated flowers. Fasciation has been documented in over 107 plant families in everything from roses to lilies and occurs when the apical meristem, the growing…
For perhaps the first time in 80 years the California State Lands Commission, which negotiates and hands out leases for state-owned shoreline property, faced a decision this summer between competing ideas for the same parcel. The commission staff announced at the end of August that it will enter negotiations to lease a shoreline parcel for…
If you’ve ever stepped into a certain kind of beach town gift shop on the Northern California coast, you are likely familiar with Josie Iselin’s work: an artist, Iselin creates slim coffee table books filled with detailed, dramatically lit photographs of the souvenirs she finds on her many beachcombing expeditions—stones, interestingly shaped sea glass, shells.…
As recently as five years ago, it was great to be a herring in the San Francisco Bay. Populations of the small silver fish had declined up and down the West Coast but boomed in the Bay at levels not seen since the late 1980s, feeding bigger fish, marine mammals and record-setting numbers of winter…
Which species am I most likely to see in a Northern California tidepool, and how can I try to identify them? There is something fascinating about tidepools. They are places of liminality, an in-between world that is neither fully land nor sea. This twilight state lends tidepools an aura of magic, which is only enhanced…
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
