Exploring Nature in the San Francisco Bay Area

  • Backyard Boarding House

    Backyard Boarding House

    Leafcutters, diggers, carpenters, and masons… At first glance that may look like a directory for building contractors. Add the miners, cuckoos, and sweats and what you have isn’t a list of tool-bag clad builders, but some of the 1,600 known species of native bees in California. Here’s how you can make them at home in…

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  • Bees, Butterflies, and Other Insect Pollinators

    Bees, Butterflies, and Other Insect Pollinators

    Insects have fascinating lives and behaviors most of us never notice. But if you spend even 15 minutes watching bees or butterflies, you’re sure to be drawn into their worlds and want to know more about them. Here are some places to see them and resources for learning about them. TOURS AND GARDENS FOR BEES…

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  • Native Plant Sales

    Native Plant Sales

    April and May are great months for getting to know native plants through native plant sales and garden tours held around the Bay Area. And not only gardeners benefit: The proceeds from these sales fund valuable conservation work all over the region.

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  • Timing is Everything

    Timing is Everything

    Climate change may have arrived in your own yard, and scientists across the nation would like to hear about it. Researchers and educators in the abstruse-sounding National Phenology Network hope to harness the power of hundreds or thousands of citizen scientists across the nation all keeping notes on critical changes in the natural world.

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  • Elephant Seals and Climate Change

    Elephant Seals and Climate Change

    A new study suggests that warmer ocean temperatures brought on by climate change may permanently skew sex ratios of northern elephant seals, the huge seals that visit a few Bay Area locations to breed.

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  • Breeding Time for Herons

    Breeding Time for Herons

    Usually solitary birds, great blue herons and egrets abandon their private ways in spring, and you can see them nesting in tree tops around the region.

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