Exploring Nature in the San Francisco Bay Area
Lifelong Bay Area resident Stephen Edwards has run the botanic garden in Tilden Park since 1983. Well-versed in geology as well as botany, Edwards says, “My main goal in life is to improve the botanic garden without harming its delicate, historic character. The garden still sweeps me away.”
Butterflies fluttering through the Mission, mice nibbling their way down Sansome, pelicans gliding up Geary. Starting today and tomorrow, four MUNI buses will make a splash with Endangered Species, an art project that has redesigned buses with photographic murals of endangered or threatened species who live around San Francisco.
Western fence lizards are a common sight in Bay Area parks on sunny days. “When you see them,” says naturalist Michael Ellis, “you should feel good, because if there’s fence lizards, that’s a good place to be.”
Rattlesnakes are the only snakes in the world that have a mechanism for warning you that they are nearby. Return the favor by leaving snakes alone when you see them on the trail.
Birders call them TVs, and they are fun to watch, as they teeter along hillsides, cliff faces, even right in the city.
For John Kelly, who’s worked for Audubon Canyon Ranch since 1988, develops and oversees conservation research, egrets and other wetland birds hold the key to monitoring and understanding how our wetlands are doing. And he knows a lot about that — he tracks more than 100 egret and heron rookeries all over the region, studies…
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
