One day, while poking around beneath a pot in my family’s backyard, I discovered a glistening arboreal salamander. It couldn’t have been longer than my pinkie finger. Its moist skin looked so delicate and permeable, like it hardly separated the little creature from the rest of the world. It was the first amphibian I’d found in our yard after five years of looking. I set down the pot, reconstituting the salamander’s dark, wet world, and felt pretty good that our small garden provided an arboreal salamander what it needed to survive.
Knowing there was an amphibian in the yard, I hoped a reptile might also find its way to us. But really, what were the chances? We’re surrounded by cement. So many busy roads in Berkeley. How would a snake or lizard ever reach us? Maybe a red-tailed hawk would drop an extra squirmy meal while flying over our postage stamp of plants? Who knows. I hoped this patch could support a diversity of local life, especially some of the sensitive species.
It was six years, a heck of a lot of planting of native wildflower seeds and a swath of red fescue from seed, and time spent hauling compost from the free pile in the Berkeley Marina every fall, before a flick of something on our steps caught my eye: a baby western fence lizard, the size of my thumbnail.
Putting aside how it got here (my bets are on the compost), the wee lizard, I was certain, wouldn’t make it. A bird snack for sure. So many hazards in its enormous world! But sitting with binoculars at my kitchen table, I narrowed the 20 feet between me and the steps and watched the baby lizard grow over weeks, then months. When I encountered it, by then a juvenile, in a completely different part of the yard, I thought, “Maybe you’ll make it.”
That was a year and a half ago, and we now have three fence lizards of varying sizes. I catch sight of one most days, skittering about, leaping wild and strong between fence posts and sunning on the rock wall. Despite the improbability, a little ecosystem has settled in here.
I share this tale because launching and building a magazine is a lot like coaxing a garden or parcel of land into becoming a rich ecosystem, an experience well known to many Bay Nature readers. The intent is always to create a landscape where all kinds of ideas, creatures if you will, can thrive. But the external forces bearing on the success or failure of the whole endeavor are legion. So it is no small accomplishment that you are reading Bay Nature’s 25th anniversary issue.
This nonprofit media organization has weathered a quarter century of perils and many moments of triumph; it has defied all the odds of a brutal media landscape, and incredibly, the organization is growing. All of it has required tremendous labor and generosity from thousands of people, but a very special thanks is owed to a handful who have given an unknowable number of hours and their hearts to this vision.
In chronological order, publishers Malcolm Margolin, David Loeb, Regina Starr Ridley, and Wes Radez; board chairs Larry Orman, Catherine Fox, Bruce Hartsough, and Rebecca Johnson; longtime editors Cynthia Rubin (25 years!), Dan Rademacher, Alison Hawkes, and Eric Simons; designers David Bullen and Susan Scandrett; staff and volunteers with long tenures include Sue Rosenthal, Jenny Stampp (20 years!), Judith Katz, David Wichner, Ellen Weis, Beth Slatkin, Laurie Miller, and Laurence Tietz; longtime contributors John Muir Laws, Michael Ellis, Claire Peaslee, Ben Pease, and Jane Kim. Enduring supporters Jorgen Hildebrandt, Nancy and Bart Westcott, Paul and Elizabeth Archambeault, and Tamia Marg and Tom Anderson.
What an exquisite ecosystem we have created.
—Victoria Schlesinger
Editor in chief
