A battle-cry of a screech was issued above my car. I looked up to see a flurry of talons and feathers over a telephone pole.

You don’t need bait to catch an Alameda whipsnake—just luck, and a low, fifty-foot-long fiberboard fence staked into the ground. If a snake encounters this fence, it will naturally respond by running ...

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Get the latest San Francisco Bay Area nature news delivered straight to your inbox. Bay Nature produces environmental journalism, public programs, and community events that connect people with nature ...

On July 27, 2017 this story was announced as a finalist for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine 2017 Communication Awards. Every year, as summer turns to fall, the mouse ...

The lights around Lake Merritt flicker off. Dawn has opened a shimmering, pink-feathered window in the pearl-gray sky through which daylight begins to pour over the water, dazzling, like liquid ...

We’re peering down into a ravine carved out by Lagunitas Creek, looking for North American river otters. According to official California Department of Fish and Wildlife records, last updated in 1995, ...

The gums are mottled tan and brown like chicken bones, crowded together, the spaces between them choked with brush and hung with streamers of bark. Along with the sweet medicine smell of the trees, ...

Pistachio orchards, like these at Gilkey Ranch near Five Points, California, are producing the nut of the future, say farmers, because the crop goes dormant during drought and demands less water and ...

Spiders — and their webs — hold a special place in our cultural mythology. Tattered webbing is a feature of any horror flick, an icon of the evil that is lurking about with the spiders themselves ...

One of Kimberly Stevenot’s responsibilities as a kid was to hang out by the side of the road and look for park rangers—or anyone else who looked like they might be trouble. The Tuolumne Rancheria, ...

In July, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill declaring the lace lichen—found along the Pacific coast and throughout the coast ranges—the state lichen. As of January 1, 2016, California will be ...