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Calling all outdoor enthusiasts: University of California Press is conducting a survey. Your anonymous responses will enable University of California Press to advance its offerings for those The survey should take about 15 minutes. Go to the survey Thanks for your participation!  It’s a beautiful morning at the Farallones, where scientists are watching 300,000 nesting seabirds. We recommend the web cam at the California Academy of Sciences. We hope that future iterations of the cam will include a sharper image and a live chat so scientists can tell us more about what they are studying. Planning a hike this weekend? The following resources can help you identify and learn more about the flora you might see on the trail. For Beginning and Intermediate Naturalists If you want to do some reading before your hike, we recommend Introduction to California Plant Life by Robert Ornduff, Phyllis M. Faber, and Todd Keeler-Wolf [more...] The Commonwealth Club will be hosting a provocative discussion between the CEO of Chevron and the Executive Direct of The Sierra Club tonight. In Chevron + Sierra Club Drilling for Common Ground, Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal will moderate a conversation between Dave O’Reilly of Chevron and Carl Pope of [more...] We caught an interesting story this morning on the California Report about how farmers are adapting to drought conditions. Turns out water-stressed plants make delicious apples. Another piece on NPR’s Morning Edition mentioned a group in Oakland, the Greywater Guerillas. Due to years of drought there’s a movement afoot in government to make it easier to [more...] Although the UC campuses tend to get a bit quieter during the summer months, the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden has a number of events coming up that should be of interest—and not just to those who already have a garden full of native plants. Wednesday, June 3, 2009 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm Sunset Stroll A hike in Del Valle Regional Park in Livermore sent one of my colleagues to Raptors of California by Hans Peeters and Pam Peeters to learn more about the Osprey. With their conspicuous nests and distinctive features, Ospreys are fairly distinctive. Less easy to discover are some of the secrets of the raptor Pandion haliaeetus. Like [more...] You don’t see them very often, but California has more kinds of owls than you might realize. Fifteen species in fact, give or take a few. This uncertainty makes a lot of sense when you consider that owls often live in remote areas and are mainly active at night, when most of us are [more...] Butterflies are such a common sight that we can be excused for thinking we understand these beautiful insects. They fly around on big floppy wings, visit flowers, and their larvae are called caterpillars. It’s all pretty simple, right? The truth is that the lives of butterflies are far more interesting and complex than this. Even our [more...] Galls are something you can be forgiven for overlooking, but they’re an important and surprisingly common feature of the natural world. In fact, gall expert Ron Russo has found as many as 30 species of galls on a single blue oak, and even casual observers may run across giant ones nicknamed “oak apples” that [more...] |
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