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 ...

If you ever wander around wanting to know the names of plants and animals around you, Seek, a newly rebuilt app from the iNaturalist team at the California Academy of Sciences, now offers instant ...

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, ...

To deliberately attract a tick, you need to emulate a large animal—which shouldn’t be that hard because humans are essentially big, lumbering apes. You increase your chances of attracting the ...

In the early 1950s, a Swedish dairy farmer and real estate magnate named Axel Adler came to California and fell in love with Big Sur. The rugged backcountry, the spring flowers, the redwoods tall over ...

In late October 1769, a group of bedraggled Spanish soldiers arrived overland in the territory of the Quiroste Indians on the San Mateo coast. Motivated by news of the encroaching Russian fur trade, ...

Ted and Moorea Stout’s forest burned in the 2021 Dixie Fire. (Photo by Max Whittaker) Ted and Moorea Stout follow an old logging road that passes their house, walking through charred groves of century ...

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 ...

Amid the din of humming electric motors and gurgling laboratory aquarium tanks, life, new and precious, has been born. “Aren’t they so cute?” says Rachael Karm, a Sonoma State University research ...

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 Grove of Old Trees sits on a hill in Sonoma County in full view of the ocean. “This is where I come to chase the fog,” says Emily Burns. But on this day in March, her prey is elusive. Buttercups ...