Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a cut to California State Parks that threatens to close more than 200 — or 80 percent — of our park lands. This post contains links to the potential closings as well as information on the California State Parks Foundation’s efforts to save our parks from budget cutbacks and closures.

This video compresses days 20 to 32 in the lives of three Peregrine Falcon eyasses (chicks) nesting in the PG&E building in downtown San Francisco. See photos and visual logs of the young San Francisco Peregrines in local photographer Glenn Nevill’s Raptor Galleries. And learn more about the Peregrine Falcon research at the website of
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Photo ©ingrid

Well, he’s a yawning goat, I must confess. But the photo begs for an alternate characterization.
Who needs Smokey Bear when you’ve got a hungry goat? These animals deserve some atta boys (and girls) for their hard labor in fire prevention. In the Oakland and Berkeley Hills you’ll find agile bucks and does doing
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These are checkerspot butterflies for sure. But when I originally posted the possibility of “Bay” checkerspot on the first photo (taken at Sibley), an astute commenter at Flickr corrected my ID: “Unfortunately that is not a Bay checkerspot butterfly.” Simple as that. Got it. Endangered, not likely.
If it had been a Bay checkerspot, it would
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Photo ©ingrid

If you’re a Canada Goose gosling in a public park, don’t count on too much respect. On this day, I stopped by one of my favorite bay-side walking spots and saw before me a flock of goslings. It was an enormous flock of babies interspersed with adults — like a National Geographic image of
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In this melee of global strife and catastrophe, there’s at least one thing you can know for sure: is it a dragonfly or a damselfly? There are a lot of folks losing sleep over the answer, I know.
I blame the awesome macro of my telephoto lens for this post. I went to UC Berkeley Botanical
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Phidippus johnsoni – Red-Backed Jumping Spider
I found this little Mr. (or Ms.) on the kitchen ceiling a few days ago. Before I could grab my telephoto to see precisely what type of venomous spider might be parachuting onto my head during dinner, he (or she) disappeared.
Today, I saw the black splotch in my peripheral vision
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