Natural History Journal

Earlier this January, we spent several days exploring the lush, ferny redwood groves and mossy Sitka spruce forests of northwestern California, and while hiking through this enchanting habitat, observing the plants, birds and other wildlife, it occurred to me that in a sense, winter in California's Humboldt and Del Norte counties is a little bit like summer in North America's vast boreal forests.   Varied Thrush Also called taiga, the world's boreal forests form a lush, green ring around the top of our planet, covering much of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia.  These dense forests are comprised largely of coniferous trees, particularly pine, fir, and most notably, spruce.  At such high latitudes, long, cold winters are characteristic of the boreal forest, but even so, these often-snowy forests are vital to the health of our planet.  Boreal forests are massively important on a global ecological scale, as they hold more surface freshwater than any other biom...

I was born into a world where wild California Condors were a thing of the past - and little more than a dim hope for the future.   But in the three decades since, California Condors have become the stars of one of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of wildlife conservation, a story filled with controversy, pitting doubt and uncertainty against unwavering hope and perseverance.   Today, thanks to years of painstaking effort on the part of hundreds, if not thousands, of wildlife biologists and conservationists, we can once again look up into Southwestern skies and see condors soaring above on majestic wings.   The story, like the birds themselves, inspires. Male condor 602 hatched at the Los Angeles Zoo in 2011 and was released at Pinnacles in 2013. During the late Pleistocene, California Condors ( Gymnogyps californianus ) were widespread across North America.  15,000 years ago, when megafauna like mammoths, mastodons and giant ground slot...

In California's Great Central Valley, wildfires are not generally an imminent threat, surrounded as we are by acres and acres of irrigated farmland.  But that is not the case over much of California's grasslands, woodlands, forests, and chaparral ecosystems, all of which have evolved and adapted over the millennia to thrive with regular renewal by fire. Fire is an essential part of what makes California so very uniquely California . I, however, dislike wildfires.  My gut reaction in the face of what we perceive as "devastating" wildfires is one of grief: grief over the loss of life and the good green things of this world.  Much as I prefer to skip Tolkien's penultimate chapter in  The Return of the King , titled "The Scouring of the Shire," I would rather not dwell too much on wildfires and their ravaging forces.  (Aside: I totally get why Peter Jackson left out the scouring of the Shire when he made his trilogy of films!  But we can talk about that ...

California is certainly a special place.  A treasure trove of natural wonders and beauty, the state encompasses one of the world's hotspots of biodiversity .  But what makes California so remarkable, so rich in endemic plants and animals found nowhere else in the world? There have been a couple of key factors at work in this mountainous West Coast state through the ages, shaping it into what it is today: one of those factors is its unique climate, and the other is its diverse topography and underlying geology. Today, we'll take a look at California's very special climate. A quintessential Californian landscape - golden, oak-dotted hills - inside the now-imperiled Del Puerto Canyon, a hotspot for biodiversity, endemism and really neat geology in the central Coast Range. The mild, Mediterranean climate of California is shared by only four other regions in the world: central Chile, the southwestern tip of South Africa, southwestern Australia, and the Mediterra...