Natural History Journal

There are a lot of reasons to love California, particularly as a naturalist. The world's six major biomes, represented in California: Top row: Forest (Redwood State Park); Freshwater (Sword Lake); Desert (Joshua Tree National Park) Bottom row: Marine (Monterey Bay); Grassland (Stanislaus County prairie); Alpine tundra (Yosemite high country) California is a land of extremes, from submarine canyons to alpine peaks, from high heat and aridity to remarkable snow pack.  It boasts the tallest trees, the most massive trees, and the oldest [non-clonal] trees.  Within its borders, one can stand on the tallest point in the conterminous United States (Mount Whitney, 14,500 feet above sea level) as well as the lowest (Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level). In addition to the greatest difference in elevation, California also has the greatest range of latitude, the highest soil diversity, the largest range of average annual rainfall and the greatest range of average annua...

Download this infographic (and more) from the World Wetland Day's website: https://www.worldwetlandsday.org/materials/-/categories/11086 Celebrated annually on February 2nd, World Wetlands Day marks the anniversary of the 1971 Ramsar  Convention, also known as the Convention on Wetlands, an international treaty created to support the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands around the world.  Currently, there are over 2,300 Ramsar sights, or Wetlands of International Importance, that have been designated worldwide - which is good news considering the sad state of our world's wetlands. Since 1970, 35% of wetlands have been lost, at a rate three times greater than the loss of forests ( source ).  In the continental United States, over half of all wetlands have been destroyed since the 1700's ( source , source ). California alone has lost between 90 and 95% of its wetlands. Sunset at Merced NWR, a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance, right here in Cali...

"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.  Like winds and sunset, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them." Aldo Leopold, 1949 Last week, on September 19, 2019, the journal Science published the results of a groundbreaking study, the first of its kind to document, with certainty, that North American birds are in big trouble. Young male House Finch Observant folks who have been around a while have been saying it for some time: "There just aren't as many birds around now as there were back in my day."  Indeed, numbers of birds have dropped dramatically over the past 50 years, and now we have the data to prove it.  It's not just a hunch, not just a feeling, not just the tendency to look at the past through lenses tinted with nostalgia for the "good ol' days."  Grandpa is right: there are fewer birds today than there were "in his day." Birds really are in dec...