October-December 2011

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Adventures in Hawk Tracking

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Mapping Bay Area Food Landscapes

Acorn Woodpeckers, Happy Together A Big Deal for East Bay Wildlands Napa’s People-Powered Park

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co n s er vat ion in a c t i o n

Claremont Canyon, 20 Years After Mary Millman, Garber Park Stewards

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by daniel mcglynn

(from left) Garber Park Stewards coordinator Shelagh Broderson, Oakland watershed specialist Rebecca Tuden, and biologist Lech Naumovich in front of a 300-year-old tree called the Garber Oak.

Standing above her home perched on the north slope of Claremont Canyon along the Berkeley-Oakland border, Marilyn Goldhaber points across the valley. Most of the houses on the other side were damaged or razed in the massive 1991 wildfire that burned 1,520 acres and torched 3,500 homes and apartments.

Two decades later, residents are still trying to figure out how to deal with the reality of wildfire while also respecting and potentially restoring native habitats.

While large agencies like the University of California and the East Bay Regional Park District develop massive fuels management policies, citizens on the ground have pursued efforts both to reduce the flammability of their neighborhoods and, in some instances, to restore the canyon’s native, fire-resilient habitats.

The largest group, the Claremont Canyon Conservancy, turns 10 years old this fall. It has drawn locals to support projects from eucalyptus removal to small-scale restoration. Meanwhile, another group, the Garber Park Stewards, has zeroed in on a 14-acre Oakland b ay n at u r e

city park near the canyon bottom.

Restoring Claremont Canyon is turning out to be ecologically complex. The canyon is the largest and least-developed of the east-west canyons in the Berkeley hills. It retains substantial pockets of coastal scrub, oak/bay woodlands, maple forest, and riparian areas of willows and ferns. “This mosaic of vegetation is something we don’t generally see in the East Bay hills, especially in the fog belt,” says Lech Naumovich, director of the Golden Hour Restoration Institute.

As in many places, a big part of preventing another disastrous fire is dealing with built-up fuels from decades of fire suppression. The university and park district are handling the major fuel removal — occasionally with opposition from residents partial to eucalyptus trees, but more often with local support.

Changes on the ground have been remarkable, says Goldhaber: “A year ago you could not see behind my fence.” Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve was thick with scrub and nonnative broom. The park district recently cleared the area as

october–december 2011

defensible space. “That’s what everybody wants,” Goldhaber says, “a fire-safe defensible zone on both the neighbors’ side and the park side.” In 2006, the conservancy worked with the district to remove a nearby eucalyptus grove. Now Goldhaber tends the area, and natives such as monkeyflower, California everlasting, and bush lupine are coming back. “They’re rebounding everywhere,” she says.

Over on the canyon’s south side, the Garber Park Stewards are working to keep a swath of woodland and riparian habitat free of invasives.

Towering big-leaf maples, sprawling oaks and bays, and clusters of buckeyes define the park. There’s also a spring-fed riparian area carpeted in native horsetails. The stewards call this the horsetail meadow, but lurking underneath is a mat of invasive cape ivy that becomes visible when the horsetail dies back every year.

“Cape ivy is our worst enemy in this park,” says Shelagh Broderson, the Garber Park Stewards’ coordinator.

For years the park was so neglected that some neighbors didn’t even know it was a park. Others dumped garbage and yard clippings in it, and ivy ran rampant.

The conservancy provided early financial support, but the Garber Park Stewards are less interested in fuels reduction than in restoring a once-popular city park. Besides removing invasives and replanting natives, the group has also uncovered and cleaned up a large, centrally located stone fireplace.

While its origins remain mysterious — volunteers have searched old newspaper archives and guess that the fireplace was built in the 1920s — it does prove that previous generations enjoyed visiting the canyon, maybe to relax in the forest’s dappled light.

Garber Park’s old stonework — built to last and built for fire — is perhaps a fitting symbol of the continuing dilemma of humans living in a fire-prone landscape. Two decades after the firestorm, some canyon residents are restoring native plants, others focus on defensible space, and along the way, one hopes, they achieve a balance that can endure.

Learn more at claremontcanyon.org and garberparkstewards.blogspot.com.

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on the trail

Nestled in a narrow canyon in Skyline Wilderness Park, Lake Marie was originally created as a water supply for the nearby state hospital, then known

Samanda Dorger-Poccia, samandadorger.com

as the Napa Asylum.

th e c u rio u s hi story o f na pa ’s s k y lin e wilde r n e s s

CITIZEN’S DOMAIN

by Greg Retsinas Larry Pyle may have the best view in all of Napa County. He is not a world-class vintner, a millionaire landowner, a famous chef, or anything else that comes to mind when you think “Napa Valley.”

Pyle’s domain is Skyline Wilderness Park.

At first glance, the park doesn’t seem to merit its name: The eclectic mix of b ay n at u r e

amenities clustered near the entrance area could hardly be called wilderness.

A disc golf course sits beside an archery range, a crowded rv park abuts a welltended native plant garden, and a few tent-camping spots intermingle with an equestrian training ring.

But the park has another face, one of sweeping natural beauty that reveals itself soon enough to the mix of hikers,

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mountain bikers, and horse riders who head out on the park’s many trails.

About 25 miles of trails thread through 850 acres of blue and live oak woodland, chaparral, grasslands, open ridges, and riparian valleys.

The rewards of a trip here include spectacular views of the Napa Valley and the opportunity to explore the dramatic canyon cut into the volcanic country rock that indeed feels like wilderness.

The 1,630-foot-high summit of Sugarloaf, the park’s highest point, is worth the climb, with views that are truly panoramic. In the foreground, Napa and its lush vineyards are close by, but on a clear day, you can see Mount St. Helena to the north, San Francisco Bay in the opposite direction, Mount Tamalpais to the west, and Mount Diablo to the east.

You might expect such an impressive domain to be preserved as a state or county park. But in this case, it’s not an overstatement to say that it’s Larry Pyle’s park. He and a few dozen other Napa County denizens have ruled this scenic, accessible plot of valley parkland for more than three decades in a governance model that is part fiefdom and part democracy — and generally a success.

To paraphrase a famous American sentiment, the park is of the people, by the people, for the people. It turned out this way by a combination of luck and the locals’ determination: Until 1979, the land was part of the grounds of the Napa Asylum for the Insane (now called Napa State Hospital), which once drew its water from several man-made lakes that still dot the park. When the state decided it no longer needed the land and was poised to sell it off, locals stepped in and struck a deal to run the park on their own — one of the state’s only large parks managed entirely by volunteers.

Now, with many California state parks facing closure due to the state budget crisis, could Skyline offer a model for

historic infrastruc-

th e

ture, such as quarries and tunnels, still visible throughout the park.

tr ail

These massive rock buttresses, about 15 feet tall, are along the fire road to Lake Marie.

with a cold beer on the porch of the archery range clubhouse, is pleased with how things have worked out here.

“Everyone wants their way — hikers, mountain bikers, and horse people. But we manage to get along just fine,” he says.

On any given day, the single-track trails handle a mix of hikers, mountain bikers, and equestrians. The park’s trails are neither straight nor well-planned. In fact, they weren’t planned at all. When the park became a park nearly three decades ago, the new managers decided that the existing cow, pig, and deer tracks would become the pathways for people as well. So volunteers set out and stamped down the grass to make the trails. Horseback riders followed and soon the trails were set. The result is that the paths range from

(below) The park is operated by a coalition of volunteers from various interest groups, including horseback riders. (right) The ridges afford sweeping views of the Napa Valley, of vineyards nearby, and beyond to hills on the valley’s east side.

Courtesy Skyline Citizens Association

on

an alternative — citizen-run parks? It sounds like a tailor-made solution — people who care about a park can run it.

After all, how tough can it be to manage some oak-covered hills and valleys?

Larry Pyle openly laughs at the notion. The retired mechanic is president of the Skyline Park Citizens Association, and he’s busier than ever.

And so is the park, located on Imola Avenue southeast of downtown Napa. It attracts 30,000 day-use visitors a year as well as a steady flow of campers from as far as away as Quebec and the Netherlands at the rv park near the entrance.

Napa County may be a scenic paradise of rolling hills and diverse oak woodlands, but in some respects, it’s hardly a hiker’s haven. Much of Napa’s open space is in private hands, and the county has only two state parks — Bothe-Napa Valley and Robert Louis Stevenson, both far from the county’s population centers in the south.

Napa County’s regional park system, inaugurated just three years ago, is limited to a few small holdings. Skyline Park isn’t one of them, though a new park master plan and recent state legislation will allow the county more involvement, including ownership of the land, which is still officially state property. The change will have little impact on the park’s day-to-day operation, since the citizen association has nearly 20 years left on its $100-a-year lease.

But all those bureaucratic details seem far away on a recent visit. Pyle, sitting

Ed Callaert, edcallaert.com

There’s a lot of

easy to strenuous and back again, zigzagging across the land.

One popular route, the Skyline Trail, rises briskly more than 1,000 feet over three miles, snaking through most of the park’s habitat types and then circling around Lake Marie. Nestled at the bottom of the main canyon, the lake is the largest of several ponds created as water supply for the hospital. Skyline Trail is also part of a 10-mile Bay Area Ridge Trail spur that runs east from the Napa River just south of downtown Napa.

Historic dry-stacked rock walls, quarry pits, and the remains of an old stone cabin along the central fire road are all good clues about the interesting geology at Skyline Park. The hills sit at the southern end of the Sonoma volcanic field, which stretches north up to the Palisades near Calistoga and into Sonoma County, the largest and most visible evidence of an extended period of volcanic eruptions here that began eight million years ago.

Recently, a U.S. Geological Survey team mapped the area and studied the rocks at the park, observing the transition from dark, ironrich basalt to the lighter gray rhyolite

Kathy Barnhart

october–december 2011

b ay n at u r e

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elsewhere . . . e ast bay

s o uth bay

3

Ingrid Taylar

san francisco

Daniel Ramirez

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Jennifer Davis

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Hayward Regional Shoreline

Los Trancos Regional Preserve

Hayward Regional Shoreline’s broad swath of marshes and seasonal wetlands hosts five miles of the Bay Trail north of the San Mateo Bridge. Though the visitor center and most of the habitat restoration work are in the south part, the park’s north entrance offers choice birding, especially around high tide, when shorebirds gather in the wastewater-fed ponds and sloughs, awaiting the exposure of acres of mudflats as the tide ebbs. Check an online tide table for Robert’s Landing to plan your visit.

This trail starts between the cyclone fences of a salvage yard and an electrical substation, with transmission towers hissing overhead. It soon finds San Lorenzo Creek, where tangled shrubbery along the levee shelters phoebes and song sparrows, while egrets fish and ducks dabble in the steep-banked channel. Less than half a mile brings you to the Bay Trail footbridge, near a shallow pond active with avocets, willets, black-necked stilts, and assorted sandpipers, who don’t seem to mind that every few minutes the shadow of an Oakland Airport–bound jetliner slides across the water. Look west and on a clear morning the clustered towers of downtown San Francisco and the Bay Bridge shimmer in the distance.

If all this isn’t enough, hike south on the riprapped levees to watch the wading birds return to their mudflat buffet as the tide recedes.

Getting there: Small signed parking lot is on the right just before Grant Avenue ends. No fees or facilities except a portable toilet near the bridge and frequent trailside benches. Bikes permitted; dogs north side only. [Ann Sieck]

Los Trancos is one of the smallest preserves in the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, but one of the most interesting to visit. With five miles of easy trails split by the San Andreas Fault, this 275-acre park is one of two in California devoted to showcasing landscape features formed by the shifting along the fault. A recreated wooden fence shows the three-foot gap originally left by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Pick up a brochure at the park entrance and follow along on the 1.5mile San Andreas Fault Trail, where nine stations correspond to brochure notes explaining the earthen benches, sag ponds, landslides, and other interesting landscape features created by movement along the fault.

The San Andreas Trail also features wonderful vistas on a clear day of Mount Umunhum, downtown San Francisco, Mount Tamalpais, and Mount Diablo. The park’s hikersonly trails loop through landscapes of open grasslands, shady forests, and wet creekside habitat, where the air is pungent with the scent of bay laurel. Giant canyon and coast live oak, madrone, blue elderberry, big-leaf maple, California coffeeberry, creambush, coyote brush, toyon, and, of course, poison oak flourish there along with hound’s-tongue, snakeroot, and giant trillium.

Getting there: The preserve entrance is on Page Mill Road, 1.5 miles east of Skyline Boulevard and seven miles west of Interstate 280. [Rob Lehman]

Mount Davidson

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San Francisco’s highest natural point and almost its geographic center, Mount Davidson is easy to recognize from a distance with its towering cement cross, but the urban naturalist will find great rewards in giving it a closer look.

Native plant enthusiasts should look out for over 40 species of indigenous plants, including the largest stand of California fescue remaining in the city.

Elderberry, huckleberry, California blackberry, and other fruit-producing shrubs attract numerous birds in the fall.

The bird list here is nearing 200 species. Many migrants pass through on their way to breeding or wintering grounds, but a keen observer can easily find at least 30 on any given day. In fall, flocks of resident Nuttall’s whitecrowned sparrows are bolstered by golden-crowned and fox sparrows arriving from their northern nesting grounds.

Mount Davidson is also great for spotting migrating 1 raptors and resident redtail 2 hawks.

Reptilian fauna consists of western terrestrial garter snakes, northern alligator lizards, and one of the city’s last populations of western fence lizards. California meadow voles can be plentiful in rainy years, and coyotes have been spotted on the hill taking advantage of this bounty.

Getting there: Find trailheads at the junction of Dalewood and Lansdale, next to the 36-Muni stop, or from the end of La Bica Street just south of Portola Drive. [Dominik Mosur]

for accessibility infor mation on many local trails, go to www.wheelchairtrails.net. b ay n at u r e

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POS556-Bay Nature_final_Layout 1 8/9/11 10:04 AM Page 1

Rancho Corral de Tierra ﾂｩ 2000 Robert Buelteman

PRESERVE OPEN SPACE CLOSE TO HOME

Peninsula Open Space Trust

Fall, Winter & Holiday Special Events Wildflower Hikes, Birding, and more!

Check out our calendar and newsletter: sorensensresort.com/calendar.html

222 High Street, Palo Alto, California 94301 (650) 854-7696 www.openspacetrust.org

october窶電ecember 2011

b ay n at u r e

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habitats of

the East Bay Regiona l Parks This story is part of a series exploring significant natural habitats and resources of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD), many of which are encountered in other parts of the Bay Area as well. The series is sponsored by EBRPD, which manages 65 parks, reserves, and trails covering more than 100,000 acres in Alameda and Contra Costa counties (ebparks.org).

by John Hart

P

lanned Wilderness

A Big Deal for East Bay Open Space For the time being, you need a stout pair of hiking boots and lots of water—and permission from the East Bay Regional Park District—to explore Irish Canyon, one of the newly acquired properties adjoining the district’s Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve. A capable truck and a guide with the key to many gates will do the job, too. The stream course, lined with oaks and patrolled by an astonishing number of red-tailed hawks, leads you up into the grassy hills east of Clayton, past the dark brush fields of imposing Kreiger Peak. A climb for another day. At an old stock pond, red-legged frogs watch from the safety of the center of the pool.

Scott Hein, heinphoto.com

(left) Mount Diablo stands just south of Irish Canyon, a strategic property located between Mount Diablo State Park and Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve. The canyon was recently acquired by the East Bay Regional Park District through the East Contra Costa County Habitat Conservancy. (above) Long Ridge, Mount Diablo State Park.

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

A piece of new parkland, and a lovely one. But Irish Canyon is emblematic of much more than that.

Something big is happening in eastern Contra Costa County.

It is not quite a secret — many people and groups and government types are in the know — but word has reached the general public mostly in the form of isolated bulletins: The East Bay Regional Park District picked up 221 acres along Vasco Road, and another piece near Kirker Pass. . . . A former military base, the Concord Naval Weapons Station, will yield a substantial park. . . . Save Mount Diablo has optioned a property on Marsh Creek. . . . The Contra Costa Water District, making up for the land drowned by a reservoir, buys habitat near the Altamont Pass. . . .

The news, hidden in plain sight, is the way preserves old and new are now linking up to form something much grander: a national park–size block of public lands, centered on Mount Diablo but extending north to Suisun Bay and south at least to the Altamont, and perhaps beyond.

There are now approximately 100,000 acres of publicly owned lands in the northern Diablo Range. At least 24,000 acres more are in the sights of the land buyers, and those acres are very special, chosen to fill in critical gaps. Already, Irish Canyon and other recent acquisitions have fused Mount Diablo State Park and Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve into one openspace expanse, separated only by one road. The park district is within two purchases of bridging a second gap, the one between Black Diamond and the hilly portion of the Concord Naval Weapons Station, also destined for parkdom.

a new way to preserve This surge toward unification is occurring under the flag of something called the East Contra Costa County hcp/nccp.

The first acronym stands for Habitat Conservation Plan, a federal effort blessed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the sec-

ond, for Natural Community Conservation Plan, a state matter supervised by the Department of Fish and Game. The present plan, administered by the new East Contra Costa County Habitat Conservancy, is a triumph of what can seem a troubling idea.

Under the federal and state Endangered Species Acts, development that invades the habitats of imperiled species must pay a kind of penance, helping to buy and protect similar habitat somewhere else. At the conclusion of each such transaction there is less habitat overall than there was before — as critics point out — but more of it is secure. If some degraded habitats are rehabilitated in the process, the result can be, if not quite a win-win, at least a win-and-a-half.

The promise of this technique, however, has not always been fulfilled. Since the federal Endangered Species Act first required developers to do mitigation, we’ve discovered that doing such projects one development at a time is inefficient. For the builders, it is a hassle, with expectations sometimes quite unclear. For species and their protectors, the results have also been disappointing. The areas set aside are often of low value and tend to be neglected after purchase, lacking the management sometimes required to keep habitat viable for targeted plants and animals.

Federal hcps and state nccps are attempts to do the job more efficiently — more protection bang per developer buck. By agreement with regulators, developers building in accordance with local plans meet their obligations under the endangered species acts by paying predetermined fees, and the fees go into building and managing preserve systems that are preplanned in detail.

flagship in the east The East Contra Costa plan, in the works since 1998 and blessed by both levels of government, is a flagship of its kind. It foresees the development of between 9,000 and 12,000 acres, as october–december 2011

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by Jacoba Charles

by Jacoba Charles

by Jacoba Charles

I n t r o d u c t i o n b y Si b e l l a K r a u s

Cultivating Community in Santa Rosa

Getting to Market in Sunol

Keeping it in the Family in Rio Vista

Urban Farms to Open Range

Aged fence posts lean comfortably toward the golden

field of wheat beside the McCormack Ranch’s dirt driveway. The road passes barns, grain silos, and an old farmhouse that Jeanne McCormack’s grandfather lived in over a century ago. Then it winds past a handful of walnut trees and another aged barn and along the banks of the Sacramento River.

And on both sides, the wheat fields stand in various stages of a three-year rotation: plowed, planted, and fallow.

But the 3,700-acre ranch on the outskirts of Rio Vista grows more than just wheat. Jeanne and her husband, Al Medvitz, believe in variety. Here in the rolling Montezuma Hills of rural Solano County, they also farm alfalfa and have a new 50-acre vineyard overlooking the river. And they raise pasture-fed sheep and Boer goats; in the early 1990s they were the first ranch to provide lamb to Niman Ranch.

“The more diversity we have, the more security we have,” says Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

decades, the couple developed a vibrant business combining her family’s farming traditions with their own commitment to land stewardship. “We are carrying on completely in spirit and partially in letter the way the ranch has been operated for 120 years,” McCormack says.

Though her father would have scoffed at the term “sustainable,” that’s really how he operated, she adds. He rotated his pastures through a three-year cycle, alternating grazing and wheat cultivation, which protected the soils and kept down the weeds.

He believed in bringing as little into the farm from outside as he could, so he didn’t use chemical fertilizers or much purchased feed.

And that’s the way that McCormack and Medvitz operate today. “One of the things we brought with us was a very strong commitment to the ranch as an important piece of the environment, and we had been given custody of the place,” Medvitz says.

“At the time, the idea of sustainability was just coming out. By coincidence we kind of met the market.”

In their early years on the ranch, prices were low.

One year McCormack took her mother’s Christmas card list and mailed everyone an invitation to buy boxed lamb. They sold 50 animals that year, and eventually a cousin introduced them to Bill Niman, who began selling their lamb. Within five years demand was so high they brought their neighbors in on the business.

Today they still market their lamb to Niman Ranch. They also sell pasture-raised goat to highend restaurants such as Café Rouge in Berkeley and

(above) The open fields of McCormack Ranch, near Rio Vista in Solano County, border the Sacramento River and look out on Mount Diablo in the distance. (right) Al Medvitz with some of the Boer goats he raises with his wife, Jeanne McCormack, whose family has owned this land for more than a century.

Medvitz. “This place has to be sustainable into the future, and diversity is a big part of that.”

Though the two have deep roots here, they don’t have typical ranch biographies. As a teenager, McCormack gladly left Rio Vista for UC Berkeley, later spending two years in Malawi with the Peace Corps. She met Medvitz while they were in grad school at Harvard. Both got involved in international aid work often related to agriculture: Medvitz wrote for a New Guinea farming guide, and McCormack worked with women’s microenterprise in Kenya. Then, as McCormack’s parents grew older, she and Medvitz considered returning to the ranch.

“For me it was a personal experiment,” Medvitz says. “Here I was writing a curriculum based on agriculture, and I couldn’t grow a tomato.”

Learning to run a ranch that covers nearly six square miles was both daunting and exhilarating. And over the last three

Putting Bay Area Food Landscapes on the Map

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Picture the geography of the Bay Area: the sweep of the Bay from the Delta to the Golden Gate; the rolling hills, rugged mountains, and intimate valleys; all the open spaces that frame our communities. The urban landscapes of iconic bridges and landmark buildings, the cities and towns where we live and work, densely packed around the Bay and then radiating into a suburban patchwork beyond.

Prospect in San Francisco. Their wheat and wool go to wholesalers. And soon their vineyard will produce wine grapes to sell to Gallo.

“We’re trying to produce great food and maintain the health of the animals and the land at the same time,” says McCormack.

“I feel that what we do is noble, I really do. It’s an unbelievable opportunity to do this work.”

Now try to put farmland into this picture. That might not be so easy. Many people think of farmlands primarily as passive landscapes—part of non-urban open space—rather than as active working landscapes that contribute directly to local economies, healthful diets, and sense of place. But Bay Area farms and rangelands cover 1.87 million acres, comprising around 40 percent of the region’s total land area, and produce almost enough food to feed all Bay Area residents. In farmers’ markets now spread throughout the region, dazzling arrays of farm products bring a taste of the countryside right into our communities. But the standard measure of “localness” in food is more often a conceptual mileage number than a real connection with the places and people at the core of our incredibly productive local foodshed.

For more than a century, the Bay Area has been at the forefront

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

of the conservation movement, and for several decades it has been a leader in the local food movement. Now these movements are coming together, with conservationists including agriculture in their vision of regional sustainability and farm advocates adding habitat value and farm tourism to their vision of agriculture’s economic vitality.

“Bay Area Food Landscapes” is born of that evolving alliance and reveals local agriculture as integral to both building healthy communities and protecting our environment. The familiar vistas (top) Cattle graze in the foothills near Mount Diablo, where rangeland forms the bulk of foodproducing landscapes. (right) Muang Saechao picks strawberries that she and her husband farm at Iu-Mien Village Farms in the Sunol AgPark. (left) Freerange chickens at Pie Ranch on the San Mateo Coast.

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

On Saturday, October 8, 3:30-6:30 p.m., join Bay Nature and LandPaths for a farm tour, community festival, and harvest dinner. Tour: free; dinner: $20.

RSVP: hikes@baynature.org or (510)528-8550 x205.

nonprofit organization, and private businesses. Hempel’s Baia Temple AgPark, Fred Hempel is multitasking. After advising two Nicchia is the largest of the four farms on the property. Others of his workers who are having trouble filling a restaurant order include Terra Bella, which grows produce for its communityfor edible radish pods, the wiry farmer fields phone calls as he supported agriculture business; Iu-Mien Village Farms, a collecwalks between hunched rows of tomato plants, inspecting his tive of Laotian immigrants whose organic strawberries are sold most prized crop.

“Even with the cool weather the last couple of days these things are growing like crazy,” he says. “We really need to get them trellised up. Is that a ripening tomato over there?

That’s amazing!”

He pulls out a pocketknife and the tomato—a muddy greenish-red—is sliced, tasted, and dismissed as too watery.

To an untrained palate, the barely ripe fruit is better than any at the grocery store. But Hempel is a biotech research scientist turned tomato breeder turned farmer, and his preferences are exacting. He says they need to be.

“The tomatoes make the most money by far,” he says.

“The first thing we think about every day is, ‘how are the tomatoes doing.’”

Fred Hempel runs Baia Nicchia Farms at the Sunol AgPark, where he grows dozens of Yet diversity and creativity are essential to survival and varieties of tomatoes and other crops specially adapted to the local climate. success as a small commercial organic farmer, Hempel adds. In addition to the heirloom tomatoes, his 10-acre farm at places like Monterey Market in Berkeley; and Fico, a small at the AgPark east of Fremont also grows unusual varieties of heirloom fig enterprise. squash, peppers, exotic herbs, and edible flowers.

The AgPark is the brainchild of the nonprofit organization “We do a lot of testing of crops from other places,” he says, SAGE, or Sustainable Agriculture Education. The goal of the projexplaining that finding seeds that thrive in this particular place ect is to support community-benefit farming, natural resource can be a time-consuming process. But the effort has been worth stewardship, and public education. SAGE leases the land from it, letting him build up a business working with high-end wholethe San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), then salers, plus direct relationships with Bay Area restaurants that ask subleases parcels to farmers who get infrastructure, community, him to grow varieties they can’t get anywhere else. “The chef at and support in exchange for participating in public education Oliveto was in Italy a few months ago, and he brought back some programs that SAGE conducts on the farm. stuff for us to grow,” Hempel says, pointing out some red-stalked “It would’ve been really hard to do what we’re doing in any corn seedlings in his greenhouse as an example. other place,” says Hempel, who started Baia Nicchia with partner Diversity and creativity are likewise hallmarks of the 18-acre Jill Shepherd in 2006. “[SAGE] provided mentoring—how to put in irrigation, when to weed, what kind of tractor to buy.

AgPark in general. Though it looks like any other small farm—a patchwork of neatly tilled rows ribboned with dirt roads—this And if you’re selling things in the Bay Area, you can’t beat the locais in fact an innovative collaboration between a public agency, a tion here.”

All that was part of the plan, says AgPark education manager Roger Kubalek of SAGE. Today, the group is developing a new curriculum and working with SFPUC on plans for a visitor center. “Now that the farming and the stewardship aspects of the program are on their way, we’ve started to focus in on education,” he explains. “It’s a great place to learn.

Many of the students have never The 18-acre AgPark includes diverse farming operations and education programs on 18 acres of land at the Sunol visited a real working farm.”

Water Temple, owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Today, Bayer Farm is about to expand, using a $5 million grant from a state fund for parks in underserved areas. Soon the rest of the six-acre lot surrounding the gardens will become a community park, planned largely by people in the neighborhood.

“People are excited,” Ridley says. “They really want this park to be a model of sustainability and respect for the earth.”

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

(above) Bayer Farm has become a community center for local children and families in the Roseland district of Santa Rosa. (right) The farm’s welcoming hand-painted sign is a beacon in a neighborhood with very few accessible outdoor public spaces.

the farm transformed part of a six-acre vacant lot into a community hub in an area badly lacking in public green spaces. The nearby main street is lined with strip malls where the Dollar Store and Mendoza’s Super Mercado alternate with empty storefronts.

“It is a very low-income neighborhood,” says Magdalena Ridley, who lives a block away and runs the farm for the local nonprofit LandPaths. “We have a lot of health problems like obesity and diabetes. Organic food is expensive, a lot of people don’t drive. So the ability to grow food is something our gardeners really treasure.”

There are 36 private plots tended by individuals and families; more people are on the waiting list. And there’s a public garden where anyone can volunteer and go home with fresh vegetables. But the farm offers more than a place to grow things.

Each summer, about 70 children come for a free lunch program; the rest of the year the farm is an outdoor classroom where kids learn about food, nature, and science.

“We have students come from local schools to work in this area,” explains Jonathan Bravo, who oversees the gardens. “For example, this is called the ‘Garden of Giants,’” he says, gesturing

On a typical early summer day at the Sunol Water

to the sunflower patch. “Second-graders saved the seeds last year and started them in the greenhouse.”

Even on a quiet afternoon, Bayer Farm is a meeting place.

A gate has been cut in the fence of the apartment building next door; a small boy comes through it to play, and later a man steps in carrying a wire cage holding four chickens. He releases the birds into a coop built along the fence.

“This place is very pretty; it brings life,” says the man, Javier Pichardo, who first came here when he brought his daughter to a bilingual story-time for children. He’s now an active volunteer and has a garden plot. “You get to be in contact with nature, see your neighbors, relax the body.”

Besides providing healthy food, creating common space is a main goal of Bayer Farm. “It’s really important for our community to have a place to come together in general, because we don’t have public spaces,” says Ridley. Several of the gardeners echo this sentiment. “If we didn’t have this plot we’d just watch TV,” says Reyna Arreola as she headed home with a big bunch of radishes.

Ernesto Lomeli, a quiet, mustachioed man, also comes to the garden for company. “Otherwise life is boring, because I don’t smoke and I don’t drink,” he says with a laugh. But then he turns somber: His wife, fighting cancer, has gone back to Mexico with their children, and he lost his right pinkie in a mill accident. Other gardeners helped him plant this year’s corn and tomatoes.

Jacoba Charles

Late afternoon sunlight was brilliant on the leaves of corn, tomato, and tomatillo plants. Sunflowers planted by schoolchildren were growing in a tight spiral. Squash and beans were wrapping eager tendrils around teepees of bamboo.

The Mexican national soccer team was playing Peru that day, so only a few gardeners were weeding and watering their garden beds at Bayer Farm in Roseland, a working-class Latino section of Santa Rosa. But on most afternoons, 20 or 30 people come to this organic farm and community garden surrounded by apartment buildings and small, closely built houses. Founded four years ago,

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by Jacoba Charles

by Jacoba Charles

by Jacoba Charles

I n t r o d u c t i o n b y Si b e l l a K r a u s

Cultivating Community in Santa Rosa

Getting to Market in Sunol

Keeping it in the Family in Rio Vista

Urban Farms to Open Range

Aged fence posts lean comfortably toward the golden

field of wheat beside the McCormack Ranch’s dirt driveway. The road passes barns, grain silos, and an old farmhouse that Jeanne McCormack’s grandfather lived in over a century ago. Then it winds past a handful of walnut trees and another aged barn and along the banks of the Sacramento River.

And on both sides, the wheat fields stand in various stages of a three-year rotation: plowed, planted, and fallow.

But the 3,700-acre ranch on the outskirts of Rio Vista grows more than just wheat. Jeanne and her husband, Al Medvitz, believe in variety. Here in the rolling Montezuma Hills of rural Solano County, they also farm alfalfa and have a new 50-acre vineyard overlooking the river. And they raise pasture-fed sheep and Boer goats; in the early 1990s they were the first ranch to provide lamb to Niman Ranch.

“The more diversity we have, the more security we have,” says Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

decades, the couple developed a vibrant business combining her family’s farming traditions with their own commitment to land stewardship. “We are carrying on completely in spirit and partially in letter the way the ranch has been operated for 120 years,” McCormack says.

Though her father would have scoffed at the term “sustainable,” that’s really how he operated, she adds. He rotated his pastures through a three-year cycle, alternating grazing and wheat cultivation, which protected the soils and kept down the weeds.

He believed in bringing as little into the farm from outside as he could, so he didn’t use chemical fertilizers or much purchased feed.

And that’s the way that McCormack and Medvitz operate today. “One of the things we brought with us was a very strong commitment to the ranch as an important piece of the environment, and we had been given custody of the place,” Medvitz says.

“At the time, the idea of sustainability was just coming out. By coincidence we kind of met the market.”

In their early years on the ranch, prices were low.

One year McCormack took her mother’s Christmas card list and mailed everyone an invitation to buy boxed lamb. They sold 50 animals that year, and eventually a cousin introduced them to Bill Niman, who began selling their lamb. Within five years demand was so high they brought their neighbors in on the business.

Today they still market their lamb to Niman Ranch. They also sell pasture-raised goat to highend restaurants such as Café Rouge in Berkeley and

(above) The open fields of McCormack Ranch, near Rio Vista in Solano County, border the Sacramento River and look out on Mount Diablo in the distance. (right) Al Medvitz with some of the Boer goats he raises with his wife, Jeanne McCormack, whose family has owned this land for more than a century.

Medvitz. “This place has to be sustainable into the future, and diversity is a big part of that.”

Though the two have deep roots here, they don’t have typical ranch biographies. As a teenager, McCormack gladly left Rio Vista for UC Berkeley, later spending two years in Malawi with the Peace Corps. She met Medvitz while they were in grad school at Harvard. Both got involved in international aid work often related to agriculture: Medvitz wrote for a New Guinea farming guide, and McCormack worked with women’s microenterprise in Kenya. Then, as McCormack’s parents grew older, she and Medvitz considered returning to the ranch.

“For me it was a personal experiment,” Medvitz says. “Here I was writing a curriculum based on agriculture, and I couldn’t grow a tomato.”

Learning to run a ranch that covers nearly six square miles was both daunting and exhilarating. And over the last three

Putting Bay Area Food Landscapes on the Map

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Picture the geography of the Bay Area: the sweep of the Bay from the Delta to the Golden Gate; the rolling hills, rugged mountains, and intimate valleys; all the open spaces that frame our communities. The urban landscapes of iconic bridges and landmark buildings, the cities and towns where we live and work, densely packed around the Bay and then radiating into a suburban patchwork beyond.

Prospect in San Francisco. Their wheat and wool go to wholesalers. And soon their vineyard will produce wine grapes to sell to Gallo.

“We’re trying to produce great food and maintain the health of the animals and the land at the same time,” says McCormack.

“I feel that what we do is noble, I really do. It’s an unbelievable opportunity to do this work.”

Now try to put farmland into this picture. That might not be so easy. Many people think of farmlands primarily as passive landscapes—part of non-urban open space—rather than as active working landscapes that contribute directly to local economies, healthful diets, and sense of place. But Bay Area farms and rangelands cover 1.87 million acres, comprising around 40 percent of the region’s total land area, and produce almost enough food to feed all Bay Area residents. In farmers’ markets now spread throughout the region, dazzling arrays of farm products bring a taste of the countryside right into our communities. But the standard measure of “localness” in food is more often a conceptual mileage number than a real connection with the places and people at the core of our incredibly productive local foodshed.

For more than a century, the Bay Area has been at the forefront

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

of the conservation movement, and for several decades it has been a leader in the local food movement. Now these movements are coming together, with conservationists including agriculture in their vision of regional sustainability and farm advocates adding habitat value and farm tourism to their vision of agriculture’s economic vitality.

“Bay Area Food Landscapes” is born of that evolving alliance and reveals local agriculture as integral to both building healthy communities and protecting our environment. The familiar vistas (top) Cattle graze in the foothills near Mount Diablo, where rangeland forms the bulk of foodproducing landscapes. (right) Muang Saechao picks strawberries that she and her husband farm at Iu-Mien Village Farms in the Sunol AgPark. (left) Freerange chickens at Pie Ranch on the San Mateo Coast.

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

On Saturday, October 8, 3:30-6:30 p.m., join Bay Nature and LandPaths for a farm tour, community festival, and harvest dinner. Tour: free; dinner: $20.

RSVP: hikes@baynature.org or (510)528-8550 x205.

nonprofit organization, and private businesses. Hempel’s Baia Temple AgPark, Fred Hempel is multitasking. After advising two Nicchia is the largest of the four farms on the property. Others of his workers who are having trouble filling a restaurant order include Terra Bella, which grows produce for its communityfor edible radish pods, the wiry farmer fields phone calls as he supported agriculture business; Iu-Mien Village Farms, a collecwalks between hunched rows of tomato plants, inspecting his tive of Laotian immigrants whose organic strawberries are sold most prized crop.

“Even with the cool weather the last couple of days these things are growing like crazy,” he says. “We really need to get them trellised up. Is that a ripening tomato over there?

That’s amazing!”

He pulls out a pocketknife and the tomato—a muddy greenish-red—is sliced, tasted, and dismissed as too watery.

To an untrained palate, the barely ripe fruit is better than any at the grocery store. But Hempel is a biotech research scientist turned tomato breeder turned farmer, and his preferences are exacting. He says they need to be.

“The tomatoes make the most money by far,” he says.

“The first thing we think about every day is, ‘how are the tomatoes doing.’”

Fred Hempel runs Baia Nicchia Farms at the Sunol AgPark, where he grows dozens of Yet diversity and creativity are essential to survival and varieties of tomatoes and other crops specially adapted to the local climate. success as a small commercial organic farmer, Hempel adds. In addition to the heirloom tomatoes, his 10-acre farm at places like Monterey Market in Berkeley; and Fico, a small at the AgPark east of Fremont also grows unusual varieties of heirloom fig enterprise. squash, peppers, exotic herbs, and edible flowers.

The AgPark is the brainchild of the nonprofit organization “We do a lot of testing of crops from other places,” he says, SAGE, or Sustainable Agriculture Education. The goal of the projexplaining that finding seeds that thrive in this particular place ect is to support community-benefit farming, natural resource can be a time-consuming process. But the effort has been worth stewardship, and public education. SAGE leases the land from it, letting him build up a business working with high-end wholethe San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), then salers, plus direct relationships with Bay Area restaurants that ask subleases parcels to farmers who get infrastructure, community, him to grow varieties they can’t get anywhere else. “The chef at and support in exchange for participating in public education Oliveto was in Italy a few months ago, and he brought back some programs that SAGE conducts on the farm. stuff for us to grow,” Hempel says, pointing out some red-stalked “It would’ve been really hard to do what we’re doing in any corn seedlings in his greenhouse as an example. other place,” says Hempel, who started Baia Nicchia with partner Diversity and creativity are likewise hallmarks of the 18-acre Jill Shepherd in 2006. “[SAGE] provided mentoring—how to put in irrigation, when to weed, what kind of tractor to buy.

AgPark in general. Though it looks like any other small farm—a patchwork of neatly tilled rows ribboned with dirt roads—this And if you’re selling things in the Bay Area, you can’t beat the locais in fact an innovative collaboration between a public agency, a tion here.”

All that was part of the plan, says AgPark education manager Roger Kubalek of SAGE. Today, the group is developing a new curriculum and working with SFPUC on plans for a visitor center. “Now that the farming and the stewardship aspects of the program are on their way, we’ve started to focus in on education,” he explains. “It’s a great place to learn.

Many of the students have never The 18-acre AgPark includes diverse farming operations and education programs on 18 acres of land at the Sunol visited a real working farm.”

Water Temple, owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Today, Bayer Farm is about to expand, using a $5 million grant from a state fund for parks in underserved areas. Soon the rest of the six-acre lot surrounding the gardens will become a community park, planned largely by people in the neighborhood.

“People are excited,” Ridley says. “They really want this park to be a model of sustainability and respect for the earth.”

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

Stephen Joseph, stephenjosephphoto.com

(above) Bayer Farm has become a community center for local children and families in the Roseland district of Santa Rosa. (right) The farm’s welcoming hand-painted sign is a beacon in a neighborhood with very few accessible outdoor public spaces.

the farm transformed part of a six-acre vacant lot into a community hub in an area badly lacking in public green spaces. The nearby main street is lined with strip malls where the Dollar Store and Mendoza’s Super Mercado alternate with empty storefronts.

“It is a very low-income neighborhood,” says Magdalena Ridley, who lives a block away and runs the farm for the local nonprofit LandPaths. “We have a lot of health problems like obesity and diabetes. Organic food is expensive, a lot of people don’t drive. So the ability to grow food is something our gardeners really treasure.”

There are 36 private plots tended by individuals and families; more people are on the waiting list. And there’s a public garden where anyone can volunteer and go home with fresh vegetables. But the farm offers more than a place to grow things.

Each summer, about 70 children come for a free lunch program; the rest of the year the farm is an outdoor classroom where kids learn about food, nature, and science.

“We have students come from local schools to work in this area,” explains Jonathan Bravo, who oversees the gardens. “For example, this is called the ‘Garden of Giants,’” he says, gesturing

On a typical early summer day at the Sunol Water

to the sunflower patch. “Second-graders saved the seeds last year and started them in the greenhouse.”

Even on a quiet afternoon, Bayer Farm is a meeting place.

A gate has been cut in the fence of the apartment building next door; a small boy comes through it to play, and later a man steps in carrying a wire cage holding four chickens. He releases the birds into a coop built along the fence.

“This place is very pretty; it brings life,” says the man, Javier Pichardo, who first came here when he brought his daughter to a bilingual story-time for children. He’s now an active volunteer and has a garden plot. “You get to be in contact with nature, see your neighbors, relax the body.”

Besides providing healthy food, creating common space is a main goal of Bayer Farm. “It’s really important for our community to have a place to come together in general, because we don’t have public spaces,” says Ridley. Several of the gardeners echo this sentiment. “If we didn’t have this plot we’d just watch TV,” says Reyna Arreola as she headed home with a big bunch of radishes.

Ernesto Lomeli, a quiet, mustachioed man, also comes to the garden for company. “Otherwise life is boring, because I don’t smoke and I don’t drink,” he says with a laugh. But then he turns somber: His wife, fighting cancer, has gone back to Mexico with their children, and he lost his right pinkie in a mill accident. Other gardeners helped him plant this year’s corn and tomatoes.

Jacoba Charles

Late afternoon sunlight was brilliant on the leaves of corn, tomato, and tomatillo plants. Sunflowers planted by schoolchildren were growing in a tight spiral. Squash and beans were wrapping eager tendrils around teepees of bamboo.

The Mexican national soccer team was playing Peru that day, so only a few gardeners were weeding and watering their garden beds at Bayer Farm in Roseland, a working-class Latino section of Santa Rosa. But on most afternoons, 20 or 30 people come to this organic farm and community garden surrounded by apartment buildings and small, closely built houses. Founded four years ago,

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On 22

November 20, 2010, Mark

McDonald had enough to do

without crazy tourists running

amok on his mountain. As Mount Hamilton’s lone police officer, he was charged with ensuring the safety of the visitors and astronomers at Lick Observatory,

San Jose. This day was espe-

Ralf Burgert

perched high in the hills east of

cially busy, as a freak snowstorm had blown in and caused the whole mountain to shut down in a wintery, slushy mess.

McDonald was busy clearing out nonessential personnel when he saw two women wandering around outside their Honda Accord on the roadside in a near whiteout, holding some kind of metal rod with silver crossbars up in the air. Visibility was about 50 feet and the snowfall mixed liberally with rain and heavy fog.

McDonald tried to shoo them away, but they politely refused to go anywhere. They and their team of hawk trackers had been following a juvenile redtail named Bonnie for almost a week, and they were damned if they would give up because of a little snow. b ay n at u r e

october–december 2011

The women were volunteers with the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (ggro), a research center nestled in the Marin Headlands that over some 25 years has grown into a partnership between professional scientists and fiercely loyal volunteers who count, band, and track local raptors.

A program of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and Golden Gate National Recreation Area, ggro is divided into three separate but related research efforts, all based out of an aging military building at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands. First, there are the hawk watch volunteers stationed atop Hawk Hill, just north of the Golden Gate; their task is to spot, identify, and count all raptors that pass nearby. Second are the banders, a smaller team of people who hide in tiny blinds for hours waiting to band raptors that get caught in baited nets. But the telemetry team sees the real

by Erik Vance

tracking hawks over hill and dale

(left) Volunteer tracker David Jesus releases Bonnie, a redtail hawk outfitted with a radio transmitter (note the tiny antenna protruding from her tail feathers). (below) Golden Gate Raptor Observatory intern Anastasia Ennis tracking a redtail called Athena near Martin’s Beach in Half Moon Bay. (bottom) Bill James tracking from his motorcycle along Skyline Boulevard in San Mateo County.

Courtesy Anastasia Ennis

’R E I T

action — fast-paced work best described as a cross between a David Attenborough documentary and an episode of 24. ggro’s telemetry program began in November 1990 with the idea that it wasn’t enough to count or band birds. Rather, scientists wanted a more complete picture of raptor movements in between the relatively rare occasions a banded bird might be found and reported. So they turned to radio telemetry, one of the favorite tools of modern wildlife research.

Telemetry starts with a small, lightweight radio transponder attached to an animal, which is then set loose. The device sends out a signal at a specific frequency received the same way that your car receives a radio program from a tower. But unlike a radio tower, wildlife is almost always on the move.

Since that first year, the telemetry team has tracked a total of 56 Courtesy Bill James

october–december 2011

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exploring nature with kids

Twinkle, Twinkle, Winter Star by Alan Kaplan (left) The Winter Hexagon outlined in the night sky. The brightest “star” inside is Mars, just passing through. Orion’s three-star belt is near the hexagon’s lower corner; his foot, Rigel, is the bottommost star. Clockwise from there are Sirius, Procyon, Pollux and Castor, Capella, and Aldebaran. Betelgeuse is

Stefan Seip, astromeeting.de

Sure, the nights are getting colder, but if you like looking at the stars, there’s no better time than winter. Early sunsets mean you get in more stargazing and can still get to bed on time. When it’s not raining, the sky tends to be clearer in the winter. And, because of the tilt of the earth’s axis, some of the brightest stars in the sky are visible to us only in the winter.

A few of these bright stars form the Winter Hexagon, a shape easy to see in a clear, dark sky. Looking at these bright stars, we can learn a lot about the different sizes and ages of stars in our galaxy and also get a sense of how far away they are.

Color is a sign of a star’s surface temperature. Hot stars are blue, medium stars are white to yellow, and cool stars are red. A bright star may be close to us or just really big. A star that is both far away and bright has to be huge!

Rigel, the bright left foot of Orion, is just such a star. It is farther from us than any other bright star in the sky—900 lightyears away, about 5,400 trillion miles (a light-year is the distance light travels in 365 days). It glows a brilliant blue-white.

So far, so bright! It is a supergiant, 18 times the mass of our star, the sun.

Sirius, the twinkler of “twinkle, twinkle, little star,” is the star that appears brightest in our sky. You can find it by following the line of Orion’s belt to the east.

It sparkles blue, red, and green as it rises because Earth’s atmosphere acts like a prism near the horizon. When higher up, Sirius looks like a blue-white diamond in the sky. Sirius is the closest star we can see from the United States (8.8 light-years away). It is not very big (only twice the sun’s mass) but its nearness makes it appear bright.

b ay n at u r e

inside the hexagon, above Orion’s belt. (below) A six-hour exposure east of Coyote Ridge in Santa Clara County.

Lech Naumovich, lechphoto.com

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Families Afield

Procyon, the bright star of the Little Dog constellation, glows yellow-white because it is medium hot and not very large (about 1.5 times the mass of our sun). Stars of this size live for billions of years before they run out of hydrogen fuel to burn.

Both Pollux and Aldebaran (across from

october–december 2011

each other on the Winter Hexagon) are cool, red-orange giants. Of the stars we can see, Pollux is the brightest star that also has a recently discovered planet orbiting it. When you are looking up at it, maybe someone there is looking back at you!

Then there’s Betelgeuse, another cool,

Ask the Naturalist red-orange supergiant that is the largest star within 1,000 light-years of us. It would fill our solar system out to the orbit of Jupiter!

Big stars like Betelgeuse live fast, die young, and leave a very dense corpse. It started out as a very heavy star (20 times the sun’s mass) and quickly burned up its hydrogen fuel. It is now only a few million years away from being an explosive supernova that will light up our sky as brightly as a crescent moon. After that, Betelgeuse will shrink to the size of a small town, and a piece of it the size of a sugar cube will weigh 17 tons!

If we wanted to see our sun explode— and we don’t!—we’d have to wait another five billion years. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. Time to go to bed.

GET OUT!

The great thing about stargazing is you can do it anywhere there’s a clear view of the night sky. Of course the less city light, the better. But even in town, you can help scientists study light pollution by participating in the Great World Wide Star Count, October 14–28. Just go outside after dark, count the stars you see in the constellation Cygnus (the swan), and report back online [info at http://bit.ly/okukel].

Viewing stars through a telescope is always exciting. The biggest telescopes are at observatories, and we’re lucky to have quite a few in the Bay Area that offer viewing when skies are clear. In the North Bay, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park’s Robert Ferguson Observatory offers monthly stargazing [rfo.org, (707)833-6979]. Or head to Oakland’s Chabot Space and Science Center for stargazing on Friday and Saturday nights [chabotspace.org, (510)336-7300]. In the South Bay, view the stars at the Foothill College Observatory in Los Altos every Friday evening [info at http://bit.ly/ovgVpS].

Some of the friendliest telescopes belong to local amateur astronomers. Like the Hercules Stargazers [http://bit.ly/qFIsXA], many of these groups meet regularly, love to talk about stars, and post star party dates and other information on their websites. You can find out about many more astronomical societies and observatories by visiting BayNature.org/stargazing. [Sue Rosenthal]

m i c h a e l Q: I’ve heard bees can see colors that people can’t.

What about birds? Can they also see more colors?

How do scientists figure out what can be seen by other animals, especially small animals like insects? [Anne, Fremont] A: I occasionally like to conduct a reality check about my own awareness of the universe. The world, as I perceive it, is only a representation that I create from data filtered through my feeble senses.

Other animals have a completely different worldview. Rattlesnakes are sensitive to infrared energy (heat). They can “feel” the warmth from a jackrabbit at a distance. Bats and porpoises use sound to “see” in total darkness and even distinguish the density of an object at a distance. Bees, as you have heard, can see colors in the ultraviolet (uv) range that humans cannot. The perceived realities of various creatures can be very different and all true.

We can’t see in the ultraviolet range — our eyes block that frequency, which can harm our retinas. Snow blindness is one result of too much uv, as is sunburn. But humans can see at least one color that bees cannot — red.

Flowering plants have evolved to maximize pollination. Some are pollinated by wind, water, bats, and birds, but by far insects are the commonest vectors. Plants have evolved showy flowers full of nectar and extra-tasty pollen to entice insects.

Plants have methods for making sure insects find their way to the Promised Land. Just shine a blacklight on a flower to see it revealed as a honeybee sees it.

There are suddenly incredibly obvious floral tracks that resemble runway landing lights, which guide the insect clearly.

Some flowers even have pollen grains that glow in ultraviolet light.

Birds, on the other hand, can see both ultraviolet and red. Consequently flowers that are pollinated by birds (usually hummingbirds in the New World and sunbirds in the old) are usually red or at least brightly colored. Birds’ eyes have at least

e l l i s four types of light-receptive cones (compared to our three) and have much richer color vision than we do, aiding in orientation, food gathering, and mate selection.

Vision in mammals and birds relies on light-sensitive pigments created and stored in rods and cones in the eye. Scientists can make assumptions about how an animal sees by observing the concentration of these pigments. Animals with just rods can’t see color but have excellent night vision.

Insects and other invertebrates use different visual pigments that function just as well or even better than the rods and cones we use. The mantis shrimp has the most complex eyes of any animal.

Scientists have found that even amoebas can tell light from dark — not too shabby for little single cells!

Email your questions to atn@baynature.org.

Be a Real Conservative Buying goods made yesteryear conserves resources from then and now.

It doesn’t make new pollution from manufacturing. It’s a conservative thing to do.

We have 3 acres; well organized; (almost) all used.

UrbanOre To End the Age of Waste

7th St. nr Ashby, Berkeley 8:30AM-7PM Mon-Sat, 10AM-7PM Sun Receiving ‘til 5PM, 360 days/yr

october–december 2011

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