There's no better time than now to observe young herons and egrets preparing to leave the nest, and few better places than Marin County's Bolinas Lagoon Preserve.

Although they are large birds, herons and egrets are remarkably graceful, says Andy LaFrenz, an Audubon Canyon Ranch board member, which is part of the reason he takes particular pleasure in watching them. The picture below is a Great Blue Heron in flight.

The 1000 acre Bolinas Lagoon Preserve is owned and administered by Adubon Canyon Ranch, which was founded in 1962 after local preservationists defeated a plan to build a major highway and other urban expansions into the Marin coastal area.

Bicycling from Santa Rosa to Seattle is no small accomplishment, but doing it a century ago was a far greater challenge.

 The intent of his 15-day ride to Seattle, explains Bill Harrison, was to repeat the trip made by two young Santa Rosans 100 years earlier. But changes to the landscape over the past century made that impossible in places.

Bill Harrison celebrates his arrival at the landmark fountain on the University of Washington campus was the final destination for both Vic and  Ray—the 1909 riders whose journey was chronicled in the book, Two Wheels North (published by Oregon State University Press), and for Harrison 100 years later.

Interstate 5 was not part of the landscape 100 years ago, but Harrison explains that it now serves as the only possible route in some parts of the trip north. Curiously, though, the legal status of bicyclists varies between states.


Traveling by bicycle is an excellent way to savor the landscape as one passes through it. Harrison says one of his most memorable vistas-from among many-was this view of Mount Shasta, look back the morning he continued on from Yreka.

Harrison also remarked on this view in his online diary from the journey, which you can read here:

Another, larger repeat of the 1909 ride is being planned for later this summer by a group in Sacramento, as a fund-raising event to help fight Histiocytosis, a rare blood disease that primarily affects children under 10 years old.

With another 2 million people expected in the Bay Area by 2035, Greenbelt Alliance is urging local governments to plan now where they are going to live. And they've got some ideas to suggest, too.

Greenbelt Alliance Executive Director Jeremy Madsen (left) points to the east bay town of Hercules as one community that has proactively embraced a smart growth development plan for their city.

 How might that work in the North Bay? Greenbelt Alliance has already prepared a case study of Novato as an example.

There is mounting demand for smaller homes in attractive urban neighborhoods, says Madsen, and he predicts that builders and developers will need little encouragement to move toward meeting that demand.

If we change how the Bay Area grows, says Greenbelt Alliance, we can make our region more climate-friendly, affordable, and economically competitive, while protecting our farms, forests, and watersheds. Read more about the Grow Smart challenge here, or click here to see a regional map of projected residential growth sites.

We tend to think of history as a record of human activity, but a natural landscape also has a history all it's own, which is what is studied in the new field called historic ecology.

The San Francisco Estuary Institute's study of the Napa River ecosystem  was a project that brought together a wide alliance of stakeholders, notes Robin Grossinger (right), and developed information that could be used for multiple purposes.