“Without allowing fire to move across the landscape as it would do naturally, there’s just a huge accumulation of fuels, particularly after these significant storms in the past two years,” said Dylan McManus, California State Park’s Interpreter. “Old-growth forests have evolved with fire for many, many, many years. So we simply can’t take it away. There has to be some form of fire, and in this day and age, it means in the safest way possible.”

These photos and videos are from a prescribed burn at Henry Cowell Redwood State Park. The forest remained peaceful as the smoke rose to mix with the fog and mist.

It is hard to describe the feeling of walking through the old-growth grove as firefighters ignited approximately 80 piles throughout the Redwood Loop. But one of the feelings that rose to the top is hope.

The catalyst to begin the controlled burning at Henry Cowell Old Growth Redwood Loop was the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire that burned Big Basin in 2020. Wanting to avoid a similar event at Henry Cowell, park stewards are charting a new path forward.

The goal of burning piles is to reduce fuel on the forest floor, reducing the risk of a catastrophic wildfire and returning nutrients to the soil. Redwood forests are adapted to fire, and periodic burning keeps them healthy. It also reduces fire risk to neighboring residential areas.

After three and a half decades of chasing butterflies across California, one scientist has been watching his butterfly count take a nosedive.

An assortment of items found during nature walks. To make these photos I constructed a “field studio” from mat board, various clips and a diffuser. This field studio folds up and fits into my backpack. It allows me to make high quality photos using only natural light. But the results are equal to what I could accomplish in an indoor studio setting with strobes or flash. It’s a useful way to photograph feathers and animals bones and then replace them exactly where they were found afterwards.

 We waded through murky bay waters and patches of deep mud under the light of the moon and our headlamps. Cool water sloshed over the tops of our boots and covered our toes. We moved slowly and carefully across the slick bottom of the bay. The tide was going out, nearing its lowest mark, and the oyster reef balls had begun to appear as the receding waters exposed them. 

Watershed project volunteers huddled around the reef balls with scrub brushes, quadrangles, clipboards and rulers in hand. They were looking this late evening in October for Olympia oysters, the species native to our coastline. 

Oysters were once “plentiful beyond modern conception” in the San Francisco Bay, in the words of author Malcolm Margolin in his book The Ohlone Way, but their populations declined substantially around the time of the California gold rush. The question the volunteers were trying to answer was whether a recent effort to repopulate the bay with oysters was having any success. 

“For a long time, people thought oysters were gone here, that there just were not any left,” said Helen Fitanides, program manager at the Watershed Project, a nonprofit based out of Richmond that is working to restore the oyster habitat in the bay. A combination of overfishing, pollution and habitat loss had all but wiped them out. Hydraulic mining brought large amounts of sand and sediment down from the Sierra Nevada mountains and into the bay, burying their rocky habitats. 

“Oysters need to live on something hard,” Fitanides said. “If they glue themselves to a tiny rock or piece of sand, they are just going to sink in the mud and die, especially out here. It’s mostly mud.”

The Watershed Project in 2013 deployed 100 artificial reef balls at Point Pinole as an experiment to see if this would help the oysters repopulate. The reef balls, which are made of crushed oyster shells, sand and concrete, provide a hard surface for the oysters to grow on, and the population grew exponentially within three years into 30,000 oysters; however, in 2017, an unusually high amount of precipitation over a prolonged period decreased salinity in the bay, killing 97% of the new oyster reef population. 

Watershed Project’s scientists and volunteers are continuing to monitor the oysters and are hoping to see the population recover. After carefully peeling off green sea lettuce and removing sediment from a portion of a reef ball, Anne Bremer, education and community outreach coordinator at the Watershed Project, leaned in to get a better look. Several baby oysters, called “oyster spat” were visible. 

“This fall is the first time that I’ve seen live oysters on these reef balls,” Bremer said. 

Oysters play a significant role in the health of the bay. As filter feeders, they help clear pollution from the water. As they grow on top of each other, they form reefs that can help protect the shoreline from climate change and associated sea level rise. 

Although much uncertainty remains about the long-term recovery of oyster populations in the bay, this fall the oyster population recovery took a positive turn. Everyone found at least one oyster on a plot. “I’m so excited about this. It has been a year and a half of looking and often not finding. There were some days when we didn’t find anything,” Fitanides said.

(This piece was originally published in Richmond Confidential in 2018)

She saw me before I saw her. I wouldn’t have seen her at all, except a chilly breeze picked up after the sun dropped down behind the hillside. I shivered and bent down to pull my jacket from my pack. As I started to stand back up, my eyes came up to meet hers—almond shaped hazel eyes of a beautiful female bobcat. She stared at me from behind a few blades of June-dried golden grasses, mere feet from the trail. The tones and dark spots in her fur blended seamlessly into the palette of the summer landscape. When she angled one of her ears to hear me better, I could see the white spot on the back. She opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out, something cats do to smell-taste. She does not have the luxury of not noticing the human first. Most animals are aware of us all the time. They know because they have to know. Their life depends on it. But it was not so long ago that all humans did this too. We did it because we had too, our very survival also depended on it. We did it the same way the bobcat did it—we made full use of all of our senses to heighten our awareness of our surroundings. We evolved to be successful at it. The skill of tracking has been largely lost to modern humans but as more people are craving a more intimate connection to nature, there has been a resurgence of interest in reclaiming this practice. 

“Tracking, at its surface, is simply the art of identifying animals by their footprints. But if you scratch this surface, tracking will take you on a journey deep into the heart of nature and into your own heart as well,” writes Richard in his book The Heart of Tracking.

The evening I encountered this bobcat I’d been sitting in one spot very still on the edge of a hillside for well over an hour, watching a white tailed kite hunt the field below. As the last light was fading from the sky I finally got up and began to slowly walk down the trail, going as far into my senses as possible.

On a recent April morning, a light layer of fog blanketed Kitayama Brothers Farms, nestled into the sandy coastal dunes of Santa Cruz County, obscuring the view of the Pacific Ocean and Monterey Bay behind a wall of white. Inside the tidy rows of greenhouses, which contain one and a half million square feet of growing space, was a sight that should never have been: rows and rows of brilliantly colored Asiatic Lilies, Pomponi Daisies and Ranunculus blooming profusely under the glass.

Each opened bloom was a flower that will never make it to market, a small casualty of a global pandemic. Now, Kitayama Brothers Farms is struggling to find a way to get their next round of flowers off their farm and into the hands of their customers before they put on their display once again for an empty audience.

The blooms should have been harvested with their buds still tightly closed and transported to customers in time for them to unfold on birthday dinner tables and wedding altars. "When you walk in for the first time, it's such a beautiful sight to see all the flowers blooming. At the same time, you realize that you're going to have to throw away all these flowers. And that's painful." said Farai Madziva, the vice President of Kitayama Brothers Farms.

At first, Kitayama Brothers Farms tried to rescue their flowers, by moving them from their greenhouses to their coolers. But by the end of the month, they began to throw away flowers by the dumpster load.

The scene unfolding at Kitayama Brothers Farms is just one example of the breakdown happening on flower farms throughout the state. The temperate climate of coastal California places the state at the center of the American floriculture industry, providing three quarters of domestically grown cut flowers.

This photo essay documents the Kitayama Brothers farm and the California Pajarosa farm as they struggle to adapt to a new normal.

"The Breakwater" is a manmade rock spit adjacent to Crab Cove in Alameda. It is a physical space where people, birds, invertebrates, fish, and marine mammals intersect—a thin line between concrete and sea. I photographed it between January and March of 2020 for a class project at UC Berkeley School of journalism. I got into a routine: Every day, I brought my camera to the Breakwater.

The changing weather, tides, wind, waves and light altered this single landscape into infinite possibilities: mudfats, whitecaps, sky-blue pink-colored dusk, or mysterious white fog. Thousands of birds or just a few.

After dark, people fishing for jacksmelt would switch on their headlamps. I would watch each little light move out onto the rocks, under the moonlight.

For several days I watched from shore as birds, sea lions and seals gathered to feast during the winter herring run.

One day I wrapped my camera in a plastic bag and slid my kayak into the water. The water was smooth as glass, and the sea and sky matched: the color of fog. As I paddled out, a huge sea lion swam right under me, almost close enough to touch. The thrill of being in a wild place, utterly alone with the animals, was exhilarating.

Faster-than-average warming is bringing changes to Richmond’s ecosystems. Temperatures and sea levels are rising. Fog patterns are shifting. Richmond’s plants and animals are facing a future of altered habitats.

My family’s land burned in the 2020 Bridger Foothills Wildfire.

As I walked through the burned fir forest, my footsteps landed softly, almost inaudibly. My boots were insulated from the ground by inches of matte black ash. The three-hundred-year-old trees were uniformly charred matte black. Soft and spongy to the touch, their bark crumbled when I pressed into it gently with my finger. The texture and color of the ground and trees matched: soft, matte black. But the lack of footsteps couldn't fully explain the quiet. The sound of the wind blowing through the branches was missing. There were no branches left. There were no animals rustling in the brush. No birds were calling in the distance. The animals, the brush, the birds were gone. Making my way across the landscape had never been so easy: No woody obstacles to step over. No grasses to brush against my cotton leggings and no seeds or burrs to velcro themselves into the cotton. No thorny shrubs to cut open my skin. Only crisp mountain air and soft empty quietness, shockingly beautiful despite the ravages that had just taken place.The enormity of what happened to this single piece of burned land is hard to describe. The losses that occurred within the bounds of the viewfinder of this single photograph are incalculable. The landscape, as we knew it has changed forever. And yet this change represents just a drop in the bucket of the ravages of wildfires in the west this year.