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In this strange pandemic school year with classes online and student clubs not able to meet in person, the Natural History Club has been meeting virtually twice a week. We can’t go out as a group on any field trips, so the students have been sharing their nature journals online. Yesterday we played Jeopardy! I…

California has been burning for almost a month now. Wildfires rage up and down the state, and it seems that new ones pop up every day. I haven’t bothered looking up the latest stats on acreage destroyed because, frankly, it would be too depressing. All across social media today people posted photos of orange skies…

Today’s report was written by a guest blogger, Alex Johnson, who also happens to be my husband. 26 August 2020 In the late afternoon last Saturday, the wind shifted and we got our first breaths of fresh air all week. We even saw actual clouds and blue sky for the first time in 5 days!…

My next public speaking appearance is coming up!

At the end of April we made another trip down to southern California to catch the tail end of the wildflower superbloom. We knew that the best part of the bloom had passed, because we had already seen lots of it a month ago, but thought that there might still be some color, especially at…

A week ago today, on Valentine’s Day, I accompanied two students from the Natural History Club to Seacliff State Beach. Catie and Ryan, on behalf of the NHC, want to take charge of a now-empty glass display case at the visitor center and turn it into an exhibit of some sort. I became an official…

In the wee hours of Sunday 12 August 2018, the F/V Pacific Quest ran aground near Terrace Point. Over the next 24 hours she broke apart and began leaking diesel fuel into Monterey Bay. Fortunately most of the diesel was removed from the wreck, but the boat itself continued to disintegrate, with a lot of…

This morning I went out on what will probably be my last low tide of the season. We don’t get any good (i.e., below 0 feet and during daylight hours) until November, so it’s time to hang up the hip boots for a few months and work on other things. I had planned to go…

Very early in the morning of Sunday 12 August 2018, the F/V Pacific Quest ran aground near Long Marine Lab. I found out about it because the lab facilities manager sent out a global e-mail telling us that a boat had wrecked and telling us that the seawater pumps had been turned off just in…