In Conversation About Bay Area Wildlife As 2024 begins to come to a close, we did not want to miss the opportunity to reflect on an event held in celebration of SPAWN’s first-ever employee (27 years ago!), Jeff Miller, author of the book Bay Area Wildlife: An Irreverent Guide. The event took place at the Dance…

Issue 43 | December 2024 Great news to kick off the New Year: Thanks to many years of hard work by the Center and allies, in December the National Park Service announced that the elk-killing cattle fence at the Point Reyes National Seashore will be taken down. Removing the fence will allow the unique tule…

Text and photographs by Jeremy Miller December 27, 2024 Earlier this month, with no announcement or fanfare, National Park Service workers began dismantling a controversial fence in the northern reaches of Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco. For more than 45 years, that barrier—eight feet high and two miles long—has hemmed a herd…

By John Beck, for The Press Democrat December 6, 2024 3:46 PM The National Park Service agreed in court Friday to stop taking down the fence in Point Reyes National Seashore that separates several hundred tule elk from adjacent dairy farms and ranches, bowing for now to a last-minute legal challenge from ranchers. It’s the…

Bay Area Wildlife – An Irreverent Guide Book Review by Norman Pillsbury and Steve Tillmann When Bay Area native Jeff Miller moved to Los Osos he joined the SLO Birding community with a jolt and upended ideas for just how much fun birding can be. Before long, Jeff was integral to birding expeditions to remote…

Bay Area Wildlife – An Irreverent Guide Book Review by Joe Eaton I wish I could have gotten my hands on Jeff Miller’s Bay Area Wildlife: An Irreverent Guide, or something like it, a couple of decades ago. Miller, best known for his years of environmental activism with the Alameda Creek Alliance and the Center for…

Bay Area Wildlife – An Irreverent Guide Book Review by John R. Platt You need to have a lot of reverence and respect for wildlife to write a book like this fun guide, which centers around one region of California but provides details on species that can be found in many other places. Even though…

An Irreverent New Center-Authored Book Longtime Center staffer Jeff Miller has a book out. Bay Area Wildlife: An Irreverent Guide casts a spotlight on the whereabouts and personalities of the Bay Area’s furred, feathered, and fork-tongued neighbors. Meet “screaming death parrots” (aka peregrine falcons), “disco slugs dressed for a P-Funk concert” (nudibranchs), and “rototillers with…

For our feature of the month, we are privileged to include a short excerpt from Bay Area Wildlife: An Irreverent Guide, by Jeff Miller—a local environmental hero. As the book’s introduction says, Jeff has spent his “entire life falling in love with the natural world of the Bay Area and most of my adult life…

New book from local author Ashland birder Jeff Miller has written a quirky and informative watchable wildlife guide for the fauna of the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Bay Area Wildlife: An Irreverent Guide is much more than a practical guidebook. The book’s 55 chapters cover 100+ native wildlife species, from furry mammals to blubbery…