InBerkeley

I’m worried about my kids crossing Ashby at Pine Avenue in the Elmwood. But a wild turkey just ambled placidly down my street and crossed without so much as a by your leave.

Nature

We’ve had the birds and the bees on InBerkeley. What about spiders?

I’ve noticed a sudden increase of spiders in my neighborhood, most of them looking like the magnificent specimen above, photographed just outside my door. Any experts on arachnids out there?

Update Well, there are experts out there, or at least people who are good at researching a specific problem. The spider outside my door (and probably yours as well) seems to be Araneus diadematus. You can find a trove of Araneus diadematus photos here, some of which are as good as mine.

Nature

Jennifer English used to write the wonderful Walking Berkeley. The blog reached its natural conclusion when English completed the mission she had set out to achieve: walk every street in the city chronicling her experiences in words and photos along the way.

The good news is that English has launched a new blog. Car-Free Outdoors focuses on car-free outdoor adventures in the San Francisco Bay Area. English says she will start with hikes and hopes to add camping/backpacking and cycling trips in future.

Her inaugural post is on a Marin Headlands and Sausalito stairways hike (above). English — who is also on Twitter at @carfreeoutdoors — says she hopes to update weekly with new content, but the schedule will vary, “depending on work and other commitments” (ah yes, we know all about those).

[Photo: carfreeoutdoors.wordpress.com]

Blogs, Hyperlocal, Nature Bay Area blogs, Berkeley bloggers

Yesterday I hiked up to the top of Claremont Canyon and on the way down — flushed, hot and bothered — I thought, Oh I wish it would rain.

Yesterday Lance tweeted the following: “Simple idea for US Open. Move to California (prefer north). Guarantee of no rain in September. No need to build a roof at the USTABJKNTC.”

So I guess it was inevitable. The thunder started rolling in last night and the heavens opened.

It’s raining in Berkeley.

[Photo: www.guardian.co.uk]

Nature

A recent tweet from Kcecelia got me curious about a place she had referred to as the Berkeley Bulb, which I had never heard of before even though I’ve lived in this area now for 26 years.  Googling the phrase turned up a few references to it, but it turned out that most didn’t really provide much information. Finally, I discovered this article on SFGate from four years ago.

It wasn’t the Berkeley Bulb, but the Albany Bulb. I must have driven right by this place hundreds of times over the years, never thinking there was much out there besides a parking lot for the racetrack. While I watched them dumping trash at the Berkeley Marina and then turn it into Cesar Chavez Park, I had no idea that another dumping ground nearby had met a similar, though less refined, fate.

Read more…

Art, General, In the wild, Nature, Recreation

Strolled past this cascade of white Bougainvillea on Domingo Avenue today. Lovely.

[Photo: Melissa Rapp.]

Nature

It’s too hot for Berkeley.

One of the wonderful things about our weather is how rarely it reaches extremes of hot or cold. Not so today, with temperatures hitting 90 degrees, even though there’s a fair amount of cloud cover. Apparently we can blame Tropical Storm Ignacio, which is raging in the Pacific, west of Baja California. That provokes the hot, humid weather we’re experiencing, despite being hundreds of miles away from northern California.

The good news is that the forecast for the weekend is a return to our usual Berkeley eden.

Photo by programwitch from Flickr

Nature

Who knew there are roughly 1600 different kinds of bees in California?  I didn’t, and apparently neither did most professional bee followers.  This shocking news was disclosed in a recent UC Berkeley study that focused on urban environments, an area that until now had been neglected.

As this San Jose Mercury article makes clear, between 60 to 80 different bee species were found in each of the seven cities covered by the research.

Gordon Frankie, a UC Berkeley professor who headed the study, said prior to his research there wasn’t much information about bees in urban environments, only agricultural ones.

“Nobody really thought there were that many types of bees in urban areas,” he said.

Of the 4,000 known bee species in the U.S., roughly 1,600 have been identified in California. Unlike the non-native honey bee, which lives in hives and is social meaning it has a queen and drones, most of California’s native bees are solitary meaning the females construct a nest and there is no hive or division of labor and prefer to burrow in the ground or in trees.

Environment, General, Nature, UC Berkeley

Scientists at UC Berkeley have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California’s San Andreas Fault [pictured above] that produced a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 1857.

What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors suggest underground stress may be building up faster than expected and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor.

Results of the research appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

For the full story, as reported by ABC7, click here

[Photo credit: www.zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk]

Emergencies, Environment, Nature, Science, UC Berkeley Emergencies, Environment, Science, UC Berkeley

Nature

I always knew when I moved from London to California I was putting myself in more danger of  myriad natural disasters.

Now these My Hazards maps, courtesy of the California Emergency Management Agency, show me precisely how much danger. The one on the left, above, shows the proximity of the UC campus to the Hayward Fault and earthquake-induced landslide area. The map on the right shows a very high fire hazard area just to the east of Grizzly Peak Boulevard and Arlington Avenue.

It’s not that we don’t know these things. But it’s a sober reminder seeing them illustrated so starkly in graphic form.

Hey, take five and input your own address for a pinpoint accurate look at just how close an earthquake, flood or fire could be to you!

Environment, Nature Environment, Nature