Tag Archives | Knowland Park Wildlife

When the Swallows Come Back to Knowland Park

Every March the California town of San Juan Capistrano celebrates the return of cliff swallows to the mission where they flock to build their nests. This annual migration is such a predictable event that the town has built an entire tourist industry out of it.

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Mountain Lions – An Inconvenient Truth

Mountain lion in the East Bay. Photo by Jim Hale.

As we were finishing up the post on mountain lions last week, the story broke that Dan Richards, President of the California Fish and Game Commission, had killed a mountain lion in Idaho on an arranged hunt. After a long chase led by hunting dogs, he shot the exhausted animal out of a tree where it had climbed to escape the dogs. Later that night Richards dined on his kill and gloated about it in a letter to a California state lawmaker. Not so surprisingly, public outrage has erupted and there have been calls for his resignation since the Commission is involved with protecting California’s wildlife. But Richards’ defenders point out that hunting mountain lions is legal in Idaho.

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