Least tern offers fish to newly hatched chick by Dan Pancamo

The wheel of the seasons is turning again.  For a few glorious weeks earlier this month, our shorelines around the bay were packed with water birds.  Shorebirds in their breeding finery shared the bounty of the intertidal and shallow water areas with California least tern newly arrived from Mexico.  The shorebirds are now gone, away in the night with a high keening cry, for their nesting grounds in the far north.

Victorian woman with egret feathers on hat, 1878 by Eastbourne

The least tern, smallest of our three tern species, will be with us for the summer.  They arrive along California’s shore with their tuxedo colors and distinctive white “V” on their forehead in late April.  Once on the brink of extinction, their population has been steadily increasing from a low of 600 birds in 1973 to current estimates of over 7,000 birds.  Long before this, in the late 1800s, they suffered depletion for the millinery trade.  What fashionable Victorian woman could be seen without hats decorated with bird feathers, wings and even whole birds?

The Migratory Bird Treaty was passed in 1918 affording protection from hunting.  Another pressure on the California least tern’s success, however, is its reliance on open, sandy beaches for nesting habitat.  Throughout much of California, this is also where people like to spend their summers.  And with the introduction of non-native predators — cats, dogs, and red foxes — the ground-nesting birds have had a hard time raising their young.

Banding young California least terns helps track their success. Photo by Linda Tanner

There remains a success story in the terns return and of the people who care enough to fight for their future.  California least tern are on the verge of being delisted and downgraded from endangered to threatened, one of 110 success stories celebrated on Endangered Species Day last week.  The main remaining hurdle to delisting them is continued commitment by agencies to protect their all-important nesting habitat along our shores.

Tern-protection volunteers also work with the East Bay Regional Park District and have successfully helped establish a new breeding colony in Hayward.  You can learn more about the terns at Alameda Point in this article and video. You can also view the Alameda nesting colony on Saturday, June 16 on one of three bus tours departing from Crab Cove Visitor Center; reserve a space by calling (888) 327-2757 or online at www.ebparksonline.org.  There will also be programs throughout the day for all ages highlighting terns and a tern watch along the beach at 2:30pm.

And are you curious about what a California least tern sounds like? Listen to an audio recording here.

Tules on Twitchell Island in the Delta. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

With thousands of acres of rich farmland, the Delta has a long agricultural legacy. But farming there can be a risky business. Dozens of farms have been flooded over the past half century as aging levees have collapsed.

That became a reality for farmer Rudy Mussi on the morning of June 3, 2004. It was clear, sunny day. "You never expect a flood in the summer months," says Mussi.

Mussi was growing corn and asparagus on lower Jones Tract, an island in the Delta, 10 miles west of Stockton. That morning, he got a phone call. Water was flooding onto his farmland.

"Your heart stops for a second or two and then realism sets in. And you just start moving your equipment and get it to high ground," says Mussi.

How did a flood happen a on a sunny day? It's because of a basic rule of physics. Mussi farmed on an island below sea level, like a lot of the islands in the Delta. The Delta used to be a huge swath of wetlands, where two major rivers met San Francisco Bay. Today, earthen levees hold that water back – most of the time.

"Once a break occurs, you know, there's no way you're gonna stop that, not with 10 feet of water on the other side," Mussi says. Draining the island and repairing the levees around Jones Tract cost about $90 million.

The levee break on Jones Tract in 2004. (Photo: CA Department of Water Resources)

It wasn't an isolated incident. Over the last century, more than 150 levees have failed in the Delta.

Delta Infrastructure at Risk

"This is how we get ourselves in kind of an arms race between the water and the land," says Jeff Mount, professor with the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis.

Levee-building began in the 1850s, when settlers came to the Delta for the rich soil. More than a thousand miles of levees were built. "This network of levees through time had to get bigger and bigger for a very basic reason: the land has been steadily lowering," says Mount.

As farmers exposed the rich peat soil, it started decomposing. The land level dropped; "In some places they talked about four inches per year," says Mount. Today, it's less than an inch per year thanks to better farming practices.

Add up all those inches over the past century and some islands are now 30 feet below sea level. That puts a lot of stress on the levees. There are also other concerns: rising sea levels and extreme floods. "And then the big 800-pound gorilla in the room – we're due for a very large earthquake on the San Andreas system."

Add up all these risks and Mount says there's a two-thirds chance of a catastrophic levee failure in the next 50 years. That, of course, affects farmers and communities in the Delta, but it could also impact California's water supply.

"The raindrops that fall in Mount Shasta are consumed by people in San Diego. Water moves a great distance and this is one of the critical hubs in that system," says Mount.

Fixing the Delta's levees is estimated to cost billions. But on some islands, scientists are experimenting with a new fix.

Farming Carbon

Peat soil samples on Twitchell Island. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

On a windy day on Twitchell Island in the Delta, ecologist Lisa Windham-Myers of the US Geological Survey pushes her way through a wetland filled with a tall, reed-like plant known as tule.

"The plant grows… some of these are 16 feet tall. They're just huge," she says. That growth is changing the ground we're standing on. Windham-Myers pulls out a sample of the dark peat soil.

The wetland produces soil at a rapid rate – four inches a year on average. That's huge, says USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi, in a place where the land is sinking. "These islands are like bowls and the way we see projects like this is you want to fill up the middle of that bowl and help level out the whole island."

Planting wetlands like this one could raise the land level and water table on the inside of levees, relieving some of the pressure. But why would farmers want to replace cash crops with tule? Windham-Myers points to the soil.

"This is basically almost 100 percent carbon. These take up far more than a typical forest environment," she says. California is setting up a market for carbon, as part of the state's effort to cut global warming emissions. Early next year, companies that need to reduce their emissions could pay farmers to store carbon in wetlands like this.

USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi talks with Delta farmer Al Medvitch. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Today, two farmers are here checking out the project: Steve Mello, a Delta farmer on Tyler Island and Al Medvitch, a farmer in the Montezuma Hills.

"The potential has been demonstrated well. You guys are standing in the middle of it. But in order to move from here to market, we need to develop a lot more techniques so people can come and verify that the carbon is stored," says Brian Bergamaschi, describing how wetland farming might work.

Both farmers seem open to the idea. But Mello says ultimately, it depends on the bottom line. "It would absolutely need to cash flow. While it could dovetail with levee stability, it would still need to generate enough to amortize your property value."

Still, Mello says assuming carbon prices are high enough, growing patches of wetlands could be a feasible way to improve the levees and to stay farming.

Cancer cells under a microscope. Colored stains
mark different compartments in the cell. The nucleus is
red and lysosomes (which break down waste) are purple.
(Image: Carolin Zehetmeier, Morphosys AG, Germany)

Dr. Susan Love thinks breast cancer researchers need to get over their addiction to rodents.

America’s most famous breast cancer surgeon started treating women some 30 years ago. “And we’re still doing the same thing we did when I started,” she told a crowd in San Francisco last month at the Sage Bionetworks conference, aimed at transforming biomedical research.

“Surgery radiation, chemotherapy, hormones, and now we’ve added a little bit of targeted therapies,” said Love, a clinical professor of surgery at UCLA. “We never subtract anything, mind you, we only add things on top. And our results are about the same.”

Although breast cancer incidence and mortality have decreased since 1998, by 1.3% and 2% respectively, more than 200,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year and more than 40,000 will die from it. Nearly 110 women die from breast cancer every day.

Experts think earlier detection and better treatments account for the decline in deaths, but screening carries risks. With mass screening comes overdiagnosis—that is, diagnosing a condition that would not prove symptomatic or fatal—and with overdiagnosis comes overtreatment and other potential harms (see video below). Screening technology can’t distinguish between aggressive and harmless tumors, which can shrink or even disappear on their own. Overdiagnosis will likely just increase as imaging technology finds smaller and smaller tumors.

Medical experts acknowledged in an editorial in the Annals of Internal Medicine last month that it’s time to recognize overdiagnosis as a serious problem. Most patient-education materials don’t even mention overdiagnosis and most women aren’t aware of the possibility, the authors said. As they pointed out, and any woman knows, “the impact of a cancer diagnosis lasts a lifetime.”

It’s hard to think of a physician who’s done more to acknowledge the trauma of breast cancer than the author of the best-selling “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book,” now in its fifth edition.

That book, along with Love's early refusal to accept the oxymoronic (emphasis on moronic) “early detection is your best prevention” mantra of mainstream cancer and advocacy organizations, won her a place of honor among frustrated breast cancer activists, who know all too well that if you can diagnose cancer, you haven't prevented it. Detecting it, by definition, means it's there.

The surgical tools used on breast cancer
patients in the 18th century look gruesome, but
aren't really so far removed from the "slash, burn
and poison" approach to breast cancer today.
(Illustration: Louis-Jacques Goussier)

Activists have long pushed researchers to shift their focus from treatments and cures to true prevention.

Despite $4 billion spent on breast cancer research, researchers still don’t know what causes it or how to prevent it. Yet Love believes that the tools exist to “eradicate breast cancer within our lifetime” if we ask the right questions.

And for decades, Love has helped shine the spotlight on causes, not cures, to spare women from that dreaded diagnosis. But that goal will remain elusive, she believes, as long as researchers keep studying the disease in rodents. That’s because mice and rats don’t get breast cancer. Researchers have to give it to them.

So she’s been trying to wean researchers off rodents. “I can say this is a good study, you could do that in women, and they say, ‘Let me tell you about my rats.’ ”

Yet researchers can learn valuable insights into the origins of disease by comparing people with an illness to matched cohorts of healthy people, as the legendary Nurses’ Health Study has demonstrated for heart disease, diabetes and other conditions.

Finding the causes and, ultimately, how to prevent breast cancer requires a radical shift in thinking, Love said. And that means that at least some researchers have to give up their rats and mice and start working with the people who get the disease.

Researchers used to tell Love that even if they did want to study women, they didn’t know how to find them. But she knew that was the easy part. So for more than three years, the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation has been recruiting an online "army of women" with a target of enrolling “one million women and a few good men.”

Dr. Susan Love spoke at the Sage Bionetworks conference in San Francisco last month. The Seattle-based nonprofit is dedicated to “moving beyond the current medical information system and its rewards.”

“Scientists come to us with studies that need people, and we e-blast them out to everybody in the army,” Love said.

So far, they’ve recruited 365,000 women for about 60 studies. Seven in 10 of the women don’t have breast cancer, but are "altruistic,” Love said. They’re willing to undergo unpleasant procedures to help researchers figure out root causes. In one study, women in the control group had to endure a sigmoidoscopy and a biopsy. And Love got more enrollees than researchers could use.

By the end of this summer, the foundation will be launching its own Health of Women Study. The large online breast cancer cohort study will follow women with and without a diagnosis to identify new risk factors. It will also follow breast cancer survivors to identify factors that predict long-term survival and consequences of different therapies.

Any woman over 18 can register online or with a mobile phone. (Men are welcome, too.)

Love’s study will let participants suggest questions they’d
like to see tested, because she thinks you don’t
need a PhD to come up with a good idea.

She told her San Francisco audience that early theories about the cause of human papillomavirus (HPV) came from observations of people who knew a man whose wife died of cervical cancer, and who then married a second woman who died of the same cancer. “They said, well maybe it’s the guy.”

“And then we figured out it was sexually transmitted, then we figured out it was a virus and now we have a vaccine.”

Potentially, Love reminds us, “Everybody is a patient.” She thinks eliminating disease is something we should all do together.

“”

Red-eyed Tree Frogs by Laurel Mundy. Mating events are not always easy to observe in the wild, but a good illustration can capture the moment.

Leafy Sea Dragon by Natalia Wilkins. Life cycles are a common theme for science illustration.

Science illustration began in a time when drawing was the only way to record the anatomy of a bird or the life stages of a flower. While it's charming to envision Darwin sketching in a field notebook, is illustration still useful today, when it seems every cell phone has an 8 MB camera with zoom, auto-focus, and image stabilization?

Marimo by Justine Shih. Colors, especially underwater, can be distorted in a photo, but selected carefully in an illustration.

The Science Illustration Certificate Program at Cal State University, Monterey Bay, gives a resounding "yes," and the success of its graduates lends credence to that answer.

Illustration and photography are both powerful tools of modern science and education. There's nothing like a photo to record, for example, the unique identifying pattern on a whale's flukes as they make a fleeting appearance above the water. But an illustration is uniquely suited to convey the similarities and differences of all cetacean species in a comparative poster.

Bills of Ardeinae Herons by Jillian Walters. This comparative illustration creates a composition that would be rather difficult to photograph.

The "Program", as it is affectionately known, trains fifteen students every year in the skills of science illustration. Techniques range from the obvious, like graphite and watercolor, to things you've probably never heard of unless you're an artist, like coquille and scratchboard.

Students also become adept with digital tools (but how many people can use Photoshop well?). They learn to sketch in the field, to create trompe l'oeil compositions and to design infographics and interactive displays.

The CSUMB students complete their training with summer internships at magazines, museums, and parks. The Smithsonian is a popular destination.

Alveoli by Leigh Anne Carter. Although cameras are getting smaller, it would still be a challenge to take a photo of these little cavities in our lungs.

Some graduates may go on to regular employment, but the job of science illustrator is more often a freelance one these days.

Blue-Ringed Octopus by Meghan Rock. Sometimes, art is just beautiful, though I am biased by the subject matter (cephalopods are my favorite).

They have their work cut out for them. Once you start looking, you see science illustration everywhere: in aquariums and on hiking trails, in field guides and textbooks, in the doctor's office and even in legal briefs.

And some truly spectacular examples can be seen right now on the walls of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History.

"Illustrating Nature," the Program’s end-of-year exhibit, is open until June 18th, and it's just as fun and educational as the "Art of Nature" show in Santa Cruz.

I learned that the "lucky bamboo" my aunt gave me at my wedding is actually not related to real bamboo at all, and that the novelist Vladimir Nabokov made a seminal discovery about the evolution of butterflies. Who knew?

The film is about an unusually large population of whale sharks that gathers off the coast of Mexico’s Holbox Island during the summer months to feed and mate. Narrated by marine biologist, Sylvia Earle, the film explores how the recent discovery of this population of whale sharks – the largest fish in the world- is shifting the economic focus of the surrounding area from fishing to eco-tourism. The film highlights the successes as well as the ecological concerns that have arisen from this transition.

Diver and whale shark vertical feeding. Photo by Kip Evans

If I was actually able to switch places with Kip Evans, I’m not sure how he would feel about working at KQED and running the QUEST TV series. I’ll admit, my job is pretty much as cool as it gets for a Bay Area science geek and TV producer like me, but Evans's resume makes the day-to-day aspects of my job look downright mundane.

He’s an internationally known photographer who’s been widely published in books and magazines including National Geographic, Outside, Sea and Patagonia. He’s an underwater cinematographer and documentary producer who’s worked on shows for BBC, CNN, Discovery Channel and National Geographic. He’s also the Director of Photography and Expeditions for the Sylvia Earle Alliance and has served for many years as the great marine biologist’s chief photographer and videographer.

I first became aware of Kip Evans's work in 2008 when I produced a QUEST TV story about Sylvia Earle. We only had about two hours to shoot an interview with Earle and that was all the time she could give us for the whole story. We normally shoot with the main subjects of our stories for two or three days in order to get enough footage to make a 10-minute story. So, because I had only a sit-down interview with Earle, I had to acquire all of the footage and photographs of her throughout her career. We were happy to locate Kip Evans and licensed some spectacular underwater footage and photographs from him.

Dr. Sylvia Earle in the Deep Rover submarine. Photo by Kip Evans

So, when I was thinking about who we could feature in our new segment, “Your Videos on QUEST,” where we feature the work Bay Area filmmakers who tell science, environment and nature stories, I immediately thought of Evans. I feel lucky that he answered the phone when I first called because it seems that he’s often traveling around the world to shoot photographs and video about what he and Sylvia Earle call “Hope Spots”- places that are critically in need of protection and conservation because they are vital to saving what’s left of the planet’s oceans.

When I was in college studying biology and cinema production, my dream was to one day, travel the world as a cinematographer shooting films and TV shows about science and nature. I’m not at all disappointed with where I ended up but I realize that one of the most special things about my job is that I get to meet people like Kip Evans and Sylvia Earle and showcase the important work they are doing to protect the environment. I suppose it’s the next best thing to being them.

Nature's gopher control, the Great Blue Heron, photographed in Bolinas by Ryan DiGaudio.

It's a sight to behold: an elegant four-foot tall heron slowly stalking across the field above the Big Rec baseball diamonds in Golden Gate Park. Suddenly, from a motionless stance, it strikes out and nabs an unsuspecting pocket gopher, swallowing it whole. If you've seen it happen, you won't soon forget it, and if not, this is a prime time for heron sightings. Why? Because up at Stow Lake, they have nests full of hungry mouths to feed.

Great Blue Herons are solitary birds for most of the year, but when mating season arrives in the spring, they pair off and build nests close to one another. Assuming they were successful the previous year, the same pair will often mate year after year, raising chicks in saucer-shaped nests that range from 1.5 to 4 feet across. Nests used over and over (like those at Stow Lake) tend to be on the larger end of the size scale.

On Saturday morning, volunteers at San Francisco Nature Education had a series of spotting scopes set up just to the right of Stow Lake's boathouse, trained on Heron Island’s towering treetops. The scene was action-packed. Adult herons swooped through the air, chasing one another away from their nests, and every so often the chicks could be seen between tree branches strutting around their nests. Observers estimate the four nesting pairs produced six chicks, which hatched in early April and are now about six weeks old.

On Stow Lake's Heron Island, parents keep watch over young chicks. The large nest in the lower-center part of the photo contains two chicks whose heads are behind a tree branch.

Heron chicks hatch from eggs slightly bigger than a chicken’s and grow to full size in just 10-12 weeks. That means mom and dad are busy around the clock hunting and regurgitating partially digested food for their rapidly growing young to eat. Soon, the chicks will begin flapping from one branch to another and at about eight weeks old, they will be ready to fledge, taking their first flights from the nest. Just a few short weeks later, parents and chicks will part ways.

When Great Blue Heron chicks hatch, they have bluish eyes and are covered in covered in pale gray down. Photo credit: Glenn and Martha Vargas, California Academy of Sciences.

Hunting herons will eat just about anything within striking distance, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, small mammals, insects, and other birds. Their S-shaped neck allows them to strike with a spring-like power (up to 90 miles per hour), and underneath those feathers is a curious anatomic design. In a human neck, the esophagus runs parallel to our vertebral column, but in a heron's neck, the two cross one another, creating a speed bump in the swallowing process. When a meal hits the crux of the "S," a heron will often do a series of maneuvers to help shift its meal past the obstacle. It sounds uncomfortable to me, but this design helps protect the delicate esophagus from potential damage to the front of the bird's neck.

Find "Heron Watch" just to the right of the boathouse at Stow Lake on Saturday, May 19.

Herons can be seen in Golden Gate Park year-round, though individuals are thought to come and go. This year’s chicks and their parents should be visible at Stow Lake's Heron Island until mid-late June, but if you want the benefit of San Francisco Nature Education’s naturalists and spotting scopes at your disposal, don't miss the final "Heron Watch" program on Saturday, May 19. Founder Nancy DeStefanis first started documenting the birds’ nesting behavior at Stow Lake in 1993, and now runs a series of interpretive bird walks, field trips, and observation sessions to educate school kids and locals about birds and local ecology.

We've taken another baby step away from the current one size fits all health care system.

We may finally be at the threshold of the age of personalized medicine. In a recent study, scientists were able to predict that a man was at a higher risk for developing Type 2 diabetes and over a two-year period tracked his health as he developed the disease. And even better, because they caught it so early, they were able to stave off the diabetes with lifestyle changes. This man’s glucose levels have returned to normal.

Wow. This story highlights the promise of at least one aspect of personalized medicine. By looking at someone’s DNA, you can predict what might go wrong with someone and so keep an eye out for early symptoms. Or maybe even start out with the right lifestyle changes that will keep the disease from developing in the first place.

This study also showed that intensely studying a single person can yield potential benefits for lots of other people. The researchers saw that just before the test subject’s glucose levels spiked, he had a viral infection. No one was really looking for viruses that trigger Type 2 diabetes in people. Now they will. (Keep in mind we don’t yet know if the two are connected or if it was just a coincidence.)

The study also points to the obstacles we still need to overcome to realize the full potential of personalized medicine. The top ones I could think of off the top of my head are our own ignorance, the inconvenience, the expense, and our lack of willpower.

The researchers were able to predict an increased risk for diabetes as well as an increased risk for high triglycerides but very little else. There is certainly more information lurking in his DNA…we just don’t understand our DNA well enough to tease it out yet.

Soon your treatments will be tailored for you based on at least partly on what's in your DNA.

Another related issue is whether we actually do know enough to make good predictions or if we just got lucky here. In other words, was his developing Type 2 diabetes a coincidence or was he really at a higher risk for getting it? He didn’t have any classic risk factors but given that so many people in the U.S. have the disease, it could have been chance. Doing many more studies on lots of different people should give us some idea about how predictive our DNA really is right now.

Besides our still sketchy knowledge, we also have to deal with the expense and inconvenience of this form of personalized medicine. The test subject had over twenty blood draws over a two year period that each looked at tens of thousands of different things. Not many people would put up with so many blood draws. And the expense of looking at all those different molecules is prohibitively expensive.

A better knowledge of our risks can help with the second point. Once we understand our DNA better and so know what are most likely risks are, we’ll be able to test for fewer molecules which should make the whole thing more affordable. This may also solve the first problem too.

Maybe in the future we’ll look at few enough molecules or the tests will be sensitive enough to get the information we need from a simple finger prick. Then we’d all be like folks with diabetes, self testing our blood on a regular basis. And hopefully in the more distant future, we’ll have some sort of implant that reads the information for us automatically without the need for a blood draw.

All of these are technical hurdles that will almost certainly be overcome at some point. The last obstacle, though, is much more difficult. It deals with human nature.

One reason this is such a powerful story is that the test subject was able to get his glucose under control without the use of medicines. This is not only good for him but it suggests that this form of personalized medicine may prove to be cost effective sooner rather than later. Keeping his Type 2 diabetes at bay will probably save tons of money over his life time. Perhaps even enough to justify the cost of his testing.

But to control his glucose levels, he had to make radical changes to his diet and exercise regime. He had to eat a whole lot less sugar and fat and exercise a lot more. Sound familiar?

Everyone should be doing this stuff anyway but most of us don’t. Will we have the willpower to realize the full potential of personalized medicine? Or will things pretty much stay the same except with more frequent scolding from our doctors?

Of course, catching a disease early and getting patients their medications early when it could do the most good is obviously wonderful too. Just not as cost effective.

What a visit to the doctor in the near future might look like.

The view from inside the Oakland Fire Department's burn trailer during a rollover fire. Photograph courtesy of Kara Platoni.

Looking back, the only field trip that stands out from my grade school days was our trip to the San Francisco Exploratorium. What I remember best is the tactile dome. I entered into total darkness and spent the next hour feeling, crawling and sliding my way through a 3-D maze.

That excursion was fairly tame compared to the exploits Kara Platoni, Eric Simons, and Casey Miner take on for their podcast series, The Field Trip, which broadcasts their science adventures out in the real world. For their first series that debuted last year, they explored fermentation by visiting the Cultured Pickle Shop, climbed into the Oakland Fire Department’s burn trailer for a kitchen fire simulation, interviewed a commercial salmon fisherman on his boat in the Berkeley Marina and followed a NASA crew at the bottom of a lakebed in Canada for their research study on Mars. To add a little more intellectual rigor to their adventures, they also interviewed an expert guest in their radio studio for each episode.

“We think our strong suit is going places, learning new things and being a proxy for the listener,” explained Kara Platoni. “We didn’t know of any other show where it was about going out and having a science adventure.”

As friends and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism colleagues, the genuine personal chemistry of this trio is evident in their podcasts and blogs. They're definitely having fun on their adventures while taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge and opportunities offered by scientists in the Bay Area — and the listener is invited to tag along.

The studio interview segments are loosely scripted, but the field trips are taped live. The key to making this work is the trio’s insatiable curiosity for science. After lots of preparation, they just go out and ask the questions that interest them in a humorous and spontaneous way that engages their listeners.

When selecting topics for their episodes, they focus on stories that take science out of the laboratory. “Our ideal narrator for the field trip is someone whose life just embodies science everyday. It is part of their job, hobby and home,” explained Platoni, “so we can show people how science is something that happens in your everyday life, not just something that happens in school.” Casey Miner added, “And it should be fun, interesting, weird or gross.”

Their field trips will continue with a second series this spring and cover the diverse topics of coffee, taxidermy, telescopes and local inventors. One upcoming episode on telescopes will visit the Chabot Space & Science Center Observatory and feature a studio interview with UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy. Beginning today, a new episode will air weekly each Monday through June 4. You can listen to a preview of their new season here.

Free episodes are available on their website, iTunes, Public Radio Exchange and Sound Cloud. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

A map of the Delta created by the US Geological Survey in the 1910s.

As detective stories go, this sunny, spring day in the Delta isn't a typical backdrop. In the distance, tractors move slowly through dry fields of row crops.

"Once he got lost, they were wandering all over," says Alison Whipple of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a non-profit research group based in Richmond. Her colleague, Robin Grossinger, agrees. "They were all over this place." The two are trying to piece together the path of William Wright, a man who got hopelessly lost somewhere nearby.

I should probably mention: it happened 160 years ago. Whipple and Grossinger are historical ecologists. They use sources like old photos, hand-drawn maps and early land surveys to sleuth out what this landscape looked like before it was dramatically remade by Californians.

The Delta's landscape has been dramatically remade over the last 200 years. Today, it's a crucial part of the state's water system, supplying 25 million people and irrigating millions of acres of farm land. But with this re-engineering, the Delta's ecosystem has collapsed, harming the fishing industry and putting water supplies at risk. Little is known about what it once looked like.

Lost in a Delta Marsh

Standing on a levee about 20 miles south of Sacramento, Whipple and Grossinger are discussing what they found a tattered, yellowing notebook uncovered in a state archive. It contains stories from William Wright, a duck hunter who spent a long, cold night lost in the Delta in 1850.

"On all sides stretched a vast wilderness of tules from ten to fifteen feet in height. The driving storm of sleet was bad, but the pitchy darkness was infinitely worse… Our situation was so miserable that no words can do justice to it."

It's not just the dramatic story they're interested in. It's passages this like one:

"The lakes proved to be from one hundred to three hundred yards in width, as near as we could judge. The water was very cold and often waist‐deep."

When Whipple and Grossinger read his account, they knew they’d found a Holy Grail source document. Its detail reveal a landscape that doesn't exist here today and hasn’t existed for some time.

"The Delta is probably one of the most intensively transformed parts of California and it was also changed really early on because of such fertile land," says Grossinger.

As California's Gold Rush boomed, farmers came to the Delta for its rich soil. Land went for a dollar an acre and settlers turned the wetlands into dry, agricultural land. 97% of the historic marshes were lost.

“We have here maybe one of the most important parts of the state's ecosystem and we don’t actually know how it used to work," Says Grossinger.

Alison Whipple and Robin Grossinger examine historic maps in the Delta.

He and Whipple have layered together thousands of historical sources that reveal an ecosystem of incredible complexity. “We would be in trees right here with a couple winding channels that were dry in the summer but had flowing water in the wintertime," explains Whipple.

Yearly floods from the Sacramento River inundated Delta marshes creating habitat for birds and young salmon. Closer to San Francisco Bay, hundreds of miles of small tidal channels branched out like capillaries in the wetlands. Today, most of those channels have been filled in.

Returning the Delta to this pristine state just isn’t possible, says Whipple, and that’s not the goal of the project. But knowing how the ecosystem once worked could improve the habitat restoration efforts that are happening.

Restoring Habitat

Liberty Island is one place in the Delta that looks as it might have 200 years ago. Not long ago, it was a low-lying expanse of farmland, protected by tall levees.

“The levees broke and it wasn’t financially worth reclaiming,” Says Carl Wilcox of with California’s Department of Fish and Game. The landowners gave up when the island flooded 15 years ago. After that, nature took over. Tules and cattails started sprouting and wildlife followed.

Returning vegetation at Liberty Island in the Delta.

Now, “some of the endangered native fishes, Delta smelt, longfin smelt are using this area,” says Wilcox. They're finding endangered Chinook salmon as well. "These are more productive areas for them, they’re more protected, they’re less prone to predators."

California Considers Ambitious Restoration Plans

California is using the Liberty Island project as a model for a proposal to restore 65,000 acres of Delta habitat. It's part of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan – a major overhaul of the Delta’s water infrastructure.

Leo Winternitz of the Nature Conservancy says bringing back habitat for declining wildlife could make the state’s water supply more reliable. Restrictions under the Endangered Species Act have limited how much water can be pumped from the Delta in recent years.

There is one big problem with restoration: most of the islands in the Delta are below sea level.

"Just south of here, some of the islands, they're in the 17 to 25 below sea level range. So if their levees broke, what you’d have is a large open body of water. You can’t create tidal marshes in those areas," says Winternitz.

That leaves only a few places where restoration is feasible. Winternitz says in those areas it’s crucial the state look to the past to create the same interconnected habitat that once was.

Governor Jerry Brown's administration is set to unveil the sweeping plan to restore the Delta later this year.

Indo-Pacific Sailfish by Kate Spencer

Two artists sat side by side at the demo table. Diane T. Sands wrestled with a live turtle who didn't want to pose; Megan Gnekow hovered over her laptop, flipping between "nestcams"–live video streams from birds' nests around the country. At the beginning of the evening, Gnekow found a pair of red-tailed hawk parents feeding their chicks. "What a treat!" she exclaimed, and began to sketch.

Sands and Gnekow were participants in the First Friday Art Tour on May 4th at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History's exhibit "The Art of Nature." Throughout the museum, behind permanent display cases of stuffed foxes and a marine touch pool, the walls were covered with artwork from the California Guild of Natural Science Illustrators.

Allen's Hummingbird by Karen Talbot

The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History has been hosting an annual science illustration exhibit for twenty-three years. It began as a showcase for the graduating class of the UC Santa Cruz science illustration program, but when that program moved to CSU Monterey Bay, the end-of-year show moved with it. ("Illustrating Nature" is now on display at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History–I'll be reporting next week.)

The Santa Cruz museum switched partners from the university to the California chapter of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. As it turns out, a large proportion of guild members are graduates of the UCSC/CSUMB program. So those artists currently showing at the PG Museum may well be featured in a few years in Santa Cruz.

And future generations of science illustrators could spring from participants in school tours of "The Art of Nature." Deborah McArthur, the Santa Cruz museum's education manager, leads kids on a picture hunt through the exhibit, then lets them experiment with their own mixed media illustration. Science and art instruction go hand in hand.

California Butterfly by Sondra Cohelan

Even as an adult wandering through the show, I found myself learning new things. When a drawing of shiny scarabs caught my eye, I first thought "Ancient Egypt!" then learned that some scarabs are actually native to the southwest US. On another wall, a California gull plowing hungrily through a cloud of flies taught me that a seagull's diet is far more varied than fish and picnic sandwiches.

One painting is particularly poignant: a watercolor of an Indo-Pacific sailfish, commissioned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a gift to the director of the Japanese sea museum Aquamarine Fukushima. According to the placard, "The framed original survived the 2011 earthquake/tsunami."

As I left the museum, Sands' turtle was crawling across Gnekow's colored pencil case while Gnekow sketched eagle chicks from Decorah, Iowa. Science illustrators may travel far afield–there were sketchbooks on display from New Zealand and South America–but I appreciated the reminder that natural subjects are everywhere, from the family pet to the internet.

Updated 5/10/12 with artists' links and higher-quality images. Thanks, artists!

Marsh plants (in sketchbook) by Emily Coren (walkaboutem.com)