A flock of Dunlin fly over “pop up” habitats in the Sacramento Valley

(photo: Drew Kelley for The Nature Conservancy)

Water Foul

The drought is putting in jeopardy efforts to shore up migratory bird populations

Doug Thomas stops his white pickup along the elevated dirt road that carves through the acres of newly planted rice stalks in Wheatland, Calif.

In this scene, replete with a myriad of migratory birds lazily grazing in the green fields, change is soon to come. The landscape, Thomas says, will be transformed into an oasis for waterfowl and shorebirds that will find a man-made wetlands to call home on their annual migration this fall.

Aug 5, 2014 John Blomster
Casey Marshall works on "The Monitaur" at Hacker Lab

Independents’ Day

Look out 9-to-5, the freelancers are coming

Casey Marshall is hunched over his phone, furiously scrolling through his Twitter feed in search of a photo of  Waste Management’s promotional robot, whose broken axle he fixed back in March. “Someone came into the Hacker Lab and needed his robot repaired,” he says, grinning,  “and I was like, ‘I gotta do that.’”

Jul 1, 2014 Allison Joy