Thousands of miles away from one another, one ecosystem along the Pacific Ocean, another land-locked and pot-holed with seasonal wetlands smack dab in the middle of the country, the Ballona Wetlands the Great Plains of the Midwest have more in common than one might imagine. To gaze upon Ballona and the Plains one might not [...]

Road Kill: Just Another Dead Gopher Snake By Lisa Fimiani No one likes to come across road kill, and one would think a snake wouldn’t evoke much sympathy from the general public, but my curiosity overcame my fear as I examined the remains of a huge gopher snake recently on the side of the road [...]

By Lisa Fimiani Last Tuesday, co-Executive Director Richard Beban and I took a walk with Dr. Edith Read, the Ballona Freshwater Marsh manager and Friends board member, along the officially closed-to-the-public maintenance road below the Loyola Marymount Bluff. It runs parallel to the 25-acre Riparian Corridor in Playa Vista, and just below and parallel to [...]

Our Co-Executive Director, Lisa Fimiani, is also on the Los Angeles Audubon Society board, and participated in last week’s LAAS fundraising Birdathon on a team with three of her pals from Star Trek. Her expedition notes: What a glorious day we had, birding the Ballona Wetlands with three pals from the infamous Star Trek series. [...]

Coastal Wetlands Month The United States Environmental Protection Agency reminds us all (perhaps ironically, in view of the news from the Gulf) that this is Coastal Wetlands Month (what, you didn’t know?) and provides a basic two-page fact sheet on why wetlands are important. Bite-sized education in PDF form. Ballona’s Science-Based Restoration Explained So what [...]