F I R S TP R E V760NEXTLAST

The Coyotes of the Presidio
For an major urban area, the San Francisco Bay area has a lot of wildlife scurrying about. Inside the city you can find gray foxes in McLaren Park and coyotes in the Presidio. Raccoons, opossums and skunks scavenge San Francisco by night while across the Golden Gate in Marin County mountain lions roam near tule elk and a black bear was recently spotted. One any given day a bobcat will appear in Berkeley or a wild boar will show in Walnut Creek. And in backyards all over the Bay Area deer and wild turkeys pop up.

One reason for the plentiful wildlife is all the available natural habitat, of the 8,000 square miles the Bay Area counties. Only one quarter is urbanized, another quarter is permanently protected habitats such as salt marshes, wooded forests, and fresh rivers and lakes. The remaining half is a mixture of farm and grazing land and private open space. Many Bay Area groups fight hard to protect the open space, the nonprofit Bay Area Open Space Council estimates at least 150,000 acres of open space have been added to the Bay Area since 2000.
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