find your place in the family of things

dedicated to the Santa Monica Mountains bioregion

in honor of a great naturalist

"I ask no heaven but this Raven's world."

When I rise up
let me rise up
joyful like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

Wendell Berry

"When we see the land as a community to which we belong,
we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Aldo Leopold
Biographyandreadings

Click to hear the canyon wren

"Sacred time. We cannot always live there.
But, if we know it exits,
we can begin to experience the soul of the land.
From here our stories will spill forth."

Terry Tempest Williams

Discover local Watersheds at Stunt Ranch and Topanga Canyon

Thumb through a field guide of Native Plants

Find out how Native Plants deal with fire

Explore the natural history of Native Animals and Plants

Investigate local climate, geology and habitat

Check out the tides

Survey the insects of the Santa Monica Mountains

Research Endangered Species

Avoid local parasites

Get to know the Mountains Restoration Trust

Learn about California's Native Peoples and see where and how they live

Knot connected?

"If I had to wish one wish for my children,
I would wish that they were interested in natural history,
because I think there you get a spiritual well-being that
you can get no other way, and what's more,
life can never be long enough..."
Miriam Rothschild

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men
to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Education is not the filling of a bucket,
but the lighting of a fire."
W.B. Yeats

Learn about migration and Monarchs
so you can join in the research!

Visit the Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society

Find out how to monitor birds!
Check out some live bird Cams for a bird's eye view!!

"Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox... This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table."

D. H. Lawrence

Click to hear
the mountain lion

Are you ready?

Make a connection in the Santa Monica Mountains!
Contact us for unique field and classroom programs at:

"What you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Get out into the field!

You can't teach something you don't know
anymore than you can come back from a place you ain't been.
Will Rogers

Do it!