The NatureTrack Film Festival was created as an extension of the NatureTrack Foundation, the nonprofit that combats “Nature-Deficit Disorder” by transporting county students outside via a variety of no-charge field trips from the seashore to the inland oak woodlands to engage curiosity and instill appreciation and awe of nature. The festival had a fine first […]

The spotted hyenas soaked themselves in one of the many waterholes surrounding the vast, searing white pan of Etosha National Park in northern Namibia of southwestern Africa. The two scavengers were multitasking. While cooling off in the shallow pool of water, they were also strategizing on how to drive off a healthy-looking lioness and her […]

Society News is bringing you insider tips of the New York City arts and culture scene firsthand after spending five days there! A city brimming with things to do, here are some top go-to’s: Connoisseurs of jazz will find A-listers playing at the Blue Note on West 3rd Street in the Village and the historic […]

Globetrotting accountant Frank McGinity has published the fourth and last updated edition of Get Off Your Street, a personal travelogue recounting his travels from all seven continents. “It covers my travels over the last 25 years,” says Frank, who lives a tiara’s toss or two from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in Riven Rock. “Most […]

The 500-pound male mountain gorilla (also known as a silverback) was hungry, not hangry, just hungry in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda in Central Africa. As shafts of morning light penetrated the rainforest, he casually lumbered over to a dense stock of bamboo, the biggest shafts as round as a baseball bat. He looked upward […]

Santa Barbara Travel Bureau co-owners Charles and David de L’Arbre and his family left Brussels, Belgium, in May 1940 just ahead of an advancing German army. Charles’s father packed their things, filled the family Buick’s gas tank, threw another tank of gas in the trunk, and took off. Charles recalls that his grandmother was walking […]

After the deluge, I took a quick, much-needed weekend jaunt up the coast. Our Central Coast hills, highways, and byways were verdant after the rains, making it hard to believe it’s still winter. Well, California winter. Tourism was evident (but not too crazy) and staffing issues are still difficult in the hospitality trade. Los Alamos […]

I was on an early morning beach run in Carpinteria, pink and orange hues melding across the eastern horizon. While weaving my way in soft sand past wintering killdeer and western snowy plovers, those hardy shorebirds thoroughly enjoyed the wrack lines of tattered giant bladder kelp left behind by the previous high tide. Later that […]

We hugged the crumbly west cliff face of Cuyler Harbor on San Miguel Island with no expectations from the seat of our kayaks. From afar, we couldn’t see any wildlife, but we could clearly hear first-year northern elephant seals snorting and bellowing on distant pocket beaches concealed along the rocky shoreline. I was paddling with […]

There was no denying the six-foot-tall dorsal fin cutting through the open ocean above the Soquel Canyon State Marine Conservation Area within the teeming waters of Monterey Bay, along the Central California Coast. Black and steeple-shaped, the dorsal fin belonging to a mature, male orca glistened in the morning sun. This apex predator is known […]