Wildmind educational programs bring science and environmental literacy alive. Students will learn to think like scientists, appreciate our connectivity with animals, the environment and each other, while having fun learning science! Beautiful and fascinating wildlife live in the fields and forests surrounding our cities and suburbs. You will gain an insight into the secret lives of these intelligent and ecologically important animals. This year's summer program for children by Wildmind Science, will be held outdoors in the North Walnut Grove picnic area on…

On Saturday, June 5 th at 4 pm, the Friends of San Pedro Valley Park welcome Kim Young, a Xerces Society Ambassador who will discuss the Western Monarch butterflies, their migratory route and breeding habits. She will discuss the severe decline in butterfly populations that has occurred in the last two decades and the various causes that have contributed to the collapse of the once large and healthy populations that were visible in their over-wintering clusters in forested groves in California.

On May 15 th at 4 pm, the Friends of San Pedro Valley Park welcome Mark Hylkema from California State Parks with a lecture entitled “Lifeways of the Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Area.” We step back in time to the year 1769 to learn about the archaeology and ethnography of the ancestral Ohlone people and about the native lifeways that once flourished in our neighborhoods and re-live the experiences of the first Spanish explorers.

On April 17 th at 4 pm, the Friends of San Pedro Valley Park welcome Senior West Coast Wolf Advocate Amaroq Weiss from the Center of Biological Diversity as she relates the current situation with wolves in California and the West Coast. With California as the latest frontier for wolf reestablishment, Weiss will discuss these remarkable animals and the politics, laws, social issues and science of wolf protection and recovery, and how you can get involved. Join us for a fascinating lecture.

Please join the Friends of San Pedro Valley Park in March as we host Dr. Doug Bell, Wildlife Program Manager at East Bay Regional Park District, for a riveting lecture on a beautiful raptor - the peregrine falcon.

Spring is the time to look at and enjoy flowers. Join Dr. Nagalingum from the California Academy of Sciences for a closer look at flowers. Different pollinators benefit from variations in flower parts and we’ll discover how and why. We will even discover how flowers in the Victorian age were used in the language of sending discrete messages in the eternal quest for love.
Join us for this most illuminating program on form and structure of flowers.

January’s program brings the eminent Dr. Tom Parker to begin our 2021 life sciences series to discuss manzanitas and their relatives with an emphasis on evolution. The talk involves several quite different processes such as fire, drought, animals, and hybridization, among others. According to Dr. Parker, differences among species have a great deal to do with the climates they live in, how they respond to fire, and their interactions with animals and not with the shape or color of the flowers.