Dick Evans and Hannah Hindley, co-authors of "In the Shadow of the Bridge"

Having explored San Francisco neighborhoods in three celebrated books, Dick Evans turns here to the avian species that call the Bay Area home. With his photographer's eye, he finds art and drama in the lives of birds, from the smallest sparrows to long-legged Great Blue Herons. He captures the pockets of wilderness in our cities that make the area a birder's paradise: from a marsh full of endangered birds wading in the reeds near the Oakland Airport to the isolated refuge of the Farallon Islands, home to a quarter-million seabirds and a handful of visiting scientists; from Crissy Field, flocked with egrets, to the pasturelands birds share with cattle. His vibrant images are interspersed with text by Hannah Hindley that weaves us more deeply into relationship with our avian neighbors, introducing readers to the natural history of the region, to themes of interdependence and ecology, and to the evolving challenges for birds in a densely settled urban environment. At the heart of these images and stories is love for the living descendants of dinosaurs as they soar and parade, and awe at their ephemerality and endurance.

Dick Evans became interested in photography as a graduate student at Stanford University and continued his practice throughout a forty-seven-year career in the global metals industry that took him all over the world. San Francisco always remained home base, though, and he now lives in the city with his wife, Gretchen. Evans is the author or coauthor of the photography books San Francisco and the Bay Area: The Haight-Ashbury Edition, The Mission, and San Francisco's Chinatown.

Hannah Hindley is a wilderness guide and the recipient of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and the Barry Lopez Prize in Nonfiction. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and evolutionary biology; she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of Arizona. Her environmental essays can be found in Bay Nature, The Sun, Hakai, and more. Hannah writes about small creatures, big landscapes, and the scientists who love them.

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