Jane Kay

Jane Kay, based in San Francisco, knows from her experience as an environmental journalist that the planet’s fragile birds signal disruption of the natural world. For San Francisco’s newspapers, she’s watched clapper rails fending off non-native foxes on the edge of San Francisco Bay, and marbled murrelets felled by logging of ancient coastal redwood forests. Reporting from warming Alaska, she’s seen trumpeter swans rebound, at least for now, and black-capped chickadees mysteriously turn up with deformed beaks. Kay, who taught and founded an environment program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, won her first national awards covering air and water pollution at the Arizona Daily Star.