What if we planted a lot more trees?

     It takes a lot of trees to have a meaningful effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the United States, for example, our vast national forests store about 16 percent of the carbon we annually produce. All of the street trees in U.S. cities together store only less than 1 percent of our carbon emissions. Still, the 360 metric tons of carbon that street trees store won't warm our climate.What if we converted half of subirdia's lawns to trees?

     . . .

     [T]hink about the effect that we could collectively have on carbon if only half of America's turflands—twenty million acres—could do what my trees do. Turf consumes carbon just as does any plant, but unlike trees, grass doesn't put on an annual layer of wood. Its use of carbon dioxide increases the soil's carbon stores. . . . [A]n acre of U.s. grass annually adds about eighteen hundred pounds of carbon to the soil, and it continues to do so for about thirty years after it is planted. An acre of my trees did about three times that amount, in aboveground carbon storage, and they have been doing so for seventy years. Their annual storage capacity will slow as they age, probably in a century or so, but their overall capacity to buffer our climate is magnitudes beyond what grass could ever hope to do. . . . [A]n additional twenty million acres of trees could absorb another 1 percent to 2 percent of our national carbon emissions. In this accounting, every little bit helps!

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 223, 225.

According to the Arbor Day Foundation, "National Arbor Day is always celebrated on the last Friday in April, but many states observe Arbor Day on different dates throughout the year based on best tree planting times in their area." In Washington State, it's the second Wednesday in April. 

Bird diversity in business and industrial areas

In short order we had seventeen new study sites, including business centers, multifamily housing units, and additional forest reserves. Don [Norman] began to survey these sites using the same point count techniques my students and I used in nearby residential and reserve areas.

. . . When Don finished the summer's work, he reported rather sheepishly that a keen birder could expect to see equal numbers of species in forests of the Cascade Mountains and in Seattle's industrial heart. Though not as rich as residential subirdia, the three forests surveyed yielded an average of twenty-nine species, whereas the twelve business sites averaged thirty-one species. In fact, one-third of the business sites equaled or exceeded the diversity Don observed in the richest forest reserve.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 98

The death toll from cats

Among the perils of city life that birds and other animals share, the most uniformly serious one is the domestic cat that ventures out-of-doors. . . . [I]n the United States . . . cats kill 6.9 to 20.7 billion small mammals each year. Suddenly the slaughter of more than three hundred million vertebrates—birds, herps, and mammals—on U.S. roads seems tiny. Cats eat at least an order of magnitude more animals than we run over with our cars each year. And it is mostly a different set of animals that cats eat; Fluffy doesn't eat many deer or salamanders, but she really tears up the mice, birds, and small reptiles.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p.

Cars and trucks versus wildlife: a big problem for both sides

Wings allow birds to avoid massive road mortality that culls the urban herd of mammals and herps. . . . The full magnitude of roadkill is difficult to estimate, but collisions with large animals are certainly on the rise. In a 2008 report to Congress, the Western Transportation Institute noted that in 2004, one in twenty reported vehicle collisions in the United States—some three hundred thousand—involved wildlife, most likely deer. These collisions annually kill two hundred Americans and injure twenty-six thousand, at an estimated cost of more than $8 billion. The cost to wildlife is also extreme. In the United States, between half a million and one million deer are killed each year, and twenty-one species of vertebrates are federally endangered in part because of road mortality; only three are birds. The Humane Society of the United States estimates that more than three hundred million vertebrates die annually in vehicle collisions. Worldwide, the annual death toll is staggering . . . .

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 170-71.

Love nature in the city

Including the urban ecosystem, and within it subirdia, in a broad conservation strategy can cure environmental amnesia. The city is the place where we can foster a love of nature because it is where we experience nature. There, among the streets and buildings, ecologically aware citizens bring local and scientific knowledge to bear on pressing social and environmental issues. Doing so not only helps the animals now, but also may be essential to those of the future that will require that Home urbanus value nature at a distance, despite living in the city.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 214.

America's investment in the lawn

In 2005, 2 percent of the coterminous United States, some forty million acres of land, was lawn. Nearly every bit was "industrial lawn," composed of only a few nonnative grass species. These invaders are regularly mowed to a low, even height and kept continuously green and free of weeds and pests. To maintain this sea of grass Americans annually spend $30 billion. The use eight hundred million gallons of gas, seven billion gallons of water, three million tons of nitrogen fertilizer, and thirty thousand tons of pesticide. The use of pesticides alone is ten times greater than used by the average farmer and includes chemicals that disrupt normal hormone function and reproduction, are suspected to cause cancer, and are banned in other countries. Simply filling up gas-powered lawnmowers is an ecological disaster of the highest order; seventeen million gallons of gas are spilled annually. That amount is more than was spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989 and every twelve years would equal the amount spewed into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. 

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 182-83.

Ecology isn't rocket science—it's more complex!

The subtleties required to get habitat right for birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, or amphibians, especially in highly modified or restored lands, are often beyond our initial naive understanding. As such, the practice of ecology, particularly in dynamic environments influenced by the unpredictable hand of humans, is much more complex than the practice of building a rocket capable of ferrying a person to the moon.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 181.

Alien earthworms contribute to America

In the forests of northeastern U.S. cities, leaves decompose quickly, much more quickly than they do in more natural settings. This might seem counterintuitive because city soils are disturbed, of low quality, and polluted. City trees also grow tough, decay-resistant leaves to fight water loss, pollution, and the mouths of herbivorous insects. Soil organisms, however, play a huge role in starting leaf breakdown, notably earthworms, which are more abundant in urban soils than in natural soils. The greater warmth of urban soils is favorable to earthworms and other agents of decay, but the greater abundance of worms in U.S. city soils also reflects their alien origins. Most earthworms are not native to the United States; they came from Europe as settlers brought in plants and horticultural soils from their native homelands.

Some of the most familiar invaders, such as "night crawlers" and "red wigglers," are clearly enhancing soil fertility and even helping stem climate change. . . . Carbon is also quickly stripped from the decaying plant matter by worms and stored in the soil. This may be the worm's greatest gift. Increasing the capacity of our soils to sequester carbon is a significant step that helps counter the carbon we release into the atmosphere.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 167

Amazing bird evolution near highways

Cliff swallows nest by the thousands under highway bridges. As the birds fly in and out of their nesting colonies, speeding commuters kill many. Despite the slaughter, the birds persist in large numbers. In fact, highway deaths are on the decline, in part because the swallows are evolving more agile bodies. Surviving swallows have longer and thinner wings than those hit by cars, a feature that endows them with greater, life-saving maneuverability. Nature is fragile, but it does not always break when bent: sometimes it evolves.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 116-17

"Subirdia is the geography of life"

To me, the suburb is neither the geography of nowhere nor the ecological desert unworthy of conservation about which I've read. Pieces of paradise have been paved, but it is not entirely a parking lot. What has been created is fully stocked with a wonderful diversity of bird life that is fragile, though sustainable. Subirdia is the geography of life.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 98

Cats kill birds: keep 'em inside

One in every ten birds in the United States will see the same thing just before death: a cat. We now know that the effect of cats goes well beyond killing. English researchers demonstrated that a parent bird reduces the rate at which it feeds nestlings when it glimpses a cat. Reduced feeding may result in undersized young, but more important, the unattended nest becomes easy prey for jays and crows. . . . Stewarding our urban birds requires that we keep cats indoors. Period. (It's safer for the cats as well.)

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 59

Suburbanites facilitating biodiversity

Considering ourselves as facilitators, not simply destroyers, of biological diversity shines a new light on our place in the web of life. Some of our actions enable other species to thrive where they would otherwise be rare. It is this role that supports the diversity I often encounter around people's homes, and allows it to grow.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 59