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.

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

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

Pet owl's chief occupation

Mumble's most constant occupation, from which all other pastimes were temporary distractions, was simply observing. Her job, her hobby, her passion was watching things—which is hardly surprising, given her place in the natural order. From her various preferred vantage points around the flat she kept constant surveillance over her environment, and when she detected any hint of sound or movement her evaluation of it was presumably based on the central question of any carnivore's existence: Can I jump on it, or is it going to jump on me? 

If it was small and mobile (which, in a seventh-floor flat, meant it was an insect), then it could travel only a matter of inches before Mumble arrived like a Stuka; but if it sat still, being enigmatic, then she might settle down to out-stare it. This balancing of boldness and caution in the face of the unrecognized cannot have been learned in her own short, prtected lifetime, so it was clearly part of her genetic inheritance.

Martin Windrow, The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), p. 214