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

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.

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

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

We can't all wax rhapsodic

Below the lodge, an unsurpassable panorama of mountains, valleys and plains stretched out before our eyes.

We gazed out upon this marvellous vista for some minutes, and then I broke our respectful silence by challenging Kevin to put his feelings about it into words. He pondered a moment, and then offered "Nice!" When it comes to nature, Kevin can be awfully plebeian sometimes. He has no soul.

Frank Kusy, Kevin and I in India (Grinning Bandit Books: 2013), p. 54 (first published 1986)