Another naturalist, more yards

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, biology, naturalists, natural history, citizen science, cities

When you think of Picnic Guests, what do you imagine? This image probably doesn't come to mind. Ants are the more likely thought. The third chapter of Secret Life of the City: How Nature Thrives in the Urban Wild, by Hanna Bjørgaas (or the fourth if you count a long "Introduction") considers ants. Ants that invade the author's city apartment, ants that drive her to consider chemical warfare. Discussions with a couple of scientists dissuade her, and she simply pays more attention to keeping things clean and outwaits them.

In the meantime, she uses a magnifier to get a closer look at one. At 20X, it looks quite fearsome. Ants are well fitted for living in a great many environments. They may be the primary ubiquitous animals. They live on six of the seven continents; none are native to Antarctica (the only insects that live there, in a few coastal areas, are a couple of species of midges that can survive being frozen for half the year). They abound everywhere else, and probably outweigh the sum of all mammals, humans included.

Ms Bjørgaas lives in Oslo, Norway. Her book was translated from Norwegian by Matt Bagguley. The nine titled chapters touch on living things she paid attention to during nine months of the year. She begins the year with crows, the most intelligent birds most of us are likely to encounter. Crows in the city, like many types of city birds, are less skittish around humans than their more rural cousins. They may not be as human-adapted as pigeons—sometimes you almost have to step on a pigeon before it flutters away—but they seem to have a keen sense of how far you can reach, should you be so inclined.

In the Introduction, though, which takes place in Antarctica where she worked briefly as a tour guide, her focus is not so much on penguins as on a particular species of lichen that caught her eye. Both crows and lichens appear later in the book also. The November chapter focuses on lichens, and is titled, "The Written Language of the City." This is because, among the great variety of lichen species, some are more sensitive, and others more tolerant of the polluted air of cities, particular when it includes sulfurous (stinky) gases. 

This picture shows at least three species of lichen on an old branch, in an area with rather clean air. Using citizen scientists to help collect observations, researchers have developed a "lichen scale" to measure the level of air pollution in and around cities. One may then map concentric rings that surround sources of more egregious stenches such as paper plants (Sixty years ago I remember the smell of paper plants near Newark NJ, which my cousin called "the armpit of New Jersey". It's been cleaned up a bit since then).

The author did an experiment in soil fertility. She bought nine pieces of cotton underwear and selected three locations, one in a desiccated city lot, one in a park, and one well outside the city in the forest. In each, she dug three holes and buried a garment a spade-length deep in each hole. Months later, there was nearly nothing left of her "offerings" in the forest, and the parkland holes yielded semi-composted cloth bits. The third location had been paved over since, which demolished that part of the experiment. I expect that the cloth may have been darkened a bit, but would have been otherwise almost unchanged, and I suspect she would agree. That's what others have found.

If you find the spectacle of a woman digging holes in a city park amusing, consider coming across her prone upon the ground, examining the contents of a shallow scrape with a strong magnifier. She did a little of this, as she tells in "August: Stories from Underground". With a bit more discretion, she visited a soil scientist, who showed her the life beneath our feet with a video microscope. A tiny springtail (the size of a comma) was a hideous monster compared to protozoa and other small denizens of the soil. And, of course, it must be said that the number of bacteria in a teaspoonful of soil will typically exceed the entire human population of the earth, perhaps ten times over. Even the dry, sandy soil of a trampled path in a city may contain a billion bacteria per gram.

This book is a delightful contrast to nature books that tend to concentrate on, for example, birds, or beetles, or some other focus. There is room in the concept of "naturalist" for anything living. I wish the book had an index. Still, it is fascinating and it opens one up to some of the variety to be found in any environment, if we will simply slow down and look, and listen, and observe.

Walk on the wild side - on Main Street

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, wildlife, cities

Do children still sing "Skip to my Lou"? One verse repeats, "Pigs in the parlor/What'll I do?". Other verses mention flies in the buttermilk, a cat in the cream jar, and a couple of birds. If you want to get creative, verses could be added about coyotes or deer in the back yard, cottontails in the corncrib, and if you were in Cape Town, baboons in the kitchen.

Most people in the cities tend to think of the city as a pretty sterile place, inhabited only by humans and their pets, maybe with pigeons and sparrows around, and a few pests such as flies thrown in. Tristan Donovan is here to tell us there is more to cities than we might imagine, in Feral Cities: Adventures with Animals in the Urban Jungle.

Much of the book contains stories about animals, not just in suburban areas and city fringes, but right in the middle of our cities around the world: Boars in Berlin, Coyotes in Chicago, the resident Cougar in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a flock of Parrots in Brooklyn, Baboons breaking into homes in Cape Town, and the finding by researchers in Raleigh that every home is host to at least 100 species of insects and spiders.

Why should there be animals in our cities? By making cities comfortable for humans, we have made them comfortable for a multitude of opportunistic animals. In the U.S., northern cities are warmer, sometimes as much as 10°F and even more. Further south, many spaces are air conditioned, so an overheated jaybird in Tucson might make its way into the local WalMart to cool off. Cities in dry places are wetter, and homes in wet places are drier, than their surroundings. Snakes have been found with half their bodies hanging into a hot tub on a cool night, occasionally diverting a human romantic encounter from its intended course. And there is food everywhere, everywhere! Raccoons raiding garbage cans. Crows and gulls picking at road kill. Rats in the storm sewers, eating our refuse and being hunted by snakes and coyotes and wildcats. To a bobcat a rat's intended purpose is turning our crap into his lunch.

Biologists have compared animals in cities with their rural counterparts, and have found that many species are more abundant, better fed and live longer in a city than in the countryside. Why wouldn't there be animals in our cities?

I really like the turn taken in the last couple of chapters. We ought to be making our cities more friendly to species we like. For most people, a little time spent watching rabbits or otters is calming. My wife was quite delighted one day to report seeing a deer "pronking" down our street outside our hedge. A few endangered species are actually doing better in cities than in their "native" habitat. The Peregrine Falcons nesting on window ledges in skyscrapers come to mind (Bookmark the DuPont FalconCam and take a look beginning next March; just now I see only feathers in the nest).

Many doctrinaire environmentalists might shudder at the thought of making our cities into better habitat for beneficial or endangered animals. To them, cities are Evil and part of the probem; there's no way they can be part of the solution. But face it, cities are here to stay. They presently encumber only 2% of the land area, but that is growing, and their impact is greater than you might think. A certain parrot species is found in greater numbers in certain southwestern U.S. cities than in its entire home range in Mexico. They go where the living is better!

And suppose we were to succeed in creating cities in which nothing could live except humans and a short list of "approved" human pets. Then what? Should inner city kids—and their parents—be deprived of the sight of a blue jay, cardinal or indigo bunting? Should they be doomed never to see a living rabbit or raccoon? Should the endangered parrots of the U.S. southwest be "repatriated" to a "native" habitat that is getting too degraded to support them?

I don't like flies in my home, so I welcome the spiders that live here. There are at least 10 species that I've found. Only when a spider gets too big and is found crawling on the bed do I evict her. Our yard hosts rabbits and squirrels, so I do have to put small-mesh fencing around the garden, and we hope for the occasional visit by a fox to keep their numbers in check (she comes through every couple of years). We see deer droppings under the apple tree in the fall. As long as I don't corner a deer and get clipped by those front hooves, I'm happy to have one bed down there occasionally. We're planting a greater variety of flowers to draw butterflies, but avoiding the "butterfly bush" which is too concentrated and becomes a praying mantis colony beneath which one finds piles of butterfly wings! When I find a robin nest in the hedge, that section goes an extra month without being clipped until the chicks fledge. We let wasps nest in the louvers of the attic vents, but not in areas where children might play. Wasps are great predators of the insects I don't want to encounter. We encourage dragonflies, which keep the mosquito population down. A local hawk "tends to" the various little mammals such as mice and voles.

I appreciate the biologists who agree with Mr. Donovan, and are working to make our cities better for human-animal coexistence. Of course we don't want rats everywhere, but the best exterminators are Maine Coon cats, not poison baits that kill so many other animals as a byproduct, and make rat bodies poisonous to house cats and wild cats. With proper education we can even learn to live with coyotes in our midst...and we aren't going to see those exterminated anytime soon, anyway! Nearby New Jersey residents need to learn to think like bears so they don't attract them where they don't want them, but do attract them where they do want them. We need to face it, humans are part of nature. Let's open up to seeing "who else" shares our cities.

A very education and refreshing book.

Leaky mountain

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cities, places

This is the Stratosphere in Las Vegas, an observation tower on the same grounds as a 24-storey hotel. At 1,149 feet, it is the tallest observation tower in the US and the second tallest, after the CN Tower in Toronto, in North America. An office tower or two are taller, but this is simply, like the much smaller Space Needle in Seattle, a place to ascend for a look around (and to ride the highest roller coaster in the world).

Why is it there? In a city noted for ephemeral existence, for show over substance, its builder apparently wanted to make a more permanent statement. It has been said that it would cost more to remove it than was spent to build it. In a city where everything gets removed sooner or later (the venerable Sands was imploded long ago), this prediction will probably be tested within the decade, or two at most.

Note: This and the following image were obtained from the Wikipedia Commons.

Ninety miles to the north a low range of mini-mountains stretches across the desert. Yucca Mountain, as a portion of the range is called, was designated some 25 years ago as the site of a nuclear waste repository for the entire nation. Recent news has it that the project is terminated, but there is so far no future direction for the disposal of nuclear waste.

What do these have in common, besides being juxtaposed in one book? That is the reason for the book, About a Mountain by John D'Agata. In 2002 he helped his mother move to Las Vegas, and stayed on for a time himself. While there, he became interested in two mysteries about the place, the suicide of a 16-year-old boy who jumped from the Stratosphere, and the highly polarizing Yucca Mountain.

This is not a work of journalism. Indeed, when on a tour of the Yucca Mountain site he was assembled with "the press", he complained that he was not a reporter. The guide was not concerned, and remarked that he'd be getting a better tour. Reading the book makes it clear, this is an inner journey, and it loops about somewhat like the scary ride attached to the observation deck of the Stratosphere. While the book opens with reports of a birthday parade for the city and of boosterism in favor of Senator Reid, it ends with a detailed timeline of the young man's last hours. In between, they are intertwined.

The book is structured around a reporter's questions: Who What When Where Why and How, but it concludes with three more chapters titled "Why". The message I was left with: the boy's suicide is emblematic of our species' rush to exterminate ourselves. Self-destructiveness seems as built into us as is the survival instinct.

Yucca Mountain has been the focus of enormous amounts of mis- and disinformation from both sides of the debate. We read of this odd explanation being offered to schoolchildren, about "half-life": "Well, think of half life as nature's egg timer ... After the buzzer goes off, the half-life is over and all of the radioactive elements are safe." If only it were so! The author soon points out (via an interviewee's explanation) that after a half-life, half remains, and after another half-life, half of what was left remains, which is a quarter, and so forth. If you start with enough "stuff" to destroy Las Vegas 300,000 times, after 18 half-life periods have elapsed, you have enough left to destroy the city, just once. In other words, still not quite safe!

The author set out to find out why 10,000 years was chosen as the period the repository would be guarded. Five pages on which he was shuttled from one "authority" to another follow. He did find out that the original scientific report had mandated ten million years, but 10,000 was chosen as a more palatable period for political reasons, and either figure is laughably unrealistic anyway.

Question: How do you make a sign whose message will be clear in 12,000 AD? More than a chapter is devoted to this, and to some of the 600+ commissions and committees who are trying to figure it out. An example by a linguist illustrates the problem: We can still read Shakespeare, whose English is but 400 years old. Chaucer, who wrote in what linguists call "Middle English" about 250 years earlier, is quite a bit harder to read. Then another few hundred years back we come to Old English, which only scholars can read. That takes us back less than a thousand years; nine-plus to go.

But 10,000 years ago there were no written languages! The oldest written languages still in use are Chinese and Hebrew, both dating back about 5,000 years (this is not mentioned in the book). And Hebrew would be dead if it had not been restored as a living language by Zionist Jews in the 20^th Century.

My own opinion is that nuclear waste ought to be reprocessed to extract all useful materials and re-purify the U-235 and Pu-239 for producing more energy. The useless stuff, if any there is, should go back in the mine it was extracted from, which kept it safe for millions of years until we dug it up. And to keep the "fuels" out of the hands of terrorists? Guard them, using Blackwater or someone similar, someone with no sense of humor, who are empowered to ensure that the penalty for attempted theft of nuclear materials is a body riddled with M-1 rounds.

The author needed a lot of endurance just to find people who would speak frankly about the flawed science and political compromises behind the choice of Yucca Mountain and the whole subculture of waste disposal it was supposed to create. It required just as much tenacity for the author to determine information about the boy's suicide, and about suicide in Las Vegas. Nobody official will comment, and he had to hire a private investigator to find out a little.

Of course, public statistics (you won't get them from any Nevada governmental agency) show that Las Vegas is the suicide capital of the world. It isn't hard to figure out why: it is a city of losers. To gamble is nearly always to lose. Most visitors can tolerate losing over and over again and keep their mental balance. But gambling attracts addictive personalities, who are not known for stability. Some lose, lose, and then lose hope. Then they jump off a building, or go drown, or use a gun or pills to end it.

The boy was too young to gamble. He wasn't too young to get grounded. It happens to teens every day. For this one, there was an attractive nuisance, if he had the endurance to make his way to the tower, wait in line for a ticket, wait for the elevator, and so forth. It took a few hours. His final trip was pretty short: 833 feet, taking 8 seconds. In this kind of era, with a sharp up-tick in the forces of destruction, will the human race one day find itself taking a short fall to oblivion?