Welcome to Subirdia:
Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlifeby John M. Marzluffwith illustrations by Jack DeLapYale University Press, 2014John Marzluff, professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington, opens his new book Welcome to Subirdia with a scenario that will be familiar to the vast majority of his readers: sitting at some comfortable perch of the house, watching the bustling, hopping, flapping, chirping, tweeting world of birds flitting by outside. This is not a field expedition; this is an everyday testament to the fact that dozens of species of birds have made their homes in and among the sprawling encampments of mankind - this is, as Marzluff puts it, subirdia, a pseudo-natural niche that's probably existed as long as cities have existed but that's become, in our ecologically-sensitive modern times, a battleground and a testing ground for lots of questions of conservation and preservation.Wrens, robins, pigeons, jays, starlings, sparrows, hawks, owls, finches, woodpeckers ... the list of subirdia's feathered inhabitants is long and varied, and Marzluff classifies them in three fairly self-evident categories: avoiders, adapters, and exploiters, each obviously determined along the lines of how the birds in question interact with the humans' homes, offices, streets, and garbage dumps. Marzluff looks at all of these species with the scrutiny of a scientist and the natural dramatics of a born teacher (he's ably assisted by some very good black-and-white illustrations by Jack DeLap), always balancing natural history with ecological advocacy.There's plenty to advocate. Marzluff is concerned that the co-habitations of subirdia be peaceful and mutually successful. He's worried about such things as landscaping chemicals, dangerously bright-lit tall buildings (many of which all over the world attract a veritable hailstorm of night-migrating birds who end up as a ghastly silt on the sidewalks in the morning), and especially cats - feral and domesticated - which kill somewhere around 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds every year in the contiguous United States alone (and another 200 million in Canada, for instance). The subject works Marzluff up to some passionate polemics ... some of which teeter into the ridiculous just a bit:
Considering that Americans own 84 million cats and tolerated another 30 to 80 million feral cats that range freely across our lands, these numbers aren't that surprising. To a bird, however, they are simply horrifying. In Bristol, England, cats eat nearly half of all house sparrows, dunnocks, and robins each year. One in every ten birds in the United States will see the same thing just before death: a cat.
(One takes his point, although one is allowed to doubt that birds are horrified by these or any other statistics - and if a cat is doing its job, those millions of doomed birds won't actually see their feline fates coming.)A certain amount of that kind of overheated rhetoric is probably unavoidable in a book like Welcome to Subirdia, but the clearly-stated clarion calls in these pages more than compensate, bringing to light with wonderful clarity this human-nature interaction zone we all inhabit. Marzluff is a wonderful expert on that zone, pointing out that "to be a bird living among Homo urbanus is no small feat" and patiently clarifying that it's not so much simpler for the humans involved:
As urban people we live in a time when everything changes rapidly. Gone is the Holocene, the geologic period that succeeded the Pleistocene, or ice age, twelve thousand years ago. Then, the climate was stable and life changed slowly. We no live in the Anthropocene - a period of chaotic change initiated by humans several millennia ago. Our fellow creatures quickly adapt, evolve, or die out. Like the great ice sheets that covered much of Earth during the Pleistocene, concrete and lawn now creep from our cities into the deep recesses of nature. How will these changes affect the community of life to which we are ultimately linked? Listening to the owls and others that live among us, we might hear the answer.
Again, once you dry off the slightly soupy rhetoric (you can listen all the live-long day to the call of a great horned owl and you won't hear a single answer to questions of suburban subdivisions or proper lawn maintenance), you come to a very appealingly passionate chronicler - and a clear-eyed book every bird enthusiast should read.
