Subirdia: Where the birds are

I recently wrote a review of the book, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife. A portion of it ran in the Inquirer's book coverage in recent Sunday paper. Following is the full-length version.

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When my husband and I moved to Chester county 15 years ago, the former owners left a list of the birds they'd seen on the property. It totaled 67 species — a number we haven't equaled, but we're working on it.

The three-acre property has woods, lawn, a semi-meadow and two streams. It can accommodate a variety of birdy needs.

So, apparently, can much of the suburbs.

Often, people think of the 'burbs as a wildlife wasteland. If you want to see nature in action, you have to go to more remote and wilder environs, right? Not so, says John M. Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington. During years of fieldwork, he showed that the suburbs support incredible numbers of birds.

"A paradox eats at my subsonscious," he writes. "Everything I have learned as a conservation biologist tells me cities are bad for biodiversity — the sum total of life in an area — yet the feathered collective I encounter seems wholly unconvinced."

In studying the phenomenon, he and his students counted birds. They followed individual birds. They looked at how birds were evolving — often, to adapt to us.

Sampling more than 100 locations in and near Seattle, they found more kinds of birds in the suburbs than in the city (no surprise) but also more than in the forest outside town.

"We had discovered subirdia," he said. Thus the title of his book, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife. Perhaps the loveliest of the 41 drawings by Jack DeLap is the cover image of baby wrens in a mailbox nest.

Suburbs are, after all, diverse themselves, with "rich edges that offer access to many resources, such as nuts from trees, seeds from annual weeds and insects from ponds."

Plus: Birdfeeders! In the U.S., we spend $3.5 billion on 500,000 to 1.25 million TONS of seed.

Here's the kicker: "That is roughly the same as the amount of corn, wheat and rice that the U.S. government donates annually to feed people in Africa."

The peak in bird diversity, Marzluff concludes, is where "the creative hand of urbanization surpasses the destructive hand."

Occasionally, the conjunction of humans and birds is hilarious. Like when Marzluff stakes out a Costco store looking for Brewer's blackbirds that feed on parking lot refuse.

He gets there two hours before the 10 a.m. opening, but no blackbirds.

He waits.

At 9:46, eight birds arrive. At 9:50, another ten. A minute later, 16 more. Finally, the doors open, and three birds actually make it inside.

"The behavior of Brewer's blackbirds is now closely tied to the commercial day," Marzluff writes. "Our habits shape their diet and schedule. Their habitat includes the places where we shop and work."

Even before Subirdia came out, it raised eyebrows among birders.

Writing in Audubon Magazine, Kenn Kaufman worried people would conclude that natural habitats were no longer worth protecting.

Not so. We still need the wild places. Plus, "to be a bird living among homo urbanus is no small feat," Marzluff writes. "It is not without struggle and loss."

If birds Marzluff calls the "adapters" do well — think cardinals — the "avoiders" do not. No wood thrush is going to choose a Pennsylvania subdivision over the woods.

The message is much more complex, of course.

Nevertheless, as long as the suburbs exist, Marzluff proposes things people can do to make it a better habitat. They can shrink their lawns, plant native species, keep bird-thirsty cats indoors, make large windows visible to birds, and keep up the food and nest boxes.

In my own yard this year, an eastern phoebe built a tightly-woven nest of mud and moss atop a front porch post.

A house wren found a nearby hanging basket of begonias to her liking.

Both spots, protected by an overhang, looked cozy and dry.

As I sat in my rocker and watched life unfold — the birds were unfazed if I didn't move suddenly — I figured they could have picked a worse spot to start a family.