Flocking to the burbs

Welcome to Subirdia

Sharing Our Neighborhoods With Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife

By John M. Marzluff

Yale University Press. 320 pp. $30

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Reviewed by

Sandy Bauers

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.

Often, people think of the 'burbs as a wildlife wasteland. Not so, writes 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, not just the house sparrows and starlings we expect.

"A paradox eats at my subconscious," 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 United States, we spend $3.5 billion on 500,000 to 1.25 million tons of seed, Marzluff writes.

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

Even before Subirdia came out, it raised eyebrows among birders. Writing in Audubon Magazine, Kenn Kaufman worried people would conclude 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."