Nature Obscura. Kelly Brenner
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had shortly beforehand raked the always-spreading algae from the pond’s surface and dumped it in a pile under the tree. As soon as she was out of sight, I wandered over and tentatively poked at the pile of green slime. It wasn’t long before I was in up to my elbows, turning the pile inside out.
There was a good reason for this admittedly strange behavior: I was looking for invertebrates. I had spent all that summer in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum, surrounded by trees from around the world, dipping my small aquarium net into that human-made and intensively managed pond, pulling out an outlandish world, one scoop at a time. I knew animals lived in the algae and plants that had been raked up from the pond, and I could almost hear them scuttling around in the pile, finding themselves now in a quickly drying, unknown world.
As I turned one handful of slimy algae over at a time, I spotted slender damselfly larvae, flat, shrimplike animals called scuds, aquatic snails pulled into their shells, and flatworms that clung to my hand like leeches. I was so taken with these creatures, at that very moment I began planning my own backyard wildlife pond.
That so many strange and largely unknown creatures could live in an urban pond dozens of people visited every day, right in the middle of the city, amazed me. Here was a challenge to unearth and discover more about the arcane natural history of cities far beyond rats and pigeons.
Using Seattle’s urban landscape as my guide, I’ve explored the complex habitats and nature of cities more generally. Seattle—a city that has plowed down hills, cut through the land to connect fresh- and saltwater, and paved over much of the rest—has a surprising variety of life. Over many years, I’ve learned how our land alterations have impacted nature, for good and bad, through observing the wildlife and plants that live alongside us, mostly unseen.
In this book, I investigate the range of habitats found in cities, from tidal zone to lake, wetland to forest, backyard to rooftop. These stories connect and overlap, reflecting how our ecosystems, species, and human histories are also interconnected. In my personal challenge to look more closely at urban nature, I chose the city in which I live. While much of the nature described here is unique to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, other discoveries can be found in cities around the world.
Today, more than half the world’s population lives in cities, with more urban growth expected in coming years. But as we increasingly surround ourselves with concrete, cars, and buildings, we risk losing our inherent connection to nature. My goal with this book is to help rebuild that connection. Why is this important? Sir David Attenborough said it best: “No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”
Experiences in nature need to take place where people are, and many people are in cities. I hope to show that nature is not only “out there” in the wilderness but in our own backyards and parks within easy access. As I’ve discovered, either elbows-deep in pond muck or squeezing tardigrades out of moss, nature is all over our cities, and we can connect with it without even leaving home.
This was an important discovery for me because I’m a reluctant urban dweller. The crush of people and cars, the constant noise of airplanes, sirens, boats, leaf blowers, and other urban life, give me sensory overload. When I get overwhelmed, I turn to nature and, like wildlife does, I find refuge in the wild nooks and crannies of the city. And in these tucked-away places, I discover organisms that are new to me.
Wildlife in cities is amazingly diverse, with strange and unknown creatures that live almost completely unseen. Species wholly new to science are regularly being found in urban environments. During a 2011 bioblitz, a twenty-four-hour sprint by researchers and citizen scientists to count all the species in a geographic area, a new spider species was found in Seattle. At another bioblitz, in 2012, a new ant species was found in New York City, and between 2014 and 2016 during a multiyear bioblitz, more than forty new species of flies were discovered in Los Angeles. Nature exists in our cities, if only we look.
In spite of these recent findings of new species, there is still much we don’t know about the habits of species already on our radar. In our cities, there’s still a chance to channel David Douglas, Maria Sibylla Merian, or other early naturalists to make new discoveries. There’s plenty of room, and a desperate need, for citizen scientists to contribute to our collective knowledge bank.
Much of this work is, in fact, being done by volunteers with an interest in the natural world. Scientists are increasingly looking to volunteers to catalog the biodiversity in our cities and to learn more about the life found there. It’s important to gather this data so we know how nature in our cities is changing. We need to know how development, infrastructure, and land use changes impact the natural world so we can make better urban planning choices. And we can use nature as a bellwether to monitor the health of cities in the face of climate change, pollution, and other forces on the environment.
In the same way that a camera obscura reflects the surrounding landscape onto a flat surface, Nature Obscura is a projection of the nature found in a city onto a piece of paper.
I once visited a camera obscura on top of Cairngorm Mountain in the Scottish Highlands. In a dark room, the surrounding mountains were projected in black and white from the angled mirror in the ceiling onto a circular table below. Although I had just walked and observed the mountains with my own eyes, the camera obscura image altered the landscape’s appearance and gave me a different perspective. When I went back outside, I looked again in a different light and saw the mountains anew. These two images, the real and projected, inspired me to look at nature writing in a new way and to share my experiences. Writing is really just a type of camera obscura, a projection of the real world.
A book on writing that I once read insisted that the job of the writer is to make the reader not want to put the book down, that somehow the writer has failed if the reader closes the book and goes outside to experience the things the writer has put in the book. I disagree. I would take it as the greatest compliment if you are inspired enough to put this book down and venture outside to follow a fly or spy on a murder of crows or squeeze moss to find a water bear. When you’re done, come back, read the next chapter, and find your next adventure.
WINTER PRELUDE
There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.
—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter
During winter, the natural world appears to sleep, cloaked in a blanket of gray clouds, while city residents seem to hibernate, or shuffle along outdoors hidden under umbrellas and raincoats. A closer look reveals that nature is very much awake, but changed. With people huddled indoors the city feels more peaceful, and those who venture outside are heftily rewarded.
At Seward Park, a forested peninsula in Seattle that juts out into Lake Washington, small coots, black with bone-white bills, band together in large swimming flocks, hundreds strong, as bald eagles dive at them, trying to find the weak. Along Lake Washington, which borders the entire east side of the city, the noisy boats of summer are replaced by swans quietly gliding across the surface of the lake, which may be smooth as glass one day and an angry, churning mass the next.
In the peninsula’s forest refuge, tiny birds flock together; chickadees, bushtits, kinglets, and nuthatches swarm through the trees, passing through like a whirlwind, sweeping observers up in their frantic tweets and cheeps before moving on. Every night, throughout the city, crows congregate, creating rivers of black in the skies as they head to their roosts.
In bare-branched trees and on lawns gracing streetsides and yards, moss hides tiny secrets, a universe contained within each green clump. On freezing days, delicate hair ice sprouts from dead wood, and ice crystals grow around the