Reviews for Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn

The average rating for Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-07-07 00:00:00 Erdi Husein William Cronon's essay "The Trouble with Wilderness" lays out a critique of the wilderness myth deeply ingrained in the American mind. The gist of the essay is that since humans are part and parcel of nature, it is not historically or ecologically sound to imagine "proper" ecosystems as without human presence or influence. At the end of the piece, Cronon urges us to "make a home in nature," "to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away." In Derrick Jensen's essay, Against Forgetting he exhorts us: "But here is what I want you to do: I want you to go outside. I want you to listen to the (disappearing) frogs, to watch the (disappearing) fireflies. Even if you're in a city'especially if you're in a city'I want you to picture the land as it was before the land was built over. I want you to research who lived there. I want you to feel how it was then, feel how it wants to be. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention." Though Holmes never acknowledges it explicitly, Surbuban Safari is an answer to Cronon's and Jensen's calls. She embarks on a year-long search to embrace and engage with the wildness of her own backyard. The engagement is thorough. It is sometimes surprising the lengths Holmes went to in completing this book. She names every animal that frequents her yard, learns the language of her local crows, and trains a chipmunk to sit in her hand and stuff its cheeks with sunflower seeds while she showers it with caresses and kisses. She also reads a huge breadth of primary literature and invites a slew of scientists, including a name as big as Amory Lovins, to her house to look for interesting things. (There's absolutely no reason Lovins should have come in service of this project, and she basically admits that both he and she knew as much, and that she just did it because she wanted to meet him.) The book is sweet and full of genuine care and interest. What's unique about that is that it really seems place-based. While there is a decent amount of hand-wringing about Holmes' own "footprint," her interest in the natural history of her yard doesn't feel ideological. It's like she really means it, instead of just carrying out a mandate to be interested and engaged because it's the "thing to do." That keeps the narrative focused on her actual observations of actual things, real questions that arose in her observations and which she answered, not padded with pretty fluff about the concept of what she is doing. There were a few times when Holmes strayed from her basic premise. Some of these, like the bits on local history (featuring a Captain's trained dalmation, Spot) and deep environmental/geologic history, were appropriate parts of her quest and fit well in the book. Others, like her trips to visit lawns in California and Arizona, seemed extraneous and over the top. How did she get the money to do all of that, anyway? The idea occurs to me that she was given a larger than necessary budget and just spent the extra money on these trips (and bringing Amory Lovins) and had to incorporate them into the book somehow. Holmes struck a great balance of science, conversations with scientists, and personal, intimate observations (she's often embarrassed to tell certain scientists about pet ideas and strange relationships she's developed, and we become confidants of these secrets). It isn't a masterwork of natural history, cultural and philosophical observations, like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or Sand County Almanac, but it is charming and edifying in a more modest way. Overall, it is an admirable project (indeed, one we should all undertake), admirably achieved, with a sweet narrative personality. Some things I learned: - Crows live in family groups of four, with a mature mating pair and two children. All contribute to raising further babies, which teaches parenting skills to the adolescents. - There is a breed of dogs, known as Carolina dogs, that were presumably brought here (deep time speaking) and bred by native Americans but were living in wild packs up to the 1970s in the woods. - Squirrels are very distinguishing about acorns. In good years, they will eat white oak acorns immediately, since they sprout in the fall and thus don't store, but store red oak acorns. In even better years, they will only eat the tender top bits and eschew the tannin-rich parts of the nutmeat. In bad years, they will remove the embryo from white oak acorns to prevent them from sprouting, so they can be stored for the winter. - West Nile virus primarily affects birds, and is carried by fiendish European House Sparrows, who are largely immune to it - There is a complex relationship between oak mast, rodent populations, tick populations, and thus incidents of Lyme's disease. - Most interesting of all was the revelation that overwintering insects (those who don't migrate and who survive longer than one year or overwinter as a larvae or adult, not an egg - including wasps and bees) are highly sensitive to deep winter temperatures. Mid-January is the last time you'd think about insects showing activity of any kind. I had sort of assumed that they just hid out someplace and put life on pause, falling out of the stream of life til Spring. Barring chance discovery by woodpeckers and other insectivores, this is mostly true. But the antifreeze techniques insects employ have limits (calibrated to their environment, of course - some arctic beetles can survive something like -40), and a particularly cold winter can have a greater impact on insect populations the next year than any more obvious ecological issue, like pesticide exposure, predator populations, food and nest resource availability, etc.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-16 00:00:00 ROB THOMAS A "Cheeky" take on a landscape you only thought you knew. An American backyard is a fascinating place! I love this author's voice -- she could make the phone book interesting. "Cheeky" the chipmunk and "Yawp" the crow are just a few of the winsome neighbors you'll meet along the way. (Bonus fact: It turns out that my low maintenance approach to lawn maintenance isn't laziness; I am cultivating a Freedom Lawn.)