New Year’s Resolutions
Goldenrod and snow in my patch of the world, (c) Megan Draheim, 2017
It’s January, the season we make promises to ourselves about how we’ll live a better life in the coming year. Most of our resolutions focus on our own wellbeing: exercising, eating better, meditating, or cracking an unhealthy habit, for example.
I’d like to offer a slightly different take. Why not promise yourself the gift of creating a more biodiverse world? It satisfies what seems to be one of the major criteria of resolutions, making yourself healthier (there’s abundant literature out there that suggests being around nature is good for you, physically and mentally), but also makes your city (and even the world) a better place, both for people and for wildlife.
So what is this promise I’d ask you to consider as part of your yearly self-analysis? Plant more native plants in your yard or whatever outdoor space you can access. Obviously not all city-dwellers have a yard, but there are other options here: a balcony, a windowsill, lobbying your building to change the plantings in its public outdoor spaces (tree boxes, front walks, etc.), a community garden plot (or, even better, convince the community garden board to set aside one plot or the outside edge of the garden for a native pollinator garden in perpetuity), a corner of your children’s schoolyard, lobbying your city to let you use a corner of the local pocket park – possibilities abound.
This isn’t to say that every bit of turf should be dug up. Instead, take an objective inventory of the space in question. Is all of the lawn actually used? For sitting in, playing in, whatever? If not (and I’m betting much of it is not), consider turning that into a native planting bed. Not only will this help local wildlife (for example, by boosting native insect populations you provide many native birds with more food), but it has the side benefit of reducing the carbon footprint and other environmental impacts of your outdoor space (gas powered lawn mowers become irrelevant, and you don’t use as much – or even any – fertilizer, resulting in less run-off to your local waterways, for example).
There’s something about acting as stewards of our little piece of the world – however little – that is inspiring. You’re committing yourself to care about your local ecosystem and all that lives in it. You’re spending your own resources (time, money) on caring for the world in a tangible way. Watching native bees buzz around your patch of goldenrod is a wonderful thing, when you’re the reason the goldenrod is there in the first place.
And besides all of that, you just might end up with less lawn to mow. Maybe that gives you more time this summer to follow through on one of your other resolutions?
Happy New Year, everyone.
Coyotes in DC
Coyote, (c) Matt Knoth via Wikimedia Commons
I recently wrote an article for DCist.com on living with coyotes in Washington, D.C. Check it out!
Cartagena, Part I
Getsemani, Cartagena, (c) Megan Draheim, 2017
Last month I was able to travel to beautiful Cartagena, Colombia for the International Congress for Conservation Biology, the Society for Conservation Biology’s biennial international meeting. I’ll be writing more about this soon, but wanted first to link to a post I wrote for my department about it, partially focusing on a presentation I co-wrote for the meeting.
More to come!
Raccoons in Fairlington
By Ken Rushia – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29208540
I wrote an article in DCist about raccoon-human conflict in Fairlington, which is in a suburb of DC in Virginia. The complex has an interesting garbage policy: residents leave out their trash in garbage bags only (no trash cans) six days a week, which provides a ready supply of easy meals for all sorts of animals. When wildlife becomes used to the idea that such food supplies are linked closely to human presence, bad things can happen (this also happens from intentional feedings). This can have extremely poor outcomes for both humans (bites, scratches, or worse) and the wildlife (many times animals like that will be captured and killed). Have you ever heard the expression, “a fed bear is a dead bear”? It’s sadly often true. So please don’t feed the wildlife!
Sea Level Rise in Maryland
This isn’t necessarily specifically urban in nature, but I thought worth posting anyway. A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrates the damage sea level rise is going to do to coastal communities, including those rather close to home for me: the coastal towns of Maryland. That’s not new, of course, but the timeline they present is quite chilling. The Washington Post reports, for example, that 22 communities in Maryland (out of 91 in the entire US) will face “chronic inundation” by 2035. This is a good reminder that we not only need to find ways to halt climate change progression, but also need to adapt to conditions that are going to change.
Odds and Ends
Public Domain via the EPA: http://bit.ly/2opJgH8
Here’s an essay I wrote for the Oxford University Press’ blog, on how to effectively talk about the policy threats our environment is currently facing.
The unintended effect of calling our “fake news.”
Hope you find it useful!
Pigeons
(c) Megan Draheim, 2017
I’ve posted photos of pigeons before. Much-maligned, pigeons are actually a favorite of mine. If you’ve ever stopped to look closely at them, they’re really quite beautiful, and you have to respect their ability to survive where many other animals cannot (they’re also not dummies, as it turns out). They’re not a native species — technically, they’re feral — but they’re not invasive either (in other words, they don’t compete and win against native species). Many people are not very tolerant of them, but perhaps that also says something about how they relate to the non-human world?
In any case, I took this shot up in Baltimore last week, at the Harbor, as part of my 365 photo project this year (you can follow it on Instagram!).
Nature and Art and Birds at Hopkins
I’ve written before about the healing powers of nature, and even where we can find nature and representations of nature in hospitals. I’ve been wandering around Johns Hopkins in Baltimore lately, looking at their amazing art collection (I love that this is a “thing” in many hospitals). One day I came across a long hallway with 26 framed photos of a water garden:
Each of them had a different smudge of paint on the mat, and the same color board on the bridge. At the end of the hallway was a description of what was going on. The water garden was, of course, Giverny, where Monet painted many of his most famous works. The artist in this case was Spencer Finch, who helped to design some of the exterior of the hospital using this color scheme. As the statement read:
…Finch distilled 26 shades of blue, green, purple, yellow and gray from the palette of the famous French Impressionist painter… Each of the 26 photographs documents a panel painted with one of the artist’s colors, poised on Monet’s footbridge and reflected in the lily pond. Finch’s paint brush and pencil notations below each photograph record the particular color as well as its descriptive name.
These colors are then replicated on the outside of the building (see above and here):
Finch’s ‘alphabet’ of 26 colors can be found on the building’s reflective exterior, painted on aluminum panels and encased in glass shadowboxes… Along the eastern side of the building, on Wolfe Street, one can find Finch’s entire color spectrum, arranged as they are here, alphabetically by the name of the color.
More of Finch’s work can be found on many of the windows in that part of the hospital, including glass walkways.
Recalling Money’s brushstrokes and the rippling of water, Finch developed a unique ‘frit’ pattern for the building’s glass. A two-layer composition, his hand-drawn strokes are fused onto the building’s glass curtain wall, reflecting and refracting light and shadows.
A benefit of this is that the glass becomes safer for birds! Birds can see the design, so are less likely to crash into the structure as they can’t see glass. A friend of mine who’s an architect well-versed in bird-friendly design said that the pattern would ideally be a little closer together, but that the design is still likely effective. I think it’s a great example of art meeting conservation biology, with the added bonus that this design is rather soothing to look at — in keeping with the idea that nature and representations of nature are healing to people.
If you’re interested in bird-friendly glass, check out this article from Nat Geo and this two-parter from NPR.
A wood thrush (the official bird of Washington, D.C.!), a species that has been found to collide with windows. (c) Cheep Shot, 2013, via WikiMedia Commons
Odds and Ends: March 11 2017
A couple of interesting articles today. First, Carl Abbott of Portland State University discusses the myth that DC was built on a swamp (it was not) in The Conversation.
Second, Vox interviews Patrick Gonzalez of NPS and UC-Berkeley about how the trend of DC’s cherry blossoms blooming earlier and earlier is a sign of climate change.
Enjoy!
Species, Part Two
In the last post we discussed how to define the concept of species, how to determine whether an animal is one species or another, and how to define what constitutes a new species. In this post we’re going to focus on people, as conservation is often more about managing people than managing wildlife.
A few years ago I helped with some research that looked at the influence of species’ common names on support for the conservation of that species. It turns out (perhaps not surprisingly) that more negative-associated names garnered less support for conservation than more positive-associated names. We tested both real and fictional names in order to manipulate their connotations, but also measured which real names were seen positively and which were seen negatively. For example, the name that had the most support for conservation was the bald eagle, while the fictitious sheep-eating eagle had the least support for conservation.
Particularly interesting to me, and relevant to urban biodiversity, we included several names for coyotes. Of those, the American song dog (the word coyote actually comes from a word that means song dog) and the Great Plains wild dog generated the most support for conservation, while the coydog, coyote, Eastern coywolf (a name used by some researchers), and Eastern coyote (my preferred name for coyotes found on the east coast) beat out only the aforementioned sheep-eating eagle for species generating the least support for conservation.
The point is that apparently a song dog by any other name would not smell as sweet. Those of us who are concerned with biodiversity conservation would do well to remember the power of names while working with the public and policy-makers!
Coyote, (c) Matt Knoth via Wikimedia Commons
Our Urban Jungle 