How, and why, to connect with wildlife in your own backyard

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

[LOW HUMMING]

And you are also listening to the sounds of my backyard in the morning. Many of us have gotten sucked into the tiny dramas unfolding in our own backyards, or at the bird feeder, or on the fire escape, or in the park nearby. But not everyone can turn those observations into a best-selling book.

Today, author Margaret Renkl is here to talk about Science Friday’s November book club pick, The Comfort of Crows– A Backyard Year, where, over the course of a year, Margaret tells the stories of her own backyard to help make sense of the changes in our world and the changes in her own life. Margaret, welcome to Science Friday. I’m so glad to have you here.

MARGARET RENKL: Thank you for having me, Flora. I’m delighted to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are crows comforting to you?

MARGARET RENKL: They are, amazingly. And I love all the corvids. I love the blue jays and the steller’s jays and the ravens. That particular group of birds is so smart, and, also, so curious, and so mischievous. And they have a great sense of humor. And it’s impossible not to see commonalities there between the crows and human beings. And I think for most of human history, at least for most of Western literature, we have wanted to see ourselves as distinct from the wild world. But I take great comfort in seeing all the ways we are kin, kindred souls, kindred living creatures.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I mean, for people who don’t know your writing, what are your goals as a writer? What do you want to capture about the natural world?

MARGARET RENKL: I guess, the most important thing, for me, is that I don’t think we save what we feel distant from, alienated from, apart from. We save what we’re in love with. And I want all of my fellow human beings to fall in love with the wild world because we are running out of time to save it, at least as we know it now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: “We save what we’re in love with.” That’s a good line. I want to know why you wanted to write this book in particular about your own backyard.

MARGARET RENKL: I wrote a book. The first book I wrote also involved a lot of stories from my backyard. It was really a book about grief. It was about losing my mom and my mother-in-law very close together, and the comfort I took look from seeing those same natural cycles play out in the creatures who live nearby. It was nice to be reminded again and again that human beings aren’t singled out for suffering. And these same losses and these same griefs are shared by many of our wild neighbors.

But when I was on book tour with that book, which is called Late Migrations– A Natural History of Love and Loss, I realized that I erred, I think, too much on the side of solace, too much on the side of how nature can make us feel better about not just grief and loss, but also about the unnatural pace we live in. When we step outside, the jangle of noises, of machines, and when we step outside into the pace of our bodies, the pace we evolve to move at, the way we walk, the way our heart beats, it’s not the speed of a car on the interstate.

We have to also acknowledge and witness all the ways our lives are imperiling our wild neighbors. And so I think The Comfort of Crows was my effort at a corrective a little bit. I hope it’s more balanced than Late Migrations was.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It felt very balanced to me. I mean, it felt like, with all the sweetness, there was always a note of bitterness that captures reality today.

MARGARET RENKL: Oh. I don’t know that I would use the term “bitterness” myself. I think I would use the term– it’s more like fear. It’s more like anxiety. It’s more like grief for me. It’s been the project of my life to reconcile myself to the business of predation. And it is only lately that I have come to recognize the beauty in that violence and in the way that world works.

But that isn’t the real source of grief. The real source of grief is climate change. The real source of grief is habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, these things that we know are happening right before our very eyes and would prefer not to know, would prefer not to see up close how it unfolds in the nearby world.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Will you take us into your world? What is your backyard like? How should we picture it?

MARGARET RENKL: I think I should warn you upfront that it is– I don’t how to say this without just saying it. But it’s a mess, is what it is. But when we moved here, the yard was nothing but empty flower beds, an entire hedge of invasive Japanese honeysuckle, and other invasives. And I remember thinking, when we bought this house, this is the most sterile, barren-looking yard imaginable.

But it did have a ton of trees on it. And those trees have been my saving grace over the years– sugar maples, a big, old white oak, four giant white pines. And when you have native trees like that, you have caterpillars. And when you have caterpillars, you have baby birds. So it looked like a sterile place when we bought it 31 years ago, but it wasn’t really, truly sterile. There was a lot to work with here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And you’ve remade it since then.

MARGARET RENKL: I have. So our first rewilding efforts was really just to get out of nature’s way, as much as we could. And so my husband raised the mower blades on the lawn mower as high as they would go. And just that change alone awakened this entire seed bank of native wildflowers that came up. And then we had, it turns out, all kinds of little bitty, beautiful flowers. And some of them had specialist bees that would only feed on that particular flower, like the spring beauty minor bee.

And so with changes like that, just starting with the simplest thing, which is not just easier, but also free, we didn’t bag up our leaves. We left the leaves for the firefly larva to overwinter in and turn into fireflies the next spring, or the spring after that.

And then I read a book that shifted my understanding of what I could do with this yard from just letting it do its own thing to truly welcoming my wild neighbors. The book was called Bringing Nature Home. It was by an entomologist named Douglas W. Tallamy. And it was a really clear, concise, and energizing argument for planting the plants that my wild neighbors evolved to eat, and explained how the whole food web worked, and how if I wanted to have a–

–any kind of wild presence, I needed to encourage caterpillars. So we started with, of course, milkweed because everybody wants to save the monarch butterfly. But yeah, it was a gradual, ever-evolving process. And it’s this constant source of wonder.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We have to take a break, but when we come back, I want to invite a very special guest to join this conversation, who is going to join us from the forests of Peru. Stick around.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, you said that Douglas Tallamy helped inspire this book. Well, surprise, Douglas Tallamy, professor of entomology at the University of Delaware, a.k.a. the godfather of the native plant movement, is here with us today. Doug, you’re joining us from the forests of Peru?

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: I am. And it is a great pleasure to be here. I’ve never met Margaret in person, but now I see her face. We’ve emailed. And hello, Margaret. [CHUCKLES]

MARGARET RENKL: Oh, my gosh. Hello, Doug. Thank you for joining us.

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: Can you hear the monkeys in the background?

MARGARET RENKL: [LAUGHS] Yes.

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: I’m serious.

MARGARET RENKL: I can. I thought they were kids, but this makes more sense.

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: There’s a screen on the windows. I can’t shut anything

FLORA LICHTMAN: Margaret, tell me a little bit more about how– yeah, how Doug’s book inspired you.

MARGARET RENKL: I know that people have been talking about the intersection of nearby nature and the wild world for a long time, but I hadn’t ever read anything or seen anything or talked to anybody. I mean, this is Tennessee. I grew up in Alabama. I went to grad school in South Carolina. I married a Georgia boy. These are not issues that come up down here too much.

And so it was the reading, bringing nature home, and then, later, Doug’s book on oaks. And I have a whole library of Douglas Tallamy books that are just very clear and very direct about what we can do. And as the perils facing the natural world get more and more overt, impossible to ignore, it just helps a lot to feel there’s something you can do.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How does that feel, Doug?

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: [LAUGHS] Margaret’s expressing everything that’s in my head, but she does it really eloquently and reaches a group of people that I don’t really reach. I mean, you said it wonderfully at the beginning of the interview, Margaret. We’re only going to save what we care about. I’m trying to convince people that nature is not optional. If you don’t care about it, that’s not OK. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to protect it because we’re all totally dependent on it. And that’s the missing link.

And what Margaret’s done in her yard, what I’ve done in my yard, what a lot of other people are doing right now, just shows how resilient nature is. I mean, our yard was mowed for hay. I mean, there wasn’t much there. My little game is to take a picture of every one of those caterpillars that Margaret was talking about, every species. And I’m up to 1,394 species now–

MARGARET RENKL: Oh, my gosh!

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: –that are making a living on our property because we put those plants back. But that just tells me this works.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hmm. I want to talk to you both about this idea of intervention and get your thoughts on how– just understand how you think about it. Because in your book, Margaret, one of the themes is your desire to help creatures in need from feeding them, if there’s not enough food around, or nursing them. And it can go bad sometimes. Do you grapple with that idea of intervention? Or how do you think about it?

MARGARET RENKL: I do think that there are ethical issues involved in the idea of intervention. What I ask myself, at least, is, am I intervening in a natural process that is supposed to happen because that’s how evolution set it up, or am I intervening because I have a preference, let’s say, for bluebirds over rat snakes? I’ve worked really hard to cultivate a love for them all, the bluebird and the rat snake. But I hear from people all the time who have– I mean, some of the stories I’ve heard would just curl your hair about what people have done to snakes because they were climbing trees to get to baby birds.

When the problem is human-made, then I think we must intervene. When it’s a feral cat stalking a baby bird, we have an obligation to intervene in that because a house cat is an invasive species. Those are two different things. But in terms of just, when do I intervene, in some of the stories I tell in The Comfort of Crows, if I’m protecting the skink from the feral cat, I don’t have any problem with that. What to do when the baby bird leaves the nest too soon, and I know the feral cat is out there, that’s a different question.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Doug, if hearing you and Margaret talk has convinced people listening that, yeah, maybe I should do something different, like maybe I should do something different in my own backyard, where do people start? It feels like it could be overwhelming for people. So what is the first step?

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: Take an inventory of what your yard looks like. We have 44 million acres of lawn in this country, and that’s an ecological dead scape. So what can you do to reduce the area of lawn? Every property should be supporting pollinators. Every property should be sequestering carbon. That will help climate change. Every property needs to support a viable food web so that you have animals that can live on your piece of the earth. Lawn does none of those things, which is why I’m always picking on it.

But what can you do to reduce your lawn? Plant that oak tree. It’s going to grow much faster than you think. Put a bed under that tree, and all of a sudden, you have less lawn. Do it again after that. And so think of it as a process, not something you have to finish tomorrow. That would be a big investment. The interesting thing about restoration– and by the way, Margaret, your yard is not a mess. It is a restoration. That’s very good.

MARGARET RENKL: [LAUGHS]

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: But the big thing is, you get to see the results. And they happen much faster than you would think. And that’s positive reinforcement, so it makes you want to do it again. If I said I want you to solve climate change tomorrow, you could put solar panels on your roof, and you could stop driving your SUV. And those are great things, and it will help, but you can’t see the difference. You can make a difference on your little piece of the earth, and you can see the difference, and you can see it right away.

MARGARET RENKL: Well, one thing I would add, there are resources online for finding out what plants are native to where you live and will grow under the specific circumstances of your little piece of land. And I think we should emphasize, that can be the whole strip between the sidewalk and the street. That can be a pot of flowers on a fourth floor balcony. It can be a lot of things. It doesn’t have to be a yard. So if you think of what you’re doing as part of a larger effort, I think it helps.

But I agree that one of the great advantages of this kind of action is that you see the difference instantly. Instead of hauling your fallen limbs after a windstorm out to the street for the city to pick up, you just make a nice little brush pile, and you look and there’s some little bright eyes sticking out from under the limbs. And it feels good.

I mean, that’s the thing, that there are so many things we should do, and we know we should do. And they cause us some sacrifice, and it’s unpleasant to us. But when we find ourselves surrounded by squirrels, and chipmunks, and bats, and birds, and toads, and little grass snakes, it feels like, oh, gosh, I’m a Disney Princess all of a sudden. It’s encouraging. You want to keep doing more and more and more and more.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is the first and only time I’ve wanted to feel like a Disney Princess.

MARGARET RENKL: [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: But I’m 100% sold. Thank you both for joining me today. This was delightful.

MARGARET RENKL: Thank you, Flora.

DOUGLAS TALLAMY: My pleasure.

MARGARET RENKL: Thank you, Doug.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows– A Backyard Year. And it is our book club pick this month. Douglas Tallamy is a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware. And if you want to read along with our book club, head to sciencefriday.com/bookclub, where you can join the newsletter and our free online community group filled with curious people who love to read.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Before we wrap, with the midterms behind us, we are taking stock of science under the Trump administration so far. Scientists, we want to hear from you. How exactly has life in the lab changed in the last two years? Grants, brain drain, university policies– you tell us. Call us, 8774-SCIFRI with your experience. That’s 8774-SCIFRI. This episode was produced by Dee Peter Schmidt. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thank you for listening.

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