Attracting urban wildlife

Just got home from walking the dogs and our flowering dogwood trees are heavy with ripe fruit and full of animals eating it. One tree had a gray squirrel, some European starlings, some house sparrows, an American robin, and a big unknown yellow bird that I've never seen before that I couldn't get a picture of, because I couldn't get my camera out and control my dogs who were going stupid about the squirrel at the same time. Upon reflection, I think the bird was a female scarlet tanager.

New Community!!

Many people who found this journal when it was spotlighted, added it under the impression that it was an urban nature lovers community. Also, many regular readers have expressed that it would be desirable for readers to post their own "Urban Species" entries. It would be a great joy to me to read entries on urban species from cities around the world (and I love seeing photos of the species in the back yards of people on my friends list). Also, lots of people seem interested in having a place to post pictures of unidentified urban species, for experts and enthusiasts to help identify them.

In order to address all of these issues, cottonmanifesto and I have created the community urban_nature (I wanted urban_nature_lovers, but lj said it was too long). It is still a work in progress, and I expect it will remain so for a long time, but it is ready enough to let you know about it, so you can join and start posting.

Unless you read my journal only because you know me in real life, you should definitely add this new community to your friends list, your blog reading list, or your list of links (however you organize these things).

I will probably post there a lot, and I'll cross-post most of my personal journal entries that have something to do with urban nature. If you find it redundant to have my journal and this new community, and you want to unfriend my journal, I promise I won't be offended. Especially if you added it because you wanted to read and contribute to a community--now you can. It will be exciting to see and read about urban nature from places other than Boston and wherever I go on vacation.

To repeat:
JOIN urban_nature!

What's in a name?

"The Urban Pantheist" as a title occurred to me sometime in the late nineties. I was emerging from time spent as a wiccan or perhaps eclectic neopagan and had rediscovered the word "pantheist" and decided that it more accurately captured my beliefs. At the same time, I was connecting with nature in a way that I hadn't since I was a boy living in a house in the woods. It struck me that to love nature in the city was remarkable, but that it was something that needed to happen, and that I probably wasn't the only person who was discovering it. I used the title for five issues of my zine, published between 1998 and 2003, before finally admitting to myself that it was now just my blog title. (Unless I find another great project to attach it to.)

For a time, I considered the title "The Urban Naturalist," but rejected it for a couple reasons. First, I didn't know enough about nature to comfortably call myself a naturalist, but to call myself a pantheist, all I needed to do was believe in a self-creating universe. I also discovered, as I looked for books about urban nature, that there already was a book called The Urban Naturalist, by Steven Garber, a New York based biologist. (This book is pretty useful, but dry, and is starting to become obsolete. It needs a revision badly, but I doubt that Dover does such a thing, since their domain is the public domain, specializing in two dollar copies of Mark Twain and such.)

One of my newish lj friends, futurebird, is currently working on a book called The Urban Naturalist, but her perspective is largely social/humanity based, and looks very interesting (if she wants, she can comment with a better description than mine, or you could follow the links and read some of it). It will not be confused with Garber's book, despite the fact that they are both based in NYC.

In 1985, British goth singer Danielle Dax used the phrase "Urban Pantheist" in two contexts. In an interview, she basically said that what we used to call hippies are now urban pantheists. And for some album art, she used a series of her own paintings, which were titled "Urban Pantheist." So far as I can tell, this is the earliest use of these two words together. (This is the kind of baiting statement I like to make in order for other people to contradict me, and in so doing, do my research for me.)

About a year ago a self-described "urban folk singer" from Melbourne Australia, named Rachael Byrnes, wrote a song dedicated to a friend, entitled "The Urban Pantheist." You can listen to it here, or if you prefer songs in written format, you can look at the lyrics (which differ very slightly from the audio version) here. She sings rather languidly, a welcome contrast (in my mind) to the punk-influenced nasal snarl popular among female singer-songwriters I usually hear. I'm rather a dope when it comes to picking up symbolism, but while the song seems to be a love song written for a friend, it also bears a strong message of loving the earth, and listening to nature. (Unless I've gotten it totally wrong. I can just about grasp the blunt-instrument environmental message of Soundgarden's "Hands all Over."

Now I'm not sure if I should continue to use the phrase "The Urban Pantheist" to refer to myself and my projects. Partly because I've drifted even further away from strictly spiritual interests more toward ecology and biology. An early draft of a business card cottonmanifesto designed for me, she used the phrase "urban naturalist" to describe me, which is more accurate than ever. The nature walk group I founded is called "Urban Nature Walk," which I think is potentially more useful than the other titles. (By useful I mean helpful in creating interest and curiosity while accurately describing what I do.) For the foreseeable future, this blog will continue to be called "The Urban Pantheist." Until such time as I am born again, and judge pantheism to be a heresy against the One True God. Just kidding. Maybe.

Here, because lj abhors a text-only post, is the bark of an apple tree, growing on a city street.

Krulwich on Quammin on Darwin

I just listened to the podcast of "Hmmmm..." the horribly named but otherwise pretty good science feature from NPR. In it I learned that David Quammen (my favorite science journalist) is writing a book about Darwin. I'm not sure if I should be excited about this or disappointed. I think Quammen's best writing is travel and experience based--the stuff he writes based on written research can be kind of dull. But anyway, the reason I bring it up is this quote, describing what the pre-Darwin theory of why living things live where they are (why there are only kangaroos in Australia for example):

"God created every species individually, and put them down wherever they are. I call that 'Special Creation, plus Special Delivery.'"

Cross-posted.

365 urban species. #273: Scarlet Tanager

Photos by cottonmanifesto. Location: out my living room window, Brookline.

Urban species #273: Scarlet tanager. Piranga olivacea

Fortune has provided this bird enthusiast with two things that have led to his seeing today, his second ever scarlet tanager. First, the city in which I live is in a migration corridor--thousands of birds pass through Boston, stopping to rest or to eat, before continuing south in fall. Second, there is a pair of flowering dogwood trees in the small dirt area between our building and the sidewalk. These dogwood trees are paying back the tremendous amount of rain they soaked up in May with an abundance of plump red fruits. Resident birds like starlings, sparrows, and robins are gobbling them up, but a few migrators have started visiting, including the tanager in these pictures.

Tanagers are insect- and fruit-eating songbirds that occur mainly in the American tropics. There are only a handful of species that reach into North America, and of these only the scarlet tanager is a likely visitor to Boston. During the breeding season the male is as red as a cardinal, but with black wings and no crest. The only other scarlet tanager I've ever seen was a male singing his hoarse robinlike song, from high in a tree in the Mount Auburn cemetery. It was summer, and his breeding plumage was shockingly red, and unmistakable.

At first I assumed the bird in these pictures was a female--they wear greenish plumage year-round. But now that I have time to study the pictures, the rich black feathers on the bird's "shoulders" (scapular feathers, to be accurate) identify it as a non-breeding male. He stayed near my home for several hours today, eating dogwood fruits and nervously watching the activity in my living room, as two humans, two dogs, and a cat watched back. Perhaps tomorrow he will return for another helping, or perhaps he will continue his flight to Central America.