The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

We live in a farmhouse that was built in the 1920s. Over the decades, the fruit orchards that surrounded it were replaced with houses—most of them in the 1940s, some in the 1970s. When my family and I walk through the neighborhood, we find other houses that look like ours farm-distance away, and I enjoy imagining the inhabitants of these houses, our historical neighbors, their apple trees cross-pollinating those that surrounded our house. In the 1938 Seattle city census photograph of our house, there are not just fruit trees, but a chicken coop out back, long-buried dirt roads leading to the front drive, and a whooping-cough-quarantine sign on the door.

  The interior of our house has suffered many bad remodels over the decades and was restored several years ago by the previous owner, just before we moved in. He lovingly scraped away layers of paint to reveal the original grain in the thick molding of local Douglas fir. Glued-down linoleum was peeled back, and the floors beneath it—more fir—were sanded and oiled. The kitchen was gutted and replaced, and the exterior cedar lap siding was painted a pleasing shade of green.

  We are grateful for all this effort, as none of it sounds very fun to us. Turning to the kind of work that better suits our family, we have embarked on what I like to think of as Home Restoration, Phase II. According to my treasured copy of Eric Partridge’s etymological dictionary, the word restore comes from the Latin restaurare, meaning “to give back something either lost or removed,” an apt and lovely origin in this context. It is in this spirit we have returned a chicken coop to the backyard of this home that once produced so much food and sweet fruit. A plum tree has been added, an Asian pear, and two little columnar apples. A sweet gum was removed, given to a local monastery’s memorial garden, and replaced with an Asian pear tree. We’ve drastically (perhaps insanely) removed grass and expanded the vegetable garden, and we have added cold frames for the chill Seattle spring. We removed a tangle of escallonia shrubs along the side fence and replaced them with northwest native vine maples, sword ferns, lady ferns, flowering currant, and huckleberry. We referred to the permaculture manual, remembering that we can both provide natives for wildlife and feed ourselves by paying attention to even this small-scale plot of land as an ecologically complex place. In the current “victory garden” movement, it seems the impulse is to construct a few rectangular wooden raised beds, then fill them with soil and rows of plants. Permaculture asks us to approach gardening with more heart, to first take a step back and ask two questions. What is it that we, the human inhabitants, require of our bit of land (food, a place to play, herbs, peace for the soul)? And then, What does the land, and the region, need from us (soil rejuvenation, removal of invasive plants/grass, space for native plants and their pollinators, varied dimensions to provide habitat for birds)? So often we think of restoration as an aesthetic endeavor, but expansively, it can be so much more. Even our small yards constitute land, and we can begin to give back to this land its “lost” innate fertility.

  The sustainable-homes movement emphasizes that while human-designed homes can never be biologically complex enough to be fully analogous to a natural ecosystem, many home systems, such as gardens, are comparable to natural systems. As true as this is, I want to say something different. Our homes—no matter how we live in them, how ecologically inspired or ecologically unenlightened—are functioning parts of ecosystems, and in creating a home, so are we. This is not just poetic analogy. From our homes, we exchange food, water, waste, and energy with the living organisms that surround us in our neighborhoods and beyond. These are the cycles that make us ecosystemic creatures, that bring us into conversation with land, air, plants, and animals. It is a beautiful, ominous realization, when we allow it to sink in. How we live matters, and matters wondrously. It doesn’t make any difference where we dwell—a house, an apartment, a tent, urban or rural—we are caretakers of the place from which we make our home—not just its physical walls, but the myriad ways in which it spills beyond itself. It is our homes that connect us, deeply, ecosystemically, to the wild earth, and all creatures near and far.

  This realization is inciting a whole movement, as urban dwellers across the country choose to practice some subsistence habits from home—growing food and making some of our household goods—because it makes us feel healthy, happy, and creative; because it throws us into the round of wild nature; and because it allows us to disengage, even if just a little, from the crazy-manic consumer economy. Urban homesteading and urban farming are the vogue labels for the movement; these are inspiring and playful epithets, and I have nothing against them, but they make me a little self-conscious (true homesteading and farming are deep and challenging lifestyles, both historically and today, and I just can’t claim to be doing either one seriously). For my own household, I prefer to adopt the older English word smallholding. A smallholding is just what it sounds like—a bit of land upon which a few people grow some of their food and make some of their living from home. Sometimes there is enough to sell at a small market or more typically to share with friends or neighbors. In my appropriated use, a smallholding can be very small—an urban apartment, even—while still bespeaking a responsible and responsive interaction of humans, plants, native trees, fruit trees. Plots of cultivation and corners full of tendrils run feral. Adults and children. Domestic animals and wild creatures. Chickens and chickadees.

  I believe that living mindfully in the bestiary is primarily a matter of creating homes that make sense, what Thoreau called common sense: a home that allows both appropriate boundaries and appropriate permeability; that provides opportunity for observation and interaction but permits wild creatures to maintain their wildness; that keeps us safe while enabling the animals that co-inhabit our urban places to flourish. Urban planning and the transition to eco-cities that integrate appropriate wildlife habitat are essential, and the most necessary steps will vary geographically; we need to be involved in this dimension of our communities and our cities. This will include everything from creating highway overpasses for wildlife and restoring urban parks to decreasing car dependence and increasing community-based agriculture. But daily, as creatures, as humans walking in the bestiary, we act from home. So often we take steps to change our habits out of guilt—we know about global climate change and that we ought to reduce our footprint. We feel guilty when we don’t recycle, when we eat too much beef, when we compare our consumptive lifestyles to those of people who live so much more simply around the world. But I absolutely believe that guilt cannot be the highest or even the most efficient motivator. Attending the world more closely, we are inspired to act instead from a sense of love, interconnection, and a recognition of mutual strength and frailty.

  There are many home practices that allow us to cultivate continuity and empathy with the wild earth—with more-than-human life near and far. Here are some of my favorites, the ones I consider essential in my own household, the ones that make our home rounder, our psyches wilder, our bodies closer to their perfect human size.

  Grow something to eat. In their fun book The Urban Homestead, Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen encourage our gardening efforts by telling us that “nature is standing by, ready to help.” Just as often, though, I resonate with Michael Pollan, who writes in his literate meditation Second Nature, “Nature abhors a garden.” As far as life in the bestiary goes, nothing makes us more aware of the animals among us than arguing with them over the food we are trying to grow for ourselves. We are supposed to be smiling there in the sun, planting seeds, feeding our souls, and thinking how pretty nature is. But here is a complex beauty. There are birds eating the berries. Squirrels uprooting the bulbs and stealing the sunflower seeds from the chickadees. Moles doing the horrible things moles do. Our well-intentioned, lovingly tended, sweat-built gardens are being nibbled by everything from robins and rats to skunks and cabbage butterflies.

  Yet this tension can be enlivening. Our awareness of the wild creatures in our midst is elevated, and in our response, we find the creativity that is the core of evolutionary adaptedness. We find empathy for al
l things that eat, earning a sense of what other animals have to deal with daily—the knowledge that food is risky, never a sure thing. We find an animal vigilance that we might never have discovered in ourselves but that is strong and original and beautiful, and grows right from our wild roots.

  I confess that I am subject to infrequent but powerful periods of melancholia, the “long walk with the black dog,” as Samuel Johnson called it. Usually I am very well, but during the occasional stretches that leave me barely able to get out of my pajamas, I’ve found that if I can somehow find my way into the garden and get my hands dirty, I will be lifted for a time out of the downward spiral. We know that natural light and physical movement are good for mental health, but we are now learning that there is so much more going on. There are somewhere between one hundred million and one billion bacteria in about a teaspoon of productive garden soil. These are participants in the soil food web, related to the plants and plant-root exudates, and though we know that some of these bacteria have to do with nutrient cycling, water dynamics, and disease suppression in plants and soil organisms, the specific roles most of these soil bacteria play remain a scientific mystery. But in 2007, studies in London and Bristol led by Christopher Lowry (now at the University of Colorado) and published in the journal Neuroscience show that one specific common soil bacteria, Mycobacterium vaccae, appears to act upon the neurons in the human brain that produce serotonin, which helps to regulate metabolism, sleep, anger, mood, anxiety, motor activity, and coping responses to stress. The bacteria can have the same effect as the class of drugs known as SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Prozac and Celexa, that are prescribed as antidepressants, though the bacteria acts on the brain more specifically than these medications and without negative side effects. And though the mechanisms aren’t fully understood, we know that gardening reduces the release of cortisol, the steroid hormone related to stress, and acts in other ways to calm the nerves and reduce anxiety. The implication is that more time spent with soil, from wilderness walks to planting a backyard tomato, can actually prevent depression and improve mental and physical health. How elegant, when things we feel to be true are borne out by modern science. By liberating us from the need to work the soil, modernity has separated us from a source of everyday joy and health. Even if all you have space or energy for is a pot of thyme on the windowsill, the wild participation is there. The herbs must be watered. The fragrance of soil rises. We cultivate a lovely multisensory attentiveness, something not sold in the plastic-boxed herbs at the grocery.

  Dry your clothes on a clothesline. A few years ago Tom, Claire, and I traveled in Kenya and Tanzania for two months. Our first stop was a volunteer stint at the Colobus Trust on the coast of Kenya, where we worked on Colobus monkey conservation, and lodged in the organization’s simple rooms. Our packs were light, with few extra clothes, and it was the cusp of the rainy season. When our freshly washed clothes were hung in the open-air windows, they sometimes took days to dry, even though they were under cover—the air was so thick and moist. Midway into our first week there, I’d been wearing my only dry shirt for a few days and was starting to feel quite funky. “Do you think they’ll ever dry?” I lightly asked one of the staff, who lived in a village nearby. “Oh, sure,” he told me, “when the sun comes out, they’ll dry right away.” “Well, you know how impatient we Americans are,” I joked, “used to just popping things in the dryer!” “The what?” “Um, the clothes dryer,” I said meekly, suddenly remembering that I was speaking to a man who’d lived his whole life with several other family members in a one-room house the size of my daughter’s bedroom made of simple earthen materials and without power.

  Many of the people we talked to in the villages of Kenya and Tanzania know that Americans’ houses are too big and that they own cars, but the thought of clothes dryers was inconceivable. Using an expensive machine to do something that the air does naturally came across as profligate, idiotic, and I suppose even indecent. At the Colobus Trust, my Kenyan friend started to laugh, and I was about to laugh along when I realized that this was a private laugh, tinged with bitterness—a laughter I was not invited to join. I resolved in that moment to sever my dryer dependency.

  Rainy Seattle isn’t the most intuitive place for a clothesline, and Tom was not the least inclined to help me build one, so I rigged up a retractable line that runs from the corner of our raised deck all the way across the yard to the cherry tree. For rainy days, I have a line strung across the ceiling of the basement, where our washer is. Of course, hanging laundry on the subterranean line isn’t as delightful as hanging clothes outside on a sunny day, but it is still meditative, and I find it pleasant. Occasionally, I multitask: while pinning clothes to the line, I sing or listen to recorded French lessons with headphones (a clothesline Luddite with an iPod).

  I’m lazy and still use my dryer sometimes. Ah, the clothes come out so soft and warm, and so fast! I think of William Catton’s work—what a monstrous prosthetic is the clothes dryer, and the clothesline is such a sweet, human-size technology. But more than this, I think of my grandmother Carrie Anna Attleson-Haupt. My dad grew up in Iowa just after the Depression, dryer-less, of course. He tells me about how his mother would bring the clothes in from the winter line, the shirts frozen solid as boards. I like to remember her, my grandma Carrie, as I hang my family’s clothes on our own makeshift lines.

  Keep track, and carry a pencil. Writing is a way of knowing. When I bring a pencil and notebook with me on a walk, my mind-set instantly changes without conscious effort on my part. The pencil is a signal to ourselves—we are prepared to see. And when we are prepared, somehow more is given. It is good to inhabit the bestiary with some sort of nature diary at hand—a place where observations, avian encounters, sketches of animal sign, thoughts that occur during urban-wild rambles and encounters, can be captured. We are in good company; Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Mary Oliver, Henry David Thoreau, Edith Holden, and innumerable others never ventured forth without a small notebook.

  The act of writing and sketching not only embeds an observation into our minds but also preserves it for future access. Memory is notoriously fickle, not to mention unreliable, lazy, and sometimes nonexistent. As the beloved naturalist Bernd Heinrich shares, “I’ve been keeping journals of one sort or another since I was a teenager, and if there is one thing I can now confidently say about all this scribbling and note-taking, it is that if it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen.”

  Keeping a nature notebook is personal; there is lots of advice out there, but no rules, no one way. Use whatever size notebook attracts you and is practical for carrying about. I use a middle-size hardcover book with blank sheets, sketch with a mechanical pencil, and narrate or take notes with a fine-nib fountain pen filled with Noodler’s brand brown ink. These days, my nature diary is one and the same as my personal diary, my “commonplace journal,” as Darwin would have called it. In the past, I have kept these two records separate, but that was a bit problematical (which notebook should I carry?) and, I eventually decided, artificial. For one, I would look back at my earlier nature diaries (predominantly birds in years past), and wonder—what was going on in my life? What underlies these observations? What moods? What human visitors? What interior joys and struggles? What was I wearing, carrying, and what did I have for lunch? These simple details of life intertwine with our watching, and I felt that without them, my notes seemed a little bereft. When researching my book about Darwin, it was a revelation for me to overlay his ornithological notes with his diaries and letters, discovering how his moods, worries, and physical state mingled with his natural history observation. The scientific notes never mentioned his homesickness, for example, and on days when it was clear from the diary that the homesickness had lifted, he seemed to engage with his surroundings more deeply in his scientific notes, perhaps vividly recording an encounter with a particularly wonderful new bird, something he might not have had the enthusiasm for on his down days. How beautifully
the two—life and science—entwined.

  And so in my current diary, my personal life and naturalist notes mingle in one wild, earthy tangle. The sketch of a squirrel’s paw sits next to the memo Overcaffeinated and cold. More squirrel sketches follow a page of worries about my current manuscript and a passage reflecting on whether it’s finally time to get Claire a cell phone. In the margins next to the cell-phone pondering are sketches of the Bewick’s wren I can see from the bench where I write, hopping, singing, causing far too much ruckus for such a tiny bird. This is my current method, but there is certainly something both romantic and useful about keeping a separate nature journal. Do what sounds most appealing and practical for you. Just carrying a little pocket notebook can be enough to enjoy the benefits of nature diarizing.

  Be an amateur phenologist. In addition to a personal diary, I advocate the keeping of a household phenology notebook. Phenology is the study of the outward signs of natural, seasonal change. The birds that come and go, the nests being built, the first butterfly, the larval hatching, the changing night sky, the first blooming trillium, the depth of snow, the first frost, the first thaw. The ever-changing, always-moving rhythm of life as it unfolds daily throughout the year. Paying attention to such things locates us in nature, grounds us in our own lives, our homes, our rhythmic bodies. With artificial light, heating, cooling, and the year-round abundance of imported, unseasonal fresh foods from the grocery store, it is easy for us to become severed from these cycles, a disconnection that breeds a vague anxiety, a mental lostness and physical uprootedness.

  Right after graduating from college, I worked as a naturalist at an environmental learning center in Minnesota, where all staff meetings began with phenology announcements, a practice that influenced the rest of my life. One of us would sit with the phenology notebook open on the table and ask what everyone had seen that week. The hooded mergansers on the lake were spotted with tiny “merganserlets.” An emerging lady-slipper orchid was discovered. The last patch of snow in the north field had completely melted. I imagine corporate meetings beginning in this same lovely, grounded way: The glaucous-winged gull is laying eggs on the ledge of the eleventh-floor office. The Anna’s hummingbird finally found the window feeder suction-cupped to the sixth-floor window. The starlings that everyone has noticed from the bus stop are flocking up for the winter, moving in those fantastic cloud formations they create out of wing and feather. Then to business.