Unseen City

by Nathanael Johnson

  SOME PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS FOR NEIGHBORHOOD NATURALISTS

  My somewhat self-defeating goal for this book is to inspire readers to set it down and ramble off through their backyards or neighborhoods in search of the phenomena I describe. The natural world is, for my money, the best book. But without some instruction, it’s hard to read that book. I aim to provide enough of that instruction to get you started. I hope it’s compelling enough to get you out the door, and to call you back out again later.

  To start, here are a few practical tips that would have been useful when I started trying to learn about my own habitat.

  EQUIPMENT

  You don’t have to buy anything: There are plenty of marketers out there who would like to use your impulse toward nature to separate you from your money. You don’t need most of what they’re selling, and the rest can be borrowed. That said, I found it worthwhile to buy the following tools. They can be truly useful for gaining entrance to the invisible city around you.

  Hand lens—I love having a little hand lens (also called a jeweler’s loupe) that’s small enough to attach to my key ring and powerful enough to let me peer into the Lilliputian realm. A lens that provides tenfold magnification is perfect; anything more powerful becomes difficult to use. The good ones, called triplets, have three lenses to minimize distortion. Mine is a sturdy nickel-plated nugget made by Bausch and Lomb. It cost $35. It is great. I’ve found that a three-year old can learn to use a hand lens quite well, but a big, traditional Sherlock Holmes–style magnifying glass with a larger field of view may be more exiting for small children.

  Binoculars—If you want to look closely at birds and identify them, you are going to need binoculars. There seems to be no upper limit on the amount of money you can spend on binoculars, and spotting scopes are even worse. You can get a pair of binoculars with ridiculously powerful lenses, a built-in camera, and all sorts of other rubbish. Don’t buy that stuff, at least not at first. In fact, don’t buy anything at all if you can avoid it: All over the world, binoculars are gathering dust in attics alongside elliptical machines, yearning for someone to put them to use. If I had the chance to do it over, I’d start by asking my family and friends if anyone had a pair I could borrow.

  You’ll see a number, like “6×32,” describing each pair of binoculars. The first number refers to the magnification, the second to the lenses’ diameters. I wouldn’t buy anything over eightfold magnification because I don’t have a particularly steady hand, and the field of view gets smaller and is more affected by shaking as the magnification increases. As for lens diameter, the second number, the bigger, the better. But don’t get lost in the numbers: You just need something that works. If you find you are using them every day, you can always go back and get that $2,000 pair.

  Guidebooks—If you want to identify the species in your neighborhood, you might start by getting yourself a guidebook to your region’s trees, birds, or beetles—or all of the above, along with guides to the local mosses, lichens, and fungi. I have never regretted buying a guidebook. I find myself pulling them off my shelves far more often than any other volumes in my library. Today, anything you can find in a guidebook you can also find online. But it’s a lot easier to get lost online. Unlike the vast, borderless Internet, the contents of books are usually limited to a geographic area, and that’s incredibly helpful for species identification. If I find myself in the same room with an interesting-looking guide for my bioregion, I’ll do whatever I can—within the bounds of decency—to take it home with me. Libraries often offer a good selection of local guidebooks.

  EXERCISES FOR SHARPENING AWARENESS

  Keep a journal—It doesn’t need to be fancy; any set of blank pages will work. But if you’re like me and appreciate a little drama in your writing tools, grab one of those black-and-white lab notebooks, or something beautiful from your local bookstore. Mine has a black cover and creamy pages. I use it to write down species names that I’d otherwise forget, along with other facts that weave these species—and myself—into my understanding of the ecosystem. I tape to its pages frivolously shaped seeds and pressed flowers. I sketch little maps of territories my front-yard songbirds have claimed. I note the dates when flowers burst, dry up, go to seed, and are eaten by birds in migration. By building this kind of record, I began to observe shifts in the seasonal patterns and to discern the otherwise invisible relationships between species. In addition to pasting actual seeds in my journal, I also record the seeds of ideas and passing curiosities. What are those tiny holes in the acorns? Why is my backyard squirrel so fat this year? How did this seashell get here, and why are shells often a rosy pink inside? When idle questions find a spot to stick and germinate, they can grow into full-fledged mysteries.

  Find one rampant weed you love (to eat)—There’s something about plucking a few leaves to garnish a dinner or chew as I walk that reframes my sense of my place in the warp and weft of interspecies relationships around me. There is no form of perception that we use less in understanding and experiencing nature than the sense of taste, and I find that tasting my surroundings triggers my other senses in new ways. The smell of a pepper tree is utterly novel when I grind a peppercorn between my molars and its complex fragrance wafts upward from the back of my palate to enter my nasal passages. When I’m about to eat something, my vision sharpens as I scan for signs of danger. I become cognizant of insect damage, or symptoms of disease: potential vectors of toxins, which could harm an eater, or make the eating less pleasant.

  Select as your favorite a plant that is irrepressibly abundant (which is to say, a weed) rather than a species that your predations will jeopardize. Maybe it’s a bitter green like dock or nasturtium or chicory that you can use on sandwiches or to garnish meat dishes. Maybe it’s something sweet, like fennel. Maybe it’s a flavor staple, like the nodding onion. Maybe it’s the plum tree that covered the sidewalk with a sticky mess until you began collecting the fruit to make preserves.

  Connect with other people—It becomes much easier to learn about your environment if you have knowledgeable people who can help you answer your questions. And there’s surely an organization of naturalists near you. Every city has a group of birders. It’s a bit harder to find slime-mold enthusiasts or snail clubs, but there are groups made up of people simply interested in nature in general. In the San Francisco Bay Area there’s a wonderful group called Nerds for Nature that organizes species identification field trips.

  You can also volunteer at your local museum of natural history. These institutions often make use of volunteers as docents or behind-the-scenes workers. You can sort dinosaur fossils at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, or catalog butterflies at the Field Museum in Chicago, or put on scuba gear and clean the aquariums at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The University of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley uses volunteers to prepare specimens for its collection, which basically means skinning road-killed animals. This is obviously gross, and therefore not for everyone, but it also allows you to sit side by side with incredibly smart people and chat as you look closely at the anatomy of animals.

  Finally, there are a proliferating number of citizen science projects, which won’t necessarily allow you to meet people in the flesh, but will allow you to participate in real science from afar. I like YourWildLife.org, or just search the Internet for “citizen science.”

  Identify one new species a month—Go out your front door and, unless you are an experienced naturalist, you’ll see an overwhelming number of species that you don’t know. What are those grasses in the median strip, those plants in the neighbors’ yard, those hovering flies? Don’t try to do it all; just pick one thing that stands out and make it your mission to learn about it. Maybe it’s a flower you like, or the spiders you are suddenly seeing everywhere, or the bird that wakes you up in the morning. The point is to move from perception followed by dismissal, to perception followed by curiosity. I find that simply
noticing that I’ve noticed something (Hey, I heard that same bird yesterday) makes me feel good. And finding clues that suck me deeper into a mystery (Aha, that’s the bird—it’s a house finch! What is he singing about?) is even more rewarding.

  I like setting a goal of one a month because it prods me to make an effort, but in a leisurely fashion. It gives me time to dig in. The point—by my reckoning—is not to become an expert in species names, but to cultivate the habit of noticing.

  TIPS FOR IDENTIFYING SPECIES

  When I’m starting from a place of total ignorance, I begin with a simple Web search: “Identifying X,” where X is “trees” or “snails” or “spiders.” Be as specific as possible; searching for “Identifying crickets” helps you zero in on an answer a lot better than “Identifying bugs” does. I look for Web sites run by research institutions, like universities or museums. Sometimes it helps to search by the scientific name to weed out the dumber Web sites. For example, I might search for “beetles” and learn that they are in the taxonomic order of Coleoptera, and then search for “Coleoptera identification.” Then I might add in a few variations on my location (North America, California, San Francisco) to narrow the search. Don’t expect to figure it out immediately—the journey is more important than the destination. As I make my way through this hypothetical beetle search, I’m learning: I figured out the Latinate name, and began to understand their family tree. And when I added the name of my city to the search, it turned up the Web sites of beetle enthusiasts near me. These local experts may turn out to be my best bets. I’m always able to learn much more if I have a human mentor who can show me when I’m venturing down a false path. You can also do this online; iNaturalist, for instance, is an app that allows you to submit photos to a community of enthusiasts (many of them true experts) for identification.

  Another tactic is to add the term “dichotomous key” to the search. I talk about dichotomous keys in the ant chapter; basically, they are tools for identifying species that present a series of questions of increasing specificity. There are lots of them online. Find one that’s simple to use and specific to your location and you’ll be all set. But you should know that some of these dichotomous keys assume you already possess a lot of scientific knowledge. For instance, when mushrooms began pushing up all around my house after a rain, I made them my next identification challenge. I found a wonderfully thorough dichotomous key that was almost entirely incomprehensible to me. One part of the key asks if the “basidiocarps” are “resupinate” or “pileate, sessile.” You can look up each of those words, but it takes some serious work. “Basidiocarp” more or less means mushroom. “Resupinate” basically means upside-down, so the fungal spores must come out from the mushroom’s top. “Pileate” means that it has an umbrella-like cap, and “sessile” means that it’s without a stalk. So, in English, this is asking: Is your mushroom growing flat across the wood, or does it have a cap that’s growing out of the wood, but no stalk?

  Eventually I found a guide for laymen, and that was terrific. It told me to break off a cap and leave it on a piece of paper overnight. The next morning, when I picked up the cap, it left behind a print—an intricate tracing of its gilled underside in yellowish-brown spores—as if I had run the mushroom through a copy machine. The color of the spores and the fact that it smelled like a radish helped me determine that this was an inedible poison pie mushroom.

  As you do this Web searching, you’ll come across guidebooks. As I mentioned, when I find something geared toward my region that looks like it would be useful, I try to get it.

  HAVE FUN

  None of this provides the immediate pleasure of, say, eating chocolate. It takes a little work to see the unseen. But it also doesn’t need to be akin to a religious pursuit: It doesn’t require years of meditation and discipline to scratch the surface. It’s really not that hard: You should be able to find gratification after a few hours of study. If you find that you love trees, but can’t get into birds, there’s no shame in that. Follow your joy.

  PIGEON

  Disgust compelled me to pigeons. For most of my life I hadn’t thought much about the birds. They were always there, invisible in their omnipresence. I suppose I must have regarded them with curiosity at some point in my childhood, but there’s something fundamentally uninteresting about pigeons, perhaps by design. It’s almost as if they evolved a form of camouflage that helps humans accept their presence. This isn’t a camouflage against sight—they are plainly visible and not the least bit furtive—it’s a kind of psychological camouflage, like a Jedi mind trick. Their bearing tells humans that these aren’t the birds we’re looking for, that they are not a threat, not indicative of anything in particular, but instead are unremarkable, as easily forgotten as the air, everywhere and unseen.

  It makes some sense, then, that I started thinking about pigeons only once I had been shat upon. This, I would learn, is a common initiation (a baptism of sorts) into pigeon research. I found one writer after another who reported having begun paying attention to the birds after a—presumably learned, scholarly—pigeon anointed them from above.

  The pigeon that elected me was an Argentinian pigeon. I was spending a few months in Buenos Aires, where pigeons are everywhere. Another thing they have everywhere in Buenos Aires is a type of cookie, the alfajor, made with the whitest of flours and dulce de leche (which is basically caramel, cubed). I ate one made with chocolate dulce de leche one evening as I was hurrying to a friend’s apartment for dinner. I was brushing the last crumbs off my fingers as I trotted down the subway stairs. It was dusk, so I didn’t see the white and brown globule on my sweater until I walked under the subway lights. It was about the size of my fingernail—a cookie crumb, right? Oh no, Nate. No. Not right.

  Without thinking, I scooped up what in reality was a pigeon turd and popped it in my mouth. I spent the next several minutes on the platform flinging my hands in the air, spitting onto the tracks, turning in tight circles, and silently screaming. The other riders waiting must have wondered what they were witnessing.

  Perhaps it was just coincidence, but a few hours later I grew ill. The nausea hit me just as my host served the second course—awkward timing. I reclined on the floor, broke into a cold sweat, and then settled in for a serious fever.

  After that, things weren’t so cool between the pigeons and me for a while. In fact, it’s only recently, as I’ve begun to understand their capacities (beyond spreading filth), that I’ve gained respect for them. In the beginning, my interest in pigeons sprang purely from loathing and a potent desire to maintain distance between us. When they flew too close, I thrashed spastically at the air. I yelled and kicked at the ones that came begging near my feet. My eye sought signs of mange and disease to confirm that these were utterly revolting beasts. As I watched them, however, I also began to notice things. I noticed, for instance, that as many as half the birds in some flocks had only one good leg. They hopped around, many holding a leg gingerly off the ground. Sometimes the leg ended in a misshapen bulb. It was totally gross, but also interesting: Disgust led me to observe pigeons closely for the first time, and I then noticed something I had previously been blind to. Of course, it was something that validated my revulsion, but it also drew me in. What the heck, I wanted to know, was wrong with pigeon feet?

  I should pause to say a word about disgust, because, before gathering the information that eventually endeared pigeons to me, I spent a lot of time accumulating evidence that affirmed my fears—in other words, what you learn here is going to get worse before it gets better. But it does get better. The more time people spend studying pigeons, it seems, the fonder they grow of them. For instance, here’s what two of the foremost pigeon researchers, Richard Johnston and Marián Janiga, write in their book Feral Pigeons:

  Our chief concern in the pages to follow is to describe and analyze the biology of the feral pigeon, which we consider to be one of the masterpieces of nature. Some readers will wonder at the idea of “masterpiece” being appli
ed to what they think of as a pest, but we hope they ultimately will join us in our opinion.

  I haven’t gotten all the way to “masterpiece,” but what I learned about pigeons turned my revulsion into curiosity, and then, gradually, admiration. Disgust is not such a bad place to begin an inquiry. It’s a good, honest emotion. It’s one of those primitive reactions that simply calls a threat into focus—Heads up, you’ve been shat upon by yonder fleabag. If my interest instead began with awe, then I’d be in real trouble, because the thing that prompted me to begin digging up information would also prompt me to ignore or distort any unpleasantness I might find.

  I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the gross pigeon feet. A Seattle weekly newspaper, The Stranger, ran an article on the subject, but the experts the writer consulted had contradictory theories. One blamed predators—cats and falcons—but what predator is going to be sated by a toe? Why do they so consistently injure pigeons’ feet? Another suggested that the problem was infection (with staphylococcus, perhaps). Maybe, but then, why are pigeons more commonly infected than sparrows? Another theory: Hair and string get knotted around pigeons’ feet, and they have no way to untangle themselves. Again, why don’t we see the same problem with other city birds? The mystery was unsolved, as far as I was concerned.

  I spent my next few days in dusty library stacks looking for information about pigeon feet. As I paged through these books, I found a lot of fascinating stuff I hadn’t been looking for. It was a revelation, for example, to read the simple description of a pigeon’s appearance, because it made it clear that I’d actually never seen the birds—not really, in any meaningful way. If you’d have asked me to describe them, I couldn’t have told you much more than: gray and gross. But reading the descriptions in these books was like seeing the grubby neighbor girl in a designer gown at the Oscars. I glimpsed them anew, dressed up in formal prose. The rock pigeon is not just gray, but “dove gray,” “with deep purple iridescence at the neck that varies with the angle of the light,” a “bold black median bar,” and “axillaries and underwing coverts of brilliant white.”