Your Backyard Is Wild

by Jeff Corwin

  “Sure,” Gabe said agreeably. “Hang on a sec.” He put the cards away carefully and led them back to the stairs. They went all the way down to the basement, which was dark and dusty and filled with old bikes. They passed a laundry room, and in the back there was a door that was supposed to lead outside. When Gabe pushed it, though, it was locked.

  “Is there a key?” Benjamin asked. He really wanted to see the yard.

  “Well . . . yeah. Somewhere. But I don’t know who has it. Nobody really goes out there,” he explained. “My mom says it’s because nobody wants to cut the grass.”

  Benjamin met his sister’s eye for a minute. He knew they were thinking the same thing. This was definitely one way that life in New York was different from life back home. In Florida, people spent as much time outside as they could. And they definitely didn’t mind mowing a little grass!

  Soon they were back in Gabe’s room. “So . . . let’s talk about what we’re going to do this week!” Benjamin said, making red Xs on a subway map next to all the sights they wanted to see. The Statue of Liberty. The Empire State Building. The mummies at the Metropolitan Museum. A baseball game, if they could get tickets. They couldn’t do everything, but Benjamin was determined to squeeze in as much as he could.

  Later that day, the Baxter kids and Gabe trailed behind their parents on a long walk through Brooklyn. Uncle Peter told the adults all about the history of the neighborhood. It was called Brooklyn Heights, and at one time it had been a suburb of New York. Now it was officially a part of the city, but it still had a quiet, old-fashioned character that set it apart.

  “People like to live here,” Uncle Peter said, “because it’s only a short subway ride from here to downtown Manhattan. People also like the shady streets, and the smaller buildings, called brownstones because of the brown stone they’re made from.”

  As his father continued talking to Benjamin’s parents, Gabe gave his cousins his own tour. “Here’s my school,” he said, pointing at a brick building with a big basketball court. “Here’s where my best friend lives,” he noted when they passed an apartment tower. “And this is the best place to get ice cream.”

  Uncle Peter agreed. He ordered cones for the whole family, and they carried them to a path along the East River called the Promenade, where people could walk and see the skyline of lower Manhattan. After they walked for a while, Benjamin realized that the Promenade was a sort of park. But it wasn’t like the parks he knew back home. That was what made it interesting.

  Lucy and Benjamin posed for pictures until Benjamin said, “My ice cream is melting! Can we take a break now?” The kids sat on a bench a short distance away from their parents, right beside a playground.

  Suddenly Lucy hopped down and walked toward a patch of weeds and waist-high grass. She crouched down in front of a tall plant with giant seed-pods and examined one of its leaves.

  “Check this out!” she called to Benjamin and Gabe. “It’s a butterfly cocoon!” The tiny brown cocoon was clinging to the underside of the leaf. You could see it only when the breeze blew.

  Gabe drew closer and looked at the cocoon. “It looks like a dead leaf to me.”

  “That’s what cocoons always look like,” Benjamin told him.

  In a flash, Benjamin was beside his sister, taking his magnifying glass from the back pocket of his jeans. He had known it would come in handy! He squinted through it at the leaf. “That’s a milkweed,” he said. “Monarch butterflies love it. The caterpillars fill up on the leaves before they go into their cocoons.” He picked a seedpod off the stem and touched the sticky white liquid that had gathered near the top of it. “Yup, definitely.”

  “What’s it doing here?” asked Gabe.

  Benjamin smiled. Gabe might know his way around Brooklyn, but he didn’t know his way around the outdoors. “Milkweed grows almost everywhere,” he said.

  “But how do you know all this?”

  Benjamin just knew. He’d known since he was a toddler. It was hard to explain, but somehow he managed to find the words.

  “I know nature the way you know Brooklyn!” he said.

  Chapter Three

  Benjamin awoke with a start the next morning. Something wasn’t right. When he opened his eyes, he knew he was at Gabe’s house—that wasn’t what was bothering him. Then he realized . . . it was noisy! He could hear garbage trucks rumbling in the street and people talking on their cell phones on the sidewalk five floors below. Uncle Peter had called this a quiet neighborhood, but it was louder than anywhere Benjamin had ever woken up before.

  The family had bagels for breakfast—a New York specialty—and then walked to the subway station to wait for a train that would take them right into the center of New York City. They would walk from the subway stop to the Empire State Building! From the top, they would see the whole city spread out before them.

  The cousins stood on the platform with their parents, and Benjamin could hear his dad telling Aunt Lily about some of the work he did as an ecologist. “And Elizabeth teaches biology in the zoology department of the local college,” he heard his father say. “She studies animals and shares her research with her students. What I do is a little different, though. I study the way those animals interact with their environment.”

  Benjamin had heard this explanation before, so he tuned out and looked at his watch. It was hot on the platform, and there was a damp smell, too.

  He felt a slight breeze. Then he heard a distant rumbling. He wondered what it was and looked at Gabe, who said, “A train.”

  Air-conditioned? Benjamin wondered, sweating. But the train flew through the station so fast that he couldn’t even count the cars.

  “An express,” Gabe added. “It doesn’t stop at every station.”

  Benjamin nodded and stared at the subway track. It was four or five feet below him, in a deep tunnel. And . . . there was something moving down there!

  He nudged his sister. “Hey, Lucy,” he said, pointing. “I think it’s a rat!” They watched as the rat rummaged through a fast-food bag that someone had thrown on the tracks. It licked what was left inside of it, then came out with cheese on its whiskers. Soon two more rats joined it, and they scurried down the track, looking for more food.

  “Oh, man,” said Gabe, following his cousins’ glance. “We learned about those guys in school. The rats in the subway are called Norway rats. Gross!”

  Benjamin said, “I think they’re kind of cool, actually. See how the color of their fur matches the color of the wood and metal of the tracks? They’re camouflaged, so you don’t notice them at first. But when you do, you can see there are lots of them!”

  “Who’d think any animals live down here at all?” Lucy added. “They must have adapted in other ways, too.”

  Another train was coming—Benjamin knew the signs now. The rats disappeared into the darkness, and the subway train whooshed into the station. As the doors opened, Gabe said, “If you think they were cool, just wait till you get to the top of the world!”

  Benjamin drew in his breath as he walked into the grand lobby of the Empire State Building. Its ceiling had to be two or three stories above him, and everywhere he looked there was marble.

  That’s when they started waiting in line. First, the security line. Then the ticket line. And then the line for the elevator to the top. After a while, even the grown-ups got restless.

  Once they got up to the top, though, Benjamin realized it was all worthwhile. It was a bright, sunny day, and it seemed he could see almost all the way back to Florida. He followed Gabe through the gift shop and outside onto the observation deck.

  Gabe went into tour guide mode right away. “To the west, the mighty Hudson River and the lovely skyline of New Jersey,” he said, leading his cousins to one side of the building. He didn’t spend much time there but motioned for his cousins to follow.

  He showed them his neighborhood to the east—they could see the Brooklyn Bridge again, this time in miniature—and the Statue of Liberty to the south.
From here, the towering buildings looked like gift boxes and the cars looked like ants.

  Looking north, they could see a patch of grass and trees set in the middle of the city. A pond near its edge glittered in the sunlight, and immediately Benjamin felt an urge to explore it. Gabe followed his glance and said, “Central Park, of course. Centrally located, as you can see.” Benjamin made a mental note to move it to the top of his must-see list.

  Gabe reached into his pocket for some quarters and fed them into a set of binoculars on a stand. Lucy looked into them first, exclaiming, “I can see people walking on the street now—a hundred stories below. Wow!”

  “This is the best way to spend your first day in the city,” Gabe announced importantly. “From up here, you can see how everything fits together. And then you can visit the sights one by one.” He sounded so grown-up that Benjamin wondered if his parents had said this to other visitors.

  Lucy stepped down from the stand, ready to give Benjamin a turn. But Benjamin had taken out his own binoculars. He was looking at the sky!

  She nudged him and teased, “Um . . . you’re looking the wrong way?”

  “I just thought of it,” said Benjamin, “but this is an awesome place for bird-watching!” He handed his binoculars to Lucy. “Look there,” he said, pointing. “Do you see the pigeons?” She didn’t really need the binoculars—the pigeons were perched on a corner of the building a few stories beneath them.

  Benjamin told Gabe what he knew about the birds. “You probably think they’re pests,” he said, “since there are so many of them in the city. But did you know they were brought to this country by European settlers, who ate them? They were considered a treat!”

  “Wow,” Gabe said. “That’s interesting. But, you know, the big thing up here is the view.”

  Obviously Gabe had never been on vacation with the Baxters. They liked to learn about the local animals wherever they went. “I just think it’s amazing to see the birds from up here, not from down below,” Benjamin said, taking the binoculars back. As he turned around, he saw a tour group walking toward them. They were looking and pointing, and he heard someone mention the words “peregrine falcon.”

  “Did you hear those people talking?” Benjamin asked Gabe and Lucy. “Somebody over there just spotted a falcon!” he exclaimed.

  Benjamin found his mom and told her about the falcon—then she went off in search of someone who could tell them more. It turned out that everyone who worked at the Empire State Building knew about the wildlife in the New York skies.

  “Oh, yes,” a woman in a uniform confirmed. “Peregrine falcons use the building as a hunting ground. They perch on the observation deck and wait for smaller birds to fly by. Yellow-billed cuckoos, orioles, warblers, and many other birds are disoriented by the towers’ lights at night. The falcons can catch them off guard!”

  “What about pigeons?” Benjamin asked. “Do falcons hunt them, too?” The ones he’d seen would be easy for a falcon to catch.

  “Oh, yes,” the woman confirmed. “In cities, falcons help keep the pigeon population under control. Pigeons know the territory well, but falcons have superior speed. When they hunt, they fly very high, then dive down sharply toward their prey. When the falcon hits its target, it comes back and grabs it in midair. Pigeons better watch out!”

  She also said that the building’s lights were dimmed during certain weeks of the spring and fall, because the Empire State Building was directly in the path of flocks of migrating birds. “If the lights are at full brightness, the birds crash into the building,” she said. “White-throated sparrows and common yellowthroats are some of the birds most at risk.”

  Benjamin quickly sketched a falcon in his notebook. Then he scribbled all the information down and tried to remember the details for when he went back to school. These were things that not many people knew about the Empire State Building, not even a native New Yorker like Gabe.

  Back on the street, Gabe insisted that they all buy hot dogs from a sidewalk vendor for lunch. “Another New York experience,” he said. Then the families took the subway back to Brooklyn. They didn’t see any rats this time, but Benjamin did hear some amazing music from the musicians in the station. Their catchy beat echoed off the tiles and made the station seem almost like a dance club!

  The day was growing hotter, and the grown-ups didn’t feel like doing any more sightseeing. When Gabe then suggested the playground back at the Promenade, the adults were relieved. They sat at a picnic table in a shady spot, while the kids took turns on the monkey bars.

  Waiting for his turn, Benjamin walked over to a sandbox. It looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. Sticks and leaves were scattered over the sand, and some big rocks were stuck in the middle of it. Benjamin picked up one to move it. Beneath the rock, a centipede squiggled in the sand, and Benjamin picked it up.

  “Gabe, come here!” he called, ready to give a tour of his own. “Look!”

  Benjamin dropped the centipede into Gabe’s open hand and he didn’t look that thrilled about holding it. “What’s that?” Gabe asked, a bit suspiciously. “A baby snake?”

  “Nope,” Benjamin replied. “A centipede! It’s about the length of a worm. But see how it’s flat, more like a salamander? And look how its body is divided into about ten segments, each with its own pair of legs.”

  Gabe studied it for a second. “It has antennae, too—see? And are those claws?” Nice observation, Benjamin thought.

  “They are,” he said. “Centipedes live in woodsy, moist places, but they’re not vegetarians. They use those claws to catch and kill tiny creatures, mostly insects. In his world, he’s a hard-core predator!” Which made him remember something else. “I think you’d better put that guy down, actually. They can pinch people, too.”

  His cousin dropped the centipede like a hot potato. “I’ve never seen one here before . . . ,” Gabe said, his sentence trailing off.

  Benjamin could tell his cousin found it a little creepy, but he couldn’t resist tossing in one more fact. “There are hundreds of kinds of centipedes,” he said, “all over the world. On some Pacific islands, they can grow to be almost two feet long!”

  “Okay,” said Gabe. “Enough about bugs! Watch this!”

  Lucy was still going back and forth on the monkey bars, so Gabe shinnied up a pole and hung upside down on a high bar. He did a flip and leaped to the ground. But when he landed, he lost his balance! Gabe fell back and hit his head against another bar, and his body crumpled on the ground.

  Chapter Four

  Benjamin crouched down next to his cousin. “Are you okay?” he asked anxiously. He didn’t know what to do!

  Luckily, Lucy and the grown-ups were beside him in seconds, and Aunt Lily smoothed Gabe’s hair back off his forehead until he could speak. He was a little dizzy, which worried his mom. But after a while, he stood up and seemed to be fine.

  Aunt Lily and Uncle Peter weren’t taking any chances, though. They hailed a taxi, while Benjamin’s family walked back to the apartment. Benjamin couldn’t help but wonder what this would mean for their trip. Would Gabe still be able to do all the things they’d planned?

  Back at the apartment, Gabe was already on the couch, resting. A woman was sitting beside him, and Uncle Peter told Benjamin it was one of their neighbors, a doctor at a nearby hospital.

  “You must have taken quite a fall!” she said to Gabe, keeping the tone light. “You might want to think twice before you try that trick again!”

  She got more serious as she explained that head injuries had to be treated with care. “It doesn’t seem like you have a concussion, which is good,” she said. “All I can see is a bump at the back of your head, which we can keep down with ice. But you’re going to need to take it easy for a couple of days.”

  Gabe groaned. “But I have things to do!” he said. “I can’t just lie on the couch while my cousins are here!”

  “We’ll stay with you,” Benjamin promised. It wasn’t what he’d expected from the t
rip, but spending time with Gabe was more important than anything else.

  And this would be a perfect time to show Gabe his rock collection! He was able to distract Gabe for a while by showing him many different kinds of rocks and telling him where they’d come from.

  Gabe also laughed when Lucy brought out the alligator skull, moved its jaws, and made it say, “Get well soon, Gabe!”

  “That thing is amazing!” Gabe said, looking it over. “I need to get one of those!”

  Eventually, though, Gabe got back to talking about their visit. “It’s not fair,” he complained. “What are we supposed to do now? Watch movies about New York instead of explore the real thing?”

  That’s when Benjamin was inspired. “What if we do a different kind of sightseeing? The kind we Baxters always do on trips?” When Gabe stared at him blankly, he explained a little more. “Usually we watch animals and explore where they live. Usually we’re part of our parents’ research trips, so we end up doing research ourselves.”

  “Okay . . . but how are we supposed to do that here?” Gabe asked doubtfully. “I think we’ve seen all the animals there are to see.”

  “No way,” Lucy said. “I’ll bet there’s a whole lot more for us to find.”

  “Wildlife isn’t exactly what makes New York famous,” Gabe pointed out. “But I guess it would be okay to try. Where do we start?”

  Benjamin smiled. “Well . . . can you get that key to the backyard?”

  It took until the next afternoon for them to find out that the key was hanging in another neighbor’s kitchen. And Aunt Lily thought it would be great for Gabe to get some fresh air, as long as he wasn’t roughhousing outside. As soon as they got the key, Benjamin grabbed his backpack and the three cousins tromped down to the basement again. The grown-ups could watch them from the upstairs window.