A catalog of my neighbors (non-human, partial)
For twelve years, as many of you know, I have lived on about an acre and a quarter, mostly wooded, a mile from the limits of a city of 100,000 people. In the past two or three years I’ve realized that there is an incredible (to me, at least) natural diversity in this small space, and I’ve started trying to understand it better.
The chart linked below lists all the species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds we’ve seen on the property in the time we’ve lived here, along with all of the species of native trees growing here. For each I’ve tried to give a sense of how often we see them or how many grow here. There are, to give you a sense of the diversity, about twenty-five different trees on this acre and a quarter (plus two more within a literal stone’s throw of the property line), and we’ve spotted at least thirty species of birds, nearly all of them within the last year (and annually).
I’m posting this in part because I want a place to keep track of it all, but also to make the point to others that has come home (literally) to me: nature is astonishingly complex, and there are whole worlds we miss if we don’t look closely. If there’s this much going on in barely more than an acre of transitional pine/oak forest tucked into a semi-rural subdivision, how much is going on everywhere else? How much did I miss for the first thirty-six years of my life? And how much is thoughtlessly destroyed every time a developer sneezes?
I’ll update the chart as I’m able. I’m still working on identifying the shrubs and vines, and I haven’t even begun to track the insects and spiders, which could take me a lifetime. Not to mention the fungi, if the rains keep up like this. And I’d like to be able to show some of the interactions — what provides food and habitat for what. How? Any ideas?