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Secret Life of the City

How Nature Thrives in the Urban Wild

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Come along on an informative, whirlwind tour of urban species—from intelligent crows to backyard lichens—and discover that you are surrounded by wild nature, even in your own backyard.

When biologist Hanna Bjørgaas spots a fairy cup lichen in Antarctica, she is surprised to recognize it from her own backyard in Oslo. When she returns home, she embarks on a journey into urban nature, visiting city parks, cemeteries, and concrete rooftops to investigate the species that live in urban spaces. Along the way, she meets corvids, songbirds, ants, pigeons, bats, sparrows, fungi, and linden trees—and the experts who study their surprising abilities to survive, and thrive, in the city.

As Bjørgaas discovers, urban nature—and its unique mixture of species that have never lived together before in Earth's history—is valuable. More than half of the world's human population lives in densely populated areas—and plants and animals have followed us into cities. Secret Life of the City invites us to pay more attention to the sounds, sights, and smells of urban nature right outside our door.

A treasure trove of fascinating flora and fauna, this wonderful book offers a plea to save our city plants, animals, and fungi before we lose them, too.

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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 13, 2023
      Biologist Bjørgaas debuts with an enchanting paean to the overlooked marvels of metropolitan wildlife. “Our idea of spectacular nature, untouched by human hands, has stood in the way” of appreciating urban ecosystems, Bjørgaas contends, surveying the plants and animals that thrive in the cities of her native Norway. Some urban animals, she writes, have developed adaptations that distinguish them from their rural counterparts: city squirrels depend on “visual signals, such as wagging their tails” to warn other squirrels of danger because their auditory communications are drowned out by noise pollution, and some birds sing at higher frequencies than their nonurban counterparts to better stand out against the din of urban life. Other organisms didn’t have to adapt because they were already well suited to city conditions, such as house sparrows, whose undiscerning eating habits enable them to thrive on human leftovers, and the “city rim lichen” that, owing to its origins in Iceland’s sulfur-rich geothermal hot springs, flourishes even in the sulfur vapor of smog. The stimulating research findings offer a nuanced understanding of urban flora and fauna and push back against common assumptions about where nature ends and the human world begins. City dwellers will see their environs in a new light.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:1070
  • Text Difficulty:6-9

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