ATM streetart

Researchers went into twenty suburban yards in Maryland, raked half the plots and left the other half alone. The raked plots produced 45% fewer moths and butterflies. Overall emergence dropped 17%. Beetles fell 24%. Spiders fell by as much as 67%. Moth and butterfly diversity dropped about 40%, and the species that vanished were the ones that overwinter as larvae or inside fallen leaves. Fireflies, moths, bees, and beetles spend the winter in the leaf layer as eggs, larvae, pupae or adults. Bag it up and you've sent them to the dump, and probably to their deaths. Shredding isn't the compromise people think it is. The same lab tested mulch-mowing against leaving leaves intact, and mulching cut emerging moths almost in half. A mower turns leaves into mulch and everything inside them into paste. Rake the leaves off the lawn if you need to, then dump them under the trees and in the beds. That's where they'd have blown anyway. Paths and edges can stay clean. The middle is where the work happens.

Birds are building nests with dryer lint, wrappers and fishing line, and it’s killing the babies. Nests have always included whatever material birds can find. The problem is what our landscapes now offer them: strips of plastic, synthetic fibers and loops that can tighten around a leg, wing or neck. A wrapper woven into a nest is a record of where the trash ended up. Fishing line is worse: it is strong enough to keep holding after a bird becomes tangled, and nearly invisible when stretched through branches. Dryer lint is a close second. It's loaded with chemicals and, when wet, holds moisture, chills babies and eggs, and can cause the nest to fall apart entirely. Picking up litter really doesn't seem like doing much, but every piece of loose plastic and line that you pull is a songbird nest made a little safer. The birds didn't choose a plastic world. That was our choice. But they're stuck building with the shit we've left them.

West London had a flooding problem. Engineers had planned an artificial reservoir and levee. The city released beavers instead, because why not? The conventional answer to flooding for most cities is usually more hard infrastructure to push and contain the water, at a cost to the taxpayers. Beavers have a different plan. Their dams slowed the flow, spread water across wetlands and held it upstream for longer. The landscape absorbed the pulse instead of delivering it all at once. In their first year at Paradise Fields, the beavers made at least seven dams and two lodges. Water that used to rush through the site toward Greenford station in minutes now takes hours to seep through the chain of dams and wetlands. The targeted area downstream had flooded repeatedly for a decade. It stayed flood-free through the beavers' second winter, then their third. As of this year, Greenford station has gone three years without flooding. The wetland changed too. Freshwater shrimp and swarms of Daphnia appeared. Surveys found more aquatic invertebrates, and the project recorded at least two new bat species. A near ecological dead zone was becoming habitat while it held back stormwater. This obviously doesn't mean that beavers can replace every flood mitigation plan in every city. This site had enough land, water and food, plus a 1.2-kilometer enclosure for the beavers to thrive. But the payoff of working with nature is clear as day. Seven dams, water slowed from minutes to hours, and three flood-free years downstream. That, as the kids say, whips.

A vineyard near Sacramento, CA had been dealing with a heavy pocket gopher and vole infestation. A researcher installed 25 barn owl nest boxes to see what would happen. By the following year, 18 breeding pairs had moved in and fledged 66 young. At peak, 102 barn owls were hunting the property and surrounding area simultaneously. Gopher activity declined measurably in the vineyard with owl boxes compared to a nearby control vineyard without them. Over three breeding seasons, those owls consumed an estimated 30,000 rodents. Then the researchers ran the cost comparison. Trapping averaged $8.11 per rodent removed. The owl nest box program, accounting for materials, installation, and maintenance, came out to $0.34 per rodent. That's a 24-to-1 cost ratio in favor of the owls. A single barn owl family can remove between 1,000 and 4,000 rodents per year depending on family size and hunting territory. Unlike rodenticide, they don't accumulate in the food chain. A 2012 WildCare study found anticoagulant rodenticides in 79 percent of raptors tested in California. The owls taking rodents killed by poison become the next casualty in a chain that runs from the rat in the vineyard to the hawk, the fox, and the coyote above it. The nest box program doesn't do that. The study, published in the Journal of Pest Management, was the first to accurately measure the number of rodent deliveries to growing barn owl chicks and establish the economic value of a nest box program to farmers. A barn owl box costs between $30 and $80. A family of owls willing to occupy it costs nothing. The rodent control starts within a season and is self-sustaining as long as the box stays up. Studies: Browning, M., Cleckler, J., Knott, K., & Johnson, M. (2016). Prey consumption by a large aggregation of barn owls in an agricultural setting. Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference, 27, 337-344. Johnson et al. (2020), Cal Poly Humboldt