A Vinyl County Almanac

Among ecologists and environmentalists, lawns have a well-deserved reputation as "green deserts." This is because, despite being defined by an extensive cover of green plants, they are not very biologically diverse landscapes. Across the world, lawns tend to be sown not only with the same grass species, but also with the same varieties, limiting both genetic and species diversity within and between lawns (Ignatieva and Ahrne 2013). What's more, only a handful of wild plant species are able to elbow their way into growing among the grasses and these are often the same across wide geographic areas (Ignatieva and Steward 2009; Wheeler et al. 2017). This lack of plant diversity in turn limits the insect communities that can find suitable habitat and forage in a lawn. Meanwhile, all the management that is needed to maintain homogenous acres of grass contribute significantly to other environmental problems, such water pollution and scarcity (Robbins et al. 2001; Milesi et al. 2...

A few weekends ago (many weekends now, as I kept forgetting to finish writing this post), my younger sibling and I were pulling into my parent’s driveway when we noticed movement in the middle of the yard. Backing up slightly, our headlights illuminated a thrilling scene — a red fox in middle of a well-earned Friday night meal consisting of what appeared to be some kind of small mammal (my best guess was a squirrel). After watching with my own eyes for a while, I took out my phone and filmed the video posted below before my parents pulled in behind us and the fox ran off. I went over to inspect the area where he was eating, but didn’t find anything — unfortunate for my own curiosity, but good that we didn’t cause him to abandon his meal. As is so often the case with these sorts of surprise interactions with wild animals, seeing this fox brought up what I thought was an interesting question — namely, what do urban and suburban foxes eat? Typically, when we think of urban wildlife, we th...