A Vinyl County Almanac

The New Haven Green. Open greenspaces like this one are quite common in New England towns and cities, and were used as communal grazing lands by early settlers (1) There’s an interesting hypothesis in the psychology of human aesthetic preference which holds that we can explain the modern prevalence of lawns and other open, grassland-like landscaping features, at least in part, by looking to our species’ evolutionary past. The idea is that because we likely evolved on the savannahs of east Africa, we have a deeply ingrained preference for open plains over other habitat types, such as dry deserts and dark, crowded forests. Thus, we continue to model our modern settlements after our evolutionary cradle by maintaining thousands of acres of open parkland. As far as I can tell, this idea was originally proposed by zoologist and educator John H. Falk in a 1977 article on lawns for Smithsonian magazine, in which he suggested that there may be a significant evolutionary basis for our landscape ...

Its finally May — the month when the spring migration really picks up and a firehose of colorful, tropical birds is let loose upon the Eastern forests of the United States! I’ve been feeling little droplets here and there while going about my everyday business — a prairie warbler stopping over in my parent's yard, a tanager singing beneath the noise of a tractor at work — and finally decided that it was time to stop by a favorite birding spot and really put some time into seeing what I could see before things calm down again in June. The spot I ended up settling on was Sleeping Giant State Park — 1500 beautiful acres of diverse habitats and plant communities scattered across a 739-foot-tall traprock ridge in the shape of person lying on their back. In addition to the realization that I’ve got pretty out of shape sitting around making maps all winter, I managed to find over twenty species of birds, including several recently arrived neotropical migrants. Below are four of my favorit...

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...

The first few weeks of Spring — hazily defined as lasting from mid-March into early April — is one of my favorite times of the year. While the winter forest is a sleepy, quiet place and the summer is buzzing and lurching with the actives of the growing season, life in the early spring seems to take on a more organized, ceremonial pace. It’s a bit like a parade, with each participant arriving on the scene, taking its moment in the spotlight, then advancing once more into the tangle of the whole so as to make room for the next act — except instead of high school marching bands and pickup trucks full of little leaguers, the participants are birds, bugs, and flowers, arriving, emerging, and blooming in a semi-predictable order hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years in the making.  The identity of the parade’s participants and the order of their arrival will vary depending on where exactly you are, adding to the fun. Just like the neighborhood across town doesn’t have that guy ...