A Vinyl County Almanac

Green Carptetweed (Mollugo verticillata), also known as devils-grip, originated in Central and South America, but has now become a common resident of parking lots, sidewalks, and driveways throughout temperate North America. What would you say that the opposite of a meadow full of wildflowers is? How about a shady forest full of big, old trees? Answers will probably vary, but I suspect many people reading this will say that it is some variety of paved surface. On the spectrum of land cover types, paved areas such as parking lots, sidewalks, freeways, or city centers seem to offer the most striking contrast to the green spaces and wilderness areas that most people picture when they hear the world “nature.” Whereas lawns, parks, and gardens represent spaces in which humans attempt to shape communities of plants and animals in ways that aligns with our own wills, paved areas seal off the major sources of nature’s vigor — the sun, the rain, the soil — from each other and in doing so, appea...

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...