Where the Wild Things Are

Photos: Victor Surovec

At a recent staff meeting, my colleague Victor Surovec described a memorable morning working at home during the Covid lockdown. He was on the phone in his backyard in north Phoenix. On hold for the umpteenth time, his frustration was building along with the Arizona heat. He was close to losing it. Nearby, a large wasp repeatedly buzzed the side of his house. With phone in hand, he walked over to investigate. The wasp was on a mission and took no notice of him. It would fly off and then return to the same spot, over and over again. Turns out, it was putting the finishing touches on a new nest. But not just any nest. Glued to the stucco wall was a structure that resembled a miniature clay pot, perfectly formed with a wide belly with a delicately turned neck. Victor had never seen anything like it so he decided to pull up a chair and watch what happened next. It was then that the wasp returned from one of its forays, not with more of the dull-brown soil it had been gathering as a building material, but with an emerald-green caterpillar, which it gingerly inserted into the lip of the pot as food for the developing young inside. Surprised and transported by the strange beauty of the scene, his irritation melted away. Time stopped. “It was a perfect moment,” he recalls. “The light was just beautiful. The wasp had an orange tint to it. And there was this bright green caterpillar.”

I heard similar stories of wonder and appreciation from other friends who found themselves sequestered at home during the pandemic. There was my friend Loren in Bend, Oregon, who on a typical morning would have rushed out the door to a yoga class in town. During lockdown, however, she switched to yoga instruction via Zoom on the TV in her living room. It was early spring, and the maple tree outside her window was bare. Though she hardly noticed the tree before, Loren began watching it as she went through her daily yoga routine. “The tree went from having a little bit of green in the buds to having leaves and then more leaves and then different kinds of green,” she recalls. “I noticed the way the leaves were hanging, the way the light hit them, and then seedpods began to grow. It brought me some happiness to see those changes. Each day there was an element of surprise even though I knew where it was going. I found myself asking, What’s my surprise going to be today? What’s going to be new?”

Debra, a university librarian, told me a similar story of a new and unexpected engagement with nature. No sooner did she set up her home office when a jumping spider began to regularly visit her desk. “It seemed to come out every time I had a conference call,” she says, laughing. “I like to think that it was attracted to the sound of my voice.”

Slowing down and staying put during the pandemic have created new opportunities for people to encounter nature on their home ground or for getting reacquainted with the plants and animals that have grown invisible through familiarity. I heard so many people waxing enthusiastically about the natural history of their home turf that I began to wonder: Are these post-Covid experiences episodic and fleeting—the equivalent of Snapchats with nature—or could they signal a bigger, more foundational shift in our relationship with the nonhuman world?

For many of us, nature has come to be regarded as a temporary destination—think Costa Rica, Yellowstone, Kruger National Park or the Great Barrier Reef—rather than the everyday world in which we are immersed. By scribing a tight circle around our home ground, however, the pandemic lockdown seems to have inadvertently enlarged the boundaries of possibilities for encountering nature to include our own zipcodes.

Jumping spider. Photo: Kevincollins123, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

And that is a good thing. For too long, says environmental writer Emma Marris, we have privileged so-called pristine places—those that she says appear to lack the obvious fingerprints of humans on them—over the nature that is near at hand. This has created an aura of elitism around nature since many ecological destinations around the world are far removed from where people live and largely only accessible to those with the time and money to visit them. There are other downsides too. Traveling long distances for nature experiences increases our carbon footprint at a time when many parts of the world are sagging under the weight of climate change and the toll of human visitation.

But there is something even more troubling about our oversight, even disdain, for the everyday world around us. By glorifying the exotic locales we see on nature programs, we train our kids and ourselves not to see a lot of nature, Marris points out, and as a result, we “talk them out of enjoying a lot of the nature that’s available to them on a daily basis.”

A nature outing for Marris and her two kids typically includes a visit to vacant city lots, grassy strips along commercial buildings or a roadside verge, many of which can host an astounding diversity of plants and animals. “I think that nature is anywhere where life thrives, anywhere where there are multiple species together, anywhere that’s green and blue and thriving and filled with life and growing,” she observes in a 2016 interview on the “TED Radio Hour.” Marris points to an abandoned elevated railway in the middle of Philadelphia, for example, that hosts more than 50 different plant species. Scientists have a term for these places. They’re called “novel ecosystems” since they host combinations of native and exotic species never before seen in nature. Overlooked for decades, these organisms have formed improvisational communities beyond the reach of an intentional human hand. Together, they perform valuable ecosystem services such as storing carbon, building soil or stemming storm runoff.

Increasingly, the human-mediated nature in our midst isn’t just capturing the imagination of people like Marris and her kids. It’s become the focus of serious biological study. And researchers are publishing some astounding findings. In his book Darwin Comes to Town, Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen, for example, profiles the carrion crows of Sendai, Japan, that have learned to exploit the abundant nuts from the city’s walnut trees by dropping them in front of moving vehicles. Turns out that tires double as reliable nutcrackers for the tough shells that the crows can’t penetrate on their own.

And to see something as exotic as evolution at work, Schilthuizen maintains that you don’t need to go visit the storied Darwin finches of the Galapagos Islands. All you need to do is check out the mosquitoes that have taken up residence in London’s Central, Bakerloo and Victoria tube lines. These mosquitoes have so adapted to their subterranean digs that their life histories are now unrecognizable from those of their above-ground cousins. The subway mosquitoes, for example, feed on human blood unlike those at street level that pursue birds, and they don’t form breeding swarms. And because the climate is tempered, the tube mosquitoes have dispensed with the need to hibernate and are active all year round. Perhaps the most astonishing is this: Isolated from each other in the three trunk lines of London’s tube system, the below-ground mosquito populations have speciated. They are genetically distinct from one another. “We all know about evolution perfecting the plumage of birds of paradise in faraway jungles or the shape of orchid flowers on lofty mountaintops,” writes Schilthuizen. “But apparently, the process is so mundane that it is not above plying its trade below our feet, among the grimy power cables of the city’s metro system.”

Now that so many of us have slowed down to the speed of life, could the witnessing of what Schilthuizen calls the “relentless adaptability of the living world” in our urban areas serve as inspiration as we too are called upon to be relentlessly adaptable in our post—pandemic lives? Could slowing down to the speed of life inspire new and better ways for humans to invent novel communities of habitation that are more lifesome? Recall the potter wasp that so entranced Victor Surovec. The grains of soil in its earthen nests are glued together by the animal’s saliva. Could a green chemist find a recipe for a less toxic adhesive from a chance encounter with an animal in her own back yard? Could an engineer study the ocular apparatus of a jumping spider that visits his desk and invent new sensing devices that monitor and heal our broken lands?

Or, could we experience in our near-at-hand nature something just as vital for healing our own breaking hearts: the easing of the painful loneliness of the pandemic’s social isolation? There is a huge comfort that comes from observing without thinking, says the nature writer Elisabeth Tova Bailey, and simply feeling “connected to another creature; another life [that is] being lived just a few inches away.”