Wildlife and subdivisions

I checked on the neighborhood without wildlife this afternoon. The gray skies don't do very much for the neighborhood, which is a typical small subdivision, with neat, well-kept houses.

As I thought, it IS a relatively new development, carved out within older areas of a small historic town nearby, a summer retreat in the 1800's for wealthy planters from the Lowcountry of South Carolina, before becoming a district center for the surrounding area.

There are large oaks and young beeches near the entrance, but otherwise, it's new surburban landscape style, with small lots, manicured lawns, and the same three or four trees and shrubs used over and over.

And the rest of the story is evident from the satellite view; the large area cleared for the subdivision doesn't have enough habitat diversity to support much wildlife activity.


It's a perfect candidate for a community backyard wildlife habitat makeover, to be sure, since the neighborhood is surrounded by older areas with tall native trees and more diverse habitats!

Where's the wildlife?

I've been thinking on and off today about a question that a nature walk participant asked yesterday.

He wondered why there wasn't any 'wildlife' in his small town (a historic town right next to ours). The rest of us looked at him rather blankly; the walk leader had just been telling us about seeing a bobcat near his house in another small rural town nearby, and talking about the wild boar (aka feral hog) he would be roasting later on that day, which one of his neighbors had shot after it had attacked a number of cows. Aside from these quite 'wild' examples, many of us have plenty of squirrels, birds, mice, racoons, etc. in relatively woodsy neighborhoods, where mature oaks, hickories, and conifers make up the fabric of the landscape.

The questioner went on to say that he saw more wildlife around his former suburban home in Chicago than he did around his house in Pendleton. So where was the wildlife, he asked again?

Another participant (new to the area, too) joked about how the people around here shoot wildlife, suggesting that accounted for it, which didn't strike me as very enlightened; we are in the Southern U.S., where hunting is certainly a strong tradition, but there are hardly people out roaming the yards and gardens of our university town or towns nearby looking for their next squirrel to put in the pot.

Having never noticed any particular lack of wildlife in Pendleton myself, or lack of suitable habitat, I asked him where he lived exactly. He replied with a name of one of the newish sub-divisions with a historic name.

I'm not that familiar with it, but the name provided a clue. I think it's one of those developments that was laid out on a largely cleared landscape and now is filled with houses rimmed with lawns and standard landscape choices, most of which aren't very sustaining to wildlife.

I'll have to go by and see if I'm right. An addendum: here's the follow-up post.

Certainly, we didn't have much wildlife in our immediate landscape when we moved in. Lawn and a few big trees wasn't much habitat diversity (the sidebar photos bear this out and the web gallery version of a wildlife-friendly garden talk illustrates it, too), and a whole neighborhood like that would be akin to a desert for self-respecting Piedmont animals with any ability to go elsewhere. But after adding hundreds of native and a few non-native plants, creating layers with native trees and shrubs, and diversifying habitat, we certainly have a diversity of wildlife to enjoy now. Even the woodchucks....

Restoring earth

Geez, that's a pompous sounding title for a post, but I'm thinking about restoration and stewardship of the land where we live. I had an interesting meeting with a group of folks interested in promoting local food and growing your own vegetables today, and it's got me thinking.

My gardening companion and I live in a wonderfully diverse (biologically) part of the world, the Southeastern US, but the area that we live in -- the Piedmont -- has been shaped and dramatically altered by agriculture and logging, but increasingly more recently by development. Sprawling strip malls, cluster developments around intersections, 'big box' stores, supposedly needed supermarkets, fast food places, gas station/minit-marts; frankly, none of these are attractive at all.

Subdivisions aren't much better (I always think of the classic Pete Seeger song about the San Francisco suburb of Daly City-- 'they're all rows of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same'). And the mega-house subdivisions, ugh.

But hopefully, even in a conservative area, we're considering how to balance land use with preservation of natural areas, and conservation initiatives to support farm and pastureland preservation.

But I do think we need to think about restoring 'earth' -- that is, patches of land that have been abused, abandoned, paved over, turned into lawn, subjected to substandard landscaping, left as vacant lots, etc....into something that's either restorative in terms of habitat for wildlife or productive in terms of food. And all the default plantings in commercial landscapes could be turned into wildlife-supporting habitats with native plants.

Something to dream about.