Who needs to explore the universe to discover alien life? Try our backyards.
Thor Hanson of Noema magazine describes the process of discovering new species and their lifecycles right outside his kitchen door.
It started with a thump, the grim sound of a bird hitting the window of my little office shack. When I ran outside to check, I found the first hermit thrush that I had ever seen in our yard, lying dead in the grass. As I lay those few feathered ounces to rest beneath a rose bush, my sorrow was tinged with something like embarrassment. Here I was, studying nature and writing books about it, and I’d had no idea that this celebrated bird was wintering in the shrubs just a few feet from my desk.
In biology, hermit thrushes are renowned for singing two tones at once, phrasing their notes in precise harmonic intervals eerily similar to the minor chords and scales used in human music. The resulting song is so haunting and beautiful that it has become a powerful metaphor in literature, invoked by hundreds of authors and poets since before ornithologists even knew which bird was responsible.
T. S. Elliot put a hermit thrush in “The Wasteland,” for example, and Walt Whitman called upon its “wondrous chant” to convey the nation’s grief in his famous elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” As a biologist and a writer, failing to notice a species so famous in both of my chosen trades begged an obvious question: What else was I overlooking in my own backyard?
Finding answers would occupy years. I climbed trees, I dug holes, I crawled on my hands and knees, and I sat inside a pile of sticks, listening and watching. I saw an incredible array of species doing things that I had never imagined, from yellowjackets sipping honeydew in the treetops to woodpeckers dropping branches on a saw-whet owl. And when my research expanded to other yards and other neighborhoods, I learned that biological mysteries occur everywhere, even in the most urbanized landscapes on the face of the planet.
Few examples make that point better than a story that begins with a wager at a lunch party. “I had been bragging, perhaps unwisely, that I could find a new species anywhere,” Brian Brown told me over a Zoom call. His dark hair and boyish face belied more than 30 years of employment at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where he currently serves as curator of insects. He made that fateful “new species” boast at a donor luncheon, and one of the museum’s trustees immediately took up the challenge. If Brown could find a new species of insect in her backyard, she told him, she would host a grand dinner party fundraiser in celebration. To add a bit of pressure, she went ahead and scheduled the party.
“I didn’t manage to get the trap set up until three weeks before the dinner,” Brown recalled, but any angst he felt about the situation disappeared as soon as he brought the first batch of specimens back to his lab. With a practiced eye, he began sorting out small, dark flies in the family Phoridae, his specialty. “The very first one I looked at didn’t key out to anything,” he said, referring to the technical manuals, or “keys,” used in taxonomy to tell one species from another.
To someone of Brown’s experience and expertise, that could only mean one thing. “It was unknown!” he said, still visibly excited years after the fact. The second fly he examined had “a weird leg,” and turned out to be the first North American record of a species known only from Europe. Then he found one from a genus never before recorded west of the Rocky Mountains. “I didn’t even have to finish looking through the sample,” Brown went on. “I already had enough for the party.” More than that, he had confirmation that backyards in cities were worthy of exploration. And that gave him the beginnings of an ambitious new research program.
“The BioSCAN project is unique,” Brown explained, ticking off the features of an effort now in its 11th season. Where most biodiversity surveys explore rural places and wildlands, BioSCAN is focused on greater Los Angeles. And where most surveys inventory a wide range of life forms, Brown’s group decided to “go narrow and deep,” studying specific insects like phorid flies and bees. They’ve sampled from the urban core to the edge of the city, and from the coast inland to the desert, and they have consistently avoided designated natural areas, targeting instead the sorts of places usually overlooked by biologists — backyards, gardens and small neighborhood parks.
“Biological mysteries occur everywhere, even in the most urbanized landscapes on the face of the planet.”
The results have been no less remarkable than those first few flies from the trap in his trustee’s yard. “There’s no end to it!” Brown exclaimed. “Every time we sample in a new area, we get new species.” For phorid flies alone, the team has discovered 50 new species, and expanded the known ranges of scores of others, and they still have thousands of specimens left to examine.
To Brown, the success of BioSCAN’s backyard strategy is gratifying, but not surprising. He finds similar untapped diversity wherever he looks for flies. Phorids are his forte, but the entire fly order remains poorly known. Over 160,000 species have been described, with perhaps 10 times that number waiting to be discovered. Or maybe more — nobody knows for sure. As Brown put it, “The magnitude of the richness, and of our ignorance, is beyond what we’re used to thinking about.”
When it comes to backyard biology, our ignorance extends far beyond putting names to all the flies and other creatures. We have even less idea about what they’re doing, but some researchers have begun asking the right questions. Behavioral ecologist Barbara Klump, for example, put a very specific query to the residents of Sydney, Australia: Had they ever seen a parrot opening the lid on their garbage can?
“We were also interested to know if they hadn’t seen it,” Klump clarified when I reached her on a video call. “It was crucial that we also could say where the behavior doesn’t happen.” By including that key detail in her protocol, and by racking up reports from over 1,300 participants in 478 different suburbs, Klump was able to pinpoint three neighborhoods where the bin-opening technique had been mastered.
It helped that the behavior was so distinctive — anyone would notice a parrot strewing garbage around their yard. It also helped that the bird was so distinctive — among Australia’s 57 parrot species, only one is large and snowy-white, with a comical plume of yellow feathers flopping around on its head.
“Sulphur-crested cockatoos are really ideal for this kind of study,” Klump told me. Intelligent and highly social, the birds live in what she called a “fission-fusion” system, dispersing in small flocks to forage during the day (the fission), and then gathering together again at large communal roosts to spend the night (the fusion). “The foraging parties change constantly, giving them lots of opportunities to learn behaviors,” she explained, and that learning process lay at the heart of Klump’s research interests.
After making a name for herself studying tool use in Hawaiian and New Caledonian crows, Klump embarked on the cockatoo study as part of a postdoctoral fellowship based at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. The project took shape quickly as soon as she and her colleagues documented the bin-opening behavior and showed that it was brand new, limited to just a few birds in a handful of locations.
“Oh my god!” she said, remembering her first glimpse of a cockatoo in action. “All of these questions started coming in. How do they figure it out? Do they all do it in the same way? Is this a socially transmitted behavior?” Finding answers would require a lot of data, far more than she and a few student-helpers could ever accumulate on their own. “We couldn’t have done it without the citizen scientists,” she said, and explained how she continued her online surveys for years, gathering observations from thousands of residents across greater Sydney. Some of them still keep in touch with her, sending pictures, notes and videos of bin-opening and other cockatoo antics playing out in their neighborhoods.
In 1984, a two-page report appeared in the journal Science describing a simple study from a small suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. The authors analyzed 10 years of data on patients recovering from the same gallbladder surgery in the same ward, where only one thing was different about their care: some had a view out their window of a grove of trees; others looked out at a brick wall.
In case after case, the results were the same: Patients with a view of trees recovered more quickly, required fewer painkillers, made fewer calls to the nurse’s station and experienced fewer complications from their surgery. To be clear, the trees in question were not towering old-growth behemoths, breathtaking in their majesty — it wasn’t necessary to be awed to be affected. Simply the presence of typical suburban maple trees, viewed through glass, was enough to enhance the process of healing.
In the decades since its publication, the hospital bed study has become the research equivalent of a runaway bestseller, cited by more than 8,000 other papers that bear out and expand upon its findings. Confirmed positive effects of nature on human health now range from stress reduction to lowered blood pressure, reduced cancer mortality, lower incidence of diabetes, and, for pregnant mothers, higher infant birth weights. The evidence is so overpowering that it is now possible to receive a medical prescription for nature exposure from doctors in 35 states, four Canadian provinces, and dozens of countries around the world, including Japan, where the remedy is charmingly referred to as “forest bathing.”
“There is a more personal benefit to spending time with nature close to home: How other species make us feel.”
I gave myself a backyard prescription on a sunny summer day when I was suffering from a rotten head cold and couldn’t get much writing done. Outside, I retreated to a patch of compacted sand and gravel on our property where I had been planting wildflowers, trying to attract native bees.
The effects of fledgling bee gardens on human health have yet to be studied directly, but I still viewed my time outside as a form of self-medication. Truth be told, my head cold wasn’t the only thing making the day harder to embrace than most. Other life stresses were involved, and, as the saying goes among biologists, “nature is cheaper than therapy.”
I found a patch of gravelly soil warm from the sun and lowered myself down to sit amongst a scattering of wildflowers — the pink topknots of sea blush, the vibrant stars of blue-eyed grass, and the rosy, four-petaled faces of farewell to spring. There was a faint breeze making the blossoms nod, as if tugged by invisible strings, and I noticed the leaves of a gumweed I’d planted and forgotten all about — small, but still surviving in the thin, dry soil. Then a bee appeared, a jet-black miner with a wash of tawny fuzz like a velvet stole across its thorax. I watched as it hovered and drifted back and forth, inches above the cobbles and vegetation. It was a species that I’d never seen before on our property, a ground-nester more common in the remnants of native prairie that dot our island’s shoreline, several miles distant. Would it nest here?
I held my breath when the bee landed, but then lost sight of it as it crawled off amongst the tufts of grass and wildflowers. My mind drifted, and a few minutes later, I decided to heave myself up and head back to the office for another try at indoor work. Just then, a furtive motion caught my eye near the base of a bunchgrass. Turning, I saw it again and felt a rise in spirits beyond the measures of science. It was sand, a flicker of grains flung skyward by tiny legs. The bee had begun to dig.
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