Last year, we bought a house in a densely populated town of Northern New Jersey.
We first visited the place in the middle of February, and the street was practically without trees, it looked pretty desolate, yet the house had something invaluable to me that other houses we saw did not, a modest backyard with a manicured lawn flanked by two rows of thuja trees (or I should say shrubs, because they have not grown much in the year we have inhabited this house).
At the back end, on the left corner of the yard lay a concrete slab which must have served at some point as the foundation for a shed or similar. I knew from the moment I saw it that I wanted the slab out, and to reconquer that space for nature.
This all happened right after the pandemic. I spent a lot of time in the house and, when the weather permitted, as much as possible outside in the yard. One evening a racoon showed up and was scared away by the dogs. And there were a couple of crazy squirrels running frantically to and from the colossal sugar maple on the right and the tree of heaven (to be continued) on the left.
One afternoon, a group of birds, possibly sparrows, sat of the vinyl fence, as if waiting for me to do something, maybe feed them? Who knows, but it worked. I was soon purchasing bird feeders, poles and seeds of all kinds. I soon noticed that house sparrows, the English type introduced two centuries ago in Brooklyn, made up the bulk (possibly 80%) of our visitors. They were insatiable, and soon started to send away all other birds, in addition to pooping all over our neighbors paved patio. It was reading about house sparrows and how they were/are displacing native birds, sometimes killing them and their offspring, that I began to take an interest not just in any bird, but in those that belonged to this tiny nook of the Earth: finches, blue jays, grackles, cardinals, woodpeckers, mocking birds, humming birds.
I kept reading and learning and realizing that, to save local birds from extinction (like the 2.9 billion birds lost in the US since the 1970s), you had to plant native and increase biodiversity. A lesson from the birds that has turned my life and our yard upside down, or rather downside up.
