Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cottonwood mix with street trees to provide a green canopy over nearly one-
quarter of the city. The forests of Seattle and its suburbs now embrace 141
species of trees, including 30 native species and ornamentals from North and
South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some are problematic invaders,
but in total they provide a diverse menu of foods and nesting and roosting
sites for birds. Birds l ock to my green city. Surely they must shun the con-
crete elsewhere.
A few trips persuade me that this is not the case.
I travel with binoculars. I'm not out to tally an impressive state-, country-,
year-, life-, or even dream-list. I simply enjoy watching birds in new places,
and this predilection af ords me an opportunity to question the generality of
my Seattle observations. As I follow my avian ambassadors into the natural
side of our built world, they take me into trashy gullies, streams that run over
partially submerged shopping carts, and dangerous neighborhoods where a
visitor who cares about safety should not tread. Amid warnings from con-
cerned residents, I manage to coni rm around the world what I've seen in
Seattle. The downtowns of cities in North and Central America, New Zealand,
and Europe are rife with birds. My daily counts average twenty-three dif erent
species and range from a low of eleven in Auckland, New Zealand (where only
four are natives), to a high of thirty-one species in St. Andrews, Scotland,
where all but four are indigenous. In Berlin, Germany, I watch white-tailed sea
eagles i sh the Wannsee, just like Seattle's bald eagles plunge into Lake Wash-
ington. Dippers, chunky aquanauts that pump up and down on streamside
perches, wade into icy streams in Ketchikan, Alaska, and St. Andrews to
search under rocks for caddisl y and mayl y larvae. I recollect these and other
colorful birds—red-billed gulls, long-tailed ducks, yellow-winged caciques,
rufous-naped wrens, red-bellied woodpeckers, crimson-fronted parakeets, fer-
ruginous pygmy-owls, and oystercatchers—from my urban visits.
I see a few of the same birds in nearly every one of the ten cities I visit. Five
are particularly cosmopolitan. All are the result of human actions. From Europe,
 
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