Geography Reference
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thanks to the desires of acclimatization societies, most cities now harbor
house sparrows and European starlings. From North America, the interests of
duck fanciers and hunters provided mallards and Canada geese to the urban
world. The rock pigeon (or common street pigeon), originally domesticated
from wild Mesopotamian stocks i ve thousand years ago, may be the world's
most familiar city bird. These “fab i ve” exemplify what conservation biolo-
gists call “biotic homogenization,” an increasing similarity in the l ora and
fauna of distant lands once isolated by geography but now joined by the indus-
try of human transportation. I worry about this result but take some comfort
that the fab i ve are the exception; most striking to me is the regional distinc-
tiveness of each city's birds.
In the downtown core of my ten cities I rack up 151 unique bird species.
For every four birds I see, I i nd three only in a single city. Homogenization is
barely perceptible. I uncover unique representatives of the waterfowl, raptor
(hawk and owl), corvid ( jay and crow), dove, i nch, woodpecker, and sparrow
tribes in each location. For instance, I see gulls of the ring-billed, black-
headed, red-billed, black-backed, glaucous-winged, Thayer's, and Franklin's
variety. Of the black-backed type alone, I spy three species, each in a dif erent
city. Woodpeckers are nearly as diverse; black, great-spotted, downy, hairy,
Hof man's, and red-bellied are on my list. Double-crested cormorants occur
in New York and Ketchikan, but in the latter city I also i nd pelagic cormo-
rants, whereas I i nd the neotropical variety and the shag in Zihuatanejo,
Mexico, and St. Andrews, respectively. My ten cities harbor nine species of
corvids, eight species of titmice (“chickadees” to Americans), six ducks, six
doves, four herons, four raptors, three swallows, and three hummingbirds.
The only partridge is the ring-necked pheasant, an alien species introduced
from Asia to Scotland to appease hunters.
My surprise at the bounty of city birds is equally matched by its compara-
bility to that of nearby wildlands. My count in Ketchikan is almost double the
next day's count along the Naha River—a remote wilderness i fty miles away
 
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