FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "The Hollow Ecosystem"
I’m a biologist and have lived in small suburban towns of the San Gabriel Valley, wedged against the mountains just north of Los Angeles, for thirty years. I was raised in a very different sort of American suburb: a little town in New Jersey just outside New York City. I grew up as a backyard naturalist keeping checklists of birds and salamanders, later expanding my horizons to local forests, ponds, and swamps. These adventures eventually led me to far-flung corners of the world, where I began a career studying the private lives of little-known animals in the tropics. But it was when I moved to the Los Angeles basin that I discovered an ecosystem so bizarre, with its unique mosaic of native, nonnative, and invasive plants and animals, that many years later I’m still trying to understand it. This book is intended to help you understand it too.
This morning, as I walked out my front door, a flock of big, bright-green parrots swooped into my yard, squawking raucously: red-headed Amazons wheeling against the backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. I admired them for a minute, soaking in the bright Southern California sunshine. The air was then further split by a piercing mournful cry. A peacock was sitting calmly on a roof across the street. His flock was scattered across a couple of green lawns, peahens and their chicks scratching and pecking in the dirt and casually strolling between parked cars and palm trees. So far, a typical morning. I headed out for a walk toward the canyon entrance just up the street. As I reached it, I noticed a pack of four coyotes trotting casually down the street toward me. They were gorgeous, russet and gray, well fed and in peak condition. Seeing me, two peeled off while the others continued on, passing me casually no more than twenty feet away. I turned and noticed a lady walking two small dogs and called out to her that the coyotes were coming her way. She scrambled to pick up both dogs and moved to the far sidewalk, only to have the coyotes pass by her and her dogs, each group eyeing the other warily. It could have been much worse; coyotes have attacked and killed dogs in this scenario, even when their owners stood their ground to protect them.
This vignette of life in suburban Los Angeles unfolded in less than fifteen minutes. It’s a beautiful, even Edenic landscape by most standards, even in modest neighborhoods: full of green grass, brightly colored flowers, and towering shade trees. It also maintains a modicum of wildness. Last year a bobcat entered my neighbor’s yard, killed a squirrel, climbed a backyard oak, and tore apart its breakfast while the family looked on. Bears leave the canyon and wander through our neighborhood, napping in backyards and dipping into swimming pools. Mountain lions occasionally stroll the streets backing up to the San Gabriels. And for every sighting of a native wild cat, canine, or hawk, there’s another of an exotic animal that hails from the other side of the world but calls our neighborhood home.
Underlying the verdant suburban settings, environmental troubles abound. The exotic flowers and trees are like living mannequins. They’re pretty, but they contribute little to the landscape as components of a healthy ecosystem. Some produce fruits or flowers that are used by hummingbirds, butterflies, and honeybees; most do not. Even those whose flowers feed our wildlife fail to feed the millions of insects that are dependent on particular native plants to complete their life cycles. Caterpillars usually specialize on certain plants. If we take those plants out of the ecosystem, the caterpillars that depend on them will disappear, and along with them the birds and other animals that depend on them for food. Our suburban ecosystem has, in a sense, collapsed, leaving only an outward appearance of Nature—and only as long as huge quantities of water are dumped on it regularly. It is hollow. The natural interactions among plants and animals that compose a healthy ecosystem are largely gone.
Southern California is not a landscape well suited to dense, sedentary human habitation. It’s seasonally arid, and except for a few months of winter rain—which sometimes fail to arrive—water is at a premium. In 2021, the flames of more than eight thousand fires stretched their tentacles into more than four million acres of California forest and chapparal. That was nearly 4 percent of the land mass of the state. The fires were mostly sparked by lightning, fed by undergrowth that had not burned in many years, and fanned to explosive force by Santa Ana winds. The fires were ultimately fed by climate change, creating hotter tinderbox summers in this Mediterranean landscape.
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During my first weeks in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I botanized from my car as I drove the freeways. Swaying palm trees, icons of the Los Angeles landscape, studded the expanse of blue sky. The tallest, elegantly bowed palms were native to Australia and South America. The stately verdant palms with their clusters of amber fruits were from the Canary Islands. Even the ubiquitous fan palms were not the species native to the Los Angeles basin, but rather to Baja California.
The Los Angeles basin is a jigsaw puzzle of an ecosystem, with ever new forms of plant and animal interactions that deserve our attention. That word interaction is all-important. In a natural ecosystem, nearly every component is interlocked with other components. Pull one out and some aspect of the ecosystem may collapse. In our anthropogenic Southern California ecosystem, where the plants and animals didn’t necessarily evolve with each other and many weren’t even meant to live in this climate, that’s not the case. We will explore this intricate web of relationships among creatures and plants from all parts of the globe that have been transplanted, and how they manage to coexist.
It matters enormously whether your neighborhood is full of local oaks and sages, or exotic palms, roses, and green lawns. Many flowering plants in our suburbs feed hummingbirds and butterflies, giving us the illusion that they’re perfect proxies for the flowering plants that belong here. But they’re really not good surrogates, because exotic plants tend to feed only those native creatures that can cope with a wide range of food sources. Generalists thrive and specialists die in a human-altered landscape; that is the rule. And there are far more habitat specialists out there than habitat generalists. House finches, squirrels and raccoons, and invasive grasses take over. The myriad other species that need a particular plant or prey animal to carry out their lives die out, only to be replaced by more hardy, adaptable survivors.
Most locals consider the plants and animals around them to be indigenous, or else couldn’t care less where they originated. Nonnatives that beautify the surroundings are accepted, even beloved. Those that create havoc are eventually reviled, although often only by cities or homeowners that have to spend money and time to deal with them. Palms are iconic of life in LA and beloved until their fronds fall onto your new car. Raccoons are adorable until they’re fighting with your dog and knocking over your trash cans every night. Coyotes howling in your local canyon are a wonderful reminder of how close we are to wild Nature in Los Angeles, until they carry away your cat.
Most Angelenos are oblivious to the environmental havoc of suburbia; in fact, most like it. I wrote this book to chart how thoroughly transformed the suburban world is from the native landscape, and to explore the lives and interactions of animals and plants that live here. In the following twenty-six chapters, I highlight species that one might encounter on a walk through a suburban neighborhood or our local hills. Our feelings and perceptions of the life around us run the gamut from admiration to ignorance to loathing, and I’ve tried to capture those perceptions in arranging this book.
We begin with the “stars of the suburbs,” plants and animals iconic to all who live here. In later sections I’ve chosen to include species or groups that are equally important to ecologists, but often overlooked or even disdained by residents. In almost every case they’re species that interact with us in some way. Some have vocal constituencies of fans and detractors. Some make do with an ecosystem utterly alien to their ancestors. Others are not so adaptable and cannot cope with the myriad nonnative plants and animals and human detritus around them. Some rely on foods that are nutritious but wildly unnatural. Others eke out a living on the scant remaining natural resources in our suburbs. Native or invasive, thriving or disappearing, they are united as part of the fabric of this strange ecosystem we call Los Angeles.
