My Backyard Jungle
The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard Into Habitat and Learned to Live With It
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For James Barilla and his family, the dream of transforming their Columbia, South Carolina, backyard into a haven for wildlife evoked images of kids catching grasshoppers by day and fireflies at night, of digging up potatoes and picking strawberries. When they signed up with the National Wildlife Federation to certify their yard as a wildlife habitat, it felt like pushing back, in however small a way, against the tide of bad news about vanishing species, changing climate, dying coral reefs. Then the animals started to arrive, and Barilla soon discovered the complexities (and possible mayhem) of merging human with animal habitats. What are the limits of coexistence, he wondered? To find out, Barilla set out across continents to explore cities where populations of bears, monkeys, marmosets, and honeybees live alongside human residents. My Backyard Jungle brings these unique stories together, making Barilla’s yard the centerpiece of a meditation on possibilities for coexistence with animals in an increasingly urban world. Not since Gerald Durrell penned My Family and Other Animals have readers encountered a naturalist with such a gift for storytelling and such an open heart toward all things wild.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the beginning of this book, Barilla, who teaches creative nonfiction and environmental writing at the University of South Carolina and formerly worked in wildlife research and management, describes the process by which his yard received certification from the National Wildlife Federation as a wildlife-friendly habitat. Fortunately, relatively little of this book deals with local phenomena. Barilla goes very far afield to look at such fauna issues as the "monkey menace" in New Delhi, India, the attempt to contain the growing bear population in and around Northampton, Mass., the work of urban beekeepers in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the struggle for survival of marmosets in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In a chapter on a possible infestation of his home by rats or squirrels, Barilla relates his very human desire to contain such "night visitors" and describes the traps used to eliminate rodents. More often, though, his focus is on the "zooopolis": the intersection of, and uneasy accommodation between, the human and animal realms. Barilla is a fine stylist his writing is thoughtful, colorful, and sometimes wittily self-deprecating who helps us to better understand the unfamiliar natural world near our homes and to realize how many habitats coexist on Earth.
