Moses Tai - Zooburbia

I would buy this lovely book for the sentiments, for the illustrations, and for this sentence alone: The mole is the most misunderstood of animals. Living alone in the gloom of darkness, unsociable and virtually sightless, the mole never gets a chance to set the record straight.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,

When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love

In Zooburbia, Tai Moses writes with great power and imagination about an urban wildlife corridor where humans and animals overlap. This is a poetics of suburbiaof animals flying above us, sharing our houses, gardens, and streets. Zooburbia will delight readers who love language and will stay with them long after theyve finished reading. There is something contagious about Mosess joy and the mindful attention she brings to her encounters with animals. Zooburbia shows us that what we consider ordinary is actually an enchanted kingdom.

Thaisa Frank, Enchantment and Heideggers Glasses

While Zooburbia shares an extraordinary glimpse into the natural world, it even more brilliantly gives you insight into the human condition, and through the eyes, mind, and heart of one of the most thoughtful, passionate, and perceptive humans you will ever encounter.

Thom Hartmann, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

Zooburbia has the power to quietly change the way you see the world. On every page, Tai Moses offers readers a way to reinterpret the ordinary, revealing that the world we humans have built is an even stranger place than we imagined, yet she reminds us of the beauty that lies beneath our human bumbling. This is a strange and beautiful booka book about animals that is really a book about being a person.

Robert Jensen, Arguing for Our Lives

With moving anecdotes and incisive knowledge, Tai Moses uncovers the natural world within our urban landscape. What a relief for us city dwellers, to know that wilderness is all around, resilient and beautiful, if only we would peer a little closer. While these plants and animals cannot offer flour or hold the extra house key, Moses shows us with humor and pathos that they are among the best of our neighbors. After reading Zooburbia I see my back garden anew, as not just a place for me, but a haven and a home to insects, birds, raccoons, and possums. This book is a delight.

Caroline Paul, Lost Cat and Fighting Fire

For MPK

Contents

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself,
What if I had never seen this before?
What if I knew I would never see it again?

Rachel Carson

I like to shop at a hardware store that has an outdoor nursery where a flock of wild song sparrows lives. The store also sells sacks of birdseed, which are kept inside on shelves not far from the automatic doors. The sparrows have learned to fly in the doors as they open, snack on any spilled birdseed, and then dart back out when theyre finished. Its a system that works for all, avian and human alike. Such graceful coexistence is the essence of zooburbia.

Zooburbia is what I call the extraordinary, unruly, half-wild realm where human and animal lives overlap. Within that territory lies the opportunity for some truly meaningful interspecies encounters. While zooburbia is a physical placethe cities and suburbs where our paths cross with those of other speciesits also a state of mind, the part of our psyches where animals reside, in all their many complications and contradictions.

As our cities grow and sprawl to accommodate burgeoning populations of humans, wild animals that once lived in woods and canyons and meadows are making their homes across the street from us, or even in our backyards. Modern cities are intricate ecosystems, teeming with a multitude of species that straddle the line between wild and not so wild. Raccoons that should be fishing crayfish out of woodland streams fish in garbage cans and wash their plunder in the gutter; striped skunks make their dens in storm drains and abandoned cars. Deer browse along freeway embankments. Flocks of parrots descended from escaped pets roost in sidewalk trees, and pigeons that evolved as cliff dwellers nest on window ledges. Last year I saw a wild turkey hen strolling along a downtown sidewalk, trailed by her brood of a dozen hatchlings. Traffic stopped and onlookers gawked. A handful of people seemed unnerved. But the rest of us saw the most ordinary sight in the world: a mother taking her children for a walk on a beautiful summer afternoon.

The way we think about animals is all over the map, but what is indisputable is that we do think about animals. Our relations with our wild neighbors can be delightful or conflicted, but they are always complex. For me, the intersection of human and animal has always been a source of wonder, and occasionally uncertainty, as I work to better understand my fellow beings and my role in their lives.

Whether wild, tame, or somewhere in between, all the animals who live among us have the capacity to enrich our lives in ways large and small. Sharing our sidewalks with wild turkeys and our shops with songbirds makes us more buoyant and more creatively connected to each other, our communities, and our planet. When we pay closer attention to the nuances of animal life we may be rewarded with a deeper connection to our own inner lives. Animals are individuals, with personalities and histories. Every one of them has a story. Zooburbia is where our stories converge.

We plan our lives according to a dream that comes to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans.

Ben Okri

M y chief preoccupation when I was a girl growing up in the heart of Los Angeles was to find a way to get out of the city and go live alone in the wilderness with wild animals and maybe a loyal dog. The air in LA was so polluted that we had smog-alert days when kids werent allowed to play outside. When I took a deep breath my eyes stung and my lungs burned. During recess and lunchtime we had to stay in the classroom and put our heads down on our desks to rest. I still remember how soothing that laminated surface felt against my cheek, so cool when everything else was so hot.

I knew things werent supposed to be this way. Air was supposed to be pure and breathable. Skies should be clear and blue, not hazy and orange. Rivers werent supposed to be sheathed in concrete, their bends straightened and rapids muzzled. With a freeway on one side and railroad tracks on the other, the Los Angeles River was as eager to escape its concrete prison as I was to escape the city. Cattails, rushes, and reeds took root in the riverbed; tiny green frogs hopped up and down the algaed banks. In the rainy season, torrents of muddy water thundered down the channel, sweeping along shopping carts, tree trunks, tires, and sometimes even an unfortunate person.

I dreamed of woods, creeks, and mountains. I dreamed of wild animals and of wildnesswildness in the true sense of the word, untamed and free. At the public library, I haunted the nature section, checking out books that taught me the names of birds and mammals, flowers and trees. I memorized animal tracks and cloud formations. Certain words ignited fiery particles in my imagination: