Unseen City Quotes

“If we come to love nature not only when it is rare and beautiful, but also when it is commonplace and even annoying, I believe it will heal the great wound of our species: our self-imposed isolation from the rest of life, our loneliness for nature. We might remember that we are no different from our surroundings, that the trees and birds are as much our neighbors as other humans. We might remember that before the land belonged to us, we belonged to it. We could belong again.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“None of the ginkgo's aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It's not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal or rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take open-hearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“The more closely we looked the more the world opened itself to us, as if to reward our attention.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“It's simply not possible to always see the world fresh and in full, like a child, while also making money, paying bills on time, and taking care of a family...But doing this work and occasionally acting like a two-year-old pays dividends of awe and pleasure. It doesn't take very much time to notice that you live within nature...Wonder doesn't come from outside after driving somewhere spectacular, it comes from within: It's a union of the natural world and the mind prepared to receive it.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“The aim of the book you are holding is to persuade people (myself first and foremost) to slow down enough to see the wonders around us.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“I have a fantasy about being the kind of father who notices on his commute that the chestnuts on a nearby tree are ripe and brings home an armful to roast--the kind of person who is able to gather up richness where others see nothing worth noting.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Many of the people who regularly feed and cultivate relationships with pigeons are themselves on the fringes of society. They are disconnected from other people due to poverty, limited language skills, or mental illness, but they form deep emotional connections with the birds.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“The first step is to stop thinking of nature as something far away that we must save from someone else and start seeing it all around us. The first step is to open our eyes to the existence of nature in our daily lives.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Welcome to Subirdia, Marzluff tells”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Research shows that animals that play are more likely to survive, and become better parents. Rats—one of the most playful species—that are deprived of play react to minor conflicts by flying into a rage or quaking in a corner.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Ravens have been observed “surfing” the wind by holding flat pieces of bark in their claws and riding mountain updrafts. They use bits of plastic to sled down snowy roofs, ride rotating sprinklers, and slide on their breasts down the onion-domed cupolas of Russian Orthodox churches (helpfully polishing them in the process). Angell and Marzluff once spotted an airborne group of crows playing with a ball of paper above a University of Washington football game. One crow would carry the ball a few wing lengths and then drop it, at which point the others would dive in, the fastest one snatching it from the air. They repeated rounds of this corvid quidditch over and over again, causing attention in the stands to stray from the earthbound athletes. And at the University of Montana, a crow learned to gather up small packs of dogs by whistling and calling what for all the world sounded like “Here, boy!” The bird would lead the dogs on frenzied chases across campus for no apparent reason.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and writer and illustrator Tony Angell.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Perhaps the decisions we agonize over are, in fact, predetermined—the sums of a million individual cellular choices. Our conscious minds assume that we are in control, but often the role of consciousness is simply to justify and explain decisions over which it has no control. Are consciousness and reason just things evolution trumped up to keep us from going insane, a Matrix-style fantasy world that keeps us from recognizing the horrific reality that we have no agency and all the perseverating we do over choices is really just rationalization to convince ourselves that we have free will? Or, to flip the comparison around, could an ant colony develop consciousness? Feelings? Spirituality? Crumble some pecan sandies on a note-card with your daughter and eventually you end up grappling with the basic tenets of philosophy. These are the questions that arise if you spend enough time staring at ants.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“From the human perspective, an ant is pretty much just an ant. As soon as you begin to look at ants through a magnifying glass, however, a world of wonderful diversity snaps into focus. With the benefit of magnification, Wilson and Hölldobler write, ants “differ among themselves as much as do elephants, tigers, and mice. In size alone the variation is spectacular. An entire colony of the smallest ants . . . could live comfortably inside the head capsule of a soldier of the largest species, the giant Bornean carpenter ant, Camponotus gigas.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Aphid Herding Insect livestock are the most reliable source of sugar for many ants. Ants most frequently herd insects from the order Hemiptera, of which aphids are one example. They are herbivores that suck the juices from plants and excrete the excess sugars in the honeydew. Some aphids produce their body weight in honeydew every hour, and if ants aren’t harvesting it, the sugar can pile up to such an extent that it makes it worthwhile for people to gather it. According to Wilson and Hölldobler, “The manna ‘given’ to the Israelites in the Old Testament account was almost certainly the excrement of the scale insect Trabutina mannipara, which feeds on tamarisk. The Arabs still gather the material, which they call man.” In Australia, honeydew is called sugar lerp, and one person can collect three pounds of the stuff in a day. If you turn up your nose at eating excrement, you should know that you may have already done it: A lot of honey comes not from the nectar of flowers, but from this honeydew, which bees collect from leaves. Essentially, this honey is insect poop that’s been processed inside another insect and then vomited up.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Aphid Herding Insect livestock are the most reliable source of sugar for many ants. Ants most frequently herd insects from the order Hemiptera, of which aphids are one example. They are herbivores that suck the juices from plants and excrete the excess sugars in the honeydew. Some aphids produce their body weight in honeydew every hour, and if ants aren’t harvesting it, the sugar can pile up to such an extent that it makes it worthwhile for people to gather it. According to Wilson and Hölldobler, “The manna ‘given’ to the Israelites in the Old Testament account was almost certainly the excrement of the scale insect Trabutina mannipara, which feeds on tamarisk. The Arabs still gather the material, which they call man.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“To capture this combination of large and small, Llewellyn used software to merge multiple photographs. The resulting images allow you to see these tree parts more clearly than you can in real life. Both the large and the small perspectives remain in focus, producing startling images. What looks like a radiant deep-sea creature turns out to be the vermillion pollen-releasing structure of a common red maple.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Perhaps it’s this autumn beauty that inclines people toward ginkgos. When they grow older still, they become giants of great gravitas. In comparison to those massive craggy branches, the leaves are dots. You can see through their pointillist drapery to the interior architecture. They live for many hundreds of years. Careful reviews of historical records puts the oldest trees at about a thousand years, though some claim they are as much as four thousand years old. These big ginkgos—there are more than one hundred of them—are especially magnificent in the autumn.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Perhaps it’s this autumn beauty that inclines people toward ginkgos. When they grow older still, they become giants of great gravitas. In comparison to those massive craggy branches, the leaves are dots. You can see through their pointillist drapery to the interior architecture.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“What’s true of other people is also true of places: to know deeply is to love more. To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Jon Young’s book What the Robin Knows,”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Steve Barley”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“I have a book on the subject: Outwitting Squirrels: 101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels, by Bill Adler Jr. The fact that humans must summon this much collective brainpower and earnest scheming to match wits with a one-pound rodent says something not so complimentary about us. At the end of his book, Adler urges his readers not to give up and admit defeat: I have high hopes for civilization. We have survived world wars, the cold war, devastating plagues. We have gone to the moon, and sent probes past the outermost edge of our solar system. We have eliminated major diseases, and we have invented Wheel of Fortune. But only if we keep up our struggle to outwit squirrels can humankind expect to progress towards the next level of development, whatever that may be.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Steele and other scientists investigating half-eaten acorns have found that an acorn has more fats, which squirrels like, in its top half, and in its bottom half, around the embryo, there are more tannins, which squirrels dislike. Tannins—the same chemicals that make wines “dry”—are poisonous in high concentrations. They are a mainstay of plant chemical warfare, used by everything from apples to persimmons. That feeling of all the moisture being sucked out of your mouth when you bite into an acorn or an unripe apple comes from the tannins you’ve just released, which act as molecular vacuum cleaners, hoovering up all the proteins that make your saliva feel slippery. Unlike squirrels, humans can’t eat acorns without processing the tannins.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Squirrels are much better at burning fat than gaining it. When temperatures drop, some internal switch flips and they begin to turn fat into heat thirteen and a half times faster than normal. This performance “stands as one of the best among animals,” according to Steele and his fellow squirrel researcher John Koprowski of the University of Arizona. Without even moving, they then can produce energy like a pro cyclist powering up into the Pyrenees.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Squirrels eat a lot of other things besides tree nuts: plants, underground fungi, insects, bones, sometimes baby birds, and even in some cases each other.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“There are many evangelical books, usually based on little science, extolling the healing benefits of wild plants. There’s no need to make airy claims about the superpowers of plants when we can instead point to the well-established benefits of eating leafy green vegetables. We’d all be healthier, poor and middle class alike, if we could open our eyes to the natural world around us and see the richness there that we usually miss. If by foraging we simply hope to harvest a little pleasure and a connection to the wild, the chances of success are good. But the likelihood of success declines if we’re primarily gathering food for the body rather than the soul.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“Euell Gibbons wrote a book about foraging titled Stalking the Wild Asparagus. It was a bestseller. It’s this book that planted the romance of foraging into our culture, setting the taproot for the later flowering of foraged dishes at restaurants like Daniel. The seed of our current fascination with foraging was a hungry kid searching the New Mexico desert for something he could bring home for his mother.”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“University of California, Berkeley, to connect the people with the least money to the highfalutin ingredients growing in the cracks in their driveways. Philip Stark, a Berkeley statistics professor, organized a team of researchers to map edible plants in low-income neighborhoods with the goal of creating”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness

“As Tama Matsuoka Wong writes in her book, Foraged Flavor, “It was pretty easy to find nature-oriented books that told me which of these plants are ‘edible,’ but my quest instead was for plants that actually taste good” (her italics).”
― Nathanael Johnson, Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness