Latest news with #suburbia
The Independent
a day ago
- Health
- The Independent
How to turn down the volume and protect wildlife in your yard and garden
In the garden, the start of the growing season means the return of dirt under our fingernails, the scent of freshly spread mulch and the first blooming roses. In my neighborhood, and perhaps yours, it also means an audible onslaught of lawnmowers, leaf blowers and other tools of the landscaper's trade. From 8 a.m. through at least early afternoon — five or six days every week — the hum of power tools and other machines disrupts my peace. But even more concerning is that my peace pales in importance to that of my property's other residents. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, frogs, insects and other wildlife are critically affected by human-made noise. They're outdoors right in the middle of what must seem to them a war zone — with no escape. And the battleground noises that surround them aren't merely nuisances; they disrupt the basic instincts the animals' lives depend on. Instincts such as those that alert them to the presence of predators become masked under the gas-powered cacophony prevalent throughout most of suburbia. The unnatural sounds can also force birds, bats and insects into changing their feeding, nesting and mating habits, says Kevin Munroe, Long Island Preserve Director for The Nature Conservancy, based in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. 'Quite a few animals communicate primarily through song, and their songs are how they find each other,' Munroe said. Those with soft and quiet songs, like warblers, small species of owls, bats and some species of crickets, for instance, can be so badly drowned out by noise pollution that 'they literally cannot build families or reproduce,' he said. To illustrate the point, Munroe likens the animals' songs to navigation systems. 'Imagine these songs are the birds' roadmaps to each other, and imagine you're using your GPS to get somewhere and all of a sudden it turns off, and that's the only way you can find your family. Now, with it turned off, there's no way you'll find your family. That's what song is like for these animals,' he said. Artificial noises from power equipment, traffic, construction and industrial sources, can also cause stress and hearing loss in animals. A University of Georgia study even found that highway noises can elevate heart rates in monarch caterpillars. Thoughtful planning can reduce the noise This may seem like a losing battle in modern society, but there are steps we can take to help. The Nature Conservancy recommends changes to industrial practices that include accounting for sensitive areas when siting noise-producing facilities, such as access roads and compressor stations, and designing them to include sound barriers such as walls, vegetative screening and noise-absorbing equipment. Altering the timing and duration of noisy activities during breeding and hibernation periods could also reduce adverse effects on wildlife, the organization said. What you can do at home On our own properties, small changes can make a big impact. Because birds do their 'most important talking to each other' between dawn and 9 a.m., Munroe recommends shifting noisy yardwork later. Another critical time for many species of wildlife is after dark, he said. 'You can play music and have fun, but try not to make any loud noises,' he said. In addition, creating sound buffers by planting dense native trees, evergreens or deciduous shrubs, and switching from gas- to battery-powered tools, including leaf blowers, string trimmers and chainsaws, are simple things homeowners can do to avoid causing harm. Educating and introducing change to local communities is important, too. Munroe suggests working with your homeowners association, schools, businesses and churches to limit loud, destructive activity on their properties. 'Talk to local municipalities about their noise ordinances and (encourage them to) create a sound sanctuary in the neighborhood (to protect) wood thrushes, katydids' and other wildlife, he said. And always observe noise ordinances at home and in public places, like parks. Wild animals serve as 'pollinators, affect pest control and have a positive effect on our agriculture and our economy,' Munroe said. 'We want them in our neighborhoods.' ___ Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice. ___
Associated Press
a day ago
- Health
- Associated Press
How to turn down the volume and protect wildlife in your yard and garden
In the garden, the start of the growing season means the return of dirt under our fingernails, the scent of freshly spread mulch and the first blooming roses. In my neighborhood, and perhaps yours, it also means an audible onslaught of lawnmowers, leaf blowers and other tools of the landscaper's trade. From 8 a.m. through at least early afternoon — five or six days every week — the hum of power tools and other machines disrupts my peace. But even more concerning is that my peace pales in importance to that of my property's other residents. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, frogs, insects and other wildlife are critically affected by human-made noise. They're outdoors right in the middle of what must seem to them a war zone — with no escape. And the battleground noises that surround them aren't merely nuisances; they disrupt the basic instincts the animals' lives depend on. Instincts such as those that alert them to the presence of predators become masked under the gas-powered cacophony prevalent throughout most of suburbia. The unnatural sounds can also force birds, bats and insects into changing their feeding, nesting and mating habits, says Kevin Munroe, Long Island Preserve Director for The Nature Conservancy, based in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. 'Quite a few animals communicate primarily through song, and their songs are how they find each other,' Munroe said. Those with soft and quiet songs, like warblers, small species of owls, bats and some species of crickets, for instance, can be so badly drowned out by noise pollution that 'they literally cannot build families or reproduce,' he said. To illustrate the point, Munroe likens the animals' songs to navigation systems. 'Imagine these songs are the birds' roadmaps to each other, and imagine you're using your GPS to get somewhere and all of a sudden it turns off, and that's the only way you can find your family. Now, with it turned off, there's no way you'll find your family. That's what song is like for these animals,' he said. Artificial noises from power equipment, traffic, construction and industrial sources, can also cause stress and hearing loss in animals. A University of Georgia study even found that highway noises can elevate heart rates in monarch caterpillars. Thoughtful planning can reduce the noiseThis may seem like a losing battle in modern society, but there are steps we can take to help. The Nature Conservancy recommends changes to industrial practices that include accounting for sensitive areas when siting noise-producing facilities, such as access roads and compressor stations, and designing them to include sound barriers such as walls, vegetative screening and noise-absorbing equipment. Altering the timing and duration of noisy activities during breeding and hibernation periods could also reduce adverse effects on wildlife, the organization said. What you can do at homeOn our own properties, small changes can make a big impact. Because birds do their 'most important talking to each other' between dawn and 9 a.m., Munroe recommends shifting noisy yardwork later. Another critical time for many species of wildlife is after dark, he said. 'You can play music and have fun, but try not to make any loud noises,' he said. In addition, creating sound buffers by planting dense native trees, evergreens or deciduous shrubs, and switching from gas- to battery-powered tools, including leaf blowers, string trimmers and chainsaws, are simple things homeowners can do to avoid causing harm. Educating and introducing change to local communities is important, too. Munroe suggests working with your homeowners association, schools, businesses and churches to limit loud, destructive activity on their properties. 'Talk to local municipalities about their noise ordinances and (encourage them to) create a sound sanctuary in the neighborhood (to protect) wood thrushes, katydids' and other wildlife, he said. And always observe noise ordinances at home and in public places, like parks. Wild animals serve as 'pollinators, affect pest control and have a positive effect on our agriculture and our economy,' Munroe said. 'We want them in our neighborhoods.' ___ Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice. ___ For more AP gardening stories, go to
ABC News
16-05-2025
- General
- ABC News
Imported emu colony swam to the mainland now thriving with the locals
In Potato Point on the NSW south coast, a mob of emus imported as pets from Western Australia broke free and now roam the beaches and suburbia.
South China Morning Post
16-05-2025
- General
- South China Morning Post
Farewell, my pink lady, that beloved smelly but sturdy sofa
One good thing about Toronto's suburbia is that you can throw away your unwanted furniture, no matter the size – bulky or small, heavy or light – on your front kerb. But considering the municipal garbage disposal charge they make you pay it's hardly a perk. So now, there she sits, my beloved sofa waiting to be collected and crushed into pieces, looking sad and lonely, unwanted, abandoned, almost tragic. I can see it as I type these words from my front window. It has been a faithful companion since I returned to the Canadian city from Hong Kong almost a decade ago. But our relationship began long before that. My late mother bought it before my time. Our relationship first started when I interrupted my life in Hong Kong to go back to graduate school in the early 1990s because my dream of becoming a war journalist in Asia went nowhere. Say what you like about my pink lady, she was sturdy, definitely not the Ikea type. The original pink cushions were worn out and long gone. I took the striped light-brown ones you see in the photo from my neighbour when he threw his sofa away. I know that's kind of gross but I didn't want to throw away the whole thing and shop for a replacement. I laid flat on that sofa so many hours of the day for years I developed a weak back and constant lower back pain. It probably gave me scoliosis. My big yellow cat Bloomie made it worse by using me as his human pillow. One of the immutable laws of cats is that when they lie on top of you, you have to stay still for as long as they want. Now that I have done the unthinkable with my sofa, I don't know how to feel – melancholy, uncaring, dismissive, detached …? Surprisingly to me, none of these emotions/ideations have a hold on me, so I can pick and choose. I choose detachment.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Childhood Trauma Gives Way to Adult Ambivalence
What surprised me most about Honor Jones's debut novel, 'Sleep,' wasn't its smarts or its savvy, or even its astute renderings of motherhood, daughter-hood and the fraught enterprise of trying to regard each one through the lens of the other. No, what surprised me was that out of its careful, orderly prose — every word neatly placed as if on a well-set table — grew an exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf, all masters of the repressed and unsayable. She covers the same material — the resentments and traumas that smolder in families wrapped in a suburban idyll — and with similar delicacy and humor. But 'Sleep' also introduces a measure of optimism and generosity I found refreshing. 'Sleep' doesn't have the best start, but stick with it. The novel opens with the slightly humdrum threshold moments of 10-year-old Margaret's life as she begins to notice her body and debate who she is in the world, a girl or a woman. (At the shoe store: 'She definitely wasn't going to wear light-up Disney sneakers, but she wasn't going to wear purple velvet stilettos either.') It all feels like a familiar coming-of-age story until Margaret experiences something no child should, putting a more sinister spin on what it means to 'come of age' well before your time. From here the third-person perspective matures into Margaret's adulthood, and the novel matures into something more poignant, and interesting, as well. Margaret is now a 35-year-old magazine editor in New York City, and a newly divorced mother of two young daughters. It's the beginning of the #MeToo movement and most of the pieces she works on are first-person accounts of unwanted male attention. The pitches run the gamut, and come in with manipulative urgency — 'by speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we,' Margaret thinks. 'How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it — that confident plural voice?' Margaret is ambivalent about these stories and her own. What narrative should her childhood experience fall into? And how should she tell this story to herself as she contends with being both a parent to girls and a daughter to an aging mother, Elizabeth, on whose watch Margaret suffered? Jones is interested in the liminal space Margaret finds herself in, a space more psychological than generational: a state of consciousness that hovers between her past and present, resembling the uncertain and unstable experience of sleep. The novel excels when exploring this extrasensory place where we come to terms with our lives. If this sounds fey, part of the pleasure of 'Sleep' is that it's grounded in the prosaic; it traces a series of familial episodes that should feel banal but that are instead shot through with feeling. Take a scene where Margaret goes to pick up her daughters from her ex-husband Ezra's apartment. She's trying to corral the kids, but they are stalling. Five-year-old Jo keeps knocking things out of the medicine cabinet, including Ezra's new girlfriend's anti-wrinkle cream. Eight-year-old Helen is coloring a picture of her grandmother's house in New Jersey. Shortly they will all be visiting this house for a weekend to celebrate Jo's birthday. The stakes of the weekend are high: Elizabeth is overbearing, demanding, matriarch of the unsaid. The stakes of Margaret picking up her daughters are low. It's in the intersection of the two that Jones brandishes her artistry: It's chilling: the ex-husband gleefully watching his wife trying to shepherd the kids while he just sits there. Helen innocently drawing the house where Margaret suffered. The light that stops at the window. Jones is very good at capturing how trauma can taint even small moments like these, in subtle and insidious ways — which is perhaps why she's styled her prose so tightly. There are no crescendos here, no soaring, looping sentences full of ecstasy or dread. Instead she's hung her prose on a tension rod of unease, a proxy for how Margaret experiences her everyday life. It's tidy, and it works.
