Coyotes in the Hydrangeas: My Personal Anthropocene

In my latest piece for The Attentive Naturalist on Substack, I write about two coyotes moved that recently moved into my neighborhood. They quickly earned names, Dodger and Daisy, while the local cat population grew just a bit thinner.

That single observation opened onto something much larger. Urban coyote numbers are climbing across most of the country, and red foxes, pushed out of the countryside by those same coyotes, are increasingly making cities and suburbs their home instead. My own garden turns out to host the same pattern in miniature, a small, human-made ecosystem thriving with animals nobody planted on purpose.

The insects tell a harder story. Real data from Britain, Ohio, and Germany show flying insect populations falling sharply over the past twenty years, in some cases by more than half. My own flowering trees had a rough spring too, victims of an increasingly common phenomenon called false spring, where warm weather tricks buds into opening before a routine frost kills them. Bud loss and insect decline reinforce each other, quietly, across landscapes far larger than one backyard. This is the Anthropocene I observe every day, up close, from the comfort of my Adirondack chair.

The essay traces all of this back to a single question: what is your own garden trying to tell you, if you know how to look? Read the full piece, backed by primary science throughout, on my Substack.