Bjorgaas is back home in Oslo after the conclusion of a job as a tour guide for Antarctic cruises and feeling a bit at a loss, starts taking long walks within the city. These walks make her more aware of the elements of nature which exist and even thrive in an urban environment.
The book is her exploring those elements through her own observation or conversations with experts. One chapter might focus on ants, seen through the prism of her discovering a line of them from a colony outside her porch into her kitchen. She'll describe how ants and their colonies function, the different roles, the importance of smell or touch for communication, the relationship certain species have with the aphids infesting her bean sprouts.
Or she might discuss seagulls. How their numbers are diminishing in the wild, while thriving in the city. This includes a ferry trip to the fishing islands of Fleinvaer, once home to abundant gull and tern populations. There's an effective bit where the fisherman who takes her out there cuts the engine and they just bob offshore. No sounds of calling birds, where they were once abundant.
Bjorgaas and the people she speaks with discuss current or past research on the species she focuses on (Bernd Heinrech and John Marzluff both get mentioned in the chapter about crows), but she works to keep the information accessible to laymen. How the aphids' waste provides nutrients the ants don't get from the rest of their diet, or how the types of lichen that dominate cities has change from those that thrive with high sulfide content in the air to those that can handle high nitrogen content as air pollution laws have prompted changes.
Bjorgass attempts a few studies of her own, from nighttime surveys of calling birds to trying to bury underwear in different soils to study decomposition as a measure of soil micro-biome health. That last one ends up being especially funny as one of her urban locations has been torn up and paced over in just the few weeks since she buried it. The scientist she had spoken to told her that often the soils in cities didn't originate there, but was scraped off from somewhere else and trucked in, then compacted to the point it's a poor growing medium.
'As I sat under the beech tree, it felt like I was eavesdropping on the blackbird's private chat room: the night. Not only do city blackbirds switch to a higher frequency in order to talk to each other in peace, they have also found their own rhythm: they start singing up to five hours earlier than their cousins in the forest.'
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