On Safari South Portland's backyard naturalist BY ALEX IRVINE

Hannah Holmes’s previous book, The Secret Life of Dust, bored deep into the invisible world of, well, dust, giving us nature red in tooth and microscopic claw. Her current offering, Suburban Safari: A Life on the Lawn, seems so wide-ranging in comparison that the reader needs to stop every so often and recall that the vast majority of the book takes place within two-tenths of an acre in South Portland. Although along the way Holmes makes information-gathering excursions to Baltimore, Washington DC, Phoenix and San Diego, her project in Suburban Safari is, as she puts it early on, to find out exactly what’s going on out there in her tiny expanse of grass, garden, and trees.

It turns out that there’s quite a bit there, and that the orthodox environmentalist’s response to the American lawn—that it is an ecological wasteland serving only to funnel pesticides into the groundwater—is true only for the most assiduously cared-for swaths of green. These "grass farms" are in fact a blight upon the natural world, particularly in those parts of the country where plants like grass must be nurtured by the wholesale waste of water resources. If you don’t poison your lawn, though, and if you don’t spend your life seeding and weeding and cutting down trees because you’re sick of raking the leaves, you can observe a startling slice of nature from your kitchen window. "From a bug’s-eye perspective, or a bird’s-eye view," Holmes writes, "most yards present a rich array of opportunities: There’s a ‘prairie’ of lawn, a ‘savanna’ of shrubs, and a ‘forest’ of trees, all within a few flaps of the wing. Many animals thrive on this patchwork of habitats—many more than I would have guessed before I delved into this world."

This is a good thing, since new lawn appears in the United States at the rate of something like a million acres a year, usually replacing much more diverse ecologies. Holmes decided to spend a year studying up on what happens in her yard, and the story she has to tell comes complete with murder, humor, disquisitions on glaciation and the history of the dog, a rueful tally of the American household’s energy consumption, and wry observations on the lengths to which even a dedicated backyard naturalist isn’t willing to go. Holmes is a marvelously engaging narrator, making light of her tendency to get "squealy" around her more creepy-crawly subjects and shamelessly indulging her impulse to anthropomorphize her yard’s more interesting denizens. We meet two nations of ants, those of Zippytown and Mellowburg; Cheeky the chipmunk; Stumpy the squirrel; Yawp the crow; and on and on. This is a useful storytelling strategy, since the average reader can follow the story of Cheeky more easily than a story about "a chipmunk," but it also makes for a much more savory read. How can you not love a book which includes the following passage about a robber fly ensnared by Babbette the spider: "This inch-long fellow won my admiration after I read about the trials he endures when mating. The females are such knee-jerk assassins that a courting male either holds out food or waits until the lady already has a mouthful of something else. I suppose it’s a spider-eat-fly-eat-gnat world, but I was sorry to see Babbette straitjacket the big boy, suck him empty, and cast his remains onto the heap of exoskeletons that must be accruing on the cellar door below."

Other writers on environmental and popular science topics would do well to take a cue from Holmes’s strategy in this book. She isn’t shy about enumerating the dangers associated with mercury, pesticides, sprawl, or any of the other human-caused ills that wreck large swathes of the natural world—but neither is she prone to the harangues that characterize much environmental writing. It’s awfully refreshing to read a naturalist who makes no bones about her genocidal impulses toward sparrows and Asiatic bittersweet. Everything about Suburban Safari is refreshing, in fact: its exploration of the nature just outside our back doors; Holmes’s deft excursions into climatology, geology, and other –ologies; and a whole pile of eyebrow-raising facts. Did you know that an oak tree releases different chemicals when it is under assault from different kinds of insects? And that other oak trees in the area will arrange their chemical defenses according to threats anticipated because of communications from the original assaultee? And that the trees also chemically alert local bird populations to the presence of yummy insectile snacks? I didn’t. And before writing this book, neither did Holmes, whose pithy summation of the situation is, "That’s pretty clever, for a big stick."

Pretty clever is an apt description of Suburban Safari as well. You’ll finish the book knowing more about your immediate surroundings than you ever thought you wanted to—and it’ll be the most entertaining education you ever get.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com

Hannah Holmes will be reading Friday, March 3, at noon, at the Portland Public Library, 871-1700; Tuesday, March 8, at 7 p.m., at Nonesuch Books, in South Portland, 799-2659; and Thursday, March 10, at 7 p.m., at Longfellow Books, in Monument Square, 772-4045.