Wild Pavements

In the thirty years I’ve been traveling for my bread and cheese career developing optical instruments, I’ve found myself stuck in various airports, idling in front of and transiting between hotels, restaurants, and convention centers waiting for taxis, and pretending to be interested in the small talk of factory managers in the parking lots of their facilities from Asia across North America and into Europe. To keep me from faking a heart attack to get out of these situations, I long ago took up the practice of always carrying a monocular or small binocular and a hand lens in my shoulder bag to enable me to examine any promising sidewalk crack, tree basin, building ledge or the skies above for signs of more interesting life than humans. As my impromptu urban naturalizing activities have mostly only gained me quizzical looks and the odd hesitant question, I long thought I was the only person who did such things. Then recently I discovered the writings of Amanda Tuke.

Writing The Urban Naturalist website and contributing articles to such worthy publications as Bird Watching Magazine, BBC Countryfile Magazine, and British Wildlife, to mention only a few, Ms. Tuke – so I’ve discovered – shares my interest in finding overlooked urban natural history, well, interesting. Most recently, she has seen her first book published: Wild Pavements; Exploring Britain’s Cities with an Urban Naturalist.

Taking her readers along on journeys around London and through other urban centers of Great Britain and beyond, Ms. Tuke brings to light the myriad flora and fauna to be discovered if only one shifts one’s frame of reference for observation from the grand and charismatic to the mundane and often neglected. The enthusiasm she brings to her discoveries is genuinely infectious and inspiring as well as informative and very enjoyable. Indeed, this book has already changed my motivation for stolen moments of urban naturalizing from an admittedly somewhat misanthropic time-filling habit into a genuinely curiosity-motivated activity. I’ve even looking forward to my next trip into a city just so I can try out some of what I’ve learned from her essays.