Los Angeles tends to strike outsiders as a borderless mishmash of suburbs spread over an unfriendly landscape with no significant natural source of water. When it’s not on fire, it seems to be sliding into the ocean or collapsing under the weight of its own untamable development. And yet Los Angeles transplants will still brag to their loved ones across the country that they could go skiing and surfing in the same day (if for some reason they felt so inclined).
As the conservationist Craig Stanford reminds us, however, you don’t have to drive to Big Bear or the beach to feel the pulse of nature in L.A. In “Unnatural Habitat: The Native and Exotic Wildlife of Los Angeles,” Stanford offers Angelenos — and anyone interested in the function and dysfunction of (sub)urban ecosystems — a guide to the natural life that teems beneath our freeways, wanders into our backyards and fights for survival in the deserts and mountains that surround our city.
Stanford, who has conducted field research around the world, lives in Pasadena, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. As he details more than 150 species of L.A.
flora and fauna — from native mountain lions to exotic earthworms, weeds that occur naturally and palm trees that, surprisingly, don’t — he evokes a portrait of an unusual city’s special, bizarre and unexpectedly fragile wildlife. He conjures up evolutionary histories, stories of foreign species’ arrival and their effects on an ecosystem that is mass.
