What drives animals to your yard? It's complicated

Listener Shabnam Khan has a problem: Every time she works in her garden, she’s visited by lizards and frogs. Shabnam has lived in the metro Atlanta area for decades, and she says this number of scaly, clammy visitors has exploded over the past few years. Frogs croak at night; lizards sun on the cement. And she wants to know, where did all of these animals come from? It turns out, there are a number of potential answers – from small-scale environmental changes like natural plants and new water sources to large-scale shifts like urbanization and development displacing local wildlife. On this month’s Nature Quest, host Emily Kwong https://www.npr.org/people/767284140/emily-kwong and producer Hannah Chinn https://www.npr.org/people/1255819925/hannah-chinn discuss the possibilities – and impacts – of these changes. If you live in the Atlanta area and are interested in volunteering with MAAMP (the Metro Atlanta Amphibian Monitoring Program), you can sign up for training here https://amphibianfoundation.typeform.com/MAAMP?typeform. This episode is part of Nature Quest, our monthly segment that brings you a question from a fellow listener who is noticing a change in the world around them. Send a voice memo to [email protected] mailto:[email protected] telling us your name, location and a question about a change you’re seeing in nature – it could be our next Nature Quest episode! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Speaker 00

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone. Emily Kwong here with producer Hannah Chin. Hey.

• 0:28Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Emily.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  OK, so I've been looking into a question from one of our listeners in Lawrenceville, Georgia, which is a suburb about 30 miles outside downtown Atlanta.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  It's very pretty here in Atlanta. Lots of hills and very green. When you're landing at the airport, you can see it's just a green canopy all over the city.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  So this is Shabnam Khan. She's lived in and around the area since 1986. And clearly, she really loves the place she lives, partly because it's so lush.

• 1:00Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, Atlanta is beautiful. It's also subtropical, so I imagine there's lots of plants that thrive there.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Exactly, which is great for Shabnam because she loves to garden. But there's one problem with her garden, Emily, a problem that's been visiting pretty regularly, that started small.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  A lizard here and there.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  And it's just not going away.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  I do gardening quite a bit. And now, last two or three or four years, every time I'm gardening, every time I'm working in the yard, I get scared by lizards and frogs.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  And there are many of them and lots of different varieties, like stripes and like beautiful colors, but I'm still scared of them.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Shabnam told me she doesn't even want to be in her garden anymore. She's so stressed out by this spike in garden visitors. And she says it's not uncommon for her to hear an army of frogs croaking in her neighborhood at night, or to find multiple brightly colored lizards sunning on the grass. And now she's like, where did all of these come from?

• 2:09Speaker 03

  It's just the quantity boggles my mind. Just the population seems to have exploded.

• 2:15Emily Kwong?

  Today on the show, we are going on a lizard hunt.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  We're talking to local experts about why so many lizards and frogs are showing themselves now, and whether there's a way to manage Shabnam's clammy, scaly little problem.

• 2:29Emily Kwong?

  You are listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 2:39Speaker 00

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• 3:51Emily Kwong?

  OK, shortwavers, once again, we are on a nature quest. This is our monthly segment, bringing you a question from a fellow shortwaver who's paying attention to their local environment and how it's changing.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  And this month, Emily, you and I are investigating the world of herpetology. Frogs, snakes, lizards, salamanders, to help out our listener Shabnam in Georgia.

• 4:11Emily Kwong?

  I love it. OK.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  So first things first, to start this nature quest, I needed to know what specific frogs and lizards Shabnam was seeing in her yard.

• 4:20Emily Kwong?

  Naturally.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  There are around 180 reptiles and amphibians native to Georgia, so I kind of needed to narrow it down. So I asked her to send me some pictures. Emily, I'm sending them to you right now.

• 4:31Emily Kwong?

  OK.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Do you want to describe these little creatures for our listeners?

• 4:36Emily Kwong?

  So this one, it's like a peacock lizard that has this pink throat sack hanging from his little lizard head.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, the top animal is the green anole. That's one of our most common lizards. Found pretty much statewide, really common in gardens and home areas.

• 4:55Emily Kwong?

  Then I'm looking at, woo, I really like this. It's a salamander with like an electric blue tail.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  It is one of our skinks, probably a five line skink, but there's a couple of other species that look similar. Green tree frog, that's.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So this is Daniel Solenberger, and he's a herpetologist and senior wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

• 5:16Emily Kwong?

  He identified these animals very quickly. I guess this is what he does for a living. So, but could he tell you anything else about them or why they might be populating Shabnum's yard?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  The things that are using her yard in Lawrenceville are very adaptable, common things, things that can tolerate a wide range of conditions. They're fine living in neighborhoods and homes. They can live under, you know, the deck on your porch or clump of cattails next to a retention pond.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Basically everywhere.

• 5:48Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so these are not invasive lizards and frogs.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  It appears not, no, they're just super common.

• 5:54Emily Kwong?

  But Shabnum also said she's seen increasingly more of these critters. So did Daniel tell you why that might be?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I asked him that too.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  You know, I guess I would ask her, has anything changed in your neighborhood or your yard in that period of time? You know, there are things that you can do in your yard intentionally or unintentionally that tend to make better wildlife habitat.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Things like not mowing your grasses often, or planting more native plants, maybe putting in a water feature like a fountain or a pond.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  You know, like if you, if you put in a goldfish pond in metro Atlanta, you're going to get tree frogs and, and stuff using it.

• 6:29Emily Kwong?

  Oh, duh, right, because amphibians love water.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Right, and other local experts told me this too, like Mara Dudley. She is a biology professor at Oglethorpe University, and she's also the urban ecologist for the Amphibian Foundation in Atlanta.

• 6:43Speaker 06

  What species might actually be found in your listeners' area is going to depend a lot on the habitats that are present. And primarily. Is your listener within about 100 yards of a body of water is going to make a big difference in terms of what species they might find.

• 7:04Emily Kwong?

  So even a pool a block away could be contributing to what Shabnam is seeing in her yard.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. It's like the length of a football field.

• 7:13Emily Kwong?

  Hmm. So what can she do then to avoid seeing more lizards and frogs in her garden?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Daniel and Meyer told me there's two different ways to kind of go about it. There's the full eradication approach, basically making your yard as inhospitable as possible to any animal.

• 7:26Emily Kwong?

  Uh huh.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  So things like cutting your grass very frequently, keeping it very short and neat. If you have flower beds around your home, either don't have those or keep the shrubs and things trimmed so there's, there's not layers of vegetation all the way to the ground. Uh, make sure you don't have any rock piles, piles of limbs, piles of leaves, things like that, just places for animals to hide. These are all terrible ideas in my opinion. But if you want to see less wildlife around your home, have nothing but concrete and sod and you'll see a lot less stuff.

• 8:05Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Which Daniel does say comes with trade offs.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  Now, keep in mind, when you're creating or destroying wildlife habitat around your home, it's hard to control what you're going to see. So for instance, if she really likes the birds, well, this is going to maybe decrease the amount or diversity of birds you see too.

• 8:27Emily Kwong?

  So that's the eradication approach.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So that's the eradication approach. And then there's the sharing is caring approach.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  I'll say this to your listener, they probably don't want to see her as much as she does not want to see them, right? Because. Any large organism is going to appear to be a predator to any kind of amphibian or reptile in the area.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Because Emily, these reptiles and the amphibians, they want to hide. So Mara suggested build a spot for them to do that. Rather than tearing rocks and native plants out completely, just put them in a separate part of a garden. The part that maybe Shabnam doesn't garden in.

• 9:09Emily Kwong?

  So create like a little amphibian sanctuary in a dedicated spot of the garden.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And Mara says this gentler approach, it has benefits for people, too.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  If your listener loves to garden, then she is probably benefiting significantly from having snakes or frogs in her garden because they are some of the biggest consumers of insects and other pests like mice and rats and chipmunks that might be consuming things in her garden.

• 9:43Emily Kwong?

  I feel like this is a whole perspective shift on amphibians in Atlanta from these herpetologists. They're like, it may not be so bad.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:52Emily Kwong?

  Of course, I imagine this is happening in other places, not just Atlanta, where someone is noticing their garden being frequented by more and different animals. Are there larger trends in urban wildlife? Like, can we link what's happening in Shabnam's yard to a like bigger ecological rise and fall in urban lizards and frogs?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Mara told me, to some extent, yes, the shift in wildlife that we're seeing goes beyond the greater Atlanta area. It's happening in all these places that are urbanizing. Because what we gain in real estate, animals lose in habitat, like in South Florida, where developers continue to push the Everglades boundary, or subdivisions and ranches in the greater Yellowstone area.

• 10:38Speaker 06

  If you move into a given area and there's a low amount of development around you, and over time, the demand for housing increases, what that means is all of these pockets that are natural areas tend to be then taken up and developed. And what that means is that what was potentially suitable habitat for a lot of amphibians and reptiles now Is no longer suitable and those species have to move.

• 11:06Emily Kwong?

  Right, because if they lose their habitat, then they gotta go somewhere and that somewhere could be places that people are.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Mara said this is just one of a few ways that human development can affect local amphibians. Another way is fragmentation.

• 11:22Speaker 06

  Particularly when it comes to amphibians, these species that live in terrestrial ecosystems most of the year and breed in freshwater ecosystems. If there's now a road that is going through that connection in between, that puts a lot of species at greater risk for mortality.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Mara also mentioned human use of chemicals like pesticides that are really bad for amphibians and reptiles.

• 11:47Emily Kwong?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  And then there's the issue of the predators that humans bring with us, like outdoor cats. Mara likes to cite a 2020 study about this.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  It was estimated that up to 92 million frogs were killed per year by cats in Australia. And there have been some similar studies and kind of numbers that are coming out for the United States as well. It's in the millions, and that's just frogs.

• 12:14Emily Kwong?

  Oh, dear.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  That number doesn't count snakes, salamanders, lizards, other animals that are also killed by cats.

• 12:20Emily Kwong?

  Honestly, this doesn't surprise me. Cats are, they're adorable, I have one, and they're meant to kill.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  They are, but the good thing is, Emily, these things can work in reverse as well, right? So just as human development can hurt reptiles and amphibians, it's also pretty easy for humans to help them. Like planting native plants and removing invasives or avoiding pesticide use, keeping our cats inside, and then supporting temporary wetlands like ponds and marshes wherever they crop up near us.

• 12:49Emily Kwong?

  So what I'm hearing from you, Hannah, is there is so much we can do to help amphibians in our neighborhoods.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yes, totally. And there's actually one more aspect of Shabnam's question that I want to get into, Emily. This idea that she's noticing more lizards and frogs. Because Mara and Daniel told me, just because she's seeing them more often, doesn't necessarily mean there's a population increase, that there's more of them.

• 13:12Emily Kwong?

  OK, but how come we don't know?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Because there's still a big gap in local scientists' data. And that's because long-term studies monitoring the populations of these species in metro Atlanta really just don't exist. So Mara is trying to change that through community science.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  So the community science program is called the Metro Atlanta Amphibian Monitoring Program, which we like to refer to as MAMP, because that's quite a mouthful.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And Emily, anyone in the metro Atlanta area can apply to be a community scientist in this MAMP program. Mara and her colleagues will train them to identify each species in the field and document their findings. And then volunteers have to take a series of quizzes to basically show that they retained all that information.

• 13:58Emily Kwong?

  This is like school.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  I mean, Emily, you love school.

• 14:01Emily Kwong?

  I do. That's true.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Anyway, there is an online signup form for trainings and program news. We'll link to it in the show notes.

• 14:08Emily Kwong?

  And if you, like Hannah and I, are not in the metro Atlanta area but still want to learn how to identify and document local frogs, consider seeing if you have an active local Frog Watch chapter. Search your city or state and Frog Watch USA. Thank you so much for guiding us through this month's hoppy, hippity nature quest, Hannah.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Anytime, Emily.

• 14:30Emily Kwong?

  Shortwavers, if you want to get in on this Nature Quest series, it's so easy. Look around your environment. Is anything changing? Or do you have an environmental question you want us to investigate? Well, record a memo and email it to us at [email protected], and we may look into it for a future episode. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy with help from Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Sam Poulsen composed and produced our Nature Quest theme music. If you liked this episode, follow us on the NPR app or wherever else you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  And I'm Hannah Chen.

• 15:07Emily Kwong?

  Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 15:14Speaker 00

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