ABOUT US

Suburban Birbs is a blog written by Nancy Garay (that's me, folks!).

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My husband, Mark Segal, and I are long-time Bridgewater homeowners and I'm also a life-long resident of Somerset County.  As an avid naturalist, I’ve been gardening and transforming our property for nearly 25 years.

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As witnesses to the constant development and loss of our wild spaces, we became deeply involved in Citizen Science—and dedicated to preserving and restoring Bridgewater's biodiversity. We strive to promote re-wilding of residential yards as a means to re-establish critical habitat for species suffering steep declines from habitat loss and fragmentation. And healthy environments for them are healthy environments for us.

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Our humble house is shared with 5 indoor cats, two mice, and a not-insignificant quantity of impressively large basement-dwelling wolf spiders. We share our property with a rich and growing diversity of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and bugs--and thousands of plants, trees, shrubs and vines.

Building, expanding, and maintaining wildlife habitat is what we do and what we've committed to.

 

We constantly assess and re-assess the state of the property and review its successes and failures. We count and record bird data daily. We build ponds and water features. We plant….and plant…and plant--and then plant some more! We try to create and facilitate the conditions needed for our resident and migratory species to thrive. Mostly, what we do is pay attention, learn, and act.

 

Developing a habitat is hard work, but the reward is rich and profoundly gratifying. There isn't a really a word for how it feels when you plant a fruit/berry-producing tree for a specific bird, wait patiently for years for the tree to bear, then witness that very bird finally arrive and devour the berries—just as had been envisioned and hoped. There really is no word sufficient…you might call it simply ‘happiness’, but it’s so much more than that.

 

We love what we do.

As a long-time resident, I have seen what’s been lost here; things that were dear to me—places and features that inspired my love of nature & ecology--have been erased and destroyed.

 

I hear chainsaws and the deep thud of trees getting chopped & dropped almost weekly (sometimes daily!) from April-November. I’ve watched 150-year-old  healthy oaks felled for the inconvenience of their “litter” (otherwise known as ‘fertilizer’). I’ve seen new homeowners clear their lot of mature trees, only to move away two years later. I see the lunacy of it, the heartbreak of it, the uselessness, wastefulness, and selfishness of it.

 

These trees, these spaces, these places are needed…they are the home of so many things. We want to be part of the solution, and sharing this patch of earth is such an easy thing to do.