Transforming Suburbia: How One Yard Became Home to 1,800 Invertebrates

Matthew Shepherd (0:02)

Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society, where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work, go to xerces.org/donate.

Rachel Dunham (0:18)

Hi, I'm Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew Shepherd (0:20)

And I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel Dunham (0:23)

On Bug Banter, we talk a lot about what people can do to help invertebrates, and nothing is more inspiring than hearing one person's successful journey to creating a wildlife haven in their own backyard. Joining us to share his experience and tell us about his incredible space is Elliott Gordon. Elliott has been a Xerces ambassador since 2022, based in New Mexico. At his home in suburban Albuquerque, he stewards a high-quality pesticide-free landscape of diverse native and xeric plants, and tries to document all of the wildlife that it supports.

He is a member of the brand-new New Mexico Rare Arthropod Technical Council, formed to identify species of conservation concern in the state. He also volunteers to the New Mexico Backyard Refuge Program, New Mexico Butterfly Monitoring Network, Pollinators in the Neighborhood, which helps support Albuquerque's Bee City USA initiatives, and the University of New Mexico's Museum of Southwestern Biology as a beetle researcher. That's a lot, Elliott. Very impressive. Welcome to Bug Banter. Really excited to have you here.

Elliott Gordon (1:25)

Thank you, Rachel and Matthew.

Matthew Shepherd (1:27)

To start us off, what inspired you to make changes in your yards, and in particular for invertebrates?

Elliott Gordon (1:34)

I knew this question was coming. And the real answer is that none of this started out as being about invertebrates or pollinators.

It just started out with wanting a better, more colorful, less of a heat island of a garden. So over time, as I've learned more about it and joined the Xerces Society and got involved with these other organizations, it's become more about the invertebrates and the pollinators. But it just started as a way to have some pretty flowers. And I'll talk more about all the things that were wrong with my yard to start with and how it's improved over time.

Matthew Shepherd (2:11)

Yeah. Do you think that anybody could do what you've done?

If you give someone encouragement, would you cheer them on or would you say, oh, no, we'll step back, keep away?

Elliott Gordon (2:23)

Yes, I absolutely would encourage everyone to do their part in bringing back the pollinators rewilding, however you want to phrase it. I have some built-in natural geographic advantages in terms of the yard list we'll talk about in the diversity of invertebrates, but certainly anyone just about anywhere can improve their spaces.

Rachel Dunham (2:47)

I love that you started this just because you wanted pretty flowers and to reduce the amount of heat that you were absorbing in your yard. I just think that's really cool because I think a lot of people who listen to this might come at it from the angle of building for invertebrates, but it gives me hope that people out there that, of invertebrates aside, if you just want a pretty yard, there are things that you can do that can really help these creatures that we're trying to save.

That's really interesting to hear.

Can you tell us a little bit about your property?

Elliott Gordon (3:16)

Absolutely. I'm in the northeast part of Albuquerque.

We're on a grid, but it's not a very useful grid because most people live in the northeast part of Albuquerque.

This is north of I-40, east of I-25, and I'm almost to the edge of what are the Sandia Mountains, which is a combination of open space managed by the city and the county, and then it goes into National Forest and Wilderness Land as you get higher up the mountain. And my neighborhood is a pretty typical neighborhood for being on kind of the outskirts of town with homes that were built mostly in the 80s and 90s on fairly regular rectangles of land. And they, it's kind of a hilly neighborhood, so each street was basically leveled out to build the homes and then the next home up is a little bit higher and so on and so forth. And the thing you really have to know is the conditions in Albuquerque were super different back in the 90s when my house was built and when the landscaping, original landscaping was put in. So we're talking about people were planning cottonwoods all over the city. And cottonwoods are water hogs, especially our local Rio Grande Eastern cottonwood. And on top of that, basically everyone had a lawn. So you had cottonwoods, sycamore, ash trees, all these really associated with like Eastern forests and lawns. And there wasn't much thought given to zero escaping water conservation, any of that. And that started to change into the 2000s, and the city actually started paying people to get rid of their lawns. But they didn't really care what you replaced it with, as long as it was low or no water. So a lot of people tore out their lawns and replaced it with all rock. And so that's where I moved in. The cottonwoods had unfortunately come down by the time I bought this house, because the roots of a cottonwood are really great at finding water.