Even in an urban environment, nature is all around, if you know where to look. This week, writer Joanna Brichetto joins me to discuss her essay collection, “This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature,” and the benefits of becoming attuned to wildlife.
Joanna is a certified Tennessee Naturalist and writes the urban nature blog Sidewalk Nature: Everyday Wonders in Everyday Habitat Loss. Her essays have appeared in Brevity, Short Reads, Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, the Hopper, Flyway, the Fourth River, and elsewhere. She is a late-blooming naturalist with a sharp eye for wildlife. Despite having chronic illnesses — she suffers from debilitating migraines — she spends much of her time exploring nature and has an infectious love for the flora and fauna near and in her Nashville home. In “This Is How a Robin Drinks,” Joanna shares her observations, reflections and commentary in 52 short, witty lyrical essays.
Joanna Brichetto is a certified Tennessee Naturalist and writes the urban nature blog Sidewalk Nature: Everyday Wonders in Everyday Habitat Loss.
Joanna teaches that nature isn’t only in a park or wilderness. It’s right outside our door, and sometimes, it’s on the door or comes inside to find us. Nature is the jumping spider on the screen, the assassin bug in the shower, and the cluster of ladybugs at the lamp, according to Joanna. It is the moss on brick where gutters spill, a sycamore sprout in the storm drain, and the trash can lid turned into a bird bath.
These essays are so thoughtful, deep and introspective, and Joanna’s writing conveys her humor and wisdom. Many of us tend to walk by so many things every day that we have no appreciation for, and yet Joanna has the ability to draw those things out, slap us alongside the face and say, “Hey, here’s some things you should maybe know about.”
I first learned about “This Is How a Robin Drinks” through an Instagram post from two-time podcast guest Margaret Renkl. Many of you know her from this podcast, her New York Times bestselling book “The Comfort of Crows” or her New York Times op-eds. When Margaret started posting about how much she loved “This Is How a Robin Drinks,” I knew that I had to read it too. In fact, Margaret’s endorsement is right on the front cover with four simple words: “Profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary.”
This book is everything Margaret said it is and more. It’s funny, it’s real, it’s candid, it’s insightful. Margaret goes on to say, in her endorsement inside the cover, “This profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary book will change how you see the world in everything living within it, including yourself.”
That is exactly the feeling that I got while reading this book, and Doug Tallamy adds his praise as well, writing, “Joanna’s love of nature is infectious, and with a little luck, it will go viral and infect us all.”
Essayist Joanna Brichetto’s debut book, “This Is How a Robin Drinks.”
Meet Joanna Brichetto
Joanna grew up in the suburbs — Knoxville, in east Tennessee. Her mother had an iron triangle dinner bell, and as long as Joanna came when she rang the bell, Joanna had the freedom to explore.
“It was the suburbs. There were no sidewalks, but still there was a lot to investigate,” Joanna recalls. “I had a tree I could climb. I was happiest when I was outside or with a book. And if I was outside with a book, it was just heaven.”
Her grandparents had a house in the country where they raised their own food, fished and hunted.
“My grandfather made his own house, his own truck,” Joanna says. “So I come from good stock that really knew what to do with nature.”
Then when she was in fourth grade, a teacher read a bit of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”
“That was a game changer, and a couple of years later, another wonderful teacher took the whole class to an environmental camp in the Smoky Mountains,” Joanna says. “And so those were great experiences.”
Joanna now lives in Nashville, a move that she made after college. She said once she arrived in middle Tennessee, she never looked back. She was particularly taken by the cedar glades, a rare and endangered ecosystem.
She is now a certified Tennessee Naturalist, a member of the second class ever of Tennesee Naturalists in 2012.
“That was a dream come true to have something in my own town, a certification program where I could go and enroll and meet with other people from the community, from all different backgrounds who were united in our love of nature, who wanted to talk about tadpoles and who wanted to get down in the dirt and investigate: What is that? Where is it from? What does it need? What can I do? It was a dream come true. I suddenly had colleagues where I had nothing before.”
She found her people, and writes about their walks and excursions in her book.
Though this is Joanna’s first book, she has been submitting essays to environmental journals and place-based journals for a number of years. She sent one to Chapter 16, a journal for Tennessee writers that Margaret Renkl edited at the time. Margaret selected Joanna’s essay for publication, and fast-forward years later, she gave Joanna advice on how to get her collection of essays published.
For Joanna’s book launch, Margaret offered to host a conversation with Joanna at Parnassus Books in Nashville. Given Margaret’s reputation, the event was packed.
Joanna holds a periodical cicada.
(Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto)
From Journal Entries to Essays
Many of Joanna’s essays are mined from her journals. She has kept a journal since fourth grade, and since the age of 19, she has suffered from migraines. Living with migraines comes up quite a bit in her essays, which serves to remind us why it’s good to be outside when you’re not feeling your best.
Joanna used to think that to get out into nature, she had to get in her car and drive for 20 minutes at least. “Little by little I realized, hey, nature’s in my yard too,” she says. “Nature’s at the mailbox. It’s down the street, it’s at the stop sign.”
On a particularly bad migraine day when she managed to drag herself outside, she sat out in the swamp heat of August.
“It’s miserable, but I’m outside and I can’t put sentences together. But I’ve got my notebook on my lap and a pencil, and I can make a list. What do I hear? And I write things down one at a time. What do I see? And I write those things down one at a time. And then maybe a few days later when I’m able to look at a screen again, I will type those into my online journal and then later on form those into an essay.”
When feeling really bad, finding the motivation to get outside is all the more important.
“It’s an opportunity to get outside of our own heads, even just for a minute,” Joanna says. “Just walk outside just for a minute. There is so much to see.”
If you don’t have the leisure to go sit in a lawn chair, she says, consider the time you are going to the mailbox, hanging out clothes on the clothesline or walking to the car.
“All of those experiences are opportunities to just look around where you are,” she says.
A common eastern bumblebee collects pollen from goldenrod.
(Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto)
Can’t Eat Just One
One thing Joana has learned about writing for an audience is to meet people where they are. Rather than leading with walnut husk maggot flies and trashline orbweavers, she can start with the charismatic, colorful things that come to her feeders, like butterflies, hummingbirds and goldfinches.
Joanna borrows the title from the Lay’s potato chips slogan in her essay “Can’t Eat Just One.”
It started with black oil sunflower seeds that had fallen on the ground the previous winter. They sprouted into a patch of sunflowers.
“That’s when I started noticing all the action that was happening on these sunflowers,” she says. “I couldn’t believe all the creatures that came, and then the creatures that ate those creatures, and then the creatures that ate those creatures. And then watching the flowers slowly turn into seeds. And who came for those seeds? It was an endless occupation just for weeks and weeks and weeks. I highly recommend that.”
A visiting goldfinch inspired the title of the essay.
“I had assumed that when these big, beautiful sunflower faces slowly turned into seeds, I was going to do what you see on the internet — I was going to cut the seed head off, hang it upside down and dry it,” she says. “But something was eating the seeds before they could even be seeds. They were still liquid, like white, whippy fat. I couldn’t figure it out, and then finally out the kitchen window, I saw who was ruining what I was hoping to save. It was the goldfinches, female and male, eating the seeds before they could even be seeds, and it was magic to watch them at it.”
Goldfinches have a call that sounds like they are saying “potato chip,” one reason to name the chapter for the Lay’s slogan. The male goldfinch is so yellow, Joanna says, that it reminds her of Lay’s bags, and when she hears them chirp “potato chip,” it makes her want chips.
Little Things That Run The World in Late October
Joanna begins one essay with a quote from naturalist Edward O. Wilson: “Let me say a word on behalf of these little things that run the world.”
Her essay reads:
“Just like that. It’s time to find the sweatshirts. The coconut oil is white again, bath towels stay wet, and I want to wear socks to bed. Just like that. Goldfinches are toppling sunflowers. Black-eyed Susans are only black eyes. Car wheels pop acorns, and bees sleep late in the goldenrod. Just like that. A new neighbor hired Mosquito Joe. Michael is with me on a walk when we see the mosquito man with a gas-powered fogger that shoots pesticide at 295 feet a second. We turn to walk a different route until the spray can settle on trees and bushes and grass and flowers and on bees and caterpillars and ladybugs and soldier beetles and jumping spiders and butterflies that had been there one second ago, 295 feet ago. Little things doing their thing, eating, getting eaten, keeping our world running just like that.”
A Polyphemus moth, a species of giant silk moth.
Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto
This Is How a Robin Drinks
The essay that gave the book its title is “This Is How a Robin Drinks.” It is the saddest essay in the book, Joanna says, explaining that it was her response to yet another mass shooting.
“What do you do when you get that news again? And in my case, you give a robin a drink, you feed the birds in the yard and give them what they need. Because what else can you do?” Joanna says.
It’s hard to even put into words how each of us deals with something so tragic. Sometimes we turn inward and look to nature. The birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks and other wildlife doing what they do, they know no different. Maybe it’s our way to escape, even if it’s just for a moment.
“I feel so out of control and hopeless and helpless when stuff like that happens,” Joanna says. “So I have to look at where I have some measure of influence, which happens to be my driveway, my yard, and I can help the creatures there, even if I can’t help anyone else.”
The last paragraph reads: “There is room for a thing to be astonishing and mundane at the same time. An accidental bird bath ripples, a sunlit drop at the tip of a beak, the matching grays of a robin’s wing and old concrete, the next peacetime massacre with weapons of war. And the next and the next and the next. Watching a robin drink what is offered.”
An eastern gray squirrel outside Joanna’s window.
(Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto)
School Engagement
Joanna is very active in her children’s school engagement — their projects, their assignments. She has the ability to create meaningful, tangible, non-disposable learning opportunities.
In one example, when her son Izzy was home sick and had a test coming up, Joanna took the parts of a tulip poplar and created a learning opportunity for Izzy’s schoolmates.
“Every kid in the class had chosen a different tree to study, but there wasn’t a tulip poplar on the campus. And I knew there was one really nearby,” Joanna recalls.
She brought in the parts of the tulip tree — leaves, twigs and “helicopter” seeds — for the kids to learn about the tree without having to leave the campus. She also brought in a color photo of the tree’s flower and actual tulips, and left them for the teacher.
Joanna writes: “On her desk at the whiteboard, I left a pickle jar filled with orange hothouse tulips, because you can’t understand tulip poplar if you can’t understand tulip. They for sure don’t know what a poplar is, but that’s okay. She told me they all say ‘popular’ anyway.”
Had it been May, when tulips poplars are in flower, she would have brought a flower in. She says they are easy to collect because squirrels nip them off tree.
“They fall on the street and the sidewalk, and you can pick them up and they’re so beautiful. All the colors and the shape — but that nectar, that’s what the squirrels are after. That nectar is so plentiful, it just oozes out of that bowl onto your feet. You just lick it. It is absolutely delicious. I can see why squirrels go crazy for those blossoms.”
Joanna has tasted the nectar herself.
“It’s another way to get to know a tree or a plant in every way that you can that won’t kill you,” she says.
A tulip poplar flower.
(Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto)
Hummingbird Winter
We all love hummingbirds and marvel at their size, energy and migratory patterns. Joanna had a personal experience with a hummingbird and shared an essay about it.
“‘Hummingbird Winter’ came about because I didn’t know we had hummingbirds in winter until just a few years ago,” she recalls. “And I saw a Facebook post by a local bander who said, ‘Hey, if you see a hummingbird after this date, let me know.’ And I saw a hummingbird after that date in my yard on a hummingbird feeder that I had left up because of that post.”
It was December and cold by then. The bander drove an hour to Joanna’s house during COVID. They both had on masks; the bander’s mask had a hummingbird on it. The bander set a cage up around Joanna’s hummingbird feeder, and within about 30 seconds she caught the hummingbird, took its measurements and banded in.
Then the bander asked Joanna if she wanted to hold the hummingbird. She recalls letting her kids, years earlier, hold a hummingbird during an August banding. The birds are not hurt, but they are stunned, so they rest on the flat hands for a moment before getting up and flying away.
“I can tell you now, a hummingbird’s heart doesn’t beat,” Joanna writes in her book. “A beat is something you could count or tap or at least discern from one unit to the next. But my hand didn’t beat, it vibrated. A hummingbird heart hums.”
What White Tree is Blooming Now?
In early spring, trees tend to be white, Joanna observed. It became fun to figure out what the trees are and in what order they would bloom. She wrote an essay about it titled “Which White Tree Is Blooming Now.”
Making it a game like that helps slow things down so she doesn’t miss out on what occurs in spring, she explains.
Tracing the order in which trees bloom is an example of phenology, the study of how seasonal and climate changes affect the life cycles of plants and animals. Joanna’s essay reminds me of Aldo Leopold, the writer of “A Sand County Almanac,” who would wake up at 3 a.m. at his shack, put on coffee, pull his chair out and his notebook, and record the bird songs of the morning. He was great at phenology and keeping records, and Joanna quotes Aldo Leopold several times in her book
Spring, it’s like a freight train when it comes on, because we’ve had this breather of a season before it happens. But when spring happens, it’s incessant. There’s no slowing it down, and it just builds momentum. It’s like a snowball going downhill. To intentionally make note of some of these things when we might not otherwise do so is helpful.
“The good news is we don’t have to get up that early and have a cabin,” Joanna says. “We can get up whenever we get up. And if we’re lucky enough to have a good tree in the yard or nearby — could be at work, somewhere where we are every day — then that’s it. That’s our way in.”
We can observe how a tree changes throughout the year, and see how spring’s buds were there all winter, she says.
“If you’re like me, you end up with 60,000 pictures on your iPhone. But if you search by season, you can see exactly what the sugar maple flowers looked like last spring and the spring before and the spring before. And the spring before. It’s just fascinating. Never gets old.”
Catalpa blooms
(Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto)
House Wrens
Joanna has a love-hate relationship with house wrens. She likes to watch them, but their song drives her nuts.
“It’s not really a song,” she says. “It’s just this little, this little torture device on auto-loop.”
By the first of May, the first male house wren comes to her yard and starts to sing and to create show homes to lure a mate.
“I feel so guilty about hating this song. It’s a perfectly good native songbird, which you can’t harm — not that I ever would,” Joanna says. “But the essay is about the house wren and my failure to appreciate the song … and then one gets stuck on my back porch, and I have to rescue it. And we rescue it wrong.”
The wren got stuck when she was suffering from a migraine, wearing an IceBeanie for some modicum of relief. She tried to chase the wren off her screen porch with a clap, which hurt her and the wren. Instead of going out the open door, the wren flew a few times into a screen before eventually falling onto the concrete floor.
“I was horrified and he was stunned. And there was a little placemat nearby. I slipped the placemat under the bird to take him outside in case he revived, he could at least fly and be free, but he did not revive. And we were kneeling there by this poor bird paralyzed on a laminated placemat that both my kids had eaten on as tots. It even had the alphabet on it. And I was so discombobulated, I wondered why he wasn’t lying next to the H or the W for ‘house wren.’”
Her husband told her to turn the wren over, which she doubted would make a difference, but when she tried, the wren got up and flew away.
Coda: Nature Lessons
I found the coda to be the most powerful part of the book.
It starts with a quote from “Pirkei Avot”: “You are not obligated to complete the work of repairing the world, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Joanna writes:
“Once upon a time, bugs were bad. All moths ate clothes. All caterpillars ate all plants. All birds ate seeds. And the nearest nature was a metro park 20 minutes away by car. Then I joined the Tennessee Naturalist Program. One watershed moment in the course came early on a hike led by Margie Hunter, an award-winning conservation educator, author of ‘Gardening with the Native Plants of Tennessee: The Spirit of Place,” and a creator of our curriculum. When she paused next to a plant, she kept using the word ‘function’ as in ‘how that plant functioned in its community.’ Function? Community? Suddenly, native plants were not just a pretty choice or a culturally historic choice or even a choice. They were a necessity. Native plants are the producers with the deepest and widest function in their ecosystem. Because plants and animals evolved together in a place, in every place, they develop specialized relationships with each other for which there is no substitute.”
Skipping ahead, the essay continues:
“Nature needs our help. Habitat loss is why more than one-quarter of all birds have disappeared in the past 50 years. And the reason one-third of all plant and animal species could go extinct in the next 50. Those two words, habitat loss, are how I summarize and simplify the countless complex threats to the health of our planet, from global warming to microplastics. If I tried to address each threat one by one, I’d be paralyzed by ecological despair. So I figure if the world is losing habitat everywhere, then I have the power to add habitat somewhere. Our yards and neighborhoods are now critical habitat. If more people believe this, maybe we can tweak standard practices to become more sustainable. We need fewer pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers. Fewer all-night security lights and automatic sprinklers, less concrete, more green space, bird-safe windows. Many, many more native plants, especially the keystone producers to host insects, feed birds, and keep us all alive. We can do this work as play with family, friends, and neighbors with free seeds and plants shared by local gardeners and with guidance from organizations that show us how the National Wildlife Federation Audubon Society, Xerces Society, Wild Ones and other leading voices like Doug Tallamy’s Homegrown National Park. They encourage small actions by many people to make big changes in biodiversity. What we start at home, on the balcony in the yard, the sidewalk can grow into networks of beautiful functional communities where humans and the rest of nature thrive together. The only way we will solve anything is together. But the first step, as always, is to look around.”
A Southern magnolia seed “cone” and a hand grenade.
(Photo Credit: Joanna Brichetto)
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Joanna Brichetto on “This Is How a Robin Drinks.” If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
How has noticing wildlife improved your health? Let us know how in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 341: A Backyard Year, with Margaret Renkl
Episode 373: The Land Ethic: Aldo Leopold’s Conservation Philosophy
Episode 386: The Revelations of a Nature Journal, with Margaret Renkl
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
“This Is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature” by Joanna Brichetto – Get 20% off your book order at tupress.org with code JG20
Joanna Brichetto on Instagram | @jo_brichetto
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Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Greenhouse Megastore, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
