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Introduction
by Rob Dunn
Nearly a decade ago, I found myself traveling to New York City to study
wildlife. It started innocuously enough. I was living in Tennessee and had just
returned from a hiking trip in one of the oldest forests in Great Smoky
Mountains National Park when the phone rang. It was an invitation to help
lead an expedition into the dirty bowels of New York City.
I rarely turn down an opportunity for an expedition, and yet New York
inspired more anxiety in me than pleasure. I grew up as a country kid, most
comfortable in and among trees. Sure, Manhattan has trees, but it also has a
way of making them seem dwarfed beneath the shade of buildings, as
though each and every one were part of some oversized diorama.
The call was from an old friend, James Danoff-Burg, then at Columbia
University, and so I listened. James wanted me to help make “big biological
discoveries” in New York City’s wildest parks. I said I would come but I
didn’t think we would find much. I was wrong.
James and I went on our first odyssey together in the desert Southwest of
the United States when he was a graduate student at the University of
Kansas and I was still a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Kalamazoo
College. I helped him search for reclusive monsters called sceptobiines—
strange beetles that live hidden in the tunnels of ants, much the way rats live
in the subway tunnels of New York. During that work, we were nearly shot by
a farmer, stuck on a talus slope with no way down, and trapped inside a tent
as a skunk walked over our feet (2 out of 3 of those were my fault, but I
digress). James promised this New York expedition would be more
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