Zoologist Roland Kays travels the world to study rare species, so he calls it a “cool surprise” to find a wealth of wildlife in the suburban backyards of Raleigh and Durham, N.C.
“As scientists, we’ve traditionally thought of residential areas as non-habitat,” says Kays, a faculty member at NC State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “But in fact we found that some backyards had more wildlife than the woods nearby.”
Kays’ latest research, published in the journal Urban Ecosystems, started as a citizen science project featured at the opening of the museum’s new Nature Research Center in 2012. Volunteers, including those with chicken coops near their homes, installed backyard camera traps to capture images of wildlife. Animals caught on film were identified by undergraduate wildlife students at NC State.