Excerpted from WELCOME TO SUBIRDIA: Sharing Our Neighborhood with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife. Published September 2014 by Yale University Press with illustrations by Jack DeLap. Copyright (c) 2014 by John M. Marzluff. All rights reserved. Substantial and significant open space exists within a city’s workplaces, but this is not the only green area in the city that can serve double duty as a place for people and birds. Soccer pitches, football fields, and baseball diamonds provide loafing areas, and if the turf is natural, feeding areas, for some birds. But by far and away the recreational site within a city that has the greatest potential to double as bird habitat is the golf course. Golf courses are one of the most plentiful vegetated spaces within subirdia. Worldwide there are more than 31,500 courses, and their numbers are increasing rapidly. In the United States alone 300 courses were built annually over the past three decades. From a humble beginning in...