Joan Cartan-Hansen, Host: Urban wildlife can really add something special to a community.

Come join me on a tour along my town's greenbelt and see for yourself.

[MUSIC] Cartan-Hansen: Steve Burns is a conservationist.

His work with zoos and wild life parks is saving animals throughout the world.

But Steve likes to remind people that you don't have go very far to find wildlife.

It's right in your own neighborhood.

Today, he's showing us what can be found in one small section of south east Boise.

Steve Burns, Conservationist: So we're walking up here.

There's the Boise Greenbelt right there.

It can't be more than 30 or 40 feet away.

And this is a beaver dam.

Beavers don't really just build one dam.

They build a whole series and they end up creating this big complex, this big network of wetlands that they live in.

And it's not just that the beavers live here, but when they create this wetland, this would normally be a little stream that was just two feet wide.

They've created this whole pond area.

And it means that all these other species of animals and plants get to live here as well.

So what exactly is a beaver?

A beaver is a rodent.

It's the second biggest rodent in the world.

A mark of a rodent is that their teeth are constantly growing and the beaver's teeth constantly grow.

And then you look and you go, man, that beaver never brushes its teeth.

They're orange teeth.

They're actually orange because they have iron in them because they chew and chew and chew on wood all day long.

And if they didn't have that iron, they wouldn't have the strength to actually get through the wood.

Cartan-Hansen: Then we walk through an underpass, a perfect place to spot another kind of urban wildlife.

Burns: Right there, that is just awesome.

That is a orb Weaver spider.

It's a native species, but this is perfect habitat for them.

And you know, you got all kinds of little insects and because you've got this wetland right here, courtesy of our friend, the beaver, you've got all these insects.

And so, all those insects then lead to other things.

One of the first things is, is you've got spiders.

It also leads to all kinds of birds.

Cartan-Hansen: And that's what we go looking for next.

Burns: When you have water, it allows for a much greater number of insects.

And when you have a bunch of insects, it attracts all kinds of other creatures, frogs being one of them.

But the other is swallows.

And so swallows because we have all of these wetlands here underneath the bridge, you just have hundreds and hundreds of swallow nests that they've built.

Cartan-Hansen: Heading back past the beaver dam, Steve notes the plants we see.

67 percent of them have been introduced to Idaho, crowding out native plants.

Burns: But I've never been that much of a much of a plant guy, and I've always wondered, you know, what am I looking at?

So, there's an app, uh, that was developed by the California academy of sciences.

Um, a whole program called I naturalist, and you can download it.

It's a free app onto your phone.

And then they have another app called seek, which you use to find the local, this stuff in your, your, your own, uh, locality.

So when you have this app, you just go up to the, to something and you take a picture of it and it'll tell you that, oh, this is a Cottonwood.

The other cool thing about it is that they're using that data to create a huge database of where species are found.

So, you're actually doing some scientific work.

You're not just finding the species, but you're contributing to this much larger conservation project that they're in the process of putting together.

When you're out and exploring, I encourage you to go out and explore.

It's great to be out there.

There are a few things you want to look out for.

This is one of them.

If you're familiar with this plant, this is poison Ivy, and you definitely want to stay away from that.

Cartan-Hansen: We head into the Golda Harris nature reserve.

Burns: One of the things that I always encourage people to do, and I encourage kids to do is if you want to get out and you want to explore nature, there's two things.

Find a place that you really like and go there often, because as you go there, often you'll start to see things change.

And then the other thing is just sit, just sit for a while, sit for half an hour, if you can, or 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and just look around because when you're moving, sometimes you're scaring creatures off, but when you just sit for a while and you're quiet, you're not making any noise.

You're not moving around.

Suddenly nature starts to come in around you.

And you're going to start to see things that you probably wouldn't see if you were riding by, on your bike or even walking by.

Cartan-Hansen: And that's what's so special about of urban wildlife.

Take the time to notice and an interesting world opens up.

Burns: Having nature nearby it's, it's not, it's not just a luxury to me.

It's a necessity.

It's something that we should all have.

And hopefully that as we design our cities, because Idaho's a growing state, there's many of our communities are growing.

Hopefully as we grow them, we've made sure that there's still parts of that community that are there for nature.

I realize we need houses.

We need roads.

We need all that stuff, but we need nature.

And when you have it close by, it is not only good for the animals and the plants that are living there.

It's good for us.

Cartan-Hansen: If you want to learn more about urban wildlife, check out the science trek website.

You'll find it at science trek dot org.

[MUSIC] ANNOUNCER: Presentation of Science Trek on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

By the Idaho National Laboratory, mentoring talent and finding solutions for energy and security challenges, by The Friends of Idaho Public Television and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.