The Comfort of Crows unfolds almost entirely in Margaret Renkl’s backyard in Nashville, Tennessee. This narrow geographic focus belies the book’s environmental breadth. The local ecosystem surrounding Renkl’s suburban home becomes a microcosm of wider ecological processes, changes, and challenges. As such, understanding the local ecology is an essential part of understanding Renkl’s work. Located in the northern portion of Middle Tennessee, Nashville sits within the Central Basin, an area geologically characterized by rolling hills, limestone bedrock, and rich, fertile soils. The city is part of the temperate deciduous forest biome, which supports a wide variety of plant and animal life. Historically, oak, hickory, maple, and beech trees dominated the area, while beneath them was a dense understory of shrubs, wildflowers, and vines. This ecosystem supported a vibrant array of wildlife: white-tailed deer, eastern cottontail rabbits, opossums, raccoons, skunks, foxes, turtles, toads, and snakes, along with hundreds of species of birds and insects, many of which Renkl mentions.

Despite urbanization, this biodiversity persists in pockets throughout the city and surrounding counties. In The Comfort of Crows, Renkl routinely encounters bluebirds, chickadees, goldfinches, mockingbirds, and crows. She shares her yard with brown thrashers, red-shouldered and Cooper’s hawks, barred owls, red foxes, garter snakes, and the occasional bobcat. Insects such as monarch butterflies, bumblebees, and dragonflies pass through or settle seasonally. Native plants like goldenrod, trillium, pawpaw, and bloodroot still bloom under the right conditions. In describing this urban-wild interface, Renkl doesn’t treat nature as something apart from the built world; she recognizes the wildness that persists in suburbia.

As Renkl notes, Nashville’s ecological character is changing. Climate change, land development, and invasive species are transforming the region’s flora and fauna in ways that are visible even within the scope of a single year in Renkl’s yard. Middle Tennessee is growing hotter, wetter, and more ecologically unstable. Average annual temperatures in the Nashville area have risen over the past decades. Winters have become milder and more erratic, marked by sudden freezes and out-of-season thaws. Springs arrive earlier, sometimes spurring premature blooms that frost later kills.

These shifts in seasonal timing have consequences for both plants and the animals that depend on them. Renkl documents many of these changes. In midwinter, she notes that her daffodils are blooming far too early. Migratory birds arrive out of sync with insect hatches. Cardinals sing courtship songs in February, long before spring has begun. She finds a fox out hunting in broad daylight, and this fox has mange, likely exacerbated by habitat loss and poisoning in other yards. The year in her yard no longer follows the patterns it did during her childhood.

At the same time, invasive species are encroaching upon and outcompeting native plants. Bradford pear trees, Japanese honeysuckle, and vinca dominate many of the green spaces in suburban Nashville. Renkl describes the bittersweet feeling of watching these plants burst into bloom in early spring: They’re beautiful but ecologically destructive. They crowd out native species that support pollinators and birds, creating a more homogenous and less resilient ecosystem. The invasive monocultures don’t provide the same nectar, nesting habitat, or insect life that native plants once did. This, too, is part of the degradation Renkl quietly chronicles. Urbanization compounds the effects of climate change. Forested lots are being cleared for housing subdivisions, and small homes on large, wooded parcels are increasingly replaced by larger homes with manicured, pesticide-treated lawns. Renkl’s choice to stay put and observe closely allows her to document change in a way that charts both the natural history of the place and the quiet unraveling that climate change and other changes bring.