Your Backyard Is Wild Read Free

like to live here,” Uncle Peter said, “because it’s only a short subway ride from here to downtown Manhattan. People also like the shady streets, and the smaller buildings, called brownstones because of the brown stone they’re made from.”
    As his father continued talking to Benjamin’s parents, Gabe gave his cousins his own tour. “Here’s my school,” he said, pointing at a brick building with a big basketball court. “Here’s where my best friend lives,” he noted when they passed an apartment tower. “And this is the best place to get ice cream.”
    Uncle Peter agreed. He ordered cones for the whole family, and they carried them to a path along the East River called the Promenade, where people could walk and see the skyline of lower Manhattan. After they walked for a while, Benjamin realized that the Promenade was a sort of park. But it wasn’t like the parks he knew back home. That was what made it interesting.
    Lucy and Benjamin posed for pictures until Benjamin said, “My ice cream is melting! Can we take a break now?” The kids sat on a bench a short distance away from their parents, right beside a playground.
    Suddenly Lucy hopped down and walked toward a patch of weeds and waist-high grass. She crouched down in front of a tall plant with giant seed-pods and examined one of its leaves.
    “Check this out!” she called to Benjamin and Gabe. “It’s a butterfly cocoon!” The tiny brown cocoon was clinging to the underside of the leaf. You could see it only when the breeze blew.

    Gabe drew closer and looked at the cocoon. “It looks like a dead leaf to me.”
    “That’s what cocoons always look like,” Benjamin told him.
    In a flash, Benjamin was beside his sister, taking his magnifying glass from the back pocket of his jeans. He had known it would come in handy! He squinted through it at the leaf. “That’s a milkweed,” he said. “Monarch butterflies love it. The caterpillars fill up on the leaves before they go into their cocoons.” He picked a seedpod off the stem and touched the sticky white liquid that had gathered near the top of it. “Yup, definitely.”
    “What’s it doing here?” asked Gabe.
    Benjamin smiled. Gabe might know his way around Brooklyn, but he didn’t know his way around the outdoors. “Milkweed grows almost everywhere,” he said.
    “But how do you know all this?”
    Benjamin just knew. He’d known since he was a toddler. It was hard to explain, but somehow he managed to find the words.
    “I know nature the way you know Brooklyn!” he said.

Chapter Three

    B enjamin awoke with a start the next morning. Something wasn’t right. When he opened his eyes, he knew he was at Gabe’s house—that wasn’t what was bothering him. Then he realized . . . it was noisy! He could hear garbage trucks rumbling in the street and people talking on their cell phones on the sidewalk five floors below. Uncle Peter had called this a quiet neighborhood, but it was louder than anywhere Benjamin had ever woken up before.
    The family had bagels for breakfast—a New York specialty—and then walked to the subway station to wait for a train that would take them right into the center of New York City. They would walk from the subway stop to the Empire State Building! From the top, they would see the whole city spread out before them.
    The cousins stood on the platform with their parents, and Benjamin could hear his dad telling Aunt Lily about some of the work he did as an ecologist. “And Elizabeth teaches biology in the zoology department of the local college,” he heard his father say. “She studies animals and shares her research with her students. What I do is a little different, though. I study the way those animals interact with their environment.”
    Benjamin had heard this explanation before, so he tuned out and looked at his watch. It was hot on the platform, and there was a damp smell, too.
    He felt a slight breeze. Then he heard a distant rumbling. He wondered