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It all started with Nathanael Johnson's decision to teach his daughter, Josephine, the names of every tree they passed as they walked up the hill to daycare in San Francisco, CA. It was a ridiculous project, not just because she couldn't even say the word "tree" yet, but also because he couldn't name a single one of them. When confronted with the futility of his mission, his instinctive response was to expand it, Don Quixote-style, until its audacity obscured its stupidity. And so the project expanded to include an expertise in city-dwelling birds (the raptors, the shockingly shrewd crows, the gulls, the misunderstood pigeons) , rodents (raccoons, rats, squirrels) , and tiny crawling things (the superpowers of snails, the vast intercontinental warfare of ants) .