When occasionally asked what traits allow native animals to live in suburbia, I answer that they are small to moderate in size, so they don't require a lot of space and aren't so likely to be noticed. They like edges, eat a variety of foods in a variety of places, including our feeders, and can use our houses for roosting, nesting, and food storage.

They are nocturnal, behaviorally inconspicuous, or beautifully colored, cute, or innocuous, so we don't persecute them. The cadre of jays, opossums, robins, rabbits, doves, squirrels, swifts, crows, finches, martins, and raccoons is widespread in suburbia.

Moreover, our nature-culture mix invents new suburbanites from among range-marginalists such as western kingbird and house finch, colonists such as white-winged dove and great-tailed grackle, and generalists such as American crow and common grackle. The dove and great-tailed grackle from subtropical Texas use cities on their march northward because of urban warmth and the uniform structure of planted vegetation selected for nesting. Grackles choose planted evergreens as safe communal roosts and fast-food parking lots for eating. And the highly intelligent crow is no surprise to those who once hunted it as a varmint and only recently stopped the persecution. Citified species may add new habits, such as nocturnal foraging for insects at lights by the usually diurnal cattle egret, killdeer, and introduced house sparrow. Moreover, killdeer now nest on flat, graveled rooftops together with common nighthawks. Heat doesn't bother these two, for they typically nest on naturally exposed gravel bars; but hatchling killdeer feed themselves and can't fly, whereas nighthawk chicks are fed until they can fly. So the baby killdeer just run off the roof, flutter-fall to the ground, and begin foraging. Clearly, those actors can play many roles, allowing them to take advantage of cultural opportunities.