What drives animals to your yard? It's complicated

Short Wave

NPR

News, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Daily News, Nature, Science

4.7 • 6.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Listener Shabnam Khan has a problem: Every time she works in her garden, she’s visited by lizards and frogs. Shabnam has lived in the metro Atlanta area for decades, and she says this number of scaly, clammy visitors has exploded over the past few years. Frogs croak at night; lizards sun on the cement. And she wants to know, where did all of these animals come from? It turns out, there are a number of potential answers – from small-scale environmental changes like natural plants and new water sources to large-scale shifts like urbanization and development displacing local wildlife. On this month’s Nature Quest, host Emily Kwong and producer Hannah Chinn discuss the possibilities – and impacts – of these changes.

If you live in the Atlanta area and are interested in volunteering with MAAMP (the Metro Atlanta Amphibian Monitoring Program), you can sign up for training here.

This episode is part of Nature Quest, our monthly segment that brings you a question from a fellow listener who is noticing a change in the world around them.

Send a voice memo to shortwave@npr.org telling us your name, location and a question about a change you’re seeing in nature – it could be our next Nature Quest episode!

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:07.1	Hey everyone, Emily Kwong here with producer Hannah Chin.
0:10.6	Hey.
0:11.0	Hey, Emily.
0:12.4	Okay, so I've been looking into a question from one of our listeners in Lawrenceville, Georgia, which is a suburb about 30 miles outside downtown Atlanta.
0:20.7	It's very pretty here in Atlanta, lots of hills and very green.
0:26.5	When you're landing at the airport, you can see it's just a green canopy all over the city.
0:33.0	So this is Shabdam Khan.
0:34.5	She's lived in and around the area since 1986.
0:39.2	And clearly, she really loves the place she lives, partly because it's so lush. Yeah, Atlanta is beautiful. It's also
0:44.8	subtropical, so I imagine there's lots of plants that thrive there. Exactly, which is great
0:50.0	for Shabnam because she loves to garden. But there's one problem with her garden, Emily,
0:56.2	a problem that's been visiting pretty regularly that started small. A lizard here and there.
1:02.7	And it's just not going away. I do gardening quite a bit. And now last two or three or four years. Every time I'm gardening,
1:15.9	every time I'm working in the yard, I get scared by lizards and frogs. Oh, no. And there are many of them
1:24.0	and lots of different varieties, like stripes and like beautiful colors, but I'm still scared of them.
1:31.0	Shepnam told me she doesn't even want to be in her garden anymore.
1:33.9	She's so stressed out by this spike in garden visitors.
1:37.7	And she says it's not uncommon for her to hear an army of frogs croaking in her neighborhood at night
1:43.0	or to find multiple brightly colored
1:45.0	lizards sunning on the grass. And now she's like, where did all of these come from?
1:51.7	It's just the quantity boggles my mind. Just the population seems to have exploded. Today on the show,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.