Urban Wildlife

Call this one "Saturday Science a Day Late": interesting article at Raw Story about the resurgence of "wild animals" in urban environments:

In recent years, a host of charismatic wild species, the coyote being only the most famous, have returned to American cities in numbers not seen for generations. Yet the official response in many areas has been, at best, disorganized, and people’s responses varied. The time has come for us to accept that these animals are here to stay, and develop a new approach to urban wildlife.

Most big American cities occupy sites that were once rich ecosystems. New York and Boston overlook dynamic river mouths. San Francisco and Seattle border vast estuaries, while large parts of Chicago, New Orleans and Washington, DC rest atop former wetlands. Even Las Vegas sprawls across a rare desert valley with reliable sources of life-giving fresh water, supplied by artesian aquifers the nearby Spring Mountains. All of these places once attracted diverse and abundant wildlife.

I lived, until recently, in an older neighborhood on Chicago's North Side -- big old trees, large yards, quiet. I would sit out in the back yard in the early morning and observe the opossums and raccoons wandering through the yard. The opossums would walk within a couple of feet, unless I moved -- then they would panic and run. The raccoons were fearless and inquisitive -- one morning, I had to yell at a pair to keep them from climbing on me. And of course, in addition to the squirrels, I'd see an occasional rabbit.

I've never seen a fox or coyote, although there have been regular reports of sightings around the city -- including the coyote that wandered into a Quizno's sub shop downtown on a hot summer day and just flopped down and the nice cool tile floor. And someone posted a video a couple of years back of a deer and half-grown fawn in an alley in Lakeview -- one of the most densely populated parts of the city. Deer are apparently becoming a real problem in the suburbs.

And we have peregrines and kestrels -- the City encourages them, to keep the pigeons in check. (It's interesting to note that in my new neighborhood, pigeons were rampant. They've largely disappeared, at least from my building, where they used to roost on a couple of nice ledges under the stairs. I was wondering why, then one day saw a couple of peregrines coasting around in the sky.) And in recent years I've noticed an increase in songbirds -- those little brown birds that are not sparrows. Maybe that has something to do with the City having planted over half a million trees in the past decade or so.

Note that Chicago has an extensive park system that includes several wildlife refuges, and sits on a major migratory bird flyway, and there have been a couple of programs restoring some areas to a "natural" state -- meaning, basically, restoring native species. North Pond and South Pond in Lincoln Park are the two that I know best.