Urban Wildlife

The July 2022 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC includes an article titled "Why Cities Are Going Wild." It's about wild animals who've adjusted to living in urban areas, often by feeding on the stuff human residents discard. For instance, numerous black bears hang around in Asheville, NC, with a human population of about 95,000. I was surprised to read that coyotes have established themselves in most major cities and in all states except Hawaii. Chicago, for instance, hosts about 4,000 coyotes. Many omnivorous mammals are "changing their behaviors as they learn urban survival skills." Bears learn when it's trash pickup day. Coyotes look before crossing the street. Nobody who lives in a neighborhood with raccoons would be surprised at their talent for breaking into closed containers. Skunks also display cleverness in adapting to urban environments.

Studies have found that not only do city-dwelling wild animals behave differently from their rural and wilderness cousins, such as becoming more nocturnal to avoid people, often they also prosper in terms of gaining weight and producing more offspring. The latter phenomenon doesn't always grant long-term advantages, though; in some populations of urban bears, fewer cubs survive to maturity than in the wild.

Animals can hardly be blamed for "invading" our spaces. In many areas they were there first, and our cities and suburbs have spread to encroach on their territories. Here's an article focusing particularly on big felines in two "megacities," Los Angeles and Mumbai, where mountain lions and leopards (respectively) have learned to coexist with people:

Big Cats, Big Cities

Authorities in those cities have experimented with ways to share space with the big cats, such as building bridges for them to overcome the problem of habitat fragmentation. (I can't help visualizing a leopard reading a "Leopard Crossing" sign at the end of a bridge, even though that's obviously not how the system works.) Public education reduces human-animal clashes and promotes a live-and-let-live policy. "Both cities have learned that trying to capture, kill or relocate the cats isn’t the answer." Moving the creatures away from the urban centers doesn't help prevent conflicts, because they or others like them just move back in. One California wildlife expert points out, “It’s better to have a stable population, than one where hierarchies and territories are disrupted.”

For me, the most intriguing information in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article is that raccoons seem to be evolving greater intelligence as they're challenged by increasingly complex human efforts to deter them. People's attempts to thwart trespassing raccoons have led to an "innovation arms race." If we're "actually creating smarter animals" by giving them "increasingly difficult problems to solve," could raccoons be poised to take over the "intelligence" niche if we ever go extinct? Or maybe to share that role with us in some future post-apocalyptic reversion to a preindustrial world? After all, they already have a head start with hand-like paws. In the novel WICKED and its sequels, sapient animals live alongside the human residents of Oz (although as second-class citizens). Imagine a sapient raccoon delegation calling on a city or state government to demand equal rights.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt