Feral Cities (34 page)

The Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo may be a deliberate attempt at conservation within the city, but even when we don't act, urban areas are supporting many threatened species. The rebound in the number of peregrine falcons across the world is largely due
to their success in cities, and as we've seen, Los Angeles has more Mexican red-head parrots than the part of Mexico they originated in, while the city of Jodhpur helped Rajasthan's Hanuman langurs endure drought.

Stockholm golf courses are also helping at-risk species. Close to two-thirds of the Swedish capital's golf courses boast bird and insect diversity equal to or better than that within nature reserves and can attract declining species like red-headed woodpeckers.

One shining example of urban conservation is the city of Bakersfield, California, which is helping the San Joaquin Valley kit fox survive. This rare sub-species of kit fox has been facing extinction due to habitat loss but, somewhat ironically, has found refuge in Bakersfield, where they live in shipping yards, parks, golf courses, and undeveloped land.

Life in Bakersfield is good for these small buff-furred desert foxes, which look as if they evolved to be muses for Japanese anime artists with their short snouts and their extra big pair of ears that keeps them cool in the heat. There are fewer predators to worry about, plenty of sites for dens, and a steady supply of human food, insects, and ground squirrels to eat. All of which has led to the kit foxes of Bakersfield living longer and breeding more than those outside the city.

The kit foxes rarely cause problems for people, either. They are quiet and rarely knock over trash cans. Their most heinous crime is nothing more serious than occasionally stealing golf balls during play. That and getting themselves tangled up in soccer nets.

Their fox cub looks and lack of antisocial behavior has won them plenty of supporters. Some Bakersfield residents have taken it upon themselves to defend the foxes, stopping people from disturbing the animals and even installing artificial dens on their property for them to use.

The urban kit foxes have also rallied the locals to their wider cause. Most residents who have seen the kit foxes now support efforts to protect them, compared to 40 percent of those who
haven't had a firsthand encounter. By fueling support for their conservation and maintaining their population, the Bakersfield kit foxes could prove crucial in helping the sub-species survive both in the city and beyond.

The idea of using cities for conservation is, however, easier said than done. The Mexican red-head parrots might be abundant in Los Angeles, but what's the point of shipping them to northeast Mexico to rebuild the original population if the problems that caused their decline there remain? But having cities that act as life rafts for troubled species does at least offer a potential means of doing that.

Of course urbanization itself has pushed out plenty of species, a good proportion of which now face extinction, but the realpolitik of the situation is that cities are not going to vanish or stop growing unless there's some cataclysmic nuclear war. We might not be able to reverse the damage already done by urbanization, but that's no reason not to use cities to supplement our wider efforts to help struggling species, especially when there's plenty of evidence suggesting that they can do this.

The reasons to use our cities in this way don't just stop with maintaining biodiversity. Having urban areas that are more wildlife friendly makes cities and towns better places to live in. Urban wildlife can sometimes be irritating or messy and, in cases like the leopards of Mumbai, genuinely scary, but for the most part these unexpected encounters with the animals among us are positive, a cheering reminder that we are not alone and that our cities are far from sterile or divorced from nature. It's hard not to have your day brightened by a glimpse of a bushy-tailed fox running down the street or a flock of monk parakeets flying across the skyline or a wild boar with piglets in tow holding up traffic.

Their presence might even make us healthier. More and more studies are finding connections between contact with nature and better mental health or reduced stress levels. Some studies even suggest that more exposure to nature can improve children's school grades.

Working out how we can engineer wilder cities is tricky, though. Urban ecology has gone understudied for many years and, as Seth's work shows, much of what we know about how ecosystems function in the wild or in rural areas just doesn't apply in cities. More funding for urban ecology research is going to be needed before we understand city environments well enough to really start designing cities that encourage wildlife effectively.

But that research need not be confined to the halls of academia. The efforts of groups like the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors have, through their dedication and studious recording of bird strikes, proven the effectiveness of Lights Out programs and helped both architects and urban planners make cities more bird-friendly. Citizen science studies, like Mark's cockroach investigation and the Arthropods of Our Homes project, offer people a way to learn about what animals live around them while also helping to increase our wider understanding of urban wildlife. From bird counts to indoor bug hunts, universities, animal charities, and natural history museums are running citizen science initiatives that can involve everyone.

But while our understanding of urban wildlife is incomplete, we already know that some approaches to fostering urban wildlife work. One approach with plenty of evidence behind it is the creation of green or brown roofs. The idea of creating rooftop wildlife gardens started in Germany back in the 1970s, and the worldwide movement that followed has plenty of success stories to tell. In the Swiss city of Basel, where green roofs are now compulsory on new flat-roofed buildings, these rooftop gardens have become home to significant numbers of rare beetles and spiders. Brown roofs of crushed brick and concrete also take much of the credit for the return of the black redstart, a robin-sized bird with gray-black plumage, to London.

Yet the full potential of green roofs has yet to be realized, says Clare Dinham, brownfield conservation officer at the British arthropod conservation charity Buglife. “The odd green roof here
and there will provide some habitat, but it's limited,” she says. “However, if you do it on a great scale then it can become really important.”

The potential is huge. If a small number of brown roofs in London can bring back the black redstart, just imagine what a city full of green and brown roofs could achieve. And what if we embraced Berlin's long-held vision for “coherent greenery” and started linking green roofs and green spaces together via green walls? We could also think about the Bakersfield kit foxes and cliff swallows in Lincoln Park Zoo and create artificial dens and nesting sites for the wildlife we want to encourage in our parks and yards.

But before we can do any of this, we've first got to stop thinking of cities as barren, anti-nature zones. This environment we've built, this urban biome, is teeming with life, but all too often we just blank it out. “I was in a meeting just yesterday and a woman was there from another zoo, and she made this statement that ‘I love it when kids come to the zoo. For many of them it's the first time they've ever seen a wild animal,'” Seth tells me as we sit on that bench looking out over Chicago.

“I just had to stand up and say, ‘That's not true! They have all seen squirrels, they have all seen pigeons, and the fact that you don't think of them as wildlife does not mean they aren't wildlife. It's just that you are so attuned to them being around, you no longer think of them as wildlife.'”

And as I sit with Seth, I see the evidence all around us. The cliff swallows under the bridge. The rare black-crowned night heron standing in the water. The squirrels scampering up the trees. And out there in the city, beyond the zoo, there are crows hunting dazed indigo buntings on the streets, ants nesting under the sidewalks, spitting spiders roaming apartments, pigeons pecking at crumbs, and coyotes snoozing unseen in the bushes.

The city is alive. The wild is here, right on our doorstep, in our streets and inside our homes.

All we have to do is open our eyes.

A great many people made this book possible, not least my ever-supportive husband Jay Priest, my fantastic agent Isabel Atherton, and Yuval Taylor and the rest of the Chicago Review Press team.

Thanks also to my sister Jade for joining me in Berlin, Tom Homewood (and his assistant Ben Milne) for the illustrations, and my German interpreter, Nancy Chapple.

A big thank you also goes to all of the people who generously shared their time and expertise as I delved into the world of urban wildlife: Vidya Athreya. Daniel Bajomi. Steve Baldwin. Carol Bannerman. Eric Barna. Liz Barraco. Matt Bertone (with further thanks for the edits). Brian Brown. Adrian Diaz. Scott Diehl. Mohammad Dilawar. Hoang Dinh. Clare Dinham. Rob Dunn. Erle Ellis. Mark Fagan. Captain Jeffrey Fobb. Omar Garcia. Jane Griffin Dozier. Dallas Hazelton. Derk Ehlert. Mason Fidino. Blair Fyten. Kimball Garrett. Stan Gehrt. David Gummer. Paul Hetherington. Lila Higgins. Wes Homoya. Bryan Hughes. Kate Kuykendall. Garry Lafaille. Liza Lehrer. Judy Loven. Seth Magle. Graham Martin. Anne Maschmeyer. Shane McKenzie. Holly Menninger. Zeeshan Mirza. Alex Muñoz (who needs an extra thanks for making my trip to Miami so productive). Armando Navarrete. Maria Németh. Gilda Nuñez. Miguel Ordeñana. Justin O'Riain. Gregory Pauly. Will Peach. Annette Prince. Curt Publow. Gregory Randall. Ian Rotherham. Tiffany Ruddle. Amy Savage. Dawn Scott. Laurel Serieys. Sarah Sharpe. Vincent Sheurer. Rob Smith. Ruth Smith. Vernon Smith. Angela Speed. Mark Stoeckle. Michelle Trautwein. Jill Turner. Wilfredo Valladares. Tim Webb. Paul Wilkinson. Mary Winston. Karen Wise.

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