Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and New York provide substitute cliff roosting sites for birds of prey such as peregrine falcons (
Falco
peregrinus
). For a decade now, I have enjoyed watching the fastest birds of prey in Europe swooping
on city pigeons from their nests in the turrets at Chichester Cathedral on the southern coast of England.
They seem to like it as well as their “proper” sea-cliff habitat.
15
More often, cities are irresistible food sources. Australia's once rare gray-headed flying foxes found
so much food in Melbourne that a colony of thirty thousand of the bats has formed there in the past
two decades. Raccoons (
Procyon lotor
) are joining others who forsake the rural life for city scavenging.
They are smart enough to negotiate any American urban obstacle course in search of a meal. They are
“able to squeeze into locked garages, open secured garbage cans, unzip tents, and pry up lids on Tup-
perware,” wrote one blogger after watching a PBS documentary.
16
Mile for mile, there are five times as
many raccoons in American suburbs as in the surrounding countryside.
Oddly, many species find cities safer than the countryside. The coyote (
Canis latrans
) lived mainly
in the southwestern United States until the twentieth century but then headed for the cities. In the ab-
sence of hunting, their survival and reproduction rates are higher there. There may now be two thousand
coyotes living in the suburbs of Chicago, navigating the city's highways by night with rarely a mishap.
Los Angeles, New York, and Boston also have substantial populations.
17
They will eat rabbits, rats, and
even household pets. Ecologists say they are the new top predators on the mean streets and have adapted
to their new territories by living more densely, with smaller home patches, and becoming increasingly
nocturnal. Once known as the ghosts of the plains, they are now increasingly the ghosts of the cities.
Like foxes in the United Kingdom, they are in part fleeing human foes in the countryside. But while
British foxes no longer fear showing themselves, coyotes keep to dark places and go out mostly at night,
“quietly conquering urban America,” as the
Economist
put it.
18
Golden-headed lion tamarins, squirrel-
sized monkeys, came out of the disappearing coastal forests of Brazil and found a new home in the
suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. That, as James Barilla of the University of South Carolina points out, makes
them both endangered and invasive.
19
Many species that traditionally get on well with humans have become convinced urbanites. The
house sparrow (
Passer domesticus
) seems to have been with us at least since we started farming. Rarely
found anywhere remotely wild, it sticks with humans, their landscapes and buildings. The relationship
has served the bird well. It is probably the most common bird in the world. Only the chicken comes
close. A flock lived for several years inside Heathrow Airport's old Terminal 2, feeding off crumbs
from the snack bars. Sparrows will even join us underground. Yorkshire coal miners at Frickley Colliery
found a nest two thousand feet down at the bottom of a shaft in the mid-1970s. The birds stayed for three
years.
20
In recent years, sparrows have been in decline in some of their favorite urban environments, with
numbers halving in Britain since the 1970s and similar declines in the United States. Nobody is sure
why. Theories range from unleaded gasoline and mobile phones to our urban tidiness. But the fact that,
after thousands of years, they seem to be finding us uncongenial is worrying.
21
There are few such fears for the wild boar (
Sus scrofa
). It is another old friend that has certainly not
lost its love of human habitat. We domesticated it nine thousand years ago. Since then it has ranged the
Old World, from Japan to Britain, and Indonesia to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It has often been
our calling card. The Polynesians took it to Hawaii, the Spanish to Florida, and the English to New Eng-
land and Australia, where some twenty million now roam free. The United States has some six million
of them. The wild boar is not a fussy companion. It will roll around in mud or dig up golf courses. It
will sweat it out in Texas or the Borneo rain forest but produce its own steam in the forests of Siberia. It
will eat kitchen scraps, mushrooms, snails, turtle eggs, live birds, or rotting carcasses.
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