Category: landscape

“Yet there’s a small subset of animals that are doing remarkably well. Known as synanthropes, these are the tiny minority of wild animals—not livestock or pets—that have adapted to thrive in the places that humans like and are forever building more of. City pigeons—the descendants of rock doves, birds that roost on steep cliff faces—are a good example. After the birds were partly domesticated as food and messengers, they learned to nest in the crevices of buildings and to eat our trash, and their numbers followed our skyscrapers upward. Other familiar examples include opossums, coyotes, raccoons, rats, wild turkeys, Canada geese, and crows. Some researchers have observed the latter using cars to crack walnuts, timing the stops between traffic-light changes in order to slip the nuts underneath the tires. Other birds have learned to line their nests with cigarette butts, whose residual nicotine keeps mites away. Some urban populations—such as lizards, whose toes are becoming more grippy, the better to climb glass and concrete instead of trees—seem to be actively evolving to live in the habitats that we’re creating. Mice in Central Park have developed genes that allow them to metabolize fatty foods and rancid peanuts; mountain lions that live near the Seattle exurbs have shifted their predation from ungulates to rats, opossums, and raccoons. Studies have shown that many synanthropes are actually more successful—living at greater densities and achieving larger body sizes—in urban and suburban landscapes than they are in the wild.” – newyorker (in the print edition of the November 15, 2021).

“Many of our ideas about animals—which we eat, which we keep as pets, which we vilify or protect—are changeable with time and context and culture. These ideas sometimes lead us to odd and inconsistent places. New Zealand is famous for enthusiastically culling non-native predators in a large-scale effort to protect its endemic species, but feral cats, because of the close association with their domesticated relatives, haven’t been included in the purge. In the American West, the government shoots coyotes but rounds up wild horses and puts them up for adoption.

“…only a fraction of wildlife management is about biology.”