Abandoned Forum

[Astarte]

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issu ... nomena.php

Urban coyotes
David Pescovitz: An interesting article in the new issue of Smithsonian Magazine looks at why coyotes seem to be moving from the rural plains into Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other big cities. From the article: Until the 1990s, the farthest that coyotes had ventured into Chicago was to forested reserves near the city limits. But "something happened," says Stan Gehrt, a wildlife biologist at Ohio State University, "something we don't completely understand." Within ten years the coyote population exploded, growing by more than 3,000 percent, and infiltrated the entire Chicago area. Gehrt found territorial packs of five to six coyotes, as well as lone individuals, called floaters, living in downtown Chicago. They traveled at night, crossing sidewalks and bridges, trotting along roads and ducking into culverts and underpasses. One pair raised pups in a drainage area between a day care facility and a public pool; a lone female spent the day resting in a tiny marsh near a busy downtown post office. Perhaps most surprising to Gehrt, Chicago's urban coyotes tended to live as long as their parkland counterparts. No one knows why coyotes are moving into cities, but Gehrt theorizes that shrewder, more human-tolerant coyotes are teaching urban survival skills to new generations... Should the urban coyote be viewed with trepidation? "Some people have fears that kids are going to be the next ones to be eaten," says (biologist John) Way. "I tell them coyotes have been at the edges of their neighborhoods for years." Way emphasizes coyotes can be an asset to urban ecosystems, keeping a check on deer, rodents, Canada geese and other animals that thrive on the suburbs' all-you-can-eat buffet.

From the website at the End of the Universe.


I thought this was an incredibly interesting story. Have any of you noticed any unusual 'dogs' in your neighbourhood? We have foxes in the urban parks around Sydney, they seem to do well just like the US coyotes!

[hamster]

It's bound to happen. Everywhere we go, we upset the ancient environment, the natural patterns that have developed over millions of years. Nothing survives that can't tolerate filth, traffic and the general insanity of human civilization. The end result: natural selection continues, but now it favors those few creatures that can put up with man. We end up swimming in a sea of rats, cockroaches, feral dogs and cats, invasive weeds and now, coyotes.

Such is the price for our greed, for our insane drive to link a chain of Walmarts from one side of the planet to the other, to have a gas station within two blocks of every home, to cut down every tree that isn't locked up in what few wilderness preserves we have grudgingly alloted, and to convert every square inch of planet earth into a money maker.

When we can learn to share this globe a little more equitably, we might see more butterflies instead of bedbugs, more falcons than fast food wrappers.