Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  “It’s a fox,” says Laurel, as she puts on her gloves and picks up the skull. “A gray fox.”

  She looks more closely at the skull, which is covered in small patches of desiccated fur. “Is that a bite mark?” she asks Miguel. “It looks like it’s been chewed on. I wonder if a coyote killed it. That would be my guess.”

  I ask what makes her think it’s a coyote kill rather than a P-22 kill. “It could be a lion but coyotes chew on the bones, whereas the lions don’t chew on the bones as much. Lions will bite on the head more.”

  She looks at the skull again. “I don’t know if that’s just the flesh rotting or an actual bite mark.”

  There’s only one way to tell, so Laurel pulls away the flesh, separating it from the skull. “Hmmm, looks like there is a bite mark. It could be a lion kill, although the lion would probably have eaten more than that. Theoretically, if it was a lion kill the coyotes could have got to it afterward.”

  As well as the remains of the gray fox, there’s a leg bone from a deer. It’s been picked clean. “Is that a mountain lion kill?” I ask hopefully. “Ah, probably not,” says Laurel. Coyotes again. The evidence from the first kill site has proven inconclusive.

  We move on to the next location. Along the way we spot a pack of coyotes roaming along the bottom of the hill below us, just a few hundred feet from the expensive hillside homes overlooking Griffith Park. The next kill site turns out to be within a large garden filled with stumpy cacti and guarded by a metal gate adorned with a sign telling people to stay out. Trespassing isn’t an option, so we head off to the third and final kill site.

  As we struggle up a steep hill, I ask Laurel what they hope to learn from P-22’s leftovers. “A lot of people have misconceptions about what the wild animals are eating,” she says. “So it’s a general diet study to show that they are eating deer like they are supposed to, even in these very urban environments, and that they’re not just picking off people’s dogs.”

  So it’s just a myth that P-22 will be feasting on people’s dogs? “That’s a very commonly held belief,” she says. “People will often have the misconception that mountain lions are coming into their backyard and picking off pets when it’s more likely to be coyotes or other smaller animals, like owls taking people’s cats. But people are always blaming it on mountain lions.”

  Mountain lions prefer to eat deer and elk. In the Santa Ana Mountains on the other side of L.A., mule deer make up 95 percent of what cougars eat. Coyotes account for another 4 percent of their diet.

  Nonetheless, cougar attacks on pet dogs can happen. In 2013 one pounced on a dachshund being walked near the southwestern outskirts of Colorado Springs. The lion grabbed the dog, pulling the still-attached leash out of the owner’s hand, before running away and eating it. A few hours later the cougar was caught and euthanized.

  Such incidents are distressing and gain a lot of attention, but mountain lions very rarely prey on pets, even when they are readily available. A study of cougar kills in the west of Washington state found that domestic animals, including livestock, formed less than 3 percent of their prey, even though the region examined included residential areas on the edge of Seattle, such as Issaquah. Of the domestic animals that were killed, the overwhelming majority were livestock, with sheep, goats, and llamas alone accounting for more than three-quarters of the victims. Nor was there any indication that the cougars were focusing their hunting in the residential areas, suggesting that domestic animal kills were opportunistic rather than systematic.

  “Generally, mountain lions are not even getting close to people’s yards,” says Laurel. “So for the National Park Service mountain lion survey, the majority of the mountain lion locations they get from the radio collars are a kilometer away from even roads. So despite being in L.A. where there are parks that are very urban, they will just stick to those core natural areas when they can.” The few that do enter the streets, like the one that entered downtown Reno in the summer of 2012 and tried—unsuccessfully—to enter Harrah’s Casino Hotel, are usually young males looking for new territory after being forced out by older males.

  So it’s something of a surprise when the route to the third kill site takes us out of Griffith Park and onto a road. After getting our bearings we figure out that the location is up the driveway of a large house. We head up to the front door.

  Laurel checks the map again. The site seems to lie right behind the house, although Laurel doesn’t think the kill happened in the backyard. “On the satellite images it looks like there’s more open space behind the property than we can see from here, but those images are a few years old so it’s hard to know exactly what is there.”

  But there’s no way to find out without going through the house, and that’s a problem. After all, what is the etiquette for turning up on someone’s doorstep, plastered in dirt and dripping with sweat, to ask if you can see their backyard because you think a lion killed something right by their house?

  After a short discussion, Laurel and Miguel decide that broaching the subject with the homeowner is best left to a uniformed representative from the Park Service, so we leave empty-handed with not a single confirmed P-22 kill to show for our troubles.

  Although today’s kills proved elusive, other days have been more successful. “We got a lot more last weekend,” says Laurel. “We found a coyote, two deer, and a raccoon.”

  On the way back, Miguel tells me how he hopes P-22 will make people less frightened about cougars living near cities. “The media likes to make these mountain lions seem very dangerous, but having P-22 right in this very urban area in a small park is a testament to how, even in these urban areas, they are not going to be like a coyote and start asking for food,” he says.

  Although city life hasn’t done much to change mountain lions, it has had a profound effect on another potential man-eater. For the past thirty years American black bears have moved into urban North America in a big way. From New Jersey to New Mexico, sightings and complaints about urban bears have soared as new developments encroach on their habitat and the appeal of garbage draws them to the bright lights.

  Smart and adaptable, black bears have been making the most of what cities can offer hungry bears. In Colorado Springs one enterprising bear wheeled away a five-hundred-pound Dumpster from the back of Edelweiss Restaurant, just south of downtown. After dragging the German restaurant’s Dumpster to a parking lot, the bear gorged on leftover Wiener schnitzel and grilled bratwurst. The bear must have liked its takeaway because the following night it returned to steal another of the restaurant’s Dumpsters.

  In Anchorage bears have learned how to deal with the electric fences people use to keep them out of their property, avoiding those with three or more electrified strands while stepping through the gap in those with just two wires.

  Few places have had an influx of black bears as startling as that seen in the towns and cities near Lake Tahoe. Between 1997 and 2006 the area’s bears switched en masse from a rural life to an urban one. Complaints about them in places like Carson City and South Lake Tahoe rose ten-fold and the number of bears involved in traffic accidents increased seventeen-fold. So many bears have moved in that the Lake Tahoe Basin now boasts one of the highest densities of urban black bears in North America and biologists are finding it a real challenge to find bears outside the city limits.

  But the bears didn’t just relocate. They changed.

  For a start, they got fatter. Spoiled by the abundance of human food to eat, the urban bears ended up almost a third heavier than those in the wild. In fact the amount of food on offer in the towns and cities was so great that bears would even stop feeding when there was more food available, despite their need to eat fifteen thousand or more calories every day.

  They became less active too. Their home ranges shriveled by as much as 90 percent and even in the buildup to hibernation they remained less active than rural bears. They also became night owls, rarely venturing out until the sun began to set, presumably to reduce thei
r chances of bumping into people. In contrast rural bears are active during the daytime too.

  There were odder, less easily explained changes as well. In the urban areas there were more than four times as many male bears than in the wild. Then, there were the females. In the wild the average female bear gets pregnant at seven or eight years old, but in the city they were getting pregnant at four or five. Some were getting pregnant as young as two years old, mere months after separating from their mother.

  But if Lake Tahoe’s towns and cities sound like a bear paradise of Dumpsters overflowing with free pizza, there’s a big downside. Urban bears die young. Of the twenty-two bears tracked by scientists in the Lake Tahoe Basin, twelve lived in urban areas. By the age of ten they were all dead, while six of the rural bears were still alive and kicking.

  Vehicle collisions are the main killer, responsible for not only the deaths of many adults but also the high rates of cub mortality among urban bears. An added danger is that bears looking for food in urban areas run into trouble with people and get killed. What’s more, the urban bears are dying faster than they can reproduce, making their population reliant on newcomers moving in from the country.

  For the black bears of Lake Tahoe, the city is a siren song, luring them in with the promise of a more-than-you-can-eat buffet before sending them to an early grave. It’s not the same everywhere. The extreme heat and dryness of the Lake Tahoe area seems to make the city extra attractive for black bears, but in more hospitable climates they use cities differently. In Aspen, Colorado, the bears are nomads. In years where bad weather makes food scarce in the wild they head for the city, but when times are good they return to their natural habitat.

  Black bears may be the bear fondest of city life, but grizzly bears, which are brown and about twice the size of the black bear, also dabble, and one of the places they visit is the town of Banff in Alberta, Canada.

  “In the summer we’ve always got bears cruising around,” says Parks Canada’s Blair Fyten when we meet on a cold, snowy January morning. “We’ve got lots of grizzly bears here and a lot of them are very used to people. We have a few grizzly bears that will go right through the town. People see them from their yards.”

  Three grizzlies, in particular, are regular summer tourists, he adds in a tone so matter-of-fact it hardly feels like we’re talking about an animal with such a fearsome reputation. Two are six-hundred-pound males. The other, a female who had three cubs in tow when she last visited. But it isn’t garbage that’s bringing them to the picturesque national park town.

  “Our garbage in the townsite is pretty good. All our containers are bear proof, although every once in a while you get a restaurant that spills some grease or something. So the bears aren’t really getting into the garbage, but they might come into town and go for a crabapple tree in someone’s yard or to graze down on the golf course.”

  There’s another reason the grizzlies come to Banff, and it’s the same reason I’m here. Elk. For years Banff has had a problem with these large herbivores. At its peak in 1999, the town was full of them. “We were getting a lot of elk here, upward of six, seven hundred,” says Blair. “They tended to congregate around the townsite during certain periods of the year. One is when they are calving. The cows come into the townsite to seek refuge from predators and have their calves in people’s backyards.”

  But calving elk don’t like people getting near them, and in a tourist town of eight thousand residents that can attract enough summer visitors to swell the population to as many as twenty-five thousand people, the chances of someone getting too close are high. “They get very protective of those calves, and so if you happen to step out into your backyard, sometimes the females would get aggressive and actually attack you, strike with their front feet. Then in the fall, the bulls would gather up their harems of cows and they get pretty protective of their cows too. So they would be right in town on the recreation areas and people would be there trying to get pictures, and these bulls would get aggressive and put the run on the people.”

  Banff didn’t always have elk. Their presence is the unexpected outcome of actions half a century ago. In the 1960s Parks Canada had a culling program that wiped out the local wolves and killed many of the local cougars. With their natural enemies gone, the elk population boomed. The elk then ate all the willow trees, wiping out the local beavers. The caribou also lost out to the elk.

  By the 1980s, however, attitudes to wildlife had changed. The culling of predators was stopped and the wolves staged a comeback. “The wolves come pretty close to town but stay two, three kilometers out,” says Blair. “For some reason they don’t come in real close.” So the elk responded to the return of the wolf by moving into the town.

  And although wolves pushed the elk into town, plants pulled them in. “The town acts as a refuge for the elk, plus there’s lots of good vegetation. They come into town and eat on the manicured lawns. They really like the golf course too. And after they’ve hung out in town for a long period, they become habituated to people.”

  Sometimes the elk’s taste for what people plant in their gardens gets them into trouble. “A couple of weeks back we had a bull elk that got wrapped up in a whole bunch of Christmas lights. He was probably eating under someone’s tree that had a bunch of lights on it, lifted his head, and found himself all wrapped up,” says Blair.

  “We thought there was a risk he is either going to get caught up in a tree and die or get the lights wrapped around his legs, which could cause injuries. So we went in and darted him. We ended up removing his antlers because he was going to be dropping them in two months anyway.” The bull’s sawed-off antlers, complete with Christmas lights in the shape of candy canes, are still on the floor of Blair’s office when I visit.

  By the end of the 1990s the elk had become a big problem for Banff. Every year there were more than a hundred incidents involving aggressive elk, including seven where the animals made physical contact with people.

  Blair takes me for a tour around town, pointing out places where elk have posed problems. Along the way we pass Central Park, a small park next to the Bow River and on the edge of downtown Banff. “There was a picture that somebody took where there are four or five people standing lined up behind this tree in Central Park, and on the other side of the tree is this huge bull who had gotten them at bay,” he says as we pass the park.

  The next stop is the outdoor area of the elementary school. It is surrounded by a sturdy metal fence. “We used to get a lot of elk on this little playing field here, so we fenced it all off.”

  Blair drives a bit further down the street. As we go we catch glimpses through the trees bordering the street of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which cuts through the town. “We’ve got elk and deer that are eating the grain that’s been dribbled out on the tracks from leaky trains. If a train stops for whatever reason and is leaky, we end up with a big pile of grain there and that attracts bears, elk and deer.”

  Do they get hit by the trains? I ask.

  “Yes, they do. Especially in the wintertime. We’ve probably already lost eight elk this winter because a bit further down the tracks there’s nowhere for them to step off the tracks, so they will run down the tracks and the train will just run them over. They report all the strikes to us so we can go out and find those elk. Sometimes they are still alive and we have to put them down, but we also collect the carcass if we can because it’s just going to attract wolves onto the track.”

  Over on the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course there are more fences, this time protecting the putting greens from the elk. “They get tens of thousands of dollars in damage to the fairways from the elk because in the fall, when the bulls are rutting, they will use their antlers to dig up a lot of the turf. If you want to watch bulls in rut, sparring and stuff, this is where you go.” In winter, when snow stops the golf, the elk are free to roam, but in the summer the golf course staff chase them off each morning in golf carts and use the sprinkler system to try to scare them
off.

  Blair takes me to the scene of the incident that was the catalyst for the counterstrike against the elk invasion. It’s a quiet backstreet of neat houses, close to a wall of conifer trees hiding the railroad tracks behind them. “I was pretty new to the warden service here and I was the person on call that day,” says Blair. “I got a call to go to an incident where a female elk had stomped a little boy in the backyard. The boy got bruised up, but nothing broken, just really scared.”

  When Blair got there the father was waiting. “The ambulance had come and picked up the boy but the father was sitting in the street, waiting for one of us to show up. His veins are all bugged out on his neck and his fists are clenched and he comes up to me yelling, about this far away,” he says, indicating a gap that would have put him and the angry dad nose to nose.

  “I thought this guy is going to hang a licker on me. He was saying, ‘It’s about time we started doing something about these elk.’ It was after that that they formed the Elk Advisory Group to come up with solutions.”

  Core to the eventual solution was a two-part crackdown on the elk. First, a couple hundred elk were trapped and relocated hundreds of miles away. The elk that remained found themselves the target of a daily routine of “hazing,” essentially a concerted effort to scare them out of town.

  Now each morning and evening Parks Canada patrols the town for elk and frightens away any they find. “We have different techniques for how we haze them. The most basic is just a hockey stick with a garbage bag or a flag tied on the end. You wave the stick and chase them off with that. It works because holding that hockey stick up with a garbage bag on the end, flapping, makes you look bigger.”

  The hockey stick originated in Parks Canada’s daredevil solution to elk raising calves in Banff backyards. “We would go in and grab those calves and move them to a safer location with Mum hot on your heels. So somebody would pick the calf up and run with it, but you had a partner with you who had the hockey stick because that cow was maybe a meter or two behind you wanting to strike you with her feet.” As the calf thief ran, the colleague would use the hockey stick to keep the angry cow at bay until the calf had been dropped in a suitable location.