The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  In a recent New York Times article, Jane Brody wrote about the increasing frequency of human-wild encounters from the standpoint of possible threats to humans. While the sighting of coyotes and other beasts might thrill, she writes, these animals can “wreak havoc on human health and safety.” Like much of the media’s coverage of wildlife, this article focuses on pathology and the possibility of disaster. Brody cites coyote-child encounters, raccoons ransacking homes they enter through pet doors, and the potential slipperiness of goose excrement. She outlines ways to protect our bodies, our health, and our property from the impacts of wild run-ins. Everything she writes is true. But I want to reframe the issue. While limiting conflict is absolutely essential for coexistence with wildlife (and a good part of The Urban Bestiary will address this very thing), it is time to evolve from the basic stance that “wild animals can hurt us, and we need to fear and contain them,” to the more expansive idea that we exist as a community of beings—a creative, enlivening, and complex recognition. Care is required, but fear is almost always misguided and undermining. It is time to redress our knowledge imbalance regarding common wildlife, where potential harms are hyped, fear is heightened, good natural history information is missing, and the benefits of living alongside wild creatures are unmentioned. If there is a moral to the modern bestiary, it is this: The more we understand the wild animals that share our home places, the better we can coexist in safety, wisdom, conviviality, and delight.

  Like many urban chicken keepers, I find that a good part of me longs for a rural existence. I never meant to live in a city. I always imagined growing my family and garden on a remote expanse of rural land at the end of a tree-lined dirt road. I would keep a cow, write nature books, send my daughter to some hippie Waldorf school, make goat cheese, bake bread. Mornings, I would watch the deer gather at the edge of our meadow; evenings, I would be on the lookout for rangy-limbed coyotes disappearing into the woods. Instead, I took a job with an urban environmental organization and married a man who works in global health for the University of Washington, and we’re raising our daughter in a Seattle neighborhood, where we will be for the foreseeable future. And as much as a corner of my mind still dreams of a farmy, rural life at the forest’s edge, I realize more each day that modern times have thrown us into a curious paradox: For those who love nature and hope to conserve wild places, urban homes are in many ways the most appropriate places to live.

  City dwellers often cite the cultural advantages of urban life. Cities are where the people are. They are where we gather to live, raise our families, build our schools and libraries, make music, produce theater. If cities are places where we incite one another to heightened material desires and rampant consumerism, where we are blinded to the needs, rhythms, and even existence of nature, they are also places that invite collaboration in the highest arts and the richest community endeavors. But there is also an unexpectedly profound ecological element to the human density that characterizes urban sites. Cities, ill-planned messes as they might currently be, are the places that the bulk of us will have to live if earthly life—both human and wild—is going to have any chance of flourishing. As inviting as the notion of a rural existence might be for many of us, the remaining open spaces in our country and beyond simply cannot accommodate a modern back-to-the-land movement, no matter how well intentioned. Well-planned urban density is the most ecologically promising mode of human habitation, allowing our homes to cluster, to be built alongside and on top of one another. This clustering encourages a sharing of resources, tools, energy, ingenuity, transport, and pavement that keep humans in one walkable/bikeable/busable place instead of sprawling out and further fragmenting the open spaces, wetlands, and woodlands that support wild creatures and systems. No matter how much I might yearn for a sweet Jersey cow on the back forty (and at this point, I’d settle for a pair of dwarf Nigerian goats on a shy half acre), I have come to realize that the most ecological life I can live begins with a new understanding of my urban home.

  We are in the midst of a vital thrust toward urban and earthen sustainability, changes in food practices, and conservation imperatives. We inhabit what I call a new nature, where the romantic vision of nature as separate from human activity must be replaced by the realistic sense that all of nature, no matter how remote, is affected by what we do and how we live. But at the same time, while enthusiasm and good intentions run high, as urban dwellers, we find ourselves unmoored—bereft of the folklore; naturalist practices; knowledge of local creatures, plants, and soil that were a necessity of life just a couple of generations ago. In this decade, for the first time in the history of the earth, more humans live in urban places than rural. Simultaneously, there is more popular interest in nature, wildlife, conservation, and natural living than there has ever been. As a new urban culture emerges, we are seeking to reclaim, and in many ways create anew, a body of knowledge that ties us to the natural world and that engages all dimensions of human knowing—intellectual, spiritual, philosophical, and deeply practical—informing a connection to the natural world that is creative, intelligent, earthy, wild, and beautiful.

  This unfolding vision of a new urban ecology has everything to do with rethinking nature more broadly. The concept of a new nature solidified for me while I was reading a recent essay by Jason Cowley, editor of the Cambridge-based journal Granta, about the changing face of nature writing. Gone are the days when “man”—typically a bearded, poorly dressed, lone semi-misanthrope in the shape of a Thoreau, or an Emerson, or a Muir—wanders into the woods in search of meaning and purpose through a romantic communing with nature. Nature was, in the history of the genre, a kind of cipher against which the writer/thinker could, through his own longings, desires, studies, and raptures, create a meaningful sense of self. The perceived inauthenticity of conventional society was renounced for something real, true, and—always—separate from the everyday life in town that the writer left behind. New nature writing, Cowley argues, is different. The “lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer” and even the descriptive natural history essay are being replaced by first-person narratives in which the writer places herself, along with nature, in a vital, urgent, and highly practical exploration of the human place in an ecological world. Humans are not observers of an untouched beauty; we are present, involved, touched and touching, in a journey of reconnection between daily life and wilder earth.

  But this notion of a new nature writing invites a question: Are writers changing, or is nature? Nature has never been securely defined. Our use of the word in an everyday sense is extremely broad. “I need some time in nature,” a friend might say colloquially, and we nod, knowing what is meant. A camping trip, a walk in the park, something to do with trees, perhaps just a foray into the backyard garden. This is a perfectly good and useful interpretation of the word, but beyond this colloquial meaning, it serves us now to be more specific. In the past, nature has been romanticized into an untouched place beyond human civilization. We love this vision and long, at times, to find ourselves immersed in wild, pristine nature. But finding untouched nature is almost impossible. Not only are the wilderness areas and parks carved with roads, trails, noise pollution, and car exhaust, but the ramifications of human-caused climate change for wild places and animals are unrelentingly global. We know that the human footprint covers the entire planet, with no place left unaltered. I would reluctantly argue that there is indeed a new nature, a sense of the earth in which we understand that humans are entangled with all of wild life, what we see and what we don’t, whether we wish this to be so or not. (Wildlife, one word, refers to wild animals, but I like to use wild life, two words, to refer to the expansive sense of biological life that throws humans into the mix alongside all things animal, botanical, geological, and atmospheric.)

  This understanding is both disheartening and inviting. I for one would rather hold fast to the notion of a remote wild earth. I want wild nature to have nothing to do with my little human plans and wants and travails and
foibles. I want there to be a “big wild” that inspires my days and my writing and my home life. But coming to terms with the fact that even the wildest places are now tied to the way we create our human lives, I try to find the poetry in this view—to know that how I live and how I focus my attention, even (especially) in my urban home, can be of benefit to wild places that I will never see but for which I have a deep passion and with which I am constantly, intimately connected. The earth is small. My life and wild life twine together. I come to this understanding by exploring wilderness with a pack on my back and with my ear to the wind, yes, but also by observing a migratory warbler in my backyard and by joining my daughter in watching a nonnative house sparrow gather nest material in the backyard garden while allowing myself to recognize fully that these activities are all of a piece.

  On our living room table lies a nest made, literally, out of our household—chicken feathers, bark from the front yard, moss from the garden stones, string from a woven rice bag that was in the garbage, bits of yarn from a scrap of carpet. It was woven by house sparrows, birds whose ancestors, like mine, came from Europe, and its loose form tells a perfect story of what I’ve come to think of as the lost boundary: the walls of our homes, our urban planning and map drawing, our workday distractions do not, and cannot, separate us from the lives and needs of a more-than-human world. We are part of a great conversation. As we pay attention, we’ll find the tracks, the script of our wild neighbors, to tell us so; we’ll begin to answer the essential question of how to live on a changing earth, where humans and nature are tangled so messily and so wondrously.

  The Lost Art of Urban Tracking

  Tracking has traditionally been considered a practice for hunters, but in the past few years, wilderness-tracking classes have become terrifically popular across the country among people with a general interest in nature, and one of the nation’s preeminent trackers, Paul Rezendes, has been a vegetarian for more than thirty years. Before that he was a leader in the Devil’s Disciples, a notoriously violent motorcycle gang. In his memoir, he speaks with raw honesty of the part he played in a shocking act of abuse against a young woman, one of the Disciples’ hanger-on “mamas.” After leaving the gang, he spent a decade in self-imposed atonement, literally crawling on his hands and knees in spiritual pilgrimage, a period that healed his psyche while attuning him very literally to the details of the earth.

  Rezendes’s book Tracking and the Art of Seeing is one of the best tracking books I know. We think of tracking as something done in the forest, or perhaps in the sandy desert wilderness, but of the forty-four mammals Rezendes teaches us to follow, covering all of the country’s diverse habitats, fourteen species typically occur in urban and suburban areas, and the trackable birdlife in cities is even greater. There is more than enough, right in the places we dwell, for a lifetime of animal study.

  Tracking often has very little to do with actual tracks. In concretized urban settings, this is good news. Certainly we can watch for real tracks, searching especially garden perimeters, the muddy edges of sidewalks, the unwalked sides of park trails, the swampy mouths of culverts. We can celebrate a tracking heyday after a snow. But we learn as much, or more, from what is called sign. The word used in the singular is often seen as a typo (shouldn’t it be signs?), but sign is the all-encompassing official tracker’s noun, referring to the almost endless observable clues that animals leave behind in their daily lives. It’s wonderful to see in body the actual creatures that dwell among us, but often they are wary, or hiding, and their behavior might change when they discover they are under observation. Sign is the true story of a secret, ever-present, insistent world. In sign, animals offer their own stories, told in an expansive alphabet that might include trails, feathers, broken nuts, dismantled pinecones, nests, droppings, pellets, scratched bark, clipped branches, middens, piles of shells, holes in trees, hollows in earth, bits of bird leg or head, the strewn fur or feathers of a kill site, sometimes entire dead creatures, their presence advertised by a gathering of crows. It takes study and practice to read animal sign skillfully, but it takes only a slender mental shift to attune our minds and bodies to the presence of sign, to be more watchful, more aware, and, through all of this, more connected to the wild life of our home places.

  Observation is a lovely, overlooked word. It seems to indicate separation: one thing (the human animal) observing another thing (the raccoon, the thrush, the fern frond, the dragonfly). But observation can become more than mere watching, more than looking across our noses at the Other, through, perhaps, the mediation of a notepad or binoculars. The word evolved from the Medieval Latin observare, which means not just “to watch” (ob-), but also “to attend” (servare). And to attend to something is an uncommon thing. It implies a kind of service, a graced allowing, a room for the movement of the observed in its own sphere—a sphere that, as attendants, we are invited to enter. With practice, our attendance deepens, becomes more astute, and also easier, more natural, part of our lives, our days, our intellects, our bodies. Observing, we grow wild, in the loveliest sense. It takes just a momentary shift in attention to turn any walk, any time spent outdoors (or even indoors, if you have a view out the window or a moth on the door frame), into a moment of natural attunement, a time in which we allow the nonhuman life among us to show itself, to have presence, to speak for itself. This manner of observation, of tracking, involves science, natural history, conservation issues, even politics—all of which are important. But it requires in equal measure contemplation, curiosity, art, wonder, poetry, play, and love.

  When I talked with David Moskowitz, one of our nation’s top trackers, he agreed that urban neighborhoods are great places for tracking. We are wired for this kind of observation, he says, to be alert to our surroundings as a condition for survival, to be active daily participants in the places we live. “In any hunter-gatherer culture,” he writes, “a detailed understanding, respect, and appreciation for wild creatures is integral to the material survival and safety of its people. Though we may think that we in this modern world have moved far from our roots in subsistence cultures, in actuality our survival and safety still depend on understanding, respect, and appreciation for our natural environment.” It is in this spirit that tracks and sign are illustrated for most animals featured in this bestiary. Tracking is a forgotten element of our innate human intelligence, one that we can practice and reclaim no matter where we live.

  Feline or Canine?

  In the muddy edges of our urban lives, the most common mammal tracks we see will be from cats and dogs; knowing feline from canine tracks is a good starting place in the urban tracker’s art. They are similar in shape, each paw with four toes and a heel pad, so they can be confusing initially, but there are several simple ways to tell them apart. Experienced trackers can determine individual species of canines and felines, but there are generalizations that are true for most species in each group.

  Canine tracks typically show claw marks, while a feline’s do not (1). If a cat is running after prey or pouncing, claw marks might be visible.

  The front two toes are side by side on a canine, and their tips are nearly parallel. On a feline track, one toe is discernibly farther forward (the inner toe, so this trait will also tell you whether the track is from the right or left paw) (2).

  On a dog, the top of the heel pad shows a clear arched, bell shape. On a cat, the top of the heel pad is dipped (3).

  The back of the canine heel pad is arched upward; the feline’s has three lobes (4).

  For both cats and dogs, front tracks are normally smaller than hind tracks. Remember, “Think horses, not zebras”: while such prints might be left by a coyote, fox, or even cougar, in our neighborhoods, the majority of these tracks will be from domestic pets.

  I have always loved the romantic notion of “the field” and have cultivated a sense of myself as a naturalist by the ever-ready presence of my field bag, which carries field guide, field glasses (a much more romantic word than binoculars),
and my endless field notes. The notion of the field as a place for natural history exploration and scientific study came into common usage near the end of the nineteenth century, alongside the explorations of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Henry Walter Bates, all of whom set off to distant lands and returned with journals and specimens through which we furthered our understanding of biological life. Field science as a discipline was honed in the first part of the twentieth century, and along with it came the idea that the field was a place, in fact, afield, away from the home or the lab, a place at least somewhat remote, awaiting exploration, with secrets to be studied and brought back. But as Michael Canfield wrote in his study of field notes in science, the field has no specific scope, no “geographical or physical bounds”; it is defined instead “by those who go there to investigate, study, or commune with nature.” In this light, the naturalist’s or tracker’s attitude allows us to reframe our home places as a version of the field, full of wild possibility, never wholly explored.

  Sweeping up the patio yesterday, I discovered a clump of striped fur. Raccoon. Raccoon-tail fur is singular; while we might think that the striped tail is created by alternating rings of light gray and darker black-brown fur, in actuality, each individual fur strand is itself also striped. I picked up the bit of fur and set it on a ledge. Sweeping more, I found another clump of fur, this one attached to three slender vertebrae—the bones from the end of the tail. Dear me! Here was a story. Another clump (no bone), and another. I did not discover the sorry reason for the tail-snipping, but I am now on the lookout for a blunt-ended, ratty-tailed raccoon.