Urban-Wildlife Syndrome
Squirrels are the most accessible and easily observed creature of all mammalian urban wildlife, so they have been studied extensively for their response to urbanization—or synurbanization, the process by which a species becomes adapted to an urban environment. Lafayette Park in our nation’s capital may also be the squirrel capital of North America. Hundreds of squirrels are fed daily by federal employees with government lunch hours. It’s entertainment for the workers and a kind of restorative connection in a stressful place. Studies of squirrels at Lafayette and other city parks form the foundation of what some wildlife biologists have begun referring to as urban-wildlife syndrome, a complex of behaviors exhibited by a population of wild animals in response to urban living and characterized by three interrelated elements:
Increased density. The population density, or the number of individuals of a specific species in a given place, is normally determined by the usual ecological factors: suitable habitat, which includes food, shelter, and water. In urban squirrels, population density is not closely related to the amount of suitable natural habitat available. Given the loss of trees in urban landscapes, there should be far fewer squirrels than there actually are, but instead, squirrel density in the urbs and suburbs is higher than in most rural/wild places. This is possible because the natural food sources are supplemented so heavily by humans—we toss peanuts, provide birdfeeders, and generally leave squirrel-food refuse about while providing warm, sheltered nest areas in the shape of street trees and attics.
Decreased wariness. Animals in urban habitats are more accustomed to, and less wary of, the presence of humans and some other mammals, such as cats and dogs. One of the reasons is obvious—there are lots of humans among the squirrels as they go about their squirrel days, and so they simply become used to us. The other reason has to do with the social complexity of squirrels and some other urban animals. When there are so many squirrels in one place, there are more individuals to act as sentinels, sending up the familiar squirrel chatter when something, such as an unsettling human presence, is noticed. The squirrels go about their lives feeling more at ease, since they know that if something is amiss, they’ll hear of it.
More intraspecific aggression. Urban squirrels fight more. While the role of chasing in squirrel society is not fully understood, one of the functions is exactly what it appears to be—the routing of an unwanted squirrel in a place/tree/general territory that another squirrel considers to be its own. With more density, this appears to be unavoidable, and while some aspects of the urban-wildlife syndrome may make urban living more comfortable, the proximity of so many other creatures can also be stressful and detrimental. Young animals, in particular, are subject to chasing and aggression from older animals that have claimed certain places as their own.
Urban-wildlife syndrome appears to exist across taxa, and animals as diverse as mice, blackbirds, raccoons, and coyotes all seem to simultaneously benefit and suffer from its effects. We are called to reevaluate our own role in this system—does human presence restore or deplete, benefit or harm? As with all questions regarding urban wildlife, there is no one clear answer. When we add food into the system, we create an uncertain tangle of benefits and conflict. And while we might have known about the conflicts between humans and animals that feeding can bring, we now have to think as well about how it interrupts the relationships between the animals themselves.
Black Bear and Cougar
The Big Wild
Let’s see who won the Friday sweepstakes,” Brian calls as he leashes Timber, a bouncing young yellow Lab. I had driven ninety minutes north of Seattle to meet predator biologist Brian Kertson at his home in a new subdivision on the edge of the Cascade Mountains. Before heading off in his pickup to search for signals from radio-collared cougars, we have to take his dog for a walk. “Friday sweepstakes?” “Yeah. It’s garbage day—that means everyone took their bins out last night. I like to walk around on Friday and see how many of them were pushed over by bears. Those are the winners.” Brian grins.*
Garbage rummaging is one of the chief complaints about black bears that Brian fields in his state fish and wildlife office. His advice shoots straight: If you move to bear country, there will be bears. If you don’t want them to raid your birdfeeder, then take it down. If you don’t want them to get into the garbage, then chain it up. Brian gets frequent callbacks:
“I did what you said, I put a bungee cord on the can, and bears still got into it.”
“Bungee cord? You need a chain with a lock. It’s a bear.”
“But I—”
“It’s a bear.”
An hour later, we’re zigzagging the off-roads in Brian’s Ford F-150. Just as I’m getting ready to confess my carsickness and ask him to pull over, the radio monitor picks up a weak signal. We turn onto a narrow dirt road. Behind us is a long drive leading to a freshly built mansion on acreage. Ahead is a wide grassy field edged by conifers and laced with flowering chicory. George Emerson might plunge through these grasses in A Room with a View and take young Lucy Honeychurch in his arms; I can see why someone would want to build a house here. Brian lifts his receiver overhead, and the beeping signal gains in strength. “This is a young male,” Brian tells me. “He strayed into town once, and so I trapped and collared him; I’m keeping my eye on him. I’m hoping he stays out of trouble.” Brian conjectures that the cougar is within six hundred yards. We turn to contemplate the idyllic setting behind us, a little wine-ready bistro table set up at the edge of the huge lawn overlooking the field. In the pasture behind the house is a paddock. “Those are thirty-thousand-dollar horses,” Brian says, speculating on the thoroughbreds. “Recipe for disaster. People move in here, loose their horses, and freak out when they find out there are cougars.” That suburban castle? “Dude,” says Brian, “it’s in big wildlife habitat.” He suggests that every real estate listing in the area should include this disclosure: Stunning view. Granite countertops. Situated in picturesque bear-and-cougar country.
In a way, it’s squirrels and coyotes all over again, but with higher stakes on all sides. These are animals that typically avoid us but, when it comes down to a close encounter, could kill us. And if, because of human feeding or habitat loss, they become emboldened or confused enough to wander among us? Well, this is the line, isn’t it? No matter how much we love these animals, we can’t share a sidewalk with them. A human-habituated squirrel is just an annoying rodent. But a human-habituated bear? It’s not for nothing that the wildlife officials tell us “a fed bear is a dead bear.” Two years ago, a city councilman was visiting his cabin in the Cascade foothills and was mauled by a bear, an adult female that was accustomed to being fed by humans. The councilman was critically injured, but he lived, and the bear was shot, a story that is repeated across the country year after year. No matter how much it belies common sense, black bears in campgrounds and around summer cabins are often fed by hand. It’s come to the point that while people are instructed to face a cougar by standing up tall and yelling, “Bad cougar, go away,” they are told to chase bears away without actually saying bear, a word the animals might have learned to associate with food, as in “Here, bear, here, bear, have this sandwich.”
Bears will eat sandwiches. But most of the black bear’s diet consists of berries, nuts, roots, fruits, and flowers. They love insects and will raid anthills and beehives (like Winnie-the-Pooh, they can sniff out honey, but unlike Pooh, they prefer the larvae within). Black bears are much smaller than grizzlies, with a typical adult female weighing about 160 pounds, a male about 250, and both standing up to six feet tall. Though we think of them as hibernators, black bears fall into more of an extended torpor than a true hibernation. They den up and take a “long winter’s nap” for five or six months, starting in the late fall, and while they won’t eat, drink, urinate, or defecate during this time (keeping the den free of odors that might attract predators—like a cougar), they are wake-able, and they will lift their heads for a drowsy
look-about several times over the course of the winter, or even defend the den if needed. My friend Bill found a denning female in a fallen stump while out for a snowy walk at the edge of his sugaring field in Wisconsin. When the bear woke up and lifted her head to look at him, his heart stopped with that common mingling of joy and fear that we feel in the face of the wildest things. She blinked, then dropped her heavy head and went back to sleep.
Black-bear dens can be as small as garbage cans—they regularly use hollowed stumps, areas beneath fallen logs, or spaces beneath rural outbuildings. Though the bears mate in the summer, the delayed-implantation reproductive strategy allows the tiny embryo to go dormant for some months, free-floating about the uterus. When the female curls into her den and settles for the winter, the embryo will implant, after which the fetus develops rapidly, and the cub will be born in the den. One or two cubs will emerge with their mother in the spring, everyone hungry and ready to grub for food. The next winter, they’ll den with her as yearlings before finding their own way in the world the following spring; females give birth every two years.
Lack of exposure to and knowledge of the wild might be one reason we do stupid things like try to feed bears, but it can’t be the whole story; our reactions to other potentially dangerous wild animals—cougars, snakes, alligators—are rarely so misguided. It may have something to do with the bears’ round furriness, their rolling gait, their gentle-looking faces. It may be something about their plantigrade stance, so unusual among the four-leggeds, so human-seeming, that invites us to try to reach across the divide of wildness and danger to create semirealistic stuffed bears (one of the most often stuffed animals in North America, even before Teddy Roosevelt), seeking (even longing) for a connection that is safe, and intimate, and maybe a little magical—lacking all common sense, perhaps, but alive with psychic meaning. We tuck our children in with their bears as we read them stories from Winnie-the-Pooh.
No one sleeps with a stuffed cougar. Who knows what might happen? Unlike berry-browsing bears, these are full-on-carnivore predators. In cougars, humans across mythological time have found a fierce protector of the cosmos; we have carried fetishes in hopes that we will be imbued with the cat’s hunting prowess. When the first Europeans reached the Americas in the fourteenth century, recognition of the cougar’s power took a perverse turn. Many of the early explorers came from countries that were heavily settled, the large predators nearly extirpated. The European view of native cultures and wilderness influenced the pattern of settlement and the relationship to the wild, where it was considered a moral duty to civilize the “savages” as well as the land. Cougar biologist and historian Kevin Hansen suggests that a dearth of factual information led to a knowledge vacuum in which “the outrageous was accepted as true.” Tales of a supernatural creature evolved, depicting the cougar as cowardly, gluttonous, devious, and brutish. “By imposing human ethics upon wild predators,” writes Hansen, “it was easy to make the step from viewing them as competitors to viewing them as enemies.” Cougars were eradicated with religious zeal—an attitude from which we have not fully recovered.
Bear Tracks and Lost Humans
The hind-foot track of a black bear is between six and eight inches long, and it will usually register all five toes (though the last toe impression might be shallow or missing), short nail marks, and a large heel pad. For an experienced tracker, black bears are relatively easy to follow—they break twigs as they go, leaving deep tracks and great heaps of berry-filled bear scats. But a human lost in the wilderness, trackers tell me, will leave as clear a trail as a bear. Panicked, lost hikers walk fast, heavy, and cut a wide swath. Bearish.
But for many, cougars and bears evoke the wildest kind of beauty. Along with wolves, these animals embody for us the deepest nature, the most primal earth, the hidden and elemental places. Much of our human wandering in bear-and-cougar land is psychic. Remembering these wildest beings, knowing they are present and real in the wilderness beyond the sightlines of our daily lives, we gather vitality, and sustenance, and a sense of our own inner wildness. We dream of these places, the bear-and-cougar places, and when we can, we load our packs and wander their paths for a day or a week, walking with care and practical caution, with awe and love. But we know that we ultimately return from bear-and-cougar habitat. Home again, where there are opossums and raccoons and maybe even coyotes aplenty but where, unless something has gone terribly wrong, we’re not about to spot a black bear or a cougar, or even see a sign of their presence. And for those of us in larger towns and cities, this sense of home is essentially true. But as sufficiently expansive tracts of wild habitat become less common, the big wild—beautiful, loved, desired, feared—is becoming increasingly confounded.
Bears require large home ranges, about fifteen thousand acres. Cougars require enormous home ranges, about two hundred thousand acres, or a hundred square miles for a male. Tracts that big are getting scarce, and those that do exist are bisected by roads, sometimes even highways. Only rarely do cougars and bears wander into dense urban places, and then it is usually by accident. But as suburbs cut into remaining wild lands, humans in these semiwooded places begin to encounter the big wild more regularly. Bears are opportunistic, and a little lazy. If there’s a fish or fruit pie in a trash bin with an ill-fitting lid? That’s a no-brainer. Black bears also possess a singular inquisitiveness that sometimes entices them into our paths. Wildlife researcher Ellis Bacon suggests that we need to take this into account in wild-bear management, to remember that actions perceived as aggressive in black bears by humans might just be the bears’ high native curiosity. With our focus on visual learning, humans forget that other species may emphasize different senses; bears explore novel objects by turning them over and over in their paws (much like parrot-family birds, as well as baby humans) and by mouthing them. Exploratory pawing and mouthing by something as big and strong and toothed as a bear can be destructive without being hostile. When bears maul a mailbox or peek into car windows, they might not be acting aggressively; they might just be curious about what’s going on inside.
Cougars, though, are different. They have always avoided humans. Brian Kertson tells me that there is no way cougars will turn into the “next coyote,” adapting to a denser urban environment and eating neighborhood cats. “People keep saying that cougars are losing their fear of humans, and pretty soon they’ll start preying on us,” he tells me. “That’s bullshit. Cougars have never been afraid of humans. But they avoid humans. They make a living off of not being seen.” He’s picked up signals from collared cougars within about 550 yards of human homes thousands of times, but Brian believes that none of these cats have been spotted by the homeowners. Different from bears, the cats are timid, elusive, present in far fewer numbers, rare in every sense. They are seldom seen. This has always added to their sense of mystique and to the irrational fear they sometimes inspire. “We don’t understand what we don’t see and imagine cougars are hiding behind trees, waiting to pounce on our kids,” Kertson says. “Trust me, if cougars wanted to eat people, there would be a lot more dead people.”
What is happening? Young cougars, especially young males like the one Brian and I were tracking, are seeking enough space for their own home territory after they are chased off their natal turf by established males. As contiguous cougar habitat becomes scarce, these young cats find nowhere to settle, and they wander into the “human matrix,” the semirural/suburban neighborhoods that are on the edge of viable habitat. Cougars prefer venison, Kertson tells me, but they are not above opportunism. You won’t find them nosing in a trash can, but fresh fenced goat or sheep? “For a cougar, that’s like McDonald’s. Wild is better, but sometimes you just want the calories.”
We know that cougars do attack and kill people, but it is exceedingly rare, which, as Kertson points out, is not because they don’t have the opportunity. Some researchers speculate that cougars do not normally recognize us as prey; their “search image” for prey is a four-legged animal, typically an
ungulate. The most common cougar attacks on humans involve runners or children. It is possible that in addition to provoking a chase response, the running posture, more hunched than walking, better matches the cougar’s search image, as do children, being smaller and closer to the ground. The worst thing a runner can do in cougar country, if this theory is correct, is bend down and tie her shoe.
In the wild, cougars have few predators. Some are killed by other cougars (established territorial males are a threat to younger males who are seeking territory). Females have sole care of the young and protect the kits from aggressive males, though some of the young are still killed, either by these male cougars or by dogs. Humans and human activities are the main source of cougar mortality. When Kertson and his colleagues radio-collar a cougar, the collar is joined by a leather spacer that will, in time, wear off. But in Brian’s studies, nearly all of the cougars die before that happens. They may be hunted by humans (legally or not); be killed by fish and wildlife officials in response to human-cougar conflict; may contract feline leukemia by consuming infected feral domestic cats; or may get hit by cars. One cougar researcher calls highways “the most efficient wildlife slaughtering mechanisms ever devised.”
The Urban Bestiary Page 12