The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Cougars Tracking the Country

  Cougar tracks are large and soft, and evoke the vivid presence of an animal most of us will never see. The historic range of the cougar is huge—from southern Canada to the tip of South America and across all of the United States. Roaming across cultural and linguistic borders, this one species, Puma concolor, is also called mountain lion, puma, panther, and catamount. (Black panther is not a species but a colloquial name for any individual big cat that happens to be all black, the result of an uncommon mutation where extra melanin produces darker fur.) Habitat loss, subsequent reduction in ungulate prey, and, especially, “predator control” led to the extirpation of cougars in the East by the turn of the twentieth century; remaining animals found refuge in the western wilds. But in recent decades, cougars have been finding a slender foothold in the prairie states, the Dakotas, the Midwest, and even the Northeast. There have been thousands of sightings, most of which are erroneous. (Reports of cougars usually turn out to be dogs, house cats, deer, bobcats, or some other wild animal—this is actually just as true in the West, where there really are cougars. We make up far more cougars than we see.) Researchers require tangible evidence to accept an east-of-the-Rockies cougar sighting as valid, such as DNA-tested scat or fur, a clear photograph, or the body of the animal itself. Small breeding populations are established in the Badlands of North Dakota and Nebraska, and there are confirmed sightings across the map. In June 2011, a cougar was killed on a Connecticut highway, just seventy miles from New York City! Now that the white-tailed deer conservation has led to an overabundance of the cougar’s historical East Coast prey, it will be a matter of human tolerance, habitat conservation, and a measure of luck in combination that will determine whether cougars can return in healthy populations to their historical range.

  Bears, too, have few nonhuman predators. Grizzlies and black bears sometimes come into conflict with each other, and cougars, bobcats, and coyotes will sometimes attack bear cubs if they get the chance. About fifty thousand black bears are killed yearly in the United States by hunters. A recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows that urban black bears living at the edge of suburbs and gathering much of their food there by gleaning human garbage have a higher mortality rate and shorter lives than bears that stay in the hills. Lead author Jon Beckmann calls urban areas the ultimate bear trap. “Because of an abundant food source—namely garbage—bears are being drawn in from the backcountry into urbanized landscapes where they meet their demise.” (Note that the word urban is used here in the ecological sense and indicates any place populated by humans. Confused young bears occasionally wander into dense urban centers, but this study refers to the suburban and exurban places where bears are becoming more common.) In this study, twelve female bears living in urban areas around Lake Tahoe were tracked for ten years, as were ten female bears that lived in sparsely populated outlying areas. Certain results were predictable, but their extent was surprising: urban bears, who feasted on garbage, weighed 30 percent more than their human-avoiding counterparts. The increased weight brought on earlier sexual maturity, and urban bears gave birth when they were just four or five years old, rather than the typical seven or eight. A couple of the bears were only two or three when they reproduced. The urban bears also died younger. Every urban bear in the study was dead before she was ten years old, all of them hit by cars. The study terminated with the death of the last urban bear, at which time six of the wilder bears were still alive. Extrapolating beyond the study site, the researchers suggest a seventeen-fold increase in bear deaths due to auto collisions in the past twenty years. Urban places are functioning as ecological sinks for black bears—“drawing in bears from outlying wild areas, where they ultimately die.”

  What are we to do? Kertson tells me that the only sure way for humans to avoid being harmed by bears or cougars that live nearby is to kill them. But, he asks, “Is this who we want to be?” The challenges of today’s new nature are different and more difficult than ever before, but they are not impossible to navigate. We have entered a time when the continued presence of the big wild, something that ought to be a given, is instead a human choice, and one that will demand of us some uneasiness, uncertainty, and even risk. But it is possible to wield our overarching presence lightly, humbly, and with gratitude for the continued existence of the big wild. In his refreshingly straightforward way, Brian says, “It’s not cold fusion. Humans have been living alongside these animals forever.” In the places we already live, the steps are simple and practical—manage our food wastes, practice good husbandry to protect our pets and farm animals, and, for God’s sake, don’t feed the bears. If we choose to live in bear-and-cougar country, then we have to be prepared to witness these animals, to act from knowledge instead of hype and fear, to help our neighbors do the same. And in the future? “We have to think about how we distribute humans,” says Brian, provocatively applying the language of wildlife management to our own species. Humans clustering in well-planned towns and cities allows the wildest creatures their space. The peaceable kingdom of the urban bestiary has nothing to do with lions lying down with lambs. It is about all of us lying down right where we are supposed to be.

  Close Encounters

  Unless a black bear is human-habituated and associates humans with food handouts, it will avoid people. And while black bears tend to be shy and gentle, they are still big, strong creatures that can be dangerous if not treated respectfully. If you see a bear in your yard, stay inside. If you see a black bear while out wandering, pause and gauge the situation. If the bear is some distance away or appears to be unaware of you, then just leave quietly. Keep an eye on the bear as you leave. If the bear seems interested in you or begins to walk toward you, then identify yourself as human by standing tall, waving your hands over your head, and talking to it in a low voice. Try not to use the word bear, which it may associate with food. If the bear continues to approach you, try to scare it away by clapping your hands, yelling, or banging things together. The more persistent the bear, the more aggressive you have to be. Never run from a bear, unless you are sure you can reach safety very quickly—they can run thirty-five miles an hour.

  If you somehow end up face to face with a cougar, you have likely come upon the cat unawares; your goal is to help the cougar do what it wants to do—get away from you. Cougars have a strong chase instinct, so don’t run. Pick up children, face the animal, and try to make yourself seem bigger than the cougar by raising your arms or getting up on a rock or stump. If you can, back away slowly while speaking in a low, firm voice. An aggressive cougar will lay its ears back, bare its teeth, twitch its tail, and rock on its hind feet as if readying to jump. In such cases, you want the cougar to understand that you are not prey. Be bolder—yell, wave your arms, throw anything you have. Do not crouch or hide. Never corner a cougar, and leave it every possible escape route. If you glimpse a cougar from a safe distance, count your blessings—even experienced outdoors people who regularly explore areas populated by cougars go a lifetime without seeing one (I’m still hoping…).

  PART III

  The Feathered

  Bird

  The Enlivened City

  At the beginning of time, the bird spirits Ara and Irik floated upon a world made only of water, and through these birds, into the sea, there came forth two eggs. Ara crushed one egg with her slender foot to release the sky. Irik crushed the other to unfurl the earth. Just as the birds we see today are busy about their nests, Ara and Irik fussed over this new earth, picking at it with their delicate bills, shaping bits of twig and soil into the first people. The people were beautiful but arid and inert until the birds roused them to life with their cries.

  Like the first people in this lovely myth from the Ibans of Borneo, we are called into life by the birds among us. In the eighth century, the bishop of Lyon proclaimed that animals could not go to heaven because they did not contribute to the Catholic Church’s coffers. Poet-novelist Jim Harrison declares this attitude “gh
astly” as he points out that “at the same time they all decided that hell was a place without birds.” Birds form a thread through our daily lives, almost without our knowing it. Recently I resolved to take one full day and pay attention to the presence of birds in the round of my activities. I have been a student of birdlife for decades, and I always notice birds, but on this day I wanted to pay special attention—to notice my noticing. There was the expected: Crows awakened me, robins and starlings argued over the ripening cherries in our backyard tree, a black-capped chickadee fed at the tiny window feeder just inches from my face as I worked on this chapter, and spotted baby robins bathed at the edge of our garden pond. There was the unexpected: an Anna’s hummingbird flew straight through an open window and into my kitchen, hovered there like a faerie apparition about six inches beyond the frame, then, thank goodness, flew back out again. There was the bizarre: Checking on what I thought was a house sparrow’s nest tucked into our gas stove’s vent, I stood on my tiptoes, stretched my arms up to feel for the baby birds, and instead felt a cold lump of feathers. Not good. I called Tom to come and reach it for me, and he pulled out a dead, fully grown Bewick’s wren, desiccated and perfect—a mystery I’m still pondering (meanwhile, I set the bird up on the kitchen windowsill, where its blank little eyes watch me make dinner). I would normally see and pay attention to each of these small avian visitations, both the living and the dead, but making it a point to watch them throughout one day reminded me that awareness of birds offers a constant source of connection to the ever-present wild. There is a trail of birdlife among us, a story told in feather, nest, egg, song, and flight. Birds are liaisons from earth to sky, from the distractions of a technologically mediated life to the immediacy of nature. From the separation of these worlds to the realization that we can walk well in both.

  This chapter is an anomaly in The Urban Bestiary; whereas most chapters consider a particular species, this one focuses on birds generally. Birds are by far the most common vertebrate wildlife we see in the places we live, whether we are urban, suburban, or rural dwellers. There are nearly a thousand bird species in North America, and of these, hundreds are possible in towns and cities. (Recall the Bestiary’s Bestiary at the start of this book; while writing, I observed only one wild terrestrial mammal but forty-eight species of bird.) I am able to treat just a few individual species at length in the scope of this book, but there remains much to consider regarding the birdlife among us as a whole—their language, identification, life habits. Birds are not just the most numerous wild things among us, but also the most lively and most easily observable. It is thrilling and essential to think about the unseen coyotes in our midst, but it is birds that we see every day, that call us into enlivened participation with everyday nature.

  Most people today can’t identify many birds, not even the most common backyard species. But our easy attentiveness to birds, no matter how unnurtured that attention is, is a natural one. The flash of feather, the shadow overhead, and we turn, however briefly, however unknowingly, to the winged one who passed over. The reasons for this are many, and intertwined.

  Birds are like us. Warm-blooded, bipedal, color-visioned vertebrates. We find this wonderful.

  Birds are not like us. Feathered, flying, scale-footed dinosaurs. We also find this wonderful.

  Birds are beautiful. They are shining, colorful, graciously proportioned beings that daily perform an act that lies beyond every human body but inheres in every human imagination—flight. It is natural that we turn toward them with wonder, joy, gratitude, and a touch of envy. (A very few birds are difficult to call beautiful. While visiting Kenya, I tried, and failed, to find aesthetic pleasure in the Marabou stork, though it is graceful in flight. Surely the flaw is in my own perception.)

  Most compellingly of all, we are biologically and evolutionarily attuned to the presence of birds. We are wired, in our innate, primal selves, to be attentive to birds’ language, to enter and engage in their discourse. Birds are vigilant to our presence and movements. While we might watch birds for recreation, aesthetic delight, or scientific study, they watch us for the same reasons they watch all animals with such bright awareness—to avoid danger, and to survive. Human societies that relied on hunting had to be attuned to the haunts and ways of birds. An agitated bird will fly out of a hunter’s reach or alert other quarry—another bird, or a mammal—to the hunter’s presence. We humans had to know how to search out birds and how to walk among them without causing alarm. I believe we still feel and respond to this ancestral knowing in our own lazy modern bones.

  Attuning to urban birds reframes the bird-watching endeavor. We think of birding as something that requires a bit of planning, effort, and knowledge—carrying binoculars to some pretty, leafy, sun-dappled place with warblers hiding in the leaves, or waterbirds resting on the peace of a secret pond. But urban birding asks something different of us. It asks us to find the wild thing, the peaceful presence, the animal awareness, in the ordinary moments of our daily lives and places. It asks us to bridge any disconnection between home and wild nature, to accept the constant continuity with the more-than-human world that is an essential part of human life, no matter where that life is lived. There is certainly not as much avian biodiversity in urban places—the majority of bird species are habitat-sensitive and cannot live in a city at all. But among the species that can thrive in cities, individual numbers of birds are often very high; these birds are accustomed to human presence and can be more approachable than those in untrammeled environs. Here, we can invite the birds into our yards and onto our window boxes with food that we buy at the grocery store. We can draw near, watch for hours. Humans have never lived in closer proximity to birds than we do now, in cities.

  It is odd that this is so. The anxieties of living in the city, one might think, would make birds even more wary. The strains of urban bird life are real—stress from noise, humans, habitat degradation, cars, light pollution, and as many predators in the form of cats, dogs, raccoons, and crows as in any supposed wilder place.* How can they handle it?

  Studies comparing various urban and rural bird populations teach us that, in general, urban birds exhibit a syndrome of interrelated characteristics: Individuals are often slightly larger than individuals of the same species in rural places; they sing for more hours of the day (because of artificial lighting) and sing louder and at a higher pitch (to compete with human noise); they are less afraid of approaching humans (having become habituated to their presence); and they are less stressable overall.

  Wondering about the role of stress in urban animal populations, researchers at Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany studied the common Eurasian blackbird (actually a thrush in the genus Turdus, similar to our American robin) and published their results in the journal Ecology. They took nestlings from urban nests and forest nests when they were just hatched and reared them in identical circumstances. At five months, eight months, and eleven months, the chicks were all subjected to the same traumatic capture and handling, and the researchers discovered that in these stressful situations, the young urban birds released less of the glucocorticoid steroid hormones associated with acute stress than the forest birds did. The implication is remarkable—it means not only that individual birds adapt to urban living but that natural selection actually creates populations adapted to stressful environments; like humans, birds exhibit classic country-mouse/city-mouse manners that are observable. The authors of the study are cautious, noting that there are other contingencies at play, but it seems that this general conclusion has merit, and it makes sense that the results might be similar for other avian species, and perhaps even mammals—including humans. Walking around the University of Washington with my friend Andrew, who lives in rural Skamokawa, Washington, I was struck when he said, rather wide-eyed and warily, “Gosh, there sure are a lot of people here.” I looked around at the students coming and going and didn’t see a lot of people at all. To me, though I don’t think of myself as being particularly we
ll adapted to urban life, it seemed like just a sunny day on the leafy campus. The upshot of this research for us as observers is that we can often watch birds more easily in places where they are accustomed to us, because they don’t stress out and hide as quickly, or ever. This is ideal for certain aspects of study—observing avian physiology, habits throughout the day, dietary preferences, nesting, rearing of young; sketching in a field diary; doing simple experiments; making a detailed study of a particular species or even an individual bird over time.

  One thing that strikes me in the typical human observation of birds is a general failure to recognize the connection of bird actions to the seasons. Most of the questions I receive about birds have to do with the seemingly insane, hormone-activated behaviors of birds in the spring: woodpeckers, especially the common urban Northern flickers, that seem to be banging the house down (actually, they’re drumming, in lieu of song, in order to establish territory and connect with mates); crows dive-bombing (protecting vulnerable nests, eggs, and young from humans, dogs, and raptors); robins throwing themselves at windows (presumably mistaking the reflection for another male robin and defending its territory by fighting it off); hummingbirds flying straight up into the sky, then nose-diving at breakneck speed back down (the breeding display of the male for impressing and attracting a female mate—the species can be identified by the pattern of this display). Though the round of birdlife will vary somewhat depending on species and location, most urban birds will follow this general pattern:

  Late winter and early spring will bring mating displays between the sexes and copulation. Throughout spring we’ll hear the males’ songs, and birds will become increasingly aggressive, industrious, and also secretive as they secure breeding territories and nest sites and begin building nests.