Jovana Curcic

Mrs. Medenica

ESS 11

3/20/2015

Urban Wildlife: when animals go wild in the city

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/08/urban-wildlife-animals-in-city

Have you ever asked yourself that wild animals may actually live and habit in your urban surroundings? Perhaps some kind of fox, coyote, boar, or parakeet is hiding in a bush in a local park or at some abandoned, haunted house waiting for a chance to get food. This may sound strange, however, reading the article I realized that I wasn’t really aware that something like this can actually be true.

For example, London is colonized by red foxes- 2 years ago, in the 72^nd floor of the unfinished skyscraper; a worker has found a fox living on the worker’s food scraps. There is data that shows that there is 14 times more foxes in urban than in rural areas. Another article claims that more than 2000 coyotes roam in Chicago, crossing the street in busy traffic searching for food to feed themselves and their young. Hunting the small rodents and searching for food scraps, coyotes have more food options than in their natural surroundings, but the main problem became more evident when they directly attacked people. (PICTURE OF THE FOX) In this picture, you can see how the officers caught the coyote in a very urban street area of Chicago. The coyotes have also attacked children in playgrounds in the Denver suburb of Broomfield in 2011. In Cape Town, South Africa, baboons can be seen at almost every corner, jumping on cars, searching for easily available food and a safe habitat in which they can live in and survive. This is also a case where monkies of Jaipur, India are protected by the Hindu Religion so the efforts to run them out of cities are pretty tepid. This results in an increase of macaques population in urban areas from 15% in the 1980s to 86% today. Elks can often be seen in some cities of Canada calving their young in safe and green neighborhoods which might be very amusing for people to observe. But the food chain might bring the grizzly bears to hunt the elk and that may result in serious threat to the humans.

Why is this happening? The main cause is, of course, human activities that have destroyed the balance between natural and urban ecosystems and the balance within each of them. People have eradicated the natural habitat of many animals by building their settlements together with all logistics that comes with. That has resulted in climate change and habitat destruction and moved many animals to the closest cities. Searching for easy available foods; garbage and outdoor pet food, wild animals are accommodating to the urban life conditions losing their natural instinct to keep a distance from people most of the time. But this does not lead to pet friendliness… but to conflicts between the humans and the animals sharing the same space.