Animal romp in the not wilds

The Urban Bestiary
by  Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Amusing and lovely tales of the animals and birds that live with us in our cities and suburbs; often told tongue-in-cheek: the four reasons why we hate rat tails. We do hate them, and there are reasons for it, and when you read this you'll understand why.

This turned out to be a a mixture of personal observations, science, history and even an occasional folktale. Delightful. On house sparrows gathering nesting materials in her chicken coop:

Finally, one male house sparrow selected the very biggest and longest--a primary wing feather. Such a prize! The feather was longer than he was but weighed nothing; he picked it up horizontally in his  bill and attempted to make off with it, flying straight into the hogwire fence. Hogwire is characterized by vertical wire rectangles, two by four inches each, a good sparrow-sized opening but not a sparrow-with-long-feather-size opening. I was stunned to observe what happened next: the sparrow dropped to the ground, put his feather down, walked through the fence, then reached his head in, grabbed the tip of the feather, and pulled it through. This was problem-solving, the sort of thing we expect from primates and maybe the higher avian orders, such as corvids and parrots. Certainly not from a plain, hated little sparrow.

From Brian, a fish and wildlife officer:

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 your 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."

On a recent trip to the Texas hill country, I cringed to see all the Future Home Of... signs on narrow roads in the undeveloped wilderness. How many car-deer collisions will it take before the deer are driven away? How many raccoons will be relocated or shot because the new homeowners get their garage can dumped out on the ground? How many foxes will survive after people strew rat poison inside their garages?

I wish they would all read a copy of this book. Understanding the wild creatures might lead to tolerance, to co-existence. When I first moved to the suburbs I had the delightful experience of cleaning up all of the contents of my garbage can spilled in the street, but I learned to keep the garbage cans in the garage until trash day.  I learned to keep the bird seed in rat-proof metal bins. And when a barred owl dive-bombs your head during a morning jog, look around to see where its nest might be--and take a detour next time. Let the critters live--or go back to your condo in Houston. Please.