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NY Times catching up.
These little newspapers are just starting to catch up with what I wrote in the last issue of The Urban Pantheist.
Unto the City the Wildlife Did Journey
By ANDY NEWMAN
And the great beasts came down from the mountains and crossed the seas and descended upon the cities — the hind and her fawn, leaping fences in the southeast Bronx; the black bear, stout but fleet of foot, stealing through the streets of Newark; the seals of the harbor sunning themselves by the score upon the hospital ruins of Staten Island.
And the coyote prowled the West Side and took up quarters in Central Park. And the dolphin beached itself on the Turuks' sandy yard in Throgs Neck. And the she-moose, 21 hands high, strayed within 30 miles of the city gates.
And the wise men stroked their beards and scratched their heads, and they finally declared, "This is not normal."
Bill Weber, a senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the other day. He was talking about the bears that have lately taken to wandering New Jersey's urban core.
But bears are just the beginning. In recent weeks, the three largest land mammals native to the Eastern United States, along with numerous runners-up, have visited New York City and its environs. A fair degree of chaos has ensued.
Big-city police officers idled by falling crime rates spend their days pursuing four-legged fugitives. The pit bulls and tomcats in the city pound in East Harlem have been forced to make room for white-tailed deer. This spring, the New York metropolitan area depicted on the evening news has come to resemble an episode of "Animal Precinct" filmed at a big-game preserve.
What in the world is going on?
There is no simple answer, the wise men say.
"You have this really neat pulse of things happening within a relatively short period," Dr. Weber said from his office at the Bronx Zoo, "and as humans we like to make some sense of that and give some justification. But they all have their anomalous reasons."
The factors include both environmental triumphs and travesties. Once-threatened species continue to recover because of conservation measures. Waterways are cleaner. Greenways are being built in and around cities. At the same time, development in the farthest exurbs chews up land and flushes animals from their usual homes. Mild winters, possibly man-made, are easier for many species to survive.
All of it adds up to a new definition of normal. (Or perhaps an old one. After all, the animals were here long before the people were.) Just as the suburbs have spent years negotiating conflicts with wild animals, it is now the cities' turn.
"I think we're just seeing the growing trend of population sizes with some of these animals, and the adaptation to survive and, or at least, venture into more progressively more urban areas," said Gerry Barnhart, the wildlife director at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The season of strangeness began on the first day of spring, when a coyote was spotted in Central Park for the first time since 1999. Four days later, biologists on a search expedition counted 20 harbor seals at the edge of Swinburne Island, off the east coast of Staten Island. Seals have been observed there since 2001, but never in such numbers. In April, a wild turkey nicknamed Hedda Gobbler was apprehended on the grounds of the Riverton Houses in Harlem, just days after one — possibly the same one — was seen wandering the lawn of the American Museum of Natural History.
Then came the bears of May. A 225-pounder, perhaps on a misguided mission to lodge a complaint against New Jersey's new no-tolerance policy on urban bears, got within two blocks of Department of Environmental Protection headquarters in Trenton before he was treed, tranquilized and killed. Under state policy, bears that wander into heavily populated areas may be killed if the state determines that they pose a hazard.
The Newark bear — a phrase that had until recently meant only a minor-league baseball player — crossed into neighboring Irvington, where he, too, was shot dead. A juvenile weighing 153 pounds made it as far as Short Hills, seven miles from Newark, before being put to death, to a growing outcry from bear defenders.
In between bear sightings, the southeast Bronx, best known for tidy waterfront neighborhoods and convenient access to Queens, was the site of two more untimely mammal deaths.
A panicked mother deer fleeing would-be rescuers gored herself on a backyard fence, ran into Eastchester Bay and drowned. Then an offshore bottlenose dolphin, a hefty subspecies usually found at least 50 miles from the shore, washed up next to the Turuk family's dock. Stephen Turuk, 40, cried as he poured water on the sickly animal trying to save it. "It's a beautiful thing to see a dolphin," he said, "but it's terrible that it died."
In April, the moose, a 7-foot female estimated to weigh 700 pounds, surfaced in Somers in Westchester County, 27 miles from the New York City line, or slightly closer than Riverdale is to the Rockaways. Joan Ackerman, a manager at a county park, was dumbfounded when she locked eyes with it. "I went to Alaska and didn't see a moose," she said.
While the intensity of the current invasion may be a fluke, the guests seem to be here to stay. Wildlife officials released the Harlem turkey and the surviving Throgs Neck deer not in distant preserves but in the city parks where they were presumed to have been living before — Morningside and Pelham Bay, respectively.
So eventually, if not sooner, city folk will have some adapting to do. But what sort of adaptation? Should New Yorkers hang their trash from ropes rather than leaving it curbside for large clawed paws to tear through? Will the orange hunting vest replace the little black dress? Could Lyme disease become the new asthma?
Fortunately, the experts have much advice to offer. Do not add meat scraps, bones or melon rinds to your compost pile. Yell or bang pots when walking through wooded areas. Provide secure outdoor shelters for poultry. And do not, under any circumstances, feed bananas to visiting seals, as some people did at the Coney Island beach last summer. ("Don't even give them fish," said Martha Hiatt, the supervisor of behavioral husbandry at the New York Aquarium.)
And if a moose should wander into the Big Apple, an outcome that Al Hicks, a state wildlife biologist and its official moose expert, said was possible "if the moose made a number of mistakes," there is only one appropriate course of action beyond notifying the authorities.
"Enjoy it," Mr. Hicks said, "because it's probably going to get hit by a car in the very near future."
Unto the City the Wildlife Did Journey
By ANDY NEWMAN
And the great beasts came down from the mountains and crossed the seas and descended upon the cities — the hind and her fawn, leaping fences in the southeast Bronx; the black bear, stout but fleet of foot, stealing through the streets of Newark; the seals of the harbor sunning themselves by the score upon the hospital ruins of Staten Island.
And the coyote prowled the West Side and took up quarters in Central Park. And the dolphin beached itself on the Turuks' sandy yard in Throgs Neck. And the she-moose, 21 hands high, strayed within 30 miles of the city gates.
And the wise men stroked their beards and scratched their heads, and they finally declared, "This is not normal."
Bill Weber, a senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the other day. He was talking about the bears that have lately taken to wandering New Jersey's urban core.
But bears are just the beginning. In recent weeks, the three largest land mammals native to the Eastern United States, along with numerous runners-up, have visited New York City and its environs. A fair degree of chaos has ensued.
Big-city police officers idled by falling crime rates spend their days pursuing four-legged fugitives. The pit bulls and tomcats in the city pound in East Harlem have been forced to make room for white-tailed deer. This spring, the New York metropolitan area depicted on the evening news has come to resemble an episode of "Animal Precinct" filmed at a big-game preserve.
What in the world is going on?
There is no simple answer, the wise men say.
"You have this really neat pulse of things happening within a relatively short period," Dr. Weber said from his office at the Bronx Zoo, "and as humans we like to make some sense of that and give some justification. But they all have their anomalous reasons."
The factors include both environmental triumphs and travesties. Once-threatened species continue to recover because of conservation measures. Waterways are cleaner. Greenways are being built in and around cities. At the same time, development in the farthest exurbs chews up land and flushes animals from their usual homes. Mild winters, possibly man-made, are easier for many species to survive.
All of it adds up to a new definition of normal. (Or perhaps an old one. After all, the animals were here long before the people were.) Just as the suburbs have spent years negotiating conflicts with wild animals, it is now the cities' turn.
"I think we're just seeing the growing trend of population sizes with some of these animals, and the adaptation to survive and, or at least, venture into more progressively more urban areas," said Gerry Barnhart, the wildlife director at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The season of strangeness began on the first day of spring, when a coyote was spotted in Central Park for the first time since 1999. Four days later, biologists on a search expedition counted 20 harbor seals at the edge of Swinburne Island, off the east coast of Staten Island. Seals have been observed there since 2001, but never in such numbers. In April, a wild turkey nicknamed Hedda Gobbler was apprehended on the grounds of the Riverton Houses in Harlem, just days after one — possibly the same one — was seen wandering the lawn of the American Museum of Natural History.
Then came the bears of May. A 225-pounder, perhaps on a misguided mission to lodge a complaint against New Jersey's new no-tolerance policy on urban bears, got within two blocks of Department of Environmental Protection headquarters in Trenton before he was treed, tranquilized and killed. Under state policy, bears that wander into heavily populated areas may be killed if the state determines that they pose a hazard.
The Newark bear — a phrase that had until recently meant only a minor-league baseball player — crossed into neighboring Irvington, where he, too, was shot dead. A juvenile weighing 153 pounds made it as far as Short Hills, seven miles from Newark, before being put to death, to a growing outcry from bear defenders.
In between bear sightings, the southeast Bronx, best known for tidy waterfront neighborhoods and convenient access to Queens, was the site of two more untimely mammal deaths.
A panicked mother deer fleeing would-be rescuers gored herself on a backyard fence, ran into Eastchester Bay and drowned. Then an offshore bottlenose dolphin, a hefty subspecies usually found at least 50 miles from the shore, washed up next to the Turuk family's dock. Stephen Turuk, 40, cried as he poured water on the sickly animal trying to save it. "It's a beautiful thing to see a dolphin," he said, "but it's terrible that it died."
In April, the moose, a 7-foot female estimated to weigh 700 pounds, surfaced in Somers in Westchester County, 27 miles from the New York City line, or slightly closer than Riverdale is to the Rockaways. Joan Ackerman, a manager at a county park, was dumbfounded when she locked eyes with it. "I went to Alaska and didn't see a moose," she said.
While the intensity of the current invasion may be a fluke, the guests seem to be here to stay. Wildlife officials released the Harlem turkey and the surviving Throgs Neck deer not in distant preserves but in the city parks where they were presumed to have been living before — Morningside and Pelham Bay, respectively.
So eventually, if not sooner, city folk will have some adapting to do. But what sort of adaptation? Should New Yorkers hang their trash from ropes rather than leaving it curbside for large clawed paws to tear through? Will the orange hunting vest replace the little black dress? Could Lyme disease become the new asthma?
Fortunately, the experts have much advice to offer. Do not add meat scraps, bones or melon rinds to your compost pile. Yell or bang pots when walking through wooded areas. Provide secure outdoor shelters for poultry. And do not, under any circumstances, feed bananas to visiting seals, as some people did at the Coney Island beach last summer. ("Don't even give them fish," said Martha Hiatt, the supervisor of behavioral husbandry at the New York Aquarium.)
And if a moose should wander into the Big Apple, an outcome that Al Hicks, a state wildlife biologist and its official moose expert, said was possible "if the moose made a number of mistakes," there is only one appropriate course of action beyond notifying the authorities.
"Enjoy it," Mr. Hicks said, "because it's probably going to get hit by a car in the very near future."