The Urban Pantheist

With the cameras I'm using on this project, I really didn't expect to include many mammals. I REALLY didn't expect to include a small swift mammal like this northern short-tailed shrew Blarina brevicauda.*


These animals might look like small rodents but they are actually very active predators who sometimes kill and eat mice and voles. The are also known to eat small snakes. More often they tackle insects and earthworms, stunning prey with toxic saliva.


Among shrews they are large, robust, blunt-nosed, and more likely to feed on vertebrates. They are omnivores that I sometimes encounter as non-target bycatch at rodent traps (meaning they are attracted to peanut butter). They produce foul smelling secretions from anal glands--often cats or foxes will kill them, but then refuse to eat the unappetizing creature. Presumably the defensive odor protects them in some circumstances.

*"Blarina" is a Latinization of Blair, Nebraska, where the animal was first described and named. "Brevicaudata" means short tail.

My dad and I were keen to see manatees. We failed in Big Cypress, and I barely caught a glimpse on Captiva. Fortunately we were blathering about it somewhere and some nice lady suggested we go to Manatee Park. Sounds like just the thing!
( Read more... )

On Monday I was told about some "really big tracks" that I needed to investigate. I was skeptical, figuring people were getting excited over fox or raccoon tracks. You can see my size nine mucking boot in the photo, so these were pretty decent sized tracks--bigger than fox or raccoon. In fact, I described them as "coyote-sized" (eastern coyote, or coywolf, a bigger animal than the western coyote) or about 3.5 inches by 2.5 inches. This is a 3 by 4 lope, meaning that one foot of the animal went into a footprint it already left, making it look like 3 tracks instead of 4. This is indicative of a certain family of carnivores.


Here's a track compared to my little hand wrapped in a lady's glove. You can see the impression of the fifth digit pad of the animal, eliminating the cat and dog families from the identification.


Get it yet?


These tracks were left by a fisher Martes pennanti, the biggest member of the weasel family still found in the east (we used to have wolverines but they were extirpated). The fisher (a misnomer--the animal is not much of a fish-eater, preferring small to medium mammals, including porcupines and raccoons) has increased in numbers in urban areas in recent years, causing some conflict with people concerned for pets. Despite being relatively small, ten to fifteen pounds for a large male, fisher can easily prey on cats and small dogs.

Masai Giraffe Giraffa camelopardalis tippelskirchi

Giraffes are among the most bizarre of all mammals and the most familiar of all zoo animals. They are the tallest mammals (male Masai giraffes can be 18 feet tall) with extremely long legs and grotesquely long necks, adaptations for feeding at treetops. Their long black tongues grasp twigs, stripping acacia leaves from their thorny branches. Whole branches can be torn off and the giraffe's powerful molars can grind the acacia thorns up. Like most large mammals, giraffes are generally diminishing in population, though they suffer less from competition with domestic animals than some other African wildlife. This may be because domestic livestock forages on much lower growing plants.

This individual is Jana, "the most genetically valuable female Masai giraffe in North America." Currently, the giraffe barn is being renovated, and it is always possible for the Jana and her mate Beau to be on exhibit. When they are out, they are with the Grevy's Zebras, at Franklin Park Zoo.

On this day in 365 urban species: Great golden digger wasp. This post has a number of anonymous comments from people (apparently alarmed to find a big orange wasp in their yard) who found their way there via Google searches.

Photo by cottonmanifesto.

What makes one rodent cute and another rodent vermin? A furry, rather than scaly tail? Stripes? Cheek pouches? I submit that it is merely context. In the forest, a rodent is an adorable sprite, dashing about gathering nuts. If you are the steward of a collection of captive animals, rodents are filthy thieves, taking food and leaving crap. This sums up my attitude toward chipmunks.

Until fairly recently, I did not consider chipmunks to be urban animals. But once I began to frequent the southern edges of The Emerald Necklace in Boson, my opinion changed. Olmsted Park and Franklin Park are both bristling with chipmunks. They seem to need a fair amount of forest, especially but not exclusively oak forest, and that needs to be messy forest, with rocks and logs for cover. They also need a good stretch of soil (not concrete and asphalt) in which to construct their burrows. Gray squirrels are more common in cities, since they need only the trees as refuge--soil, it seems, is a more rare commodity. Their burrows are where they dart when alarmed, and they are often alarmed. Small mammals survive by being cautious, if not downright twitchy. The burrows are also where they construct their larders of stored acorns and beech nuts. When they aren't eating plant material, they are surprisingly predatory, eating insects, salamanders, and even mice.

Like many rodents, chipmunks are opportunistic, and given access to a food source, they will enter homes and other buildings. As alluded to earlier, one of their favorite haunts is the city zoo.

Here's where I ask you to post your chipmunk pictures in the comments.

Photos by urbpan. Location: Aberdeen, Washington.
I apologize for the low resolution of my photographs. If anyone reading this has taken pictures of mule deer, please feel encouraged to post them with your comment. The animal diversity web has some pictures here (including one photograph of a doe in a clearly suburban setting, next to ornamental flowers and a blue spruce).

Urban species #236: Mule deer Odocoilius hemionus


What species are present in a city has as much to do with human history as it does with ecology. In eastern North America, the most densely settled part of the continent, large mammals were virtually eliminated. The mountain lion and wolf are gone, and though they are rebounding in recent years, bears and deer were driven into the last vestiges of wilderness. This isn't the case in the west. By the time that cities became large in the western states, both the shape of cities, and attitudes toward wildlife had changed. Newer American cities are generally more spread out, with a less well-defined center. They often have large city parks that are not enclosed within the grid of the city, but rather fade into the surrounding wilderness. Also, when the conservation ethic began to spread, it became less acceptable to simply kill all the large wild animals near cities. With the cities sprawling into the nearby deserts and forests, wild animals could hardly be kept out of the urban areas.

When black bears, moose, and white-tailed deer stray into neighborhoods in northeastern cities, the event, and the resulting police action, make the news. In many western cities, there is much greater tolerance of large mammals, and often a clearer understanding that the animals are merely walking in areas that were historically their habitat. It's not their fault that someone the area is paved, or fenced, or considers it their property. In fact, human changes to the land, such as planting exotic edible shrubs and providing year-round water sources, are open invitations for animals such as mule deer.

The mule deer is a close relative of the white-tailed deer (O. virginianus), and replaces it through much of the western part of North America. Mule deer are named for their large ears, and are sometimes called the black-tailed deer, due to the presence of black hairs at the tips of their tail. They share with white-tails the large light colored rump, a warning flag to others in their herd, visible when they dash away from danger, tails raised. They also share a taste for a broad range of foliage of shrubs and trees; human tastes in landscaping often seem to include small shrubs perfect for deer browsing, and newly planted trees are easy fodder. Many common weed species around cities are tempting for mule deer, also, notably the abundant foliage and fruit of Himalayan blackberry.

The family pictured--two fawns and a doe--was picking along the waterfront in the small industrial port city of Aberdeen, Washington. Deer are most active at dusk, and as in the case of this group, early morning. Urban deer will find these hours quieter and less likely to include human disturbances. One can only speculate what these deer were finding as they foraged in the sand and mud in front of a derelict warehouse, and underneath the highway. Doubtless the fawns were learning priceless lessons about how to survive in the urban ecosystem.

( click for more pictures )

Photos by urbpan. Location: University of Victoria campus, British Columbia.

Urban species #218: Domestic rabbit Oryctolagus cuniculus

Domestic animals often find their way into the ecology of urban places. They owe their very existence to humanity and civilization. But humans are flawed stewards, and will allow their animals to escape, or through a misunderstanding of "wildness," will turn pets, livestock, and lab animals out of their enclosures. And then there are the countless deliberate introductions, for the sake of sport hunting, or to seed an island with edible inhabitants, which have wrought destruction on ecosystems around the world. In North America domestic rabbits run free because a pet was no longer wanted, an animal mistaken for wild was "liberated," or because a bunny was only meant to be an Easter gift. The vast majority of released rabbits live short brutal lives, their flight-or-fight instincts blunted by centuries of breeding for life in the hutch. A released domestic rabbit has a life span of somewhere between one and two years, according to the House Rabbit Society, and other sources. In Australia, European rabbits (the wild ancestors of domestic rabbits) have run roughshod through the country, and constitute a serious ecological problem.

In North America, there are a few small cities that harbor breeding populations of domestic rabbits. The requirements for a population to become established include plants to eat, soil to burrow into for protection, and a single month to reproduce. Predators of rabbits are many, but their famously high rate of reproduction may overtake the rate of predation. On the campus of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, for example, the rabbits are well-loved by most of the students, and relatively safe from human predation, at least. University campuses are generally free of roaming dogs and cats, and most wild predators (notwithstanding the occasional mountain lion report at UVic) tend to avoid urban areas.

Some more discussion of urban rabbits occurs here.

( see more rabbits )

Street dog, St. johns, Antigua. Photo by cottonmanifesto.
Urban Species #112: Domestic Dog Canis familiaris

No other domestic mammal has had as long and intimate an association with humans as the dog. Molecular evidence indicates that domestic dogs have been distinct from their Asian gray wolf ancestors for at least 15,000 years. (This is nearly 3 times as long a time than any other animal has been domesticated.) Aborigines as far north as the Arctic and as far south as Australia and the South Pacific brought dogs with them as they spread from Asia.

How a dangerous and wary wild predator was genetically transformed into a coworker and companion of humans is a matter for discussion and controversy. The best explanation we have comes from biologist Ray Coppinger, in his highly recommendable book, DOGS: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution. Simplified for brevity, the story is this: When humans began to settle into permanent camps and villages, they produced permanent garbage and waste areas. Wild animals made use of the waste areas as a food source. Those wolves that would be the least likely to run from humans (those least likely to have a flight response) began to lurk near villages, and over time, became dogs. The genetic change that needs to occur to change "wild" responses to "tame" responses comes with a whole suite of other attributes: patchy fur color, a tendency for ears to droop, and so on. In short, dogs evolved from wolves to associate with humans--humans didn't capture and domesticate wolves. This makes dogs one of the first truly urban animals.

Today things are much more complex. There are still wild village dogs (such as those on the African island of Pemba, where Coppinger did his research), but much more often dogs that are seen in cities are former pets. Attitudes about dogs vary wildly, from country to country, among different social classes, and even among individuals of the same culture and class. Dogs have long been used to guard livestock (ironically, against wolves), assist in hunting, for entertainment (racing or fighting other animals), and for pest control. In the Victorian era, it became the vogue among the rich (and subsequently, among the middle class, always eager to emulate their betters) to keep dogs as pampered child substitutes.

Now the most common purpose of domestic dogs, at least among urban people, is companionship. Alas, in many places, dogs are thought to be disposable companions, and veterinary care is considered to be an extravagance. Inconvenient pets are turned out into the streets, and street dogs breed with indiscriminate fervor. Some people consider leashing a dog to be cruel or degrading, allowing pets to wander and mix with strays and feral animals. In some places, street dogs are a public health risk, forming aggressive packs and acting as vectors for rabies. My own experience with urban street dogs has involved sad sickly loners, surviving on handouts and scavenging.

These dogs exist in a way similar to pigeons. They're always on the lookout for food, and they are attuned to the behavioral clues of human kindness. Dogs have the advantage over pigeons of being social mammals with a rich array of gestures (puppy-dog eyes, anyone?) and behaviors that they use to interact with humans. Adorable dogs are fed, mean dogs are taken out and shot. Arguably the greatest contributor to the success of dogs is their ability to socially interact and communicate with humans.

( More street dogs )

Urban Species #114 Big brown bat Eptesicus fuscus

The most urban of all North American bats, the big brown bat roosts almost exclusively in man-made structures. A few colonies have been found in hollow trees or caves, but for the most part, these animals prefer attics, barns, and belfries. As they are among the most cold-tolerant of bats, they will roost in more open places, such as under bridges and in chimneys. They are the first bats seen awake in late winter, and the most commonly seen bats in our area. They feed on insects over still water and open areas, and are also frequently observed taking advantage of the bug-attracting properties of streetlights.

Perhaps the most famous urban bats are those that make up the colony of Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiensis) in Austin. Someday I dearly wish to see the spectacle of more than a million bats (the largest urban colony in the world) stream out from underneath the Congress Avenue bridge.

( photos of a sleeping bat, by cottonmanifesto )

photo by cottonmanifesto

Urban species #086: Raccoon Procyon lotor

At my job, taking care of caged animals in a woodland setting, the wild raccoons are my enemy. Early on I realized that I was at war with "raccoon nation," as I termed them. These crafty beasts are armed with intelligent minds and dextrous hands. They can climb any fence and can reach through fencing to grab caged birds. They eat nearly anything, and have a knack for an easy meal. Their ability to open trash cans, and to raid campgrounds, is legendary. Dave Barry has said that if we ever want to get to the planet Venus, we need to convince the raccoons that there's food there, and then follow them.

Raccoons are among the largest of urban mammals, weighing up to 25 pounds. They can survive in large city parks and wooded neighborhoods because they are nocturnal, and spend the daytime sleeping in holes in trees. They can live in almost any environment, but have a strong desire to be near water. Besides trash and pet food, urban raccoons feed on the fruit of landscaping plants, and on various small animals.

I'm hoping that cottonmanifesto will post her story of the raccoons in the Boston neighborhood of Allston.

( If one picture is good, three pictures is thrice as good. )