Feral Cities (2 page)

In the local park there were gray squirrels edging out the last of the native red squirrels. Then there were the pigeons that sometimes joined me and other passengers for a ride on the London Underground. Not to mention the sooty mice scurrying between the tracks, whose disappearance always told you when a train was coming.

Then there were the flying ants that would swarm from improbable nests in the concrete and brick of the housing estate I grew up on. They would emerge in such numbers that you couldn't go outside without getting hapless ants in your hair or, if you were really unlucky, your mouth.

But the headline-grabbing foxes with their distinctive bushy tails seemed new. City foxes were rare sights in my childhood, yet today they are everyday sights in most British cities. Their presence seems like a direct challenge to the very idea that cities are “our” space. People talk of cities as sterile, barren places somehow divorced from nature—places that wipe out the wild as they grow, gobbling up the land like asphalt-skinned monsters. And yet here were foxes, brazen foxes, wandering through the streets of one of the world's biggest cities, climbing skyscrapers, entering homes, and digging dens under garden sheds.

It made me wonder if we had it wrong. Maybe our cities are
more wild and alive than we think. And if they are, what about the animals that live there? Are they thriving or dying in the concrete jungle? Why are some animals victims of urban expansion while others are urban survivors who seem as at home on the streets as we are? This book began as a search for answers to these questions about what lives among us, whether that be London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, or Nairobi. But it soon became clear it couldn't stop there.

Cities are possibly the most exciting, most surprising, and least understood ecosystems on the planet. They are places where much of what we think we know about the natural world doesn't apply. Places where our own love-hate relationship with wild animals flings open the door for the unexpected. Places that may even be changing the animals within it, just as the shift from country to city changed us.

The red foxes of London seemed like a good place to start looking for answers to these questions and, as it turned out, the city fox has a long history.

The first urban fox was spotted in 1930s London. The British capital was expanding fast, rolling out suburbs in every direction, swallowing villages, farms, and entire towns as it went. By the end of the 1930s, London was four times the size it was ten years earlier. And it was in this period of rapid expansion that the city fox emerged.

The foxes didn't so much move to the city as have the city built around them. Within a few short years they found themselves marooned in a new world of semi-detached houses, freshly laid roads, and fenced back gardens. By the 1940s foxes were common enough in south London for the government to attempt to eradicate them by hiring hunters to chase them through the leafy new suburbs. It didn't work.

Forty years on, London's foxes were still outsmarting the urban hunters, and when the British public turned against the idea of wearing fox fur, the city hunts fizzled out. By then having urban foxes was not just a British phenomenon. Red foxes could be found
in cities across the world, from Zürich and Melbourne to Toronto and Hakodate in northern Japan.

Central to their success was their adaptability. “They can tolerate a wide range of environments. They are very adaptable,” ecologist Dawn Scott tells me when we meet at her office in the University of Brighton. Dawn has been tracking foxes in the English seaside city to learn more about their urban lives. “They are renowned for being cunning and they've got such a variety of diet—they can survive off everything—and that makes them a good urban exploiter.”

One thing cities aren't short of is food. From garbage bags filled with leftovers to roadkill and compost heaps, cities offer a varied menu for hungry foxes. Dawn's GPS-tagged foxes even go for dinner on Brighton's pebble beach. “They pootle around the seafront, and if there are any places where they deal with fish they go and scavenge there,” she says. “I've also had people reporting them on Brighton Pier, eating ice cream or whatever else has been dropped by people that day.”

Plenty of people feed them too, some by hand, and this helps explains why urban foxes are now comfortable enough with us to not worry about being seen and will venture into homes or hassle Londoners for their garlic bread. “We have records of people encouraging them into their kitchens and houses, and that can lead to foxes exploring other houses,” says Dawn. “If you hand feed a fox, then it associates hands with food. And because they explore with their mouths and tend to snap and grab because they are opportunistic animals, they tend to go in, grab something, and peg it off.

“If you combine hand feeding and grabbing with running off, there could be an instance where a fox goes up and gives someone's hand a test with its mouth that could be perceived as an attack.”

The bountiful supply of food also makes the life of the city fox noticeably different from those living in rural areas. Like us, foxes live in denser populations in cities than in the countryside. In rural England there's roughly one fox per square mile, but cities cram in as many as fourteen into the same space.

The size of their territory shrinks too. “We've had some very, very small home ranges in Brighton, and we think one of the things that affects the size of their range is human feeding,” says Dawn. “So if you have a suburb where you have got two or three people who are feeding foxes, that means the home range isn't very big as they only need to go and visit those two or three gardens. But in the next suburb, if nobody is feeding them, the range will be bigger.”

The city does have dangers, though. Dogs are a problem, so foxes often avoid yards with pet dogs on the loose. Roads are a big killer, but the ever-adaptable fox has devised a solution for that. “We found that foxes delay crossing the main busy roads until the middle of the night and are more likely to cross at two or three o'clock in the morning,” says Dawn.

Disease is another problem, and infections can be devastating for dense populations of urban foxes. In spring 1994, Bristol's foxes experienced a major outbreak of mange, the disease caused by the same skin-burrowing mite that gives people scabies. When untreated it can cause itching so severe that animals have chewed off their own tails. Mange spread fast in Bristol, taking fox after fox. When the disease finally fizzled out two years later, more than 95 percent of the city's foxes were dead. Yet, bad as the outbreak was, it also demonstrated the resilience of the red fox. Today, fox numbers in Bristol are back to the levels seen before mange struck.

Foxes, it seems, are as at home in cities as in the countryside, capable of altering their behavior to fit in with the demands of urban living. But, I wondered, are these charismatic scavengers one-offs or just one of the most visible examples of how wildlife is adjusting to life in cities across the world?

And that's how I ended up five thousand miles away from home in Phoenix, looking for urban rattlesnakes.

Fifteen minutes after Bryan got the call, we arrive at the entrance to a gated community in Scottsdale. The homes are huge, done out in
a Pueblo Revival style with sandy stucco walls topped with curved terracotta roof tiles. Next to the homes lies a patch of undeveloped desert dotted with spiky green bushes and tall cacti.

“It's probably going to be a western diamondback—it's the most common snake here,” says Bryan as we turn into the driveway of the house with the rattlesnake.

A woman is waiting for us. “It's in there,” she says, pointing at the garage. Bryan opens the back of the truck and gets out an empty red bucket and his snake hook—a long metal stick with a smooth U-shaped hook at one end.

We enter the garage. In one corner is a coiled-up dusty gray rattlesnake with its head raised and ready to strike. Diamond-shaped patches of darker gray run along its back, and its underside is a patternless egg white. Its tail points upward and is rattling manically.

At the opposite corner of the vast garage are a young man and a terrified-looking woman with frizzy hair and a high-pitched voice. She's brandishing a garden rake as if she expects the snake to fly across the garage at any moment. You could probably fit a bus in the space between her and the snake.

Bryan glances at the snake. “It's a western diamondback,” he says.

“Wow! Look at the face. He's angry,” says the woman with the frizzy hair.

“He thinks you're predators and are about to eat him alive,” explains Bryan as he flips the lid off the bucket.

He moves in, snake hook at the ready. The diamondback rattles even faster.

“Oh, crap! Oh my goodness!” squeals the woman. “He is so big! Oh my God!”

Bryan stretches his arm out and twists the hook so it slips underneath the snake's body. He carefully lifts the snake into the air and gently tips it into the bucket before slapping on the lid. We've been here less than ninety seconds.

“That's awesome!” says the man.

The high-pitched woman looks stunned. “That's it?” she asks.

“That's it,” confirms Bryan.

“What you going to do with it?” she asks, putting down the rake. “I'm going to let him go,” replies Bryan.

“Not around here,” says the woman, staring at the hissing bucket.

“No, but I do have to release him within a mile. But he won't come back. This is the scariest thing he has ever experienced. He thinks he is dying right now—he thinks that something has eaten him. So even if I put him right outside, this garage was a near-death experience and he won't come back in.”

Reassured, she recounts the discovery of the snake. “He was on my son's clothes. I pushed it, and then I saw it was moving, and then I freaked out.”

“Did you leave the garage door open?” asks Bryan. She nods.

“This is a cave,” says Bryan. “If you're a snake and you see this thing, it's a cave. It's a nice way to get out of the sun. Rodents will come in too, sometimes, and the snakes will track them into here.”

“The bobcats!” exclaims the woman suddenly. “What about the bobcats? They poo! Do you pick up bobcats?”

“I wouldn't worry about the bobcats,” says Bryan.

“But they are in my swimming pool,” she says, excitedly. “I cannot swim. I cannot swim. They're wicked. A mom and two children. With the snake here and the bobcats in the swimming pool—all kinds of poos!”

“The bobcats will just run off if you go outside. They don't attack,” says Bryan.

We return to the truck and load the trapped snake in the trunk. As we leave, Bryan explains that situations like this are typical. “See all these rocks?” he says, as we look at the front yard. “They are like the perfect habitat—it's what the rattlesnakes look for.”

We look at the untouched desert right next to the house. “It's amazing that someone who lives here is so shocked. They should have seen a rattlesnake before, but they get shocked because they are not from here. They are shocked, shocked, that there is a snake in Arizona.”

They're not alone, or even the worst. One time a lady called Bryan because a hawk was in a tree. “She was the perfect mix of town, animals, and ignorance all in a bundle.” It seems as if people have a mental block when it comes to urban wildlife. We move to the city and expect it to be free of bugs, snakes, carnivores, and just about everything else too. Even, it seems, when the land right next to our homes is untamed desert.

Snakes show up all over the Phoenix area, though, not just on the edge of deserts. A couple of days before I arrived, Bryan picked up a diamondback from the parking lot of a hotel in downtown Scottsdale. “He had been living in this hotel parking lot for years and years. The gardeners say they've seen him numerous times. He didn't rattle, didn't bother anyone and then one day they were like you've got to get rid of him. I don't know what to do with him. I can't put him in the desert—he is old, he'll just crawl around and die, and no one wants him as a pet because he is a big, old, ugly diamondback. He is old and crusty and his color is fading.”

Then there was the hot tub. “It was in the spring. The guy opened his tub for the first time since winter and there's a gopher snake lying half in, half out of the hot water. I got there an hour later and he was still lounging in there, like ‘Yeah? What do you want? I'm in the hot tub.' I felt bad taking him out of there. He seemed pretty happy.”

Hot tub snakes aren't that unusual. “In the summer I get calls in the night from super-drunk people, really drunk people, who've gone out to the hot tub. A lot of almost successful dates people have had have been interrupted by a snake in the hot tub.”

Rattlesnakes tend to be found close to desert parks, but sometimes they end up in more urban places. “There's this one area where there are still rattlesnakes that come in from the desert deep into the city because there's this old drainage canal,” says Bryan. “If it rains there are these torrential floods that just go through the city, and that's when these diamondbacks get washed into those neighborhoods.”