Feral Cities (9 page)

The time when sparrows could freely nest in people's ceiling fans is being left behind. “Somewhere in the 1990s the culture in India started changing, so from being a very open culture it started becoming a closed culture or a private culture of the type one sees in the UK or the western countries,” he says. “Open windows started closing up, and from a culture where you knew everything what is happening in the family of your neighbor, today we are in a culture where you don't even realize who your neighbor is. Because of this closed culture, the homes started getting closed and these sites were lost for sparrows.”

The way food is sold in India is another important change, he adds. “During the '80s women used to sit outside their homes cleaning grains and other vegetables, so there was food for the sparrow. Today, women no longer sit outside their homes and clean grain in India. They just walk into a store and buy pre-packed grain. This answers a lot of the reason why the food source for sparrows has gone down.”

Another pressure India's city sparrows face is being killed not by cats or sparrowhawks but by people armed with plastic catapults that cost as little as five rupees. That's about eight cents. The reason the birds are being hunted is simple: hunger. “In India the cost of fresh fish or meat is very high now. A lot of people cannot
afford buying protein over the counter, so they go out and kill wild animals because it's free,” says Mohammed, who wants the Indian government to ban people from using catapults in this way. “This problem is increasing in cities because a lot of people who used to live in rural areas have migrated to the cities as laborers, and these people have the skills and knowledge to kill urban wildlife.”

As India continues to urbanize, the pressure on the sparrow is likely to grow but, Mohammed says, the fight to save the oldest bird on the city block—a bird whose success reflects the state of the towns and cities we live in—is too important to fail. “When you save a species like sparrows, or for that matter any other wildlife found around cities, you don't only save them, but you save a lot of plants that depend on them. You save a lot of landscapes,” he says. “A city becomes healthy if there is a big enough amount of wildlife within. This is something that is very, very important.”

The contrasting attitudes to the declining house sparrow and the starlings that invade US cities says a lot about how we view urban wildlife. When house sparrows were abundant in cities, we viewed them as pests and berated them for causing many of the same problems as the starlings of Indianapolis. But now that they are vanishing from our streets, we see them as lovable victims in need of rescue rather than elimination.

It's not a matter of us preferring sparrows over starlings, either. In European cities, starlings have been declining fast too, prompting campaigns to save the birds that cause so many problems in urban America.

It seems we have a love-hate relationship with urban wildlife. We want animals around us, but only if they know their place. We revile them when they succeed at living among us, but we'll miss them when they're gone.

“Smell! Smell!” says Derk Ehlert, using his hand to waft the air toward his nose. He takes a long, deep breath. “You can smell them.
Mmm. Mmm. Ahhhh.”

I sniff the forest air, wondering what it is I'm supposed to smell and then it hits: a whiff that brings dank mushrooms to mind.

It's the smell of wild boar.

We're in Berlin. Grunewald, the large forest in the city's southwest, to be precise. It's dusk and the fading light makes it hard to see, but somewhere in the trees straight ahead of us are boars.

Not only can we smell them, but we can hear them too: the rustle of hooves moving through leaves, the snorts of boars snuffling in the soil, and a moist crunching sound. “They are eating all the acorns,” whispers Derk in his German-accented English.

More munching noises come from the trees. Then, an abrupt squeal. Something moves in the shadows, but I can't make it out. “A call from the ma,” says Derk.

Everything's suddenly silent. The rustling, snuffling and munching has stopped. The boars have realized we're here. “They are freezing,” says Derk. “They can smell us.”

The silence lasts half a minute and then there's a deep groan, a long, drawn-out
ooooorrrrgggghhh.
We catch a glimpse of a piglet moving away from us into the bushes and then the sound of more movement. The boars are leaving.

We've unnerved them. The boars of Berlin may be used to people, but we're not acting right and that could mean we're hunters, so they've opted to head deeper into the trees and further away from us.

“Hunters behave differently,” says Derk. “They sneak up, go off the paths. Hunters, if they want to see the boars, might talk out loud to themselves because for the boars normal, talky people walking along are not a problem. It's the sneaking people with the funny smell that worry them.”

More than three thousand of these coarse-haired wild pigs live in Berlin. We may have gone looking for them in Grunewald, but their search for food makes them regular visitors to the city streets. In the suburbs they dig up gardens, tip over bins to get to leftovers, and plough the parks. One time wild boars tore up a Second World War cemetery, uprooting gravestones and causing thousands of dollars' worth of damage.

Another time, they broke through the fence guarding the training field of Berlin soccer club Hertha BSC. Once inside they ripped up the pitch to feast on the roots and grubs below the grass. The club repaired the fence, but the shaggy vandals returned, found a new way in, and churned up the pitch for a second time.

The boars are aided in their search by an amazing sense of smell. Their noses are three times as sensitive as those of dogs, making them capable of sniffing out damp soil from as far as two miles away. Perfect for finding the prime feeding spots in the city.

As Berlin's only wildlife officer, Derk has plenty of experience with the boars. The day before I visited, he had to deal with one that got hit by a car while crossing a busy road. Though the boars usually leave people alone, when wounded they can be dangerous.

In fall 2012 another collision caused a 260-pound boar to go on
the rampage in the leafy western Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. The first victim was an elderly man, who was bitten on the back of his leg. The boar then knocked over an old lady before attacking a young woman who had to scramble on top of a parked car to escape. When a policeman came to the rescue, the boar charged at him, cutting the officer's leg. The injured officer ended up drawing his gun and fatally shooting the animal in the middle of the usually quiet residential street.

The previous day's incident was less serious. Well, for Berliners, at least. “The boar was mortally wounded but still alive, so it was really important it was killed,” Derk tells me as we drive throughout Charlottenburg. But taking down an injured boar in a busy city is no easy feat, so Derk called in one of Berlin's city hunters, an elite troop of volunteer huntsmen he has recruited for exactly this kind of situation.

Derk has thirty
Stadtjägers,
as the city hunters are known in German, he can call on. They are some of the area's most experienced hunters and they need to be, for hunting in the streets is a risky business. Not only must they contend with wild boars that often know the streets better than them, but they have to be sure their shots won't hit someone by accident or ricochet off the hard urban surfaces with potentially lethal consequences.

“They have to be really experienced. They have to be very good at dealing with people and their weapons,” says Derk.

The risk is so high that the
Stadtjägers,
rather than the city authorities, are the ones who are liable if anything goes wrong. It might sound like a bum deal for the hunters, but there is an upside, as they get to keep the meat of any boars they kill to sell or eat themselves. But even that comes with a caveat. Many of the boars they have to kill are sick or injured, so there's a good chance the meat is unfit to eat. This was the case yesterday.

“They did ultimately kill it and it was a very big animal, but it was not appropriate to be sold because the boar had so much adrenaline going through its blood after being hit by the car that it
was no longer edible,” he explains through the interpreter who is sitting in the back, helping out whenever Derk's English fails him. “The question then is what do you do with the dead body? It was clear it could not be eaten, but it had to be removed.”

Derk ended up loading the dead boar into the back of his car and taking it to a vet to be disposed of. The interpreter, who is sitting right where the dead boar was, eyes the seat warily. “You've cleaned the car since then, right?” she asks, only half joking.

Why don't you get the police to shoot them? I ask. “A good question,” says Derk. “For ten years we have been at the police school telling them how to shoot the wild boar, but the police often they don't want to kill them. They ask what can we do? Can we bring the wild boar to the doctor?”

Paperwork is another problem. “If they use their weapon they have to write out why they did it. It's a long form, more than fourteen sides of paper, and then they get an official notice in their file that says they used the weapon. If they then want a different position or a promotion, they have this notice saying they've used their weapon. So even if they are stationed in an area with a lot of wild boars, they prefer not to shoot them because it might ruin their chances of getting promoted.”

Even when the police do act, they can make mistakes. “Sometimes they misunderstand the situation. In the spring we had a wild boar that was bearing her young in the middle lane of a street, and a cop came and shot it because he thought it was a wounded animal. It caused a huge scandal in the newspapers.” As a result the police usually call in the
Stadtjägers
when there's a boar to shoot and restrict themselves to closing off the streets so it is easier for the hunters to make the kill. On average the police call Derk and his
Stadtjägers
three or four times a week.

While there is a steady stream of incidents needing the help of hunters, most of the calls Derk gets about the boars come from people who have had their gardens invaded or object to the very sight of the wild swine in the city.

One especially irate woman called Derk only a few hours before we met. “She was shocked that at ten in the morning she sees a wild boar when walking in the forest. She says it is a problem because children with bicycles go to the forest at that time. But the forest is a normal neighborhood for wild boars. I told her that it is not possible to abolish the wild boars, that they are not dangerous for the children, and that I have never heard of wild boars eating kids—it is not possible. But she was angry with my answer because she wanted to hear another thing. She wants to hear that the army is coming now.”

Berliners are hopelessly divided about the increasingly bold boars. When the city authorities asked almost five hundred residents about their hairy neighbors, most agreed that the boars were a “plague” and said they should not be in the city, yet they also felt that the boars were not a nuisance and were adamant they didn't want them shot.

The muddle of opinions also reflects the German capital's divided past. “The westerners call more,” he says. “More than three-quarters of my calls are from former West Berlin. They have a certain kind of demand of the authorities, where they go: ‘Do something about this problem I have!' The easterners are more relaxed about it. They may go and talk to a forester to get it taken care of. They don't immediately escalate it to the authorities.”

With the city unsure how to respond, it falls to Derk to try to reconcile boar and Berliner. “There are three and a half million people in Berlin and they have three and a half million opinions about the animals,” he says. “I am the reverend of the wild. The animals don't need me, but the people have problems, so my job is to talk with the people who are angry about the wild boars.”

The boars are not new arrivals. They have been living in the forests and outskirts of Berlin for decades. But in recent years they, like the red foxes of London, have become more willing to venture onto the streets.

“The boars have developed a kind of trust of people. They are not so scared of people any longer,” says Derk. “In people's
perception there are more now, but that's not true. It is the new behavior that they see because the boars don't mind being out where people can see them now.” This newfound willingness to roam among people is something many Berliners have encouraged. Estimates suggest that more than three hundred thousand residents are feeding them, despite the threat of a hefty five-thousand-euro fine for anyone caught in the act.

Another attraction is that the streets are often safer for boars than the forest. In the forests licensed hunters are allowed to shoot boar in designated areas, but once the animals enter built-up areas they face no such danger. The boars have even started moving into the suburbs at weekends during hunting season to avoid hunters before returning during the week when the hunters are back at work.