On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (15 page)

After our walk, I had a bit of the sensibility of a spider: find a corner and build a web to catch insects bopping around. I had a search image for a sinewy trail on bark or leaf that would indicate a leafminer or a barkminer. This intuition is not always desired, I will admit: after our first encounter, I found a dozen motionless, parasitized flies on the undersides of leaves. That is an image I will be happy to remember how to ignore. But once you have an eye for these things, even when you’re not looking for them, they just jump out at you. Everything is a sign of something.

“It did seem like the more we just stopped in one spot . . .” I began.

“. . . we just started seeing more things,” Eiseman, my tour guide to the bugs, finished the thought.

¹
As a member of an invasive species myself, the tone of this descriptor seems unduly harsh.

“It matters not where or how far you travel—

the further commonly the worse—

but how much alive you are.”

(Henry David Thoreau)

“A spill of spaghetti, cooked and sauced, formed a sunburst at my feet, attended to by a cluster of pigeons.”

It was December twenty-first, the winter solstice. The business of being a pedestrian in the city had changed: any mosey that crept into people’s summer gait had been replaced by the determined fast stride of the winter walker. It was cold out, and I hunched my shoulders in a futile attempt to warm my ears and bully the chill away. But I was walking slowly enough to scan the tree branches and windowsills and fence tips for squirrels. For December twenty-first is the first day of the mating season for the eastern gray squirrel, apparently. Perhaps I would see some courtship, a typically pell-mell affair in which many males race after a single female squirrel—up tree trunks, along delicate branches, leaping across wide crevasses. It sounded like the rodent version of a great chase film, without the small European cars and tourist-crowded
plazas. At the very least, the squirrels should be out and about on this monumental date, engaged in something other than the nonstop nut-collecting and -consuming that has been their occupation for the last months. I knew this because John Hadidian told me so.

He is Senior Scientist in the Wildlife division of the Humane Society and had flown up from Washington, D.C. to meet me. Even to those of us familiar with seeing pigeons and squirrels on our daily walks, looking for “wildlife” in a city may sound oxy-moronic. But New York City, the most densely peopled city in the country, is, like all other urban environments, host to a huge population of nonhuman animals. The bears, wolves, and mountain lions that roamed the land that became our city are no longer here (we think). But squirrels, raccoons, bats, deer, fox, coyote, possums, and scores of bird species are. Hadidian and I aimed to see if they were, what is more, on my very block.

Like most animal behavior researchers, Hadidian began his scientific career studying a relatively exotic animal—in his case, the crested black macaque, an Old World monkey you have likely never seen outside of a zoo. Just when he was looking for a job, though, the National Park Service was hiring, trying to get a handle on the raccoon population, which, like the rabies the animals were carrying, was skyrocketing. So Hadidian became, all of a sudden, a rare breed of animal researcher: one who studies the most common, least exotic animals. He began tracking and observing the urban raccoon more than twenty-five years ago, and he never went back to primates.

Happily for me, though, he readily agreed to walk around a city block with this human primate. Also like most animal behavior researchers, Hadidian is full of a kind of animal trivia that comes from long hours observing, reading, and discussing animal habits and quirks. Studying the macaques, Hadidian cataloged their yawning behavior and found that the males not only yawned
much more often than the females, but they nearly always yawned in response to thunder. This kind of gem can only come from many, many hours of watching and yawn-counting.

A compact man with a gentle smile, Hadidian stepped out of a cab dressed in two, maybe three layers of sweatshirts, as befits someone whose profession involves standing outside for hours at a time. We were not a minute into our walk before his squirrel trivia came up.

“One thing I’d want to comment on—aside of the fact that there’s a squirrel’s nest here,” he began, gesturing with his head up in the bare branches of a gingko tree. A dense cluster of dried leaves smudged the silhouette of the tree against the sky. I took the bait.

“How do you know it’s a squirrel’s nest?”

“Just by the way it’s built—it’s messy—and how it’s positioned in the tree. It’s a leaves nest, a
drey,
which is not at all cuplike . . .”

. . . and he dove into a veritable natural history of the squirrel. It was in this way that I learned that this very day was the first day of our arboreal squirrel’s breeding season, one of two it engages in per year.

Just today! The specificity of the claim was astonishing. Though as city residents we come to expect to see animals outside . . .
some
where . . . whenever we leave our homes, it is another thing to think of them living through their own datebooks, their own calendars of things-to-do and when to do them. But just as there is a time of year when we uninstall the air conditioner and send it to the basement, or flock to a Florida beach to warm our chilled northern skin, the animals around us are habitual as well.

The mating-season news got my hopes quite up for squirrel sightings. But the wind was whistling through the nest. It looked abandoned: perhaps last season’s nest site, housing its handful of hairless squirrelettes for two or three months. No squirrels
remained. And Hadidian had moved on, too, back to the topic that the squirrel’s nest had interrupted.

“I was going to say that the primary distinction in the city is between night and day.”

For urban wildlife, that is. Though we think the city is fundamentally the same place in the nighttime as in the daylight, it is not. It is not just darker, cooler, and quieter; it is teeming with animals. As plentiful as the pigeons, the sparrows, the chipmunks, or the squirrels may seem to be on city streets, what you see outside by day is a fraction of what you would see along the same route at night.

The reason for this is simple: us. “Humans are predictable, in terms of their behavior,” Hadidian went on. “We create pulses of traffic: we’re going into town, and then we’re going home. And long about one thirty, two thirty [in the morning], things really quiet down.” At night, we retreat from the streets, pull into our shells, tuck ourselves cozily in bed. And that is just when the animals’ city day begins.

 • • • 

It is a logical move for animals. If they are to live around us, they must adapt to our galumphing presence. We are rather noisy, for instance: in an urban environment the ambient din is regularly 50 to 70 decibels, with spikes to 100, a point at which a sound can be both physically painful and destructive to ears. Where Cooper’s hawks, a North American bird of prey, have settled around humans, as in New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Diego, the birds have resorted to vocalizing more frequently, ensuring that at least
some
of their calls are heard by other Cooper’s hawks. The great tit, a small bird common in the Netherlands, and the song sparrow in the United States both sing at higher frequencies in cities, as most of human-produced sound is at relatively low frequencies.
Urban scrub-jays breed earlier (giving them more time to recover from unexpected losses) and forage more efficiently than their country cousins. Some animals have changed themselves with lightning speed. The most famous case comes from the UK at the time when cities became industrialized. With factories belching black smoke, a layer of soot settled on every surface, man-made or natural. Among the population of the small peppered moth—
Biston betularia
—which counted on its coloration to be camouflaged against tree bark, a rapid transformation occurred. Where once the peppered coloration was dominant, suddenly a rare black varietal made up the majority of the population. These black moths were better camouflaged against the soot-coated trees. Birds couldn’t spot them, and the little black moths flourished.

There are good reasons for animals to live around us humans. We provide plentiful food resources. We create shelters that easily accommodate small, discreet animal homes. But humans are also, for the most part, predatory, disruptive, and destructive. In our ordinary lives, we eat animals, kill them with our cars, and disturb their trash-can meals and garden-dirt baths. Thus, some animals have become more crepuscular—active at dawn or dusk—to avoid us. And more have become entirely nocturnal, even if the same species in rural areas is out and about in the day.

The first ones out at night are the raccoons.

You might think of raccoons as suburban animals, but if you live in a temperate city with a park, chances are you live quite close to a few hundred of these cat-sized mammals. Raccoons are classic urban adapters. They are generalists: they are so unpicky that they will live anywhere and eat nearly anything. In the city, the raccoon avails himself of the convenient supply of all things edible in our city trash bags, left insecurely tied on the streets twice a week. While a dog or rat might open a bag and scatter its contents,
the raccoon tears a small hole, reaches in, feeling around for what he wants, and pulls it out. Hadidian noted that the animals he observed ate almost
anything
—except raw onion.

They are also alarmingly intelligent: “They’re what I call the North American primate,” Hadidian said. Watched closely, the behavior of
Procyon lotor
is indeed oddly familiar.
¹
They sit upright, grasping food in their front paws—which, with five fingers, look like and function remarkably like human hands. You might catch a raccoon dexterously
finger
ing an item; or gripping, exploring, and fiddling with it. Their reflexes are better than ours—a raccoon can snatch a fly out of the air—but give one a Rubik’s cube and he will, like so many humans, turn it methodically and not solve it. Like young persons, raccoons love to play—with their own tail tips or with each other; with a corncob rolled between their front paws; by drumming on the floor with their fists. One raccoon was spotted attempting to tie a bit of straw around his nose. Their facial mask—the familiar glasses of black hair around their eyes—adds to the feeling that they have distinct personalities. Should you be stealthy enough to come upon a sleeping raccoon, you will likely find it in one of two positions: either flat on his back, with his front paws over his eyes; or on his stomach, his head tucked between his front limbs as if frozen in the beginning of a somersault. I observed strikingly raccoonish sleep poses in my own husband and toddler last night.

As a culture, we are decidedly ambivalent about the raccoon. “Criminals!” some cry, surely accusing these masked bandits of more than they are able of being. But raccoon researchers speak of their subjects’ “knavery,” greed, and curiosity. We seem caught between identifying the raccoon as wild animal or as an urban
pest. On the one hand, it is cute, costumed and catlike; on the other, it is a disease-carrying scourge. Even a century ago, raccoons were fairly beloved in America. They were popular as pets and were known as mischievous, inquisitive, and quick studies. President Coolidge, sent a raccoon for his Thanksgiving table, promptly decreed her his pet, named her Rebecca, and took her with him on long walks and on whistle-stop train tours. The sight of a crowd of children gathered around the First Lady clutching Rebecca to her chest on the White House lawn for the annual Easter egg roll, an image captured in the newspapers of the time, seems about as unlikely today as one featuring the current president cozying up to a brown rat.

I asked Hadidian to name the most surprising thing he noticed about the social life of his raccoons, the ones he had tracked and radio-collared for decades. “Culturally, these raccoons were a little like lions,” he replied. Though thought of as solitary animals, urban raccoons live in groups. The pressures of city life lead to this crowding. They have many different den sites—in sewers, basements, hollow centers of stone walls, and holes of trees. One animal that he tracked even traveled well outside of his home range each fall, to build a den near a beautiful persimmon tree, a huge wildlife lure: “Every animal you can think of is drawn to the persimmon tree,” Hadidian said. They notice the smell of the tree’s fruit, surely, but even outside of their olfactory range they remember where this special treat is and migrate toward it.

Hadidian stood by the curb, gazing down, it appeared, at the sewer grate. I reluctantly joined him.

“There. Someone is living in there.”

Although it was hardly put there to deter wildlife, the city sewer system would seem to be an inauspicious place for an animal. But the sewer, with its curbside drains and pipes running along every street and connecting to every building, is home to
innumerable raccoons, rats, and possibly possums (rats willing). Plenty of the raccoons Hadidian tracked made homes in the Washington sewer, which sweeps away the excreta of some of the country’s most powerful people.

“A couple of the animals we followed actually gave birth and raised young there,” he said.

“Coming out . . . where?”

“Oh, anywhere.” He pointed at a small gap between a step leading into a neighborhood bodega and the sidewalk. Bits of debris clogged the opening, which did not look in the least hospitable to living and raising young raccoons.

“A raccoon could easily fit in there, even at a full run.”

I tried to imagine the raccoon’s tail disappearing under the step. It is nigh impossible to picture a raccoon wanting to, or actually darting into that forlorn space. This is what makes the urban animal so elusive. He is actually attempting to elude us, and our imaginations do not seem to account for animals (aside from pets) in cities. Even our sense of scale is distorted when considering urban wildlife corridors and passageways. Remembering, perhaps, a childhood inability to scale a fence or shimmy through a gate, we find it incredible that urban animals are not thwarted by the seemingly impenetrable stone walls and chain-linked barbed-wire fencing we present to them. But the descriptions of nearly all urban animals include an impressive dimension: the size hole the animal can squeeze into, through, or out of. Raccoons, even as adults, can fit in a four-inch space between grates, flattening themselves and taking advantage of their broad, short skulls. Squirrels fit through a hole the size of a quarter; mice, through dime-sized holes. Look around you on your next walk. See any holes at all? Gaps between stair and building? Between sidewalk and curb? An animal goes there (after you have passed).