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{Why Toronto residents must embrace city wildlife}
Featured VideoClose More Video Thorncliffe gets new kindergarten-only school Thomas Fahlman beats cancer, relearns to walk Ontario allows wider use of Tasers by police Ford vs Hulk A fox sleeps in the sun, cosy on the threshold of Ruthi Gladstone’s front door. Deer in the backyard nibble on herbs. Rabbits idle and stretch in her garden.This benign kingdom is in Canada’s most populous city, near Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave., a 10-minute walk from a subway station through which 48,000 people pass every day.Gladstone thinks it’s only fair she puts out a welcome mat for urban wildlife. “We are taking over their habitats,” she says. “They will stay and we have to learn to live with them.”MORE ON THESTAR.COMCoyote Crawl at the Toronto Botanical Garden offers another side to the storyPolice too quick to shoot coyote in downtown neighbourhood: HumePodcast: What to do about Toronto’s coyotesHer view is embraced by naturalists and conservationists. Animal populations have rebounded in North American cities and everyone — two legged and four — must adapt. But this accommodation will take effort: “We’ve largely taken ourselves out of the working landscape and mostly forsaken both the destructive ways and the stewardship skills of our ancestors,” says Jim Sterba in his engaging 2012 book, Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds. “But the comeback of wildlife and forests all but demands that we reconnect to the natural world around us, relearn old stewardship skills and develop new ways of practising those skills better.”It is impossible to overstate the population explosion of urban wildlife in recent years — deer, geese, raccoon, foxes, wild turkey and coyotes, with more immigration on the way. The why is simple: Cities have become sanctuaries for animals because they are relatively free from predators and food is abundant. Hydro corridors provide convenient wildlife highways into Toronto, where trees and shrubs comprise 27 per cent of the city’s area and ravines represent 18 per cent of city land. (One study showed that a Chicago coyote has a 60-per-cent chance of surviving for one year compared to his rural cousin, who has a 30-per-cent chance; there’s no reason to think it’s any different in Toronto).And as Ralph Toninger, a manager at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, observes, it’s not just migration from the country that’s increasing wildlife numbers. “Cities are engines that generate wildlife.”That’s why, in Toronto, coyotes lounge on driveways and raise their pups in city ravines. In Ottawa, beaver build dams, causing flooding that enrages homeowners. In Thunder Bay, a bow hunt of deer was approved last fall.Further afield, in British Columbia more than 1,000 rabbits lived idyllically on the University of Victoria campus — a Watership Down of cuteness — until they were sent to a sanctuary in B.C. to escape the threat of a cull. Another group of about 200 were taken by volunteers to the Wild Rose Rescue Ranch in East Texas. University of Victoria teacher Kathleen Terrio, a former Toronto resident, made the trip twice and is outraged that it is necessary. A cull “is cruel and barbaric. I wonder why people are living here if they can’t coexist with wildlife.” A deer cull is now being debated in Victoria.Coyotes proliferate in large American urban centres — for example, an estimated 2,000 in Chicago. Ditto deer. There were so many deer in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C. — about 50 per square kilometre — that a cull was approved that yielded hundreds of pounds of venison that was donated to food banks. In Princeton,[url=http://www.longchamp-handbags-outlet.net]longchamp le pliage[/url], N.J., the deer density was even higher, about 145 per square kilometre. Sharp shooters were called in. “It is very likely that more people live in closer proximity to more wild animals and birds in the eastern United States today than anywhere on the planet at any time in history,” Sterba.One of his most startling stories concerns the return of the whitetail deer. In 1900 their North American numbers were about 500,000; there are now reported to be about 30 million and they are regarded, in many places, as nuisances.Brad Gates, owner of Toronto’s AAA Gates’ Wildlife Control, confirms the abundance of local animals: “I have customers who come from the country and move to the city and they have not seen so much wildlife. They look in their backyards and see coyotes and foxes and raccoons and can’t believe their eyes. They’ve moved into a wildlife haven.”Population controlAs for the burgeoning population, one view is to let the animals be and they will sort out the best population densities themselves. Zoologists at the University of Toronto reported some years ago that when Arctic ground squirrel populations reach the environmental tipping point, the females severely reduced reproduction and most died over winter during hibernation, thus controlling the population.Anecdotal evidence suggests that letting nature take its course isn’t working in the heart of North American cities.One of the problems is that the average urban dweller has a skewed idea of the natural world, thanks mostly to popular culture.Those early deer estimates cited by Sterba come from Ernest Thompson Seton, the naturalist who spent his childhood roaming Toronto’s wilderness and whose first book, Wild Animals I Have Known, was about animals he had encountered in the Don Valley ravine. His aim was to show the “heroism and personality” of animals, either in overcoming their enemies or, more typically, falling victim to them.“The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end,” Seton wrote.This view, attributing “human ingenuity” to animals, has led to complicated relations between us and them, says Sterba on the phone from Maine. Since hardly any of us work on the land and the wilderness has been largely tamed, most of us are ignorant of the ways of nature. “We spend 90 per cent of our time indoors,” he says. “We live in conditioned air … and are walled off from the nature that is right outside our windows. The chief way most people interact with nature is to put out a bird feeder and look at what comes to it.”Popular writers such as Jack London (The Call of the Wild, White Fang) and Seton anthropomorphized and sentimentalized animals in their stories in the early years of the last century; society’s response, gradually, has been to regard wildlife as we would children, a tendency heightened by Disney movies.Sterba observes that hunters shooting Bambi’s mother evokes “a child’s worst nightmare, losing a parent.”“We’ve distanced ourselves from the real natural world and substituted that for a digital world,” he says. “We’ve lost track of the stewardship skills that we need to relearn now that we have to deal with problems of what some people think is an overabundance of creatures. We argue about what to do or not do.”Toronto and Region Conservation Authority now finds itself managing conflict when homeowners insist that animals be moved from their neighbourhoods. The authority advocates the kinder stewardship of which Sterba speaks.Take the worrisome example of beavers.“Beaver numbers are definitely high,” confirms manager Toninger. “We have beavers swimming around million-dollar yachts on the harbourfront.”Most complaints are about beavers damming and causing flooding in recreation areas but on occasion the problem involves backyards. In the winter, problems associated with North America’s largest rodent concern damage to trees. “They can level a whole forest and over the course of a winter can take down hundreds of trees.”Residents usually want beavers trapped and relocated. But that’s not the way nature works, Toninger explains.“Our understanding of wildlife is scripted,” he says, referencing Walt Disney. “That you can trap him and somehow he’d be happy and frolic somewhere else. You’d be trapping beaver for the rest of your existence. Move him somewhere else and the beaver dies a lonely existence in an area it doesn’t know. It can’t set up a territory and can’t feed. They are not like deer. They need a home base, they need a lodge. It’s no different than a stranger picking up your teenage son and taking him to a country he doesn’t know.”The conservation authority recommends installing a system of pipes called “beaver deceivers” or “beaver bafflers” so beavers can learn to live with lower water levels. Trees can be protected by wrapping them with wire. Deer require a different strategy. Residents in the Toronto neighbourhood of Thistletown (the area surrounding Albion Rd. and Islington Ave.) were plagued by deer eating their vegetable gardens and strolling down their streets and laneways. (Traffic mishaps involving larger animals are a real problem. There were nearly 1,[url=http://www.longchamp-handbags-outlet.net]longchamp sale[/url],000 wildlife collisions in Toronto in 2010, a 26-per-cent increase over 20 years. Across Ontario there were some 13,185 vehicle-animal collisions that year.)To help Thistletown residents adapt to the deer population, the authority held a deer-management workshop that suggested putting up fences and growing plants that deer find unpalatable — they love hosta and peonies; foxglove, tiger lily and delphinium, not so much.Another approach is to look at how wildlife benefits a community. University of Ohio wildlife ecologist Stan Gehrt, an expert on urban coyotes, has noticed a change in attitude toward the critters. The tone in municipal websites on wildlife conflicts is boosterish, assuring citizens that coyotes, for example, are beneficial because they reduce rodent populations.Furthermore, Gehrt has reported that coyotes are useful in controlling Canada geese — they go after their eggs in nests: “For the first time, we are hearing people say how we can live next to these predators instead of saying how do we get rid of them. This is a large natural experiment and it’s not an experiment we are controlling. Nature is. We don’t have a lot to say about it. Right now we’re finding many of these species are ignoring us and taking advantage of the opportunities we provide.” Still, it’s no Garden of Eden for animals or people. Police shot a coyote in Cabbagetown this year; in Riverdale Park a man doing yoga was charged by a coyote in 2012 and an 8-year old Oakville girl was bitten by one. Not feeding animals is a basic principle of managing urban wildlife, and such towns as Kimberley, B.C., have introduced no-feeding bylaws. That said, as Diana Wilson, an educator at Toronto Botanical Garden, points out, there’s lots of food lying around for them anyway — takeout containers, brimming garbage bins and fruit falling from trees.The botanical garden recently held a “coyote crawl” to help children and adults appreciate the misunderstood urban creature, whose numbers across North America have never been higher.A peaceable kingdomLila Dewhurst, 88, plays host to a family of fox on her Guildwood property in Scarborough — the latest generation of a long-settled dynasty.“He sits on the grass and looks at me,” says the former school teacher of a male fox for whom she freezes food scraps and later thaws them in the microwave. “He knows the sound of the microwave. The other one, she had kits, and she was so hungry she followed me in the kitchen when I left the screen door open. “I like having a fox around because it keeps the squirrels at bay. They are very aggressive and get into the bird feeder and dig up the tulips.”She called a wildlife centre for help when she noticed a fox with mange. It was trapped, treated and returned to the neighbourhood.“That was nice,” says Dewhurst. “The one that visits now is one of her kits, I think, who has grown up and come back.”
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