Feral Cities (11 page)

The hotel had no choice but to let Alex stay free of charge. “Alex ended up staying there for a year and a half before he left for another part of the city to find a wife,” says Derk. “But for that year and a half the hotel manager would get calls and cancelations from people who told him, ‘You're this bad, bad owner who wants to get rid of the raccoon and I don't want to stay in a hotel run by a killer.'”

As Alex's stay in Alexanderplatz shows, raccoons get by just fine even in the most urbanized areas. A large part of the raccoon's urban success is down to its sharp intelligence and its front paws, which are similar to human hands and allow raccoons to open garbage cans, jars, and refrigerators as well as turn doorknobs and
use water spigots. Their cleverness and dexterity also makes them a nuisance as they break into attics through weak points in wood-framed houses, rifle through bins, and use pet doors to enter homes.

Despite the problems, Derk admires raccoons. “I like raccoons. They are so pretty and so intelligent—they are the most intelligent mammals in Europe. They can smell with their paws. Where they come from in North America the streams and rivers they use are muddy so they cannot see, so they use their paws to figure out what is worth exploring more.

“Urban raccoons do the same thing with trash cans. They open trash cans and put their hand on top of it to figure out where to go for the good stuff with their paws.”

Raccoons have also turned sewer and storm drains to their advantage. One city where raccoons make the most of the drainage networks is Milwaukee. They are so popular with raccoons as a way of getting around the city that Scott Diehl, wildlife manager at the Wisconsin Humane Society, calls them “the raccoon subway.” “They use the storm-sewer system to travel without fear of people and predation, and get in and out through the large sewer grates near curbs,” says Scott, who has been helping injured wildlife in Milwaukee for the past twenty-five years.

But adaptable and clever as they are, raccoons do make mistakes, and each year the Wisconsin Humane Society rescues around ten raccoons who get stuck in sewer grates. One of these hapless raccoons was Blake, who got his head stuck in a grate in 2009 while trying to climb out of a sewer in downtown Milwaukee. “Blake misjudged one grate and got stuck,” says Scott. “He made a lot of noise. He was screaming and crying. I had to sedate him to get him free.”

Although most of the several hundred raccoons the society helps each year have been hit by cars, they find plenty of other ways to get themselves into trouble too. Among the trickiest raccoons Scott has had to rescue was the one found near the top of the Milwaukee County Courthouse. “There were renovation works and scaffolding set up on the outside of the courthouse. The raccoon climbed up
the scaffolding overnight and had gotten up into the rafters of this scaffolding shelter. The workers couldn't do their jobs with the raccoon up there, so we were called on.”

Scott soon had to play daredevil, trying to catch the raccoon thirty feet above the ground. “We put up an extension ladder and I put on a safety harness and went up. When I got up to the rafters there was a metal apparatus I was able to click onto so I was comfortable that I wasn't going to fall, and then I had to use a pole snare to capture the raccoon before carrying him down.”

After bringing down the raccoon, the team set him free a short distance away. “We didn't want to take him so far away that he wouldn't know his neighborhood anymore, so we took him to a nearby green space that evening and released him.”

Derk has his own wildlife rescue stories, the most dramatic of which is the time a red fox took a ride on a U8 subway train. “From what people said it was early in the morning and this young fox, he was perhaps worried by people or a dog. He was running through the street and goes down into an underground station where there was a train standing with the door open. He goes in and the door shuts and the train starts moving while he is inside.”

After passengers reported the fare jumper, the train stopped at Hermannplatz, a busy commuter station where two of Berlin's underground lines meet. “At first they wanted to shoot the fox but then they decided no, there are people, press, and electronics inside the train to worry about, so they rang me up,” says Derk.

“So they bring me up to the station by police car with the sirens going. I went down and it was full of people. People on the gate, policemen, people from the fire service, more than forty people, and they are all in a half-circle around the fox in the train, which was crying.”

Derk told everyone to get out and to clear the stairs leading out of the station. “After a minute or two, I went into the train to check on the fox and it runs through my legs, up the stairs and out.”

While much of Derk's time is spent dealing with the times people and animals clash, he is happy that wildlife is part of life in Berlin. “It's brilliant to see that we are not alone in cities and most people are happy about that,” he says.

The challenge is getting those who object to the wildlife to stop feeling threatened. “It is not necessary to change the way we live. It's a change in how we think, to have a coolness, a tolerance. If people are angry about some animal, maybe they do not know about it. The fox, for example, it is not dangerous for the kids and it is normal to have a fox in the city.

“For example, some people came to me and said children are playing in the playground, and every day a young fox comes there. They wanted me to promise that the fox is no danger. So I said, ‘I will make a deal with you. If the danger increases we will shoot it.' Then, they say, ‘Oh, well, we don't want you to shoot it. Why don't you just take it away?' I said, ‘No, we can't just take it away. Where would it go?'

“The foxes have changed their lives. They have no dens in the soil. They have their dens in the houses or basements. They prefer to look at the garbage and not at the forest.”

Shane McKenzie said I wouldn't be able to miss him, and he wasn't wrong.

From the moment I saw the dark blue Ford Ranger heading toward our meeting spot at Chicago's Cumberland metro station, I knew it was Shane. The huge chrome aerial sticking out of the cab gave it away. It's enormous, held aloft by a four-foot-tall mast. The antenna juts out horizontally from the top of the mast, extending five feet, its length crisscrossed with short metal rods.

“So, you saw the giant antenna,” grins Shane as I get into the passenger seat. “It's called a Yagi. That antenna allows us to pick up the VHF signal that the radio collars on the coyotes are producing.”

Inside the cab is the bottom end of the mast. It is poking through a circular piece of wood affixed to the underside of the roof. A grubby disc of laminated paper with angles marked out in degrees has been glued onto the wood. Sticking out of the base of the mast is a makeshift metal handle that ends in a skewered golf ball and is used to rotate the antenna from within the pickup. A thick black
electrical cable runs out of the mast and into a blue 1970s radio receiver covered in dials, switches, and ports. In an age of GPS the kit looks dated but, then again, the Chicago coyote-tracking project predates the smartphone era.

The man behind the project is Ohio State University ecologist Dr. Stan Gehrt. It started in 2000 back when Stan worked for the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, the research charity founded by the eponymous electrical equipment tycoon.

“During the 1990s coyotes started showing up in areas where they had never been seen before,” Stan told me over the phone before my meeting with Shane. “There was a lot of concern because, at that time, the idea of coyotes living in or around cities was not common. So in 2000 we got funding to do a one-year study.

“It was basic stuff. We were going to try and catch some coyotes, which we weren't even sure we would be able to do, put a few radio collars on them, and find out if these animals were really living in the Chicago area or just passing through.”

Stan remembers being skeptical about the project's future. “The thinking was that there weren't many coyotes to study in Chicago and it would be a very temporary thing. But we were lucky and managed to catch some animals right off the bat and, in the first few weeks, we realized that we were completely underestimating the way that coyotes are using the urban landscape and so the project has never stopped.”

Stan didn't know it at the time, but the arrival of coyotes in Chicago was no one-off. All over North America, coyotes were moving to the city. Today there are coyotes in St. Louis, in Boston, in Nashville, and in Washington, DC, to name but a few. Even New York City, once seemingly immune to the coyote influx, has now been colonized by the medium-sized omnivores, which resemble small wolves.

Stan thinks the rapid urbanization of the coyote is due to the collapse in demand for the animals' grayish brown to yellowish gray fur back in the late 1980s. “Obviously we weren't doing research
on them before they got here, so it's pretty much speculation, but Illinois is typical of most states in that hunters and trappers can take as many coyotes as they want. There's basically no restrictions.

“So there was this constant removal of coyotes in rural settings that kept the population at a certain level. But at some point in the late 1980s, early 1990s there was a crash in the pelt prices and with it a huge drop in the interest and effort to hunt and trap coyotes.”

With the hunters and trappers gone, the coyote population boomed and the resulting overcrowding encouraged many of them to seek a home in the urban sprawl. “Coyotes have a very territorial social system, and as their population builds coyotes are constantly getting pushed out into abnormal habitat. So probably what happened was the rural population grew during the late '80s and early '90s and caused the animals to explore new habitats, and the only habitat that was left that wasn't already occupied by other territorial coyotes were the huge metropolitan areas.” The coyote baby boom also coincided with efforts to make America's cities greener, a trend that helped to ease the coyote's transition from rural to urban life.

Since 2000 Stan's project has put collars on hundreds of coyotes in the Chicago area. Shane's job is to spend nights cruising the streets and using the Ford Ranger's aerial to locate the coyotes and record their whereabouts.

“Our nights always start at sundown,” says Shane, as he turns onto I-294 and we head toward the suburb of Northbrook to find the first coyote of the evening. “That's when they start moving. They know the traffic patterns—they know the times when it is busy. So they all wait until it dies down and then they come out.”

Many of the sixty or so coyotes that currently have collars live in the city's forest preserves, but tonight we're focusing on the more urbane individuals. “The animals we're going to go to tonight are much more comfortable being seen by people and being around cars,” says Shane. “There are a few of them where I can sit with the spotlight on them and they just turn their eyes away until I turn away the spotlight and then they just continue on.

“They don't worry at all. I think they know the truck, for when we pull up they start watching us, whereas the ones in the forest preserves will run away right away. They never stick around.”

First on the list is Coyote 390. She was collared as a pup back in 2009 and the team have nicknamed her the Northbrook Animal. “She began her life in the Highland Woods area, which is about eight to ten miles away from where she now is,” says Shane.

Coyote 390's early life was uneventful. She stuck to the golf course she was born on, found a mate, and had a litter of pups. But then, around the age of three, she was struck with wanderlust and took off to find a new place to roam.

Her decision to pull up stakes was a tense moment for the team. The radio signals sent out by the collars can only be picked up within a mile radius and so tracking down a wandering coyote can be a challenge. “Usually it will take months before we'll end up finding these animals again, but we got really lucky with her—we found her within a week. Her home range now, half of it is forest preserve—the Des Plaines River forms the boundary line for her—the other half is a residential area she uses.