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For much of my life, wild animals have been my neighbours.
I grew up in rural Alberta. There were beaver dams to play on, coyotes howling in the fields and red-winged blackbirds singing outside my bedroom window. I went on to spend large chunks of my twenties working in the Rocky Mountains, where huge landscapes were just outside my doorstep and in them, huge animals: elk, bighorn sheep, bears. Sometimes there were bears on my doorstep.
But now I live in a city. Obviously, I’m not alone. In Canada, nearly three quarters of us do. And often, we feel like we live far removed from wildlife.
So when a Calgary journalist reached out to me about moose living in the city, I was intrigued.
“There’s a community in northwest Calgary where moose just live in the suburbs,” Amir Said wrote to me. “You can see them wandering through the neighbourhood every day, licking cars and eating peoples’ gardens.”
In the story he wrote for us, Amir writes how we need to adjust our understanding of who’s visiting who. It’s not that moose are wandering into the city, exploring unknown territories. It’s that city limits are sprawling outward, swallowing up their habitat.
Since 1990, the world’s urban footprint has increased by an average of more than one square kilometre per hour. We’re building new urban landscapes on top of the places wildlife call home at an unprecedented rate.
And it’s not just moose that make their homes in Canadian cities. This year, a pair of bald eagles nested in Toronto for the first time in the city’s modern history.
As Emma McIntosh reports in her feature about the species’ recovery, the relationship between bald eagles and people has long been fraught. The use of the pesticide DDT is now an infamous example of the intricate — and devastating — human impacts on wildlife.
But a long-term, multi-part strategy brought the species back from the brink.
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