Deer and other wildlife have
adapted to living in cities and urban areas, such as this deer
photographed in south Surrey.
Photograph by: Les Bazso ,
PNG
I rose one recent morning, poured a coffee, stepped onto the
back deck to admire the fog drifting off the sea and found
myself in the company of a blacktail doe and two slightly shaggy
yearlings just beginning to shed their winter coats.
Wild deer in the backyard and on the boulevards — a spotted
fawn no bigger than a lamb bounded across the road in front of
my car just yesterday — are an increasingly common sight, even
in British Columbia’s most urbane gardens.
It’s not just Bambi who’s moved into the neighbourhood,
either. Deer moving uptown have brought some unexpected baggage.
Their chief predator, the usually shy and reclusive cougar, has
followed its food source, bringing a real hazard to public
safety.
Just this week a cougar was shot by conservation officers in
Coquitlam. It signed its own death warrant when it menaced a
woman, lunging at her while she sat behind a window.
The general — and justifiable — standard is that when a
top-of-the-food-chain predator shows no fear of humans, it has
to be killed before it starts preying on us (and in this case,
an elementary school was near).
In Nanaimo, there were three cougar sightings early this
week, although no aggressive, threatening or predatory behaviour
was reported. The week before that there were three cougar
sightings in Trail, and they came on the heels of three juvenile
cougars that had to be shot in residential Castlegar.
Nobody should panic, of course, as attacks on humans by
cougars are extremely rare — there are far more fatalities
from bee stings each year. But it is a reminder that
increasingly, suburban joggers and walkers would be wise to
refresh their backcountry hiking expertise.
If you encounter a big cat, make yourself as big as you can.
Spread your jacket, open an umbrella, pick up children, stomp
your feet and talk loudly. Sound and look menacing — you want
the animal to decide you’re a threat, not prey. Don’t turn
your back. Never run.
Experienced wilderness hikers carry a stout walking stick and
if a cougar behaves aggressively, they are prepared to fight
back.
B.C. isn’t the only place that’s coping with the wonders
and headaches of urban wildlife, although we still have more
undeveloped wilderness than most places.
The migration of wildlife from backcountry to downtown is a
continental phenomenon, one of the fascinating developments of
the 21st century.
Scientists call it “synurbization.” It refers to a
growing recognition that cities themselves represent a new
evolutionary trend, what one researcher has described as an
explosion of new and strange types of artificial environments in
the natural landscape to which wildlife adapted over millions of
years.
Yet if this process reconfigures ancient natural habitats, it
also creates a portfolio of new ecological niches that wild
animals may colonize.
Nicholas Read, a former Vancouver Sun reporter who now
teaches journalism at Langara College, has written a fascinating
and popular book about it, City Critters: Wildlife in the Urban
Jungle.
“They’ve moved into places we used to think of as
belonging to people and no one else. The strange thing is that
for a long time they did it without anyone noticing,” Read
observes. “Now we can’t help noticing them because they are
everywhere.”
Not that we should be surprised. Human relocation from
undeveloped hinterlands to our manufactured landscape occurred
first and is one of the most rapid and extensive migrations in
history. A century ago, more than 80 per cent of us lived rural
lives, intruders into the habitats of wild creatures. Now, fewer
than 15 per cent of British Columbians are rural inhabitants and
it’s the wild that intrudes into the domesticated spaces most
of us inhabit.
I still find the presence of urban wildlife a pleasant
surprise, but many fellow citizens see deer, raccoons,
squirrels, Canada geese, crows, coyotes, cougars, black bears or
bobcats as more curse than miracle and in some cases — far
fewer instances than popular perception suggests, however —
they have cause.
Not so dear
Deer have become a problem for drivers, for example. In the
provincial capital, where the regional district is grappling
with urban deer management, the number of collisions between
deer and motor vehicles tripled between 1991 and 2005. In Metro
Vancouver, it doubled over the same period.
The estimated cost of dealing with deer killed by vehicles on
city roads is about $100 per accident. That means that in
Greater Victoria they claimed more than $268,000 scarce tax
dollars between 2001 and 2010. Provincewide, ICBC reports
animal-related accident claims of almost $278 million between
1997 and 2007, although this total includes high-speed highway
collisions outside urban areas, too.
And, as Nanaimo discovered last week when a car killed a
mother bear and left two orphaned cubs, it can be tragic for the
animals as well.
But most urban complaints about deer are cosmetic and revolve
around their browsing upon the ornamental flowers, shrubs, fruit
trees and vegetables adorning city gardens. The complaints are
usually accompanied by the claim that there’s a vast
over-population of deer.
Yet B.C. wildlife inventories show that while more deer are
being seen within city limits, blacktail deer populations on
Vancouver Island are actually in a steep decline — in large
part because of us.
Logging and residential sprawl disrupted the ecosystems that
sustained Island deer. The blacktail herd collapsed from almost
300,000 deer before 1968 to about 55,000 today. In the same
period, the human population grew by 50 per cent to about
750,000.
In other words, for every two additional humans who moved to
the Island, about four blacktail deer were lost.
These declines were predicted by wildlife biologists as the
backcountry food supply was disrupted. First, there was a sudden
increase in forage as old growth forests were logged, opening
the understory to more sunlight. Then there was a sudden
decrease in forage as fast-growing new forests matured. Logging
subsequently moved into winter browsing areas. Urban development
encroached upon the forest edge. Deer weren’t part of the
economic equation. During one bitter winter, about 100,000
perished.
Faced with dwindling food supplies, deer migrated from where
forage was scarce to where it was more plentiful. The
concentration of shrinking numbers in a smaller, more contested
space has created the illusion that deer populations are
exploding when the opposite has been true.
Newspapers’ editorial pages are rife these days with
letters complaining about stripped gardens, deer menacing the
public and so on, usually accompanied by demands that they be
relocated, that urban hunting regulations be relaxed or that
professional slaughters with venison sales be permitted.
Municipal governments respond to public demands. Cranbrook,
for example, presses ahead with a kill program; Nanaimo is
watching closely; so is Penticton; and a district-wide cull is
one option being examined by Victoria’s Capital Regional
District.
Not everyone agrees, though. Invermere suspended its deer
cull after being sued by a local deer protection society. And
other jurisdictions report that culls are only temporarily
effective because other animals will migrate to fill the vacant
niche. Thus, “controlling” the urban population further
depletes the declining wild herd.
Threat sometimes exaggerated
Misperceptions and their consequences don’t just apply to
ungulates.
Coyotes, for example, are seen as a growing threat to
domestic pets and children. Alarms have been raised recently in
Metro, Toronto, Detroit, Boston, Ottawa and elsewhere. There are
thought to be up to 3,000 coyotes scattered amid the 145,000
dogs and 2.3 million humans inhabiting Metro.
Examine the statistical evidence and scientific research and
the threat seems minuscule.
One detailed study of urban coyote scat in Calgary, for
example, discovered that less than two per cent showed any
evidence of a coyote having killed and eaten dogs or cats.
Almost 80 per cent of scat was comprised of other small mammals,
so coyotes may actually help control mice and rats — the other
urban wildlife that’s seldom mentioned.
Rats are estimated to cause up to $1 billion in damage to
North American homes each year. Damage includes electrical
wiring, insulation, roofing, gardens and ruined food — a
single rat can consume 50 kilograms of food over its lifespan,
but will easily ruin 500 kilograms in the process. Thus, 100
rats in the wrong place might render 50,000 kilograms of food
unfit for human consumption.
Canada geese can be a problem because their massed droppings
can elevate fecal coliform counts in public parks, on beaches
and in waters where the public likes to swim. They’ve been
described as a “menace” in the media, even threatening
airlines.
There’s truth to this. The Canada goose population has
grown to more than five million birds since 1970, with most of
the growth among resident populations that like to flock near
airports — which are often in low-lying areas, frequently near
waterways that attract waterfowl.
Between 1990 and 2005, according to one aviation study,
Canada geese were involved in 1,279 collisions with aircraft,
some resulting in serious damage. But another major study of
more than 16,000 civil and military aircraft accidents recently
discovered that roughly 12,000 were caused by human error
related to skills and judgment.
Metro Vancouver’s raccoons have been reported behaving
aggressively toward humans. But in reality, the risk of being
attacked by a “psycho” raccoon, as one tabloid dubbed such
an incident, pales by comparison to the risk of being attacked
by a fellow human.
There were half a dozen reported raccoon incidents last year,
for example. But in 2011, 87 British Columbians were murdered,
36,716 were assaulted and there were 66,784 violent criminal
offences reported.
City dwellers are about 13,000 times more likely to be
attacked by a fellow citizen than by a wild animal. And if
Canadian Safety Council estimates are accurate, you are 90,000
times more likely to be bitten by somebody’s dog, including
your own, than by a raccoon or a coyote.
Nevertheless, civic governments are increasingly asked to
deal with the uncanny ability of wild animals to adapt and
prosper in the built landscapes that humans once considered the
exclusive preserve of themselves and their domesticated pets.
And this raises serious ethical questions, not merely for
civic authorities, but also for those who want to be rid of
creatures that inconveniently migrate to urban areas because
their habitats elsewhere are being degraded, defiled, disrupted
or diminished by human activity.
The great divide
At one end of the spectrum are vehement animal rights
advocates who argue the problem is entirely ours, not the
animals.’ At the other, an exasperated fringe that argues:
“Just shoot the damn things.”
Somewhere in the middle reside most of us, concerned about
safety and reducing damage but not entirely displeased at this
small intrusion of wild nature into our engineered environment.
As I looked on, the blacktail family browsed contentedly on
the back lawn just below the tree house we built in a Pacific
maple for our daughter 15 years ago. The tree has since begun to
dismantle the structure again now that she’s about to graduate
from university, a reminder of nature’s resilience.
Not that the tree house fell into complete disuse. I climbed
up to do some minor repairs a few years ago and discovered a
mother raccoon had moved in temporarily and was using it as a
nursery — cute little kits they were, too — although for
some reason it’s been spurned by the red squirrels that
occasionally use its roof as a landing pad.
Just this winter my daughter reported that a raccoon still
too young to be afraid of humans had padded up onto the sliding
glass door to the deck outside her quarters, pressed its paws
and nose to the glass and examined her at length while she was
studying.
Kind of like me, examining the deer on the back lawn.
The two yearlings looked up in alarm. Mom just gave me a slow
once-over and then went back to brunch. We’ve come to know
each other quite well, the doe and I.
Last year, those yearlings were a couple of tiny spotted
fawns. They would burst onto the lawn and gambol like the
proverbial spring lambs, jumping and mock-butting while mother
kept a careful eye on the humans on the deck.
By my count, this is the 17th generation of fawns to find
safety in our back garden — and the gardens of equally
sanguine neighbours up the street and down — but their
presence hasn’t come without some adjustments all around.
It’s not just the lawn upon which the deer dine. They so
liked the Japanese holly in the rock garden that I transplanted
to a pot on the deck, which has since morphed into a kind of
rescue garden. They’re especially partial to geraniums and
love their petunias, too. Day lilies, dahlias, pansies and
impatiens have all now migrated to safety in pots.
The deer turn up their noses at nicotiana, though, so it’s
in the front border. They don’t like marigolds and shun
poppies of all varieties, Welsh, California and Oriental alike,
but I like the bright colours so there are lots of them. Deer
detest alyssum, too.
But they love roses, so the heritage climbers have moved to a
fenced area. Oregon grape, salal, cotoneaster, potentilla,
kinnikinnick, lavender and bamboo they dislike, so these provide
grace notes elsewhere.
One never knows, though. My neighbours warned that deer would
devour the azaleas. They never touch mine. Or the grape vines.
The sumac that’s taken root in an old stump they shun but
there’s now an eight-foot mesh fence around the apple trees
and the planter boxes for garden vegetables. I’m told deer can
leap a fence like that but the ones who visit my garden never
have shown an inclination.
So we’ve arrived at a quid pro quo. If they’ve adapted to
us, we’re adapting to them.
We garden outside the fences with plants they don’t like
and inside with plants they do. They’re welcome to eat in
their part of the garden. Plants for which we both share an
affinity either go into protected areas or we forego them.
As I say, however, some of my fellow citizens, having
blissfully mowed down the deer’s habitat to pay for their
hospitals and shopping malls, are now angry over the displaced
deer moving in to lunch on their gardens.
Deer have been evolving in North American landscapes for
millions of years. The vast human changes imposed upon it that
Metro represents have occurred over the last 100 years or less.
Maybe, as Nicholas Read so eloquently argues, we should all
be a little more patient in figuring out how to live together
with our fellow creatures.
“The lives and futures of urban wildlife, resilient though
they appear, are firmly (or perhaps precariously) in our hands,”
Read observes. “As we go, so do they. We can either hold on to
them for dear life as some of the last precious vestiges of
wildlife on this rapidly shrinking and overcrowded planet, or we
can selfishly and carelessly let them go. The choice is ours.”
