Sharing Space: Urban Wildlife and Human Society

As roads, housing tracts, and shopping malls devour more of the countryside and the wilderness areas each year, adults may worry that their children will miss opportunities to consort with nature. At a first glance, wild animals seem absent from the confusion of high-rise buildings, traffic jams, supermarkets, and the tidy suburban neighborhoods. Yet if the truth be told, the cities and suburbs are teeming with wildlife, which presents a learning opportunity for the social studies teacher. Close Encounters Whether urban wildlife is a benefit or a problem for humans depends on the animal in question--and your point of view. Traffic engineers, construction workers, agricultural extension agents, health officers, street cleaners, exterminators, gardeners, tree surgeons, and linemen fixing the cables strung between utility poles--there is a long list of people who have daily encounters with the reality of urban wildlife. For example: * A single fawn is as cute as the fictional Bambi, but due to our land-use practices, and without natural predators, thousands of deer get into trouble in America's suburbs each week. The carcasses of white-tailed deer on the roadside reveal the danger of collisions with cars. Unauthorized urban hunters who take pot shots at deer from car windows are a new threat to safety. In some communities, police officers occasionally hold a Bucky stake-out, placing a partially concealed, plastic decoy (replete with a nice rack of antlers) near a road to lure the unlawful drive-by shooter. * In Banff, Canada, elk are having close encounters with human residents. As the horse-size animals wander along the streets to avoid wolves, they munch on flowers and bushes and may act aggressively towards spectators if they perceive a threat to their calves or if people approach too closely. * In New York's Central Park, a coyote was recently seen. In southern California, coyotes are loping into city parks and have attacked pets in broad daylight. * Beavers gnawed the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin beside the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC. * In the arid Southwest, javelinas (also known as collared peccaries) roam about the suburbs. Homeowners are warned to trim bushes and keep pet food inside to avoid javelinas taking up permanent residence in their yards. When humans encroach in a major way on the landscape, it is not always bad news for wildlife. Some will stay and multiply, taking advantage if food is readily accessible and predators are absent. Animals other than mice and rats can benefit from the change: peregrine falcons have been observed producing bigger and hardier clutches of chicks when they build homes on the top of a city building rather than in the wild where other predators, like weasels, can reach their nests. Another odd example: The world's largest colony of black-capped vireos lives on a military base in Fort Hood, Texas. Signs advise people to keep quiet and stay away from nests so as not to disturb them, although the birds seem unfazed by howitzers and tanks that are often blasting away. Interdisciplinary Learning The dilemma of urban wildlife is richly provocative, an ideal arena for students to learn how a social issue, the management of wildlife, can be seen from several perspectives. How can this rich subject be integrated into the social studies classroom? Students can explore the historic, geographic, sociological, economic, and public policy dimensions of human attempts to manage urban wildlife, addressing the local, state, national, or international stage. Urban wildlife is also an ideal topic for integrating the disciplines in a middle school setting. The fictional literature of urban wildlife tucks snugly into language arts; zoonotic or animal-borne diseases become an issue for health class; the growth and decline of wildlife populations can be graphed in math; and the ties to the life sciences are easy to find. …

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