Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the critters

have moved in-

With surprising results

Wild Animals
Among Us

Condensed from AMERICAN WAY

Michael Dileo
JUST BEFORE SUNDOWN a crowd begins to gather near the Congress Avenue
bridge in downtown Austin, Texas. On a knoll above a lake, families spread out on
blankets and fathers hoist small children onto their shoulders. The air is still, the lake
gunmetal gray, and the stacked-up cumulus clouds are reflected in the mirrored glass of
nearby highrises. There is a buzz of anticipation in the air. It’s time for the big show.
Most every spring and summer night, a large colony of Mexican freetailed bats
emerges from its roost beneath the bridge, then heads for a night of feeding and flying
around the lowlands east of tuwn.
“Hear that ? ” asks bob Benson, who often serves as a nature guide for the bat
emergence. A high-pitched keening gradually rises from the bridge. “We’re hearig
their social sounds, their conversation.” It’s hard to imagine,looking al the bridge’s
underfacing, that an estimated I.5 million bats live inside it, but Benson explains that
the animals happily crowd 200 to a square foot.
As the sun drops behind the western hills, the emergence begins with a rush of wing
flap and bat chatter. The bats are so fast and fluid that they appear only as a dark
ribbon, a teeming Möbius strip against the dusty-rose sky. At first the emergence
silences the awe-struck crowd, but soon people are shouting to their friends and calling
to their children. The fly- by lasts about half an hour, an infinity of bats accelerating
toward the horizon.
While there have long been colonies of bats in the hills outside Austin, this urban
colony is a recent arrival. In I980 the bridge was rebuilt, and the new concrete slab had
expansion joints---- slots running lengthwise along the underside---- that provided
perfect temperature and humidity conditions
for bats. From there, the colony grew substantially .
Initially, residents were alarmed “Mass Fear in the Air as Bats Invade Austin” screamed
one newspaper headline. But then Bat Conservation International, a group founded in
1982 by bat advocate and wildlife conservationist Merlin Tuttle, helped change pubic
opinion. Tuttle conveyed to people the relative safety of bats----fewer than 0.5 percent
carry rabies and virtually nome come in contact with humans. He also dispelled myths
about the animals flying into people’s hair or biting their necks.
The scale- tipping factor has been the bats’ role as organic pest control : the bridge
colony consumes between 15,000 and 30,000 pounds of insects (moths, beetles and
flying ants) every night. Instead of becoming a public menace, the balt colony has
become one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions.
IN MANY American cities urban wildlife has become a presence to value. In Seattle,
a bank set up video monitors to allow passerrs-by and customers to observe a family of
peregrine falcons nesting in the bank’s tower. Amherst, Mass., built two tunnels to
allow spotted salamander to safely cross under a busy street.
In part, the growing profusion of animal life in cities is the result of changing human
attitudes about the relationship between nature and civilization : people have stopped
thinking of cities as one place and nature as someplace else. It would, however, be
misleading to describe the changing face of urban wildlife as entirely intentional, the
product of altruistic human effort. While Austin’s bat colony and Seattle’s peregrines
seem to be a happy blend of fluky circumstance, expanding human consciousness and
animal adaptation , there is a darker side to animal encroachment.
Loss of habitat is pushing wildlife toward an uncomfortable proximity to humans.
The U. S. Department of Agriculture reports a steady increase over the last decade in
complaints about wild animals. In 1994 California reported its worst year in decades for
mountain-lion attacks. Even in promoose Anchorage, which had installed a moose
underpass, when one animal stomped a man to death last year, a state legislator held
hearings to consider a moose hunt in three local parks.
The profusion of coyotes in Los Angeles, red foxes in many northern and eastern
cities ; the rising numbers of urban deer, Canada geese, raccoons and skunks ---these are
developments not necessarily desired.
When attorney Pat Deely and hiswife, writer Kathy Lowry, bught their home a decade
ago in San Antonio, they didn’t think to ask their real-estate agent about wildlife. Over
the years raccons, skunks and opossums have taken up residence in their basement.
Experts advised blocking all entrances to the basement. “We’d use heavy stones in front
of holes,” says Kathy, “but the next morning we’d find them moved, as if some kind of
animal miracle had occurred. We love animals, but we just wish they’d stop raising
families inside our huse.”
The couple’s experience is not unusual. “I’m afraid there’s a big ‘but’ after the
sentence ‘We like urban wildlife,’ ” says Craig Tufts, chief naturalist for the National
Wildlife Federation. “ People want wildlife as long as it’s not going to cause them
problems, and different people have different ideas about what a wildlife problem is. ”
“ We get all kinds of calls, ” says Kate Stenberg, who manages the King County
Wildlife Program in Washington. “Raccoons, because they’re so bold. Beavers, they
dam the streams and kill fruit trees. Coyotes, they eat a lot of house cats. Even bears,
especially in the suburbs. ” In some cities, well-intended conservation efforts backfired
into overpopulations of Canada geese, and there has been at least one incident of a goose
being clubbed to death by a frustrated golfer wishing to finish his gaggle-infestd 18
holes.
The difficulty isn’t that cities are inhospitable to wildlife. With their yards, parks and
golf courses, their abundance of garbage and lack of predators, urban communities are
just too good a habitat.

MY HOME in Austin has a fine back yard, rich with small lizards and snakes, some
oversized vermilion dragonflies and the occasional toad. We have our own management
problems : a surplus of mosquitoes. I decided to remedy the situation organically by
putting up a 12-unit purple-martin hose to attract that large swallow so fond of
consuming insects.
Nature abhors a vacuum but doesn’t necessarily fill it according to our heart’s desires.
Instead of martins, pesky house sparrows moved in. I kept removing their nests. One
day I saw that a male sparrow had returned to the now empty house. He stood at the
opening, turning rapidly from side to side, confused as I was. The way he struck out his
small beige breast, in a kind of mournful defiance, broke my heart.
When I recounted this episode to Noreen Damude, a wildlife expert, she assured me
that limiting the house sparrow was my ecological duty. I was simply experiencing the
pain and pleasure of stewardship, of wildlife management in my own back yard.
Perhaps as we fine-tune our relationship with urban animals----as we look up from our
bank deposit slips to check on the peregrines, fret about cayotes in Los Angeles or raise
a toast to the bridge bats of Austin----we’re trying to create an equilibrium that’s new in
the world.