I am starting this blog to provide a forum for education and advocacy surrounding local wildlife, as well as to encourage open discussion of issues relating to how we co-exist with our non-human neighbors in densely-populated lower Westchester County. Since I am a frequent Patch commenter about these issues, and my comments are often long enough to be blog entries, it seemed a good idea to become a blogger.
As a wildlife advocate, I recently got a distressed email from a resident of an apartment building in a neighboring town. She was upset because the co-op board had hired a trapping company to place live traps in the wooded area behind her building. These traps were baited with open cans of sardines, and placed outside of the den of a family of raccoons.
When I asked what the problem was that prompted trapping, she relayed to me that residents "had seen raccoons walking around at night and were scared of rabies." The raccoons hadn't appeared sick, behaved strangely, acted aggressively, or taken up residence in anyone's basement. They hadn't even been raiding the trash bins. They were just walking around at night---normal behavior.
I wrote an informational letter to the co-op board (excerpted below). This got me thinking of how frightened we are of the perceived risks in the natural environment, even when those risks are highly exaggerated. Our lives are threatened far more from our interactions with fellow human beings and our everyday environment, not wildlife (automobile accidents, household accidents, pollution, crime, abuse, food poisoning, poverty, cancer, heart disease, obesity, etc). And often the removal of members of our ecosystem creates other, unforeseen problems, and rarely even accomplishes the original goal.
Here is an excerpt from the letter:
"...The main point I would like to communicate to you with regard to trapping is that nature abhors a vacuum. This is a widely-known natural principle, but one that people have a hard time accepting due to emotional factors and personal feelings. Simply put, if you have an environment that supports a particular species---especially a highly resilient and adaptable native mammal such as the raccoon--- removal of any animal from that environment will result in another taking its place. It may be an animal of the same species. It may be another animal. This may cause even more conflicts than the original, long-established, native species. But with certainty, the area will be populated with wildlife..."
This leads to the question, which is the fundamental basis of this blog: Given the fact that wildlife are part and parcel of suburban living, how can we best coexist with them?