Most people picture cities as concrete deserts. Steel towers. Gridlocked traffic. The last place you’d expect to find a mountain lion, a colony of bats, or a hawk circling its nest 30 floors above street level. Yet that picture is increasingly, wonderfully wrong.
Cities across the United States have gone from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more large and charismatic wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. The reasons are complex, fascinating, and honestly a little humbling for those of us who thought nature had given up on urban life entirely.
Cities, often seen as the antithesis of nature, are revealing themselves as complex ecosystems teeming with life. From peregrine falcons swooping between skyscrapers to beavers engineering dams in drainage canals, American cities are quietly becoming some of the most extraordinary wildlife habitats in the country. Let’s dive in.
1. New York City, New York – The Concrete Jungle That Actually Has a Jungle
Here’s the thing about New York City. It is simultaneously the most densely packed human environment in America and, shockingly, one of its richest urban wildlife havens. New York City is home to an incredible 168 species of wildlife and more than five million trees. That number stops most people in their tracks when they first hear it…