The animals have come to town!

Animals are living in the habitats of our streets, our roofs, our walls.

We use animals, they use us. 

City living has a high death toll for urban wildlife, well-documented in daily sightings of roadkill, littered oceans, and possums frozen on powerlines. But some animals take advantage of urbanised landscapes: they don’t just survive the city, but flourish. 

Although yellow-tailed black cockatoos are declining in number, they frequent Sydney’s Centennial Park to forage for pine cones. In Circular Quay, seagulls beg for tourists’ chips — and they usually get what they want. I’ve seen rainbow lorikeets perched on a lone tree in the middle of a highway, settling in for a night surrounded by raging cars. This is surprisingly a safe haven, with the birds using noisy traffic as a protective barrier against other birds or predators. The lorikeets are left undisturbed in their refuge.

City animals repurpose our infrastructure in bizarre ways, as shown in Picfair’s Urban Wildlife Photography Awards and the Urban Animals category of Australian Geographic’s Nature Photographer awards. A Hylaeus bee lays eggs in unused drill equipment. Tasmanian devils live beneath residential houses. Critically endangered woylies cluster around a campsite, eating discarded dinner crumbs.

The Animals are Adapting

Synanthropes are species of wild animals or plants which live beside — and benefit from — human habitation. Rats, ants, pigeons, and possums are synanthropes found in cities across the world. New York-based artists Gal Nissim and Jessica Scott-Dutcher have created audio tours of New York parks which document synanthropes, giving tips for people to find urban animals.

Syanthropes demonstrate the ability for animals to adapt to new conditions. Cities create new ecosystems, shifting species’ ecological functions as their predators, diseases, and access to food and shelter also change. Some animals adapt by making big changes to their behaviours, like crows who nest in Brisbane buildings instead of trees. Animals’ diets are adapting to city living — for example, researchers have spotted brush turkeys devouring roadkill. Brush turkeys usually eat an omnivorous mixture of grains and grubs, but in Manly, they’ve been eating bandicoot. Until recently, brush turkeys were becoming scarcer due to habitat loss and feral predators. In the past 20 years, they’ve become a common urban sight since they’ve figured out ways to benefit from suburban life.

Endangered Animals

In his book The New Nature, biologist Tim Low explains that some animals and plants have adapted to the extent that they now need human habitation for survival. The green and golden bell frog is listed as endangered under the NSW Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995, and one of the largest populations reside in the artificial wetlands of Sydney Olympic Park. Low explains that 28 out of the 30 sites where the frogs are found are artificial; most of these are around Sydney. The frogs seem to prefer human-made habitat: artificial ponds, amidst introduced plant species, or sheltered beneath sheds. Urbanisation is one of the main causes of biodiversity loss, destroying many wildlife populations through habitat degradation, but species like the green and golden bell frog are becoming reliant on urban landscapes.

The western swamp tortoise is Australia’s most endangered reptile, largely due to urbanisation. Other than captive breeding, it lives just north of Perth Airport, in the Swan Valley, making it an “urban-restricted threatened species,” found only near Australian cities or towns. It is an amazing creature. The tortoise is a type of Australian chelid which closely resembles fossils from the early Miocene epoch, approximately 20 million years ago. This reptilian grandparent lives in shallow swamps which fill with water during winter and spring. When the swamps are too hot and dry during summer, the tortoises aestivate — a process like hibernation, but during hot or dry periods — in holes or beneath leaf litter. The tortoises are vulnerable to further habitat degradation due to urban development, pesticides, and climate change. To care for the western swamp tortoise, and urban endangered species like it, city conservation efforts are vital.

The Urban Wilderness

Animal conservation by Australian settler-colonial organisations often constructs the idea of the untamed wilderness, positioning animals as being out there, in an imaginary pure, untouched natural landscape far away from the city. A trip to Sydney’s Taronga Zoo creates an impression of escaping the city to glimpse where animals really live, and where conservation is really happening, in Sumatra or Tanzania or the remote Australian bush. But while visitors imagine the wilderness, non-captive urban animals wander around the zoo. They cleverly use human actions to provide for them. Brush turkeys snack on grapes dropped by children, lorikeets feed in human-planted trees, ibis bathe in artificial water features, and Eastern water dragons sunbathe on the hot concrete footpaths. While zoos traditionally emphasise the wilderness, Taronga is beginning to highlight urban wildlife, with keeper talks educating visitors on backyard birds and encouraging possum-boxes. Wildlife is not overseas, nor in the outback, nor on a Blue Mountains weekend bush walk. And it’s certainly not confined to the enclosures of the zoo.

Government policies for biodiversity conservation often focus on regenerating the lost wilderness: supposedly undisturbed habitats, protected areas, or large national parks fenced-off from people. Meanwhile, city habitats are in danger of being understood as a “lost cause” by the public. If city-dwellers are only aware of the conservation happening far away from them, they may not realise the importance of the urban ecosystems to which they contribute every day.

Low writes that urban species are now inescapably reliant on human habitation:

“Their fates are now bound to ours. If Homo sapiens packed up and left Australia some species might not survive into the future. This shows again the danger of assuming that ‘nature does not seek to make a connection with us’; that ‘nature does not care if we live or die’. Animals and plants do what they can to survive. If that means taking over a quarry or a dump, so be it. We should not judge this as ‘unnatural’. If we are surprised, it only shows that our picture of nature is faulty.” 

Cities and their synanthropes are here to stay. Perhaps this reveals a possibility for peaceful human-animal coexistence. Perhaps not, and we must face a fraught reality of species battling for resources: fighting for sunlight, for water, for nutrients, for endless consumption. Regardless, animals are living in the habitats of our streets, our roofs, our walls. It’s crucial that we learn how best to live alongside them.

As I write, rain pours outside my window on Wallumedegal land. I wonder where the wild things around me might be hiding.