Do you live at the urban edge? How do you get along with your "wild neighbors?"?
Answer:
personally i live right 'in town' so other than birds and the occasional squirrels and possum, i don't see a whole lot of wild neighbors in my area. but for the sake of this question, my parents said i could 'borrow' their house for a bit.
they built their retirement dream home in the boreal woods in northernmost minnesota. the usual wildlife critters are there, bear, wolves, moose, ravens, eagles, coyotes. they revel in the interactions they have on a daily basis: it makes the experience of living there that much more enjoyable for them. on occasions when i visit, i would tend to agree. the sky is the darkest black at night, nearest city of any consequence is two hours away.
they do not try to keep the wildlife at bay. they realize that THEY are the guests in the woods, however the sheer size of the clearing is larger than i would like. other than the battle with the squirrels to keep them out of the feeders (which most suburbians also fight) they have enjoyed in the last year: fledgling ravens learning to fly from a nearby nest. black bears regularly snffing at the windows. a concert of frogs and loons from nearby lakes and streams, with fireflies providing the visual accompaniment.
who would wish to keep all this at bay? part of the experience of living on the edge (or in this case past it) is seeing what and who saunters by at that place of amazing diversity.
if you don't like the sound of planes, don't build your home near the airport. and if you don't like the 'wild' neighbors, don't encroach on their land.
I used to have tanuki (rakoon dog) guests, they ate the food I used to leave for the stray cat, so he came to ask for more. But they did no harm, so when I spotted them just increased the amount of food I leave, and was very happy to see it all disappeared.
At home , when I wen jogging, I often used to meet deers, hares and pheasants.
Deers are so beautiful! I just ignored them and they got used to me, but the hares are different, they keep distance.
I had snake near the dorm some time ago.People wanted to kill it, but I told them to leave it alone. Poor creature! Hope it is OK...It wasn't poisonous, they should have left it alone!!
I'm not right at that edge, per se, but all around where I live and near where I work borders along areas where wildlife and "domesticated" life meet. It's not really a happy meeting. I ride bike to work and see all manner of rabbits, chickens, geese, ducks, and such along the way. I was really surprised when I saw a coyote last week! These have all been on the trails that I ride to work. At my work, I've seen numerous deer, which is so odd, because while there has been preservation efforts of the wooded areas surrounding our offices and other offices, all around us is civilization, housing, stores, businesses... It seems so weird that these deer are still surviving in these very slim strips of habitat that are still being protected from development. It also seems so weird to be in our parking lot in the morning and seeing a pair of deer skitting off back into the bushes, in an area I don't think of as close to nature. All around my work, there are protected areas that are being maintained/protected as marshy areas and just natural spaces that people shouldn't walk into and they seem to be great and contain a lot of wildlife for seemingly sitting right in the middle of cities, or right at the edges of where the cities are finishing and country is bordering.
As for when cities encroach deeper into wildlife habitat, nothing good is going to come of it for the wildlife. You can already see what we've done as people everywhere we go. We aren't giving much back and we're still growing as a population and looking for more land to take for ourselves. Animals will feel greater pressures and find less and less habitable spaces for themselves.
Deer in the area are long gone, but the canny rabbit lives on and is a menace to green life. In order to grow anything we have to fence off everything. The quail family still comes around and there are foxes...I'm told, but I haven't seen them. Here in the Baja outback encroached on by builders. The wild Baja we loved has disappeared in the shade of the highrise condo.
The answers post by the user, for information only, FunQA.com does not guarantee the right.
More Questions and Answers: