What you don't know about the wild animals in your city

What You Don't Know About the Wild Animals in Your City

We share our cities and suburbs with the furred and the feathered, but our understanding of them is fraught with misinformation. An excerpt from The Urban Bestiary provides a modern perspective on the wildlife we take for granted or even despise.

By Lyanda Lynn Haupt from Discover Magazine

The practice of assembling bestiaries — compendiums of animal lore and knowledge — began in medieval times. They were lavishly illustrated volumes, lettered by monastics on vellum, edged with hand-mixed colors and gilt. They blended medieval science — what was believed to be factually true about each animal — with unreservedly fanciful descriptions.

Penned in the 12th century, the Aberdeen Bestiary’s entry for beavers exhibits the classic medieval bestiary components of observation, imagination and allegory. The beaver is accurately described as possessing a tail that is flat like a fish’s and fur that is soft like an otter’s. The animal was prized for its testicles, which were said to contain a potent liquid that could cure headache, fever and “hysteria.” (This liquid would have been castoreum, located in a small glandular sac at the base of the tail on both male and female beavers.) It is noted, impossibly, that to keep from being killed by a hunter, a beaver would castrate itself and toss its testicles in the hunter’s path.

We may chuckle over the misguidedness of beaver testicle tales, but our own cultural/zoological mythology is fraught with misinformation every bit as false as the beaver castration story. Nature books, television shows and conservation organizations educate us about remote wild and endangered species. Very often we know a great deal more about the Chinese giant panda or the lowland mountain gorilla than we do about the most common of local creatures, say the eastern gray squirrels in our backyards.

As urban dwellers, we find ourselves unmoored — bereft of the knowledge of local creatures, plants and soil that were a necessity of life just a couple of generations ago.

It is time for a new bestiary, one that engages our desire to understand the creatures surrounding our urban homes, helps us locate ourselves in nature and suggests a response to this knowledge that will benefit ourselves and the more-than-human world.