OUR WILD FAMILIARS

How and why animals are making homes for themselves in the world’s urban areas.

In a wide-ranging, delightfully surprising, and often counterintuitive survey, journalist and epidemiologist Werb (The Invisible Siege, 2022) examines the question of how cities change and are changed by the behavior of the undomesticated animals that make their homes in them. From 2007 on, Werb says, more humans have been living in urban areas than outside them, and “cities are now, on balance, more biodiverse than the wild areas that surround them.” But comparatively few studies have been undertaken on how animals are adapting and even evolving in response to these environments. Werb zooms in on some studies of synanthropes, “wild creatures that have found a way to survive or thrive in human-modified environments”: raccoons that have figured out ways to circumvent garbage locks and passed that knowledge on to their fellows; giant Pacific octopuses that fare better in the garbage-littered stretches of ocean outside Seattle than the more pristine ones; coyotes that take advantage of “thousands of years of evolution…at the margins of apex predators”; baboons that terrorize schoolyards in Saudi Arabia; and many more. Though Werb focuses on animals, he also branches out to consider plants, in particular kudzu and its dramatic effect on the city of Birmingham, Alabama. The author has a soft spot for the animals he writes about, but he also sympathizes with the humans whose lives have been devastated by them, notably the many “tiger widows” of India whose husbands fell victim to Bengal tiger attacks. He has a clear-eyed understanding of ecological degradation, but he’s not without hope. He writes, “Building a conservation movement based on joy will pay greater dividends than one that moves to the tune of a funeral dirge.”

Dazzling insights into the cohabitants of our daily lives.