Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City - Hardcover

Anne Matthews is the author of two previous books, Where the Buffalo Roam and Bright College Years. She is a contributing editor for Preservation magazine.

To the untrained eye, New York City is a concrete jungle inhabited by humans and pests. Matthews (Where the Buffalo Roam) applies a naturalist's scope to the cityscape and brings an array of newcomer urban species into focus. Coyotes hunting in abandoned lots, deer browsing the parks, herons in secluded estuaries, porpoises and sea turtles in the rivers, exotic songbirds and other previously rare animals make for fascinating city wildlife anecdotes. In recent decades, the five boroughs of New York have become a nurturing environment for beasts of every description, as they have adapted to their new surroundings. Into this evolving, unplanned zoo, the author wanders with amateur and professional ethologists. Her brisk, informative narrative brings to life both the animals under study and the humans who study them. Here we meet, among others, the banker-cum-bird specialist who spends her early mornings saving migratory birds that have become confused in the financial district's canyons. We encounter a Harvard professor, a specialist in urban open space studies, critiquing the quality of various mini-environments supposedly dedicated to leisure and reconnection. When concentrating on the animal and human city dwellers, the book soars. Unfortunately, it concludes with a thudding, apocalyptic vision. Using dire but unproven computer-generated prophecies, Matthews belies the life-affirming bulk of her book by offering a world-to-be of global warming, overpopulation and disease-ridden slums. Except for this dismal ending, the book is a fine, lively read.

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