fish and wildlife service in the remote tropical pacific her writing has appeared in a variety of publications including l a times birdwatchers digest open spaces wild earth conservation biology journal and the prairie naturalist she is the author of several books where encounters with ordinary birds pilgrim on the great bird continent the importance of everything and other lessons from darwin's last note books planet central wisdom from the urban wilderness and she is here to talk about her new book the urban best year encountering the every day wild land thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks nick i'm happy to be here so start out tell us what was your motivation in your new book the well you know there are several intertwined reasons that i wrote this but the first one is really a strong sense of mission i believe passionately that daily connection with the natural world makes us healthier makes us more intelligent makes us more creative it makes us happier science bears all of these things out but i think we can also find this out from our own experience the more time we spend outdoors and observing sort of a more than human world the more connected we feel to that world and to ourselves and so i think it matters to sort of share means of making that connection with others another reason the i wrote it though it's just simple self preservation i have been a naturalist my whole life studen of wild animals birds in particular and i always thought that i would live in the country and instead i found myself you know with a husband that works in global health and living in the city for good reasons i you know believe in his work and want to support it  but i found myself on one level feeling really desolate and so when i started paying more attention to the wildlife right outside my door and found that i could do the kind of st and with the kind of depth that i would in while there are places with animals that were closer to home it was a kind of salvation is actually not too strong a word to use so there's a very personal dimension it dimension to it but there's one more thing which is when i started started putting this book together and researching perceptions of urban wildlife i found out how much misinformation and fear and confusion there is among people that live in urban neighborhoods regarding the non humans that live among us so here we are in the first decade really in human history that more humans are living in urban places than live in rural places and so that's very new and the disconnect between i think that humans moving to urban places sort of felt like here we are in these human fortresses that you know are separate from everything else and we're finding instead that they're quite semi permeable to  humans but at the same time we're suffering this disconnect from the information that humans once had when we lived closer to nature and so that disconnect is catching up with us and we're confused i've talked to wildlife professionals who say you know people are idiots they see a coyote and they freak out and they call and they want me to come in to shoot it and you know i really i don't think people are idiots for the most part i think that we don't have the information that we need and we're confused about what to do we want to be safe and and so i wanted to kind of calm some of the fear and hype and provide some of the good common sense that is required to live well and graciously as inhabitants with other creatures in our urban neighborhoods so what is a best theory it's a medieval book form that i just became completely fascinated with so there are these big compendiums of animal lore and they were penned by i mean just the image that you probably have in your imagination is exactly right so penned by monks by candlelight on huge pieces a valid which is dried goat or calfskin you know in these dark stone walled monasteries and what they were were compendiums of knowledge of the medieval understanding of the animals that well what's really wonderful about a base theory is that there are a combination of good the best of medieval science so what people could really observe about animals but also what they just imagined to be true they just filled in with imagination and sort of conjuration and in the series none of this is teased out they present all of this information about creatures their real observed the imagined the feared as if it were all on equal footing in terms of factual footing and so they're really really good fun to read i mean some of the animals themselves are made up so you know unicorn type things but more like part reptile part mammal and they're all thrown in alongside the animals that you could really see out there with without letting us know which is which so what i love about that oh there's another level to the beast area which is our allegory so animals were always presented with a moral dimension to them so for example you had a bird like a jay that was chattering away and the moral to us was that we should just keep our mouths shut so we could listen to you know the spirit of  god an animal like a duck it's very quiet is able to see the devil of the hocks sneaking up on it and so we too should be quiet and still like the day and all of it would tie back to a sense of god and scripture like th should be quiet that we should let could let scripture sort of sink into us so i found the form absolutely fascinating and what i wanted to carry over into my modern p c ari was the idea that compendium of animal lore matter that it is an important for us to be be intelligent co inhabitants of our urban neighborhoods with the more than human neighbors  but what i also really wanted to bring was that idea that there are different kinds of human knowledge that all matter so when i would look at an animal and want to learn more about it just say something like an eastern gra i have to go to several different book about tracking a book about mammal identification a book about animal myths how animals appear in dreams and mythology and folklore and i thought you know all of these ways of human knowing are beautiful all of the matter so i wanted to bring those kinds of knowing alongside our everyday storytelling and our modern sort of myth making and put those those ways of knowing  again on an equal footing and so that that sort of commingling of kinds of human knowledge inspired me to be scary and how did you select the animals and creatures that make up your book that was actually really hard because there are a lot of animals in the urban landscape and the book could be a lot longer i wanted to be sure that each animal that i chose got some kind of in depth treatment so instead of trying to treat every single animal that we might see i wanted to choose representative animals that showed certain kinds of lessons and treat those with some complexity and so instead of choosing instead of treating both foxes and coyote's as sort of a top urban predator i looked at coyote's as the kind of big you know carnivorous animal trickster figure in terms of you know birds there's actual actually hundreds of birds possible in an urban landscape and so i chose chickadees as sort of the representative cute garden bird and hawks and owls were treated as one chapter and for birds i did kind of a general chapter on b life overall so it's really difficult and i kind of felt like anyone who reads this book will be able to say you know why didn't she write about blank you know whatever their own favorite animal in the urban landscape or something they've been wondering about but i'm hoping that in looking at the animals that i did include they'll sort of find a way into thinking about whatever animal is of interest to them and one of the other things that i really wanted to have happen with this book was to see it not as a complete you know finished statement on urban wildlife but instead as an invitation to participation an invitation to observation and so it's my hope that people will look at this book and go you know i'm going to december's and of creating my own beast yari not necessarily taking pen to paper and writing it down but by participation with observation to sort of come into this story this unfolding story of human and wildlife and the urban landscape so that the writing of the beast you're continues to talk about a few of i think that they're the perfect example of the human schizophrenia regarding urban wildlife it turns out when you look at studies of people's perceptions of urban wildlife squirrels are the number when most loved animal the ones that they think are cutest and want to attract to their yards they're also the number one most hated nuisance animal and so they're both they have these you know we love them because they have these cute tails and these big white eyes and they run up and down our trees and sort of enliven our neighborhoods and del peanuts out of our hand and that's very cute and we hate them when they eventually instead of eating the peanut out of our hand bite our toddlers finger and you know the thing that people most hate is that they come in they eat all of the expensive black oil sunflower seeds that the people put out for different wildlife so i just love that we have this complicated relationship with squirrels  one of the myths about squirrels that i try to dispel in the book is that they're dumb people it's one of the most common things i hear about about squirrels people say oh they're they're cute but they're so dumb i just think you know where do you get this where you are spending so much money and and energy becoming insane trying to prevent them from eating your bird seed and the squirrel is still winning so how can you go it turns out that they in task test their intelligence is very high they have a good you know sense of spatial relations they have really incredible problem solving skills and if you watch them trying to get at the bird seed you can tell that but one of the things that i learned in reading this book was that there their communication system between themselves is really complicated and we hear their vocalisations and if you kind of listen you can tease out you know sort of baseline vocalizations where they're just sort of chatting with each other and then they're kind of alarm calls and they don't want to stare but the main way that they communicate is by using their tails so all those little switches that they're doing with their tails are met many of them are messages to one another and they use their tails and all kinds of ways that don't have to deal with communication that we can observe they use them for writers when they're jumping from branch to branch they use them i think all of us have seen a squirrel at some point fall off an electrical wire and then just get up and run away and part of the reason they're able to do that is they use their tail as a parachute on the way down and then they throw it under themselves as a pad when they land and one of the cutest uses of tails is that they wrap themselves in it like a blanket in chile evenings and even cuter they use it to wrap up their young as a as a baby blanket in the nest so they really have a lot of uses for their tails they do and they actually also use them as umbrellas and either and as shade umbrellas too and actually that's what they're there scientific mean name means shade tail or it and in the same chapter  on schools you also talk about rats get a lot of negative publicity well rats are trouble you know because once they get in your house most of these animals if you have a squirrel and you're nesting in your house or in a possum or a raccoon basically all you have to do is kind of wait it out seasonally because they're there with their young and once they are grown they'll leave and you can hammer up the hole that they got into in the first place rats are different because they have a very quick you know just station period and so once you have rats in your house waiting for them to leave you know it's going to be a long wait so we have to be really proactive about protecting our household against rats but the human perception of rats other than that you know other than them being a problem in our houses which can be true the human perception of rats is very odd and i found the more i talked to people that it was linked to the of their tail you know rats if you hang out with rats if you've ever been around a pet rat you know that they're super friendly they come when they're called they're kind of like dogs they hang out in your pocket they hang out you know in the crook of your neck there you can train them to do tricks they're just lovely and affectionate and friendly creatures also super smart and if you just look at their faces you know they have these nice brown eyes and kind of big ears they're kind of cute but for most people it's the naked detail that they just can't get past and they associate that the maybe scabby or dry miss of the tail with disease they feel that it's dragging behind the rat like a snake something that they can't control and so people just have a hard time getting past that with rats but i would just argue for you know if you if you there's some there they are very clean i mean they have a reputation for being associated with disease because of the plague but that does not have to do necessarily with their bodily cleanliness and here in this country the the plague is not an issue and rats are busy cleaning themselves all the time sort of like our cats even more so just busy washing washing watching but there is some recent research about altruism in rats was just just wonderful so what researchers discovered was that when you put two rats into plexiglass cases you'd have one rat in a small locked plexiglas box and then another free rat running around it inside and close in a larger box and what they discovered was that the free rat would work very hard to unlock the plexiglas case of the the locked in rat and then when that rat got let out the two would run around squeaking and celebrating together just beautiful the films of it are really really fun and so they upped the ante on the free rat by they've got now they've got the lock trap and the free rat and so in with the free rat they put one of the rats absolute favorite foods which is milk chocolate chips another thing that we have in common with rats inside intelligence so the free rat might eat a chocolate chip but almost without fail she would save some of the chocolate for the rat in the box and when she let the rat in the box out they would still the very first thing they would do is squeal and run around celebrating and then they would eat some chocolate and one of the things i should point out is that i'm saying she because if you're ever locked in a box you should hope that it's a female rat that comes along to help you because  i think it was eighty percent of the time female rats would free their imprisoned colleague whereas a male rats it was only twenty percent of the time talk about records because i encountered one and two houses away seattle and most urban places and they are for the most part nocturnal there are a lot more americans for that reason than we probably think they are but this season especially that from spring into autumn we'll see them more often during the day and people freak out and think you know there rabbit there's this myth that i reckon during the day is seen during the day as rabbit and we should all know living here in the pacific northwest that there is no rabies among the mammals except that so i reckon seen during the day is likely not rabid and if you're outside of the pacific northwest there are still lots of other good reasons for acting to be wandering around the most common one is that it's a female with young and so she is during the time she has yet she is foraging for food  much more of the day than she would be if she was just taking care of herself and so it's not uncommon to see them wandering around especially you know more and more as urban density increases and our interface with wildlife increases we're going to be seeing more animals and so the message there is just to use common sense don't feed the raccoons when we feed wild animals we invite them to become more expectant of food from humans and so when they go to another house that doesn't want a raccoon it becomes a problem raccoon and that's when you know they get the fish and the fish and wildlife you know wild animal remove people to come and kill him or wreck and so the best thing we can do in acting in allowing these animals to flourish is to leave them alone and basically just avoid them but yeah it's a wonder to see them they're really fun to watch they're very playful and they live alongside us the very good with their hands they're super good with their hands i think one of the things that makes says pay extra attention to raccoons is the fact that their front paws look very much like human hands and the masks on their faces even though their fur we sort of associate them with the real masks and all of the cultural mythology around you know banditry and be very and mischief that goes along with masks and so between the masks and the human like front paws we miss ascri intent to a lot of reckon behavior so recommends come into our yards and they you know they mess up our garbage cans are they come inside the cat door they steal the cat food and people think oh and that raccoon is really out to get me and i think that with other animals without masks and without the busy busy little human like paws we sort of let them be as wild animals more but it's important to remember when raccoons and any animal comes into our yard that they're basically after exactly the same things we are their reckons even the ones that are poking in our cat doors are after food water shelter a good place a protected place  to nest and give birth to their young and then protection for those young and for themselves and so that's all they're after in the same way that all of us animals are but yes they can do a lot with their hands they can they can undo locks they can untie knots i learned that they could tie the knots which is somehow disconcerting they can open zippers i had when i was camping when i was younger they got into my pack instead of eating through the side or whatever they  the animals in your book bird in your book that is often thought of as stupid is the pigeon talk about pigeons a bit yeah pigeons get a really bad rap because i think one of the things is that they are so common in the deepest and sort of filthiest of urban places that we just associate them with you know places we don't want to be places we don't want to go  trash species basically they're called flying rats sometimes they get lumped in with that hatred we feel for rats and then they have these heads that you know their heads just aren't that big looking and so we think  much brain in there and i have to admit that i was sort of a species this pigeons i think there they're a beautiful bird when you stop to look at them and in fact yesterday it's so funny i've been so busy you know writing this book and then copy editing it and promoting it now that i sort of got a little bit away from it in the last couple months from the central lessons that i'm trying to share and yesterday i was at westlake and i was hanging out with all the huge variety of people on that plaza by the fountain and i had my veggie dog you know the dog in the park guys that i love and i was taking now here i'm going against their will is you know really supposed to feed the animals right there pigeons so i'm not really is as scrupulous about that as some people so the pigeons are gathering around and i started through my little by now and you know a saint is now to pigeons become twenty pigeons and i just thought i just took you know ten minutes to really observe the details of each bird and they're beautiful they're iridescent they have these lovely orange i wring their feet are coral and they have a lot of variation in their plumage their behaviors together are complicated and interesting and they are all really gentle birds so it's fun to sort of just take that moment out from everything  just sort of sit with the the urban birds and hang out with them and noticed their they're the peacefulness that i kind of brings but yes it turns out that modern studies show that they're a lot more intelligent than we thought so there's been studies and a stallion lately about their mathematical ability and so they had these pigeons pairing cards that had images of numbers of dots so there would be  like a card that had two dots and a card had four and they had the to put them in the right order ascending order and they could do this at least up to nine which is amazing and uncommon in birds and they did just as well on this task tess as rhesus monkeys so we like to think that primates are much smarter but they didn't do the not only birds but one of the birds that we consider to be the dumbest of birds pigeons in this test so i thought that was that was quite wonderful so one of the things that observation of urban wildlife does is sort of turns our preconceived notion of animals and our relationship to animals on its head and our preconceived notion of intelligence and what the possibilities for animal intelligence are when we get a few minutes left talk about the coyote because typically you will hear about these there's a guy there's a guy already in the city you know put the schools into lockdown right so coyote's are really kind of the flagship species in my book and the reason is that they are pretty much the largest animal that it's possible from the perspective of humans in the urban landscape i mean let's think about it if bear is bears aren't going to be hanging out in the city for their safety and for eyes cougars no wolves if there were any close enough i know you know but coyote's are just you know they're more carnivorous they're they have more teeth they're bigger than we want our urban wildlife to be as much as we you know i think we like the romantic idea of living in a more wild city  and yet maybe they're just small enough to slip in and there is a place in urban ecology for coyote's they by controlling the feral cat population they allow the native birdlife to thrive and they've discovered in areas where they've executed the coyotes that the uptick in rats is incredible and so they are a huge control on the urban rat population and the thing mike that people don't realize is that they have been living we have been living alongside coyote's since you know since human settlement i mean coyote's have been among us for a long long time they just are wary of us and so they stay out of sight but you're right people react with a lot of fear and a lot of emotion when they see a coyote when for the most part this time of year it's important to think about that a lot of the coyote's mostly they're nocturnal but this time of year there's a lot of young coyote's they're just kind of finding their way they're learning what's what and we might see a couple of more coyote's this season so just call them is in order and one of the wildlife biologist that i spoke to stand here in chicago has done more urban coyote research anyone in the world so that every human interaction with a coyote is a teachable moment so he said what we are trying to teach we're trying to teach ourselves that it's ok coyotes are are we can live alongside them and we can both flourish for the coyote that teaching is that they need to avoid us in order for that flourishing to occur and so he suggested you know throwing a sick yelling at the coyote go away and it's hard we think that when we want to welcome wildlife we want to you know watch them our feed them but the teachable moment here is yes we can live together as long as we you know it's not the peaceable kingdom isn't about everyone you know the lion and the lamb lying down together it's about everyone lying down where they're supposed to be we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios once again during the rainy delhi rainy is a long time seattle activist she's a former school board member in is a quad a former p t a president former mayor oral candidate former candidate for king county council and currently a member of women and black darley thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you mike for having me here was a pleasure so start out you have you are involved with many different issues but the one i see you most active with of late is foreclosures and our banking system in fact you were just recently arrested at a sation that was coming out of the ninety nine protests and a lot of very committed people working there do help people who are going  bailouts came there were five big banks a rich general motors and i this who got a lot of money but the banks were supposed to help people to either stay in new homes to pay rent to lower their payments or help in any way shape or form to stop the hurt and what the banks had doing now is say they say our ed you have to bring x amount well as fargo or to us bank and that then they sold them off the other people and they split the good ones off from the bad ones and kept that  and so we we did have a very specific problem with wells fargo they absolutely refused to talk to anybody and the person that we worked with we went into the made at least six attempts to pay that mortgage and that ross fargo will not accept that with found out then that they were sure servicing that loan put change the way we do and not the way they used to go break in black they come in the middle of the night they drag people out and sell now at least they will not arrest people the man let theirs and that the man said that we will leave as soon as you live up to the bargain you're made to when you got  and they always sang a little saw him finally the management they kept doing business there were people actually going into the bank suit against us but the city attorney that it was necessary that he would file a lawsuit against us and that we went to pretrial banks or small state banks though they have the money the service the short and long term business at the city yes some of the money has to be their immediate lee when they have to pay bills and some banks send created units though and have the kind of reserves so once you get into this there's so you are prepared to be arrested and or serve time for this issue whatever yes because i am i'm not very like gary i live on social security i don't have any great needs and there young people can't do it they cannot take time off from work we had had two teachers with us and they were bin because you know you know you lose time and money when you when you sit in somewhere and they have to go to jail and how many of these of the safe events have you participated in in the last year or so my are a lot of them i don't know if i've been arrested twice once said the house of jeremy i don't know if you know the story of jeremy is the guy that kept wanting to pay the bank and the bank would not take his money interesting so there is that the same case that you were in at the bank and got arrested for it was at a different that was that was at his house ok all right so another issue th together against the pile and we could not get a hearing there was all this problem with getting our material of friends of the city council and you and but when i look at what's going on now they cost over as already there every day that the whole machine sits there and know that the orly other transportation cuts that people will not go through the tunnel because if you want to go from list seattle to downtown seattle you cannot go to the t have to go down the surface arose to get into downtown or you can go all the way from west seattle to the seattle center and then turn around and go back downtown the co indicated that seattle would be picking up the tab the extra over the overrun tab is now mayor of seattle and wonder if he'll be singing the same tune there is that fred yea i was on the transportation committe yeah i know and we see this with everything else you know with the sound there and metro having their it's so over full in those spouses that sometimes you wait for tourists three buses to even get on a bus and sometimes standing in front of a yellow lion because there's no rule and i asked the bus driver said what's the capacity of this bus to that i don't know but that they pointed to x t biases and everybody has to put their worker card out there check it so in a bus that's already a super bowl for all these two people just adds to the aggravation on the bus and it's not that people don't like you know they're not mad at the at the bus cops but it is just one of these intrusions and all the bus reading i do and for me it's a bergen because i read the biases more than anybody all over the world but is an intrusion for very little results i have only one time seen them take one person off the bus for a fair fraction that's make work and it's it's really i read down than sit because some or all later this guy is going to get off the bus that's a lot of payroll and they're looking at a seventy percent cut pro seventeen percent cut when it seems they should be going the opposite way exactly  and make a report but we have people that it allowed it then to do one thing check the fare and don't see anything around you don't see that that biases over stritch that get too many people on this bus and if an accident happens describe in may so i think they are the people that ran the parking  and those fear patrol people they all or all to check and see what else is going on around where days that they should not just give a ticket to the guys over  but no i i believe guilty i had a car and my only the kids started working and they shared a car so yeah  were in this great mode of tomorrow never comes and it's here now and morrow is here now with the pollution with the climate change and everything else so we only have about eight minutes left you ran for mayor of seattle and we have a new mayor coming in here in another month  what would you recommend as changes to our new mayor coming in if you had the power i really don't schools who asked for more funding for all my wellness people and stuff like that and now he seems to embrace things like the fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage which swill where they were split into city camps split families now know they have to have x the port a pott x that they have to pay the positive dumpsters and things so everything they do is now three times as expensive and the city gave five hundred thousand dollars t and you find these things all over town where days at a place where somebody might be able to said that they put the clips up there and i'm not sure what else they do next that and i'm hoping for humane and more humane city council than what we have now but there's the mayor i'm going to have to just wait and see right in in three minutes can you sum up why people should become active about things they care about well one of the thing is  and i have friends who really depressed because they feel useless and i said you want to go with me well i have to play cards tonight  them next time but the next time they have to do something else like watch a television show or a soap opera something is this invigorating to be out there i love reading the buses i find somebody i know on the buses almost every day and i have not somebody else will say something almost that a conversation and it's fun and people miss an awful lot by nat being active and it's interesting business like for instance when the middle of this boeing mess brazil brazil has now just canceled thirty six faded checks chits that boeing was supposed to build for brazil and gave woods to the great swedish car maker sob i didn't know they made him planes are the flag i never knew that and boeing has over has wanted to be that in california and i would say to them go the long beach and don't monkey with the of this because what you get in california is a head go a lot more congressional people than any other state so if i were a boeing guy i'd go split the