Area must adapt to straying wildlife

By Bryan McKenzie

Published: August 29, 2008

Seven deer — impudent impediments ignoring traffic’s horns — dined on carefully manicured landscape as the quick red fox sprang across the road, yipped a pup-squeak and disappeared into the brush.

The backyard, below-ground yellow jacket nest was dug hollow and its remnants scattered by a larvae-sucking bugavore, known as a skunk.

No doubt about it, this town has a wildlife problem.

‘Big increase’

“In the past five years, there’s been a big increase in wildlife in the city,” said Bobby Durrer, Charlottesville animal control officer. “Down by Lyons Avenue, I saw a deer and a fox running side by side. I thought I was crazy, but there they were.”

Officer Durrer is not crazy. Neither are people who swear they’ve seen coyotes in residential neighborhoods.

“I can tell you that a coyote on Meadowbrook Heights Road is not entirely out of the question,” said Ed Clark, president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, near Waynesboro. The center acts as veterinarian to the wild, taking lost and wounded wildlife, healing them and turning them back to nature.

“There have been confirmed reports of coyote down near Ivy Road and all they have to do is follow the railroad tracks,” he said. “They go where the food is and there’s plenty of food. It’s getting so common to have problems with wildlife in urban areas that there are college programs in urban wildlife management now.”

Like heavy traffic, bad air and crowded men’s room stalls at University of Virginia football games, you can blame wildlife on developers.

“As cities put fingers of development into rural areas, animals only have two choices: they can go extinct or they can adapt to the new environment,” Mr. Clark said. “It turns out that it’s pretty easy to adapt to an urban environment because our habitat creates lots of food.”

Urban food chain

Follow the chain of foods: Landscaping feeds deer; garbage feeds birds, mice, chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, possums and neighbors’ cats; mice, birds, chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons and possum feed fox; and all but the fox feed coyote.

“Coyote are a growing urban problem because the population is growing exponentially,” Mr. Clark said. “There’s lots of food, they’ll eat anything and they don’t have any competition.”

The new habitat suits a variety of God’s little critters, including those red in beak and maw like the large, turkey vulture that recently stood in the lawn of a Rio Road church, tearing into road-kill deer.

“It’s the trend for the future,” Mr. Clark said. “Wildlife isn’t going to go away anytime soon. As we move into nature, nature has nowhere to move but into the cities and suburbs.”