Caller:
What shall I feed it?

Naturalist:
It will feed itself.

Caller:
They can do that?

Fall 2000

by Jerry Sullivan

know it’s just nature," the woman told me. "But nature is not going to take its course in front of me." I was answering phones at the Hal B. Tyrrell Trailside Museum. She was calling to report that she had rescued a pigeon from an attacking crow. Trailside is a wildlife rehabilitation facility operated by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, and she wanted us to try to nurse the pigeon back to health.

I’ve got nothing against pigeons, but there are only so many hours in the day. At Trailside we all do our best for everything that comes in, but what makes the long days bearable is releasing a long-eared owl or a pied-billed grebe. That’s when our work has some conservation significance.

But in the year and a half I spent at Trailside, I discovered that many people share my caller’s point of view both in their desire to have nature happen someplace else and in their tendency to look upon nature as a matter of individuals. It’s a view that makes the suffering pigeon one sees more important than a dozen far-away California condors. It is quite different from the way those of us in conservation think, and it can create—or at least worsen—conflicts over subjects as diverse as ecological restoration and deer control.

Trailside Museum has been around since the 1930s, but it is only in the past decade that its mission has been explicitly defined as caring for injured or orphaned native wildlife. We take in more than 3,000 animals in a typical year. Our goal is to get them healthy enough for re-release into the wild.

The work is highly seasonal. Winter is pretty quiet, but in late March the baby season begins. Soon the person staffing the front desk may find herself juggling two phone calls while four people—each with a box or a pet carrier in hand—stand in the lobby waiting to turn in their animals. My understanding of what people know and how they feel about wild animals comes from talking with thousands of callers and hundreds of visitors.

Large numbers of people evidently pay no attention to animals. If they happen to notice one, they will assume they are seeing something extraordinary. And in many cases, they feel called upon to do something about it—or to demand that someone else does something. So residents of Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood call to ask us to come get the opossum they have discovered in the alley behind their house. I first explain that we cannot come and pick up animals under any circumstances, and then I ask if the animal appears healthy.

—Yes, it looks healthy.

—Is it bothering you? Is it turning your garage into a nest?

—No. We didn’t even know it was around until today.

—So why not leave it alone?

This makes sense to many callers. Those who reject it usually fit into one-or more-of three broadly defined categories.

1. It can’t live here. It should be in the Forest Preserves. I explain that we have lots of opossums in the forest preserves, but this is a city opossum. It knows how to find food in an alley, but it has no idea at all about living in a forest. Capturing it and releasing it in a preserve is like getting rid of your dog by driving way out in the country and pushing it out the back door of the car.

Some people want to give us baby cottontails and fledgling birds to save them from the neighborhood cats and crows. Many see the forest preserves as places of safety. I tell them we have great horned owls and red-tailed hawks along with coyotes and two kinds of foxes. Rabbits, and virtually every other kind of wild creature, are in mortal danger every moment of their lives.

2. It can’t live here. I don’t like it. Nobody wants to be awakened by the sound of baby raccoons playing in the attic, but a noticeable fraction of the population regards anything that moves as a potential pest. Some residents of up-scale neighborhoods seem to think that the presence of opossums might lower their real estate values.

3. The third response is the most interesting: What should I feed it? Pest is at one pole in our attitudes toward animals. At the other pole is Pet.

Pets are animals we relate to as individuals. We give them names and hold long conversations with them. When we take family portraits we include them. We think of them as furry children, and, like children, they are dependent upon us. They can’t live without us, and we know it. Our love for them makes us take very seriously our duty to protect and nurture them.

When we make pets of everything, we extend that sense of duty—and that personal affection—to wild animals. I have seen adults weeping over the death of a wild bird they first saw less than an hour before its demise. Putting the pet label on wild animals makes them lovable. And it makes them—in our minds—helpless. We think we need to step in because this poor little animal cannot survive without our help. A caller who wanted to remove a fledgling from her yard to save it from cats accused me of "copping out" when I told her to leave the bird alone. Another caller discovered a goose sitting on eggs at the edge of a mall parking lot.

— What shall I feed it? he asked.

— Is this a healthy bird?

— It looks healthy.

— Don’t feed it. It will feed itself.

— They can do that?

Well, yes, they can. And, yes, a classification of animals with only two categories in it is far too simple to describe reality. We certainly need to add to pet and pest a new class of creatures called wild animals. Wild animals need respect more than they need nurturing. They live on their own. They may depend on us for food, as urban raccoons do. They may depend on us for nest sites as chimney swifts and nighthawks do. But they live their lives and die their deaths separate from us. We provide for them as the bison provided for the cowbird — accidentally and with no awareness of what we are doing. They may live on what they can collect from open dumpsters, but they are independent nonetheless.

Cook County — like the rest of Chicago Wilderness — has two wildlife communities. One consists of a portion of the native fauna and a few exotics who live among people in city and suburban neighborhoods. The other includes the whole surviving native fauna and it lives in suitable habitat on wild lands.

In a landscape as varied as ours, these two communities merge and blend in complicated ways. The exotics — pigeons, starlings, house mice, etc. — are more or less confined to developed areas. And some native species thrive in all sorts of situations. Killdeer can scrape a nest on bare ground inside a large preserve or they can nest on gravel at a construction site. Robins are everywhere. Many larger animals wander freely between natural areas and urban alleys. If your back yard adjoins a forest preserve, you are more likely to have deer in your garden or great horned owls in your trees, but such things are not unheard of even in the middle of Chicago. In my time at Trailside, Chicago animal control brought us two grey foxes trapped on the city’s South Side and a red fox from the Northwest Side. Coyotes have been found near Lincoln Park’s Bird Sanctuary and even on the steps of the Art Institute.

But most of our native wildlife need wild lands. Migrating scarlet tanagers may appear in your yard, but they are unlikely to nest outside a forest. And least bitterns will die out in the absence of marshes.

Conservationists take it as axiomatic that the most important group of animals in Chicago Wilderness are species that depend on wild lands for their survival. And among that group, the rarest and most closely tied to a disappearing habitat are objects of the most concern.

We intervene in nature to protect species, and we protect species by protecting populations. Our principal tool for protecting populations and species is managing wild lands to provide suitable habitat. This is easy to say, but doing it involves a continuing — and sometimes painful — learning process. Difficult as it is to achieve the goal of providing habitat for all our remaining wildlife species, it seems to us that this is the appropriate strategy. Saving the life of an individual animal may make us feel good, but in nearly all cases, it has nothing to do with conservation. Saving species one animal at a time is a desperation strategy for situations like that of the California condor. And even that strategy cannot succeed without suitable habitat where captive animals can be released.

So "save the habitat" is the most important message that conservationists have for the rest of the world. It is a complex, multi-layered message. It means creating and properly managing the county, local, state, and federal preserves and parks in Chicago Wilderness. It also means keeping air and water clean and, on the largest scale, avoiding climatic change so drastic that it wipes out the ecosystems our preserves are supposed to protect.

As I understand it, this is the core message of Chicago Wilderness and we need to spread it by every means available. We need to tell it to adults and, especially, to children. Kids need to understand how nature works, even the parts of it that Disney leaves out of its movies.

We also need to think about how we should relate to wild animals and how that relationship differs from our relationship to pets. Suppose you go to someone’s house and meet his dog or cat for the first time. If you are anything like me, you will probably try to make friends. You don’t want to force yourself on the animal, and you want to be cautious, but you send out whatever signals you can to encourage the animal to approach you. A successful meeting ends with you scratching the dog behind the ears or petting the cat as it curls up in your lap.

Many people try to relate in much that way to animals in zoos. They call; they wave their arms; some of them throw food, all in an effort to create some kind of relationship between themselves and the animal. This is not what you want to teach your kids.

Children need to be taught the fundamental lesson that the best way to approach wild animals is not to approach. Leave them alone. You aren’t Dr. Doolittle. The animal has its own life to deal with, and it may not welcome your intrusion into it. The animal you least want to approach is one that allows you to approach. Healthy animals generally like to keep their distance. Sick animals will let you near, but you don’t want to get near them.

If you want a literary figure to imitate, forget Dr. Doolittle, the man who talked to animals. Try to be the invisible man. Millions are fascinated by wildlife documentaries that give us close-ups of the complex behaviors of wild animals. The fact is that if you are patient and willing to tolerate a little frustration, you can see that sort of thing yourself. It may gratify your sense of yourself as a compassionate individual to pluck a robin fledgling from your backyard, stick it in a box, and watch its excited gaping as you stick a wad of dog food into its mouth. But what is really exciting is to find a place where you can see a free fledgling and watch its parents feed it. This also happens to be the best thing for the animal. In spite of the very real dangers created by cats and crows, a bird raised by its parents gains wisdom that it could not learn living in even the largest and most humane cage.

This winter, watch the squirrels in your neighborhood. As mating season approaches, they will be chasing each other up and down trees, leaping from tree to tree, displaying a gloriously irrational exuberance that is an ideal counter to the gloom of winter. What you are seeing is exactly what you would see if you were in the Smokies 10 miles from the nearest road. The wilderness is indeed just outside your window.

If you are willing to let nature take its course in front of you, you open yourself to the possibility of joy. We get many phone calls at Trailside from people overwhelmed with anxiety because they discovered a robin’s nest on their front porch. We tell them to try to avoid disturbing the birds, and otherwise, just enjoy their presence. Often, their response is "I can’t do that. I’m too worried." But every relationship opens us to the possibility of pain. Indeed, to the inevitability of pain. The secret is to seize the joy while you can. The pain will come. Anticipating it doesn’t help.

So watch them. Take joy from them. Don’t intervene to protect prey from predator. Hawks have to eat too. There will be times — especially in a world overrun with automobiles — when you encounter an obviously injured animal, an animal in pain. You can’t be indifferent to it, and you certainly don’t want your children to be indifferent to it. For those times, places like Trailside are there to ease the animal’s suffering and your own pain. For the rest, when you really pay attention to the animals around you, when you use your powers of observation to see the drama of their lives, a new richness of life opens up to you.

Jerry Sullivan is a naturalist with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.

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