With a little knowledge, we can learn to coexist with the coyote in the backyard or the turkey walking down the street
This is a good article about the importance (and fun) of human coexistence with wildlife in an urban environment. Over the years, I've learned that when you create an environment at home that is designed around the local ecosystem and includes native plantings, or you have near a forested area, or one of your pleasures in life is feeding the birds and watching them, or all of these plus more, you take what you get.
In our yard, the squirrels feloniously snack in the bird feeders, depriving the birds of what the squirrels eat. But, as they do their squirrel thing, they toss seed onto the ground, where the birds get what they want anyway. The chipmunks scurry around eating what's on the ground, and the Cooper's hawks and Red-tailed hawks have a GPS setting on our house, and they swoop down and snack on the chipmunks. The blue jays bully the chickadees, the red-bellied woodpeckers bully the downy woodpeckers, the red-winged blackbirds like to pretend to threaten the humans in the yard, the deer enter the yard and eat seed (surprised me), the skunks come around and do their skunk thing, mostly at night, as do the raccoons and the foxes and the possum. The coyotes are out there, waiting and sometimes singing, probably grabbing something to eat in our yard at night. Some of that is unpleasant to watch, but then I think of the baby hawks or coyote pups or baby skunks needing food, and I'm ok with all that.
And, by the way, we live 9 miles from the "Loop" in downtown Chicago, so we are in the heart of a major global urban area. All those creatures I mentioned above also live 9 miles from that same downtown. So humans and wildlife can coexist, as we do here.
Here's a short excerpt from the Sierra Club Magazine story:
As we humans alter our ecosystems, we also create opportunities for animals. Organisms that benefit from human proximity are called synanthropes. It is easy to picture animals thriving off our trash: urban rats and pigeons, or seagulls by the boardwalk. But those animals represent just one part of the anthropogenic ecosystem. The trash-eating synanthropes often form the base of a food web that feeds less obvious neighbors, such as red-tailed hawks flying over Manhattan. Other synanthropes like suburban turkeys thrive where human activity eliminates the predators that may cause their rural counterparts to struggle.
People are happy to see some of these animals—they are a sign that perhaps we haven't completely failed our wild neighbors. Many people move to suburbs or beyond to feel closer to the land, to get easy selfies with spring wildflowers, to grow or hunt their own food, or just to feel the quiet thrill of finding a fawn curled up in the forest. But when deer munch on our gardens, beavers dam up streams and flood our yards, turkeys attack, and coyotes dine on unleashed chihuahuas, suddenly nature is not so charming. In our human-centered daily lives, it's often easy to forget that nature is all around us, no matter where we live.
Forgetting synanthropes are out there has consequences—for them and for us. It means we react to their sudden appearance with surprise, and sometimes with panic. We light up group texts and Nextdoor because we are shocked to find that the nature we live with is not actually the nature we want, and it's not behaving in the way we expect. We set out birdseed to attract orioles and finches but get angry when squirrels show up instead. We put out poison to rid ourselves of rats and find to our dismay that hawks are poisoned in turn.
