So I was really very interested in things like that and sort of began to think of myself as a writer when I got to college and I started writing for the college newspaper and things like that.

That's a really good question.

I mean, I have to say what comes to mind immediately are ocean waves.

So I grew up in Vancouver and right on the Pacific Ocean.

I mean, it's a beautiful place.

The water, you know, it's the sound of the ocean and it's the feeling of the undertow dragging on my legs and pulling me in or trying to pull me in, which is a sense memory that I always come back to.

So what is it that has made them so adaptable to a city, like a big city like Toronto?

Yeah.

It's an amazing story.

And I think that if you...

I think for people who live not only in Toronto, but a lot of cities across Canada that have... been that have become raccoon home ranges you forget how surprising and unlikely it is that an animal that is that big because they they weigh up to 30 pounds these are big creatures with big claws big teeth They're not mice.

They're not rats.

They're not inconspicuous.

And now it's like a nightly occurrence, right?

That's true.

Got them there.

We have TV.

You know what's crazy is, so one of the animals in this book that, so every chapter in this book is a different city and a different animal.

Did you do Vancouver? Yeah, so I went, I didn't do Vancouver.

Son of a bitch.

I'm so sorry.

Hey, there's no rules here.

So I was really very interested in things like that and sort of began to think of myself as a writer when I got to college and I started writing for the college newspaper and things like that.

That's a really good question.

I mean, I have to say what comes to mind immediately are ocean waves.

So I grew up in Vancouver and right on the Pacific Ocean.

I mean, it's a beautiful place.

The water, you know, it's the sound of the ocean and it's the feeling of the undertow dragging on my legs and pulling me in or trying to pull me in, which is a sense memory that I always come back to.

So I was really very interested in things like that and sort of began to think of myself as a writer when I got to college and I started writing for the college newspaper and things like that.

That's a really good question.

I mean, I have to say what comes to mind immediately are ocean waves.

So I grew up in Vancouver and right on the Pacific Ocean.

I mean, it's a beautiful place.

The water, you know, it's the sound of the ocean and it's the feeling of the undertow dragging on my legs and pulling me in or trying to pull me in, which is a sense memory that I always come back to.

Can you tell me a little bit about the cognitive flexibility of raccoons?

Yeah, so that was...

I mean, it's a really interesting situation where you've got raccoons, which are... members of the order of the carnivora, which basically means they're related to wolves, they're related to weasels, they're related to all species of cats.

I mean, they're related to whales.

They're a lot more related to all those animals than they are to their more distant relatives, humans and apes.

And so for that reason, you'd think that they would think a lot like those other creatures that they're more closely related to.

But actually...

Yes.

Do they come into urban environments in reaction or have they simply just said, hey, there's no place else to go?

You know what? It's a little bit of both, right? So the fascinating thing here is that for really hundreds of years, Scientists thought that cities were what they called biological deserts.

So what does that mean? That basically means places where nothing can live, right? Like there's no animals.

These are environments that are essentially too dangerous with too few resources for animals to survive.

But over the past couple decades...

What other scientists and really these are urban ecologists have found is that cities are on balance more biodiverse than the areas that surround them.

And Bob, to your point, like part of it is that humans are animals too, right? So We found our cities, we found our communities in places in the environment that are the most, you know, that are the richest in resources, right? So we want to put our cities where there are the most resources.

This is not naturally your subject matter, but how did you come to it?

Do they come into urban environments in reaction or have they simply just said, hey, there's no place else to go?

You know what, it's a little bit of both, right? So the fascinating thing here is that for really hundreds of years, Scientists thought that cities were what they called biological deserts.

So what does that mean? That basically means places where nothing can live, right? Like there's no animals.

These are environments that are essentially too dangerous with too few resources for animals to survive.

But over the past couple decades...

What other scientists and really these are urban ecologists have found is that cities are on balance more biodiverse than the areas that surround them.

And Bob, to your point, like part of it is that humans are animals too, right? So We found our cities, we found our communities in places in the environment that are the richest in resources, right? So we want to put our cities where there are the most resources.

This is not naturally your subject matter, but how did you come to it?

Can you tell me about the Raven and their adaptation to the city?

yeah absolutely so ravens are i totally agree with the caller they are such incredible creatures and if listeners haven't uh heard raven calls they are so varied and complex they do these clicks and sort of these pops and they're great mimics as well so i'd encourage people to to seek those sounds out i mean the raven is fascinating because um you know there's evidence and this is in the book uh of cohabitation between ravens and humans going back 27,000 years back to this archaeological site called the Pavlovian caves, which is which was found in northeastern Europe.

And this was a time in Europe where, you know, it was glaciers.

It was an ice age.

You had humans hunting woolly mammoths, dragging these carcasses back to in front of this cave site.

And that attracted all kinds of large scavengers like cave lions, hyenas, things that were threats to humans.

And so the humans of the Pavlovian caves were forced to kind of fend off these large scavengers.

These are not animals that necessarily go well in an urban space, you know, Your thoughts around the conflict, the animals, you know, how some animals can adapt really well and slip into urban life and others are, you know, people really feel the danger.

How is that change affecting Canadian cities specifically?

So this is a phenomenon that biologists at the University of Toronto Mississauga have been looking at.

And they've done some models based on climate change scenarios.

And what they're predicting is that over the next few decades, there may be literally thousands of animals moving into cities and towns across North America.

And the difference here is that we're used to seeing pigeons and raccoons, of course, and crows and sparrows and rats and all these animals that are certainly not threatened in the least.

But the animals that we're going to be seeing in the future based on these scenarios are increasingly threatened animals.

They're animals that are sometimes on the verge of extinction.

I wonder if you can give us some examples of the type of species that we'll be seeing.

What did that episode tell you about the limits of how humans and animals can cohabitate?

It, it is a tough question, and I wanted to open the book with that because i- it seems like this very intractable situation.

If you have a leopard in a courthouse that is attacking humans, you know, it seems like there's no solution there except extirpation, just destroying those animals and, and trying to eradicate them from urban environments.

But in the research for this book, what I learned is that those efforts are essentially always going to fail.

You know, you look at rats in New York City.

There have been multiple campaigns, um, using all kinds of rodenticides and sterilization techniques and literally kind of like chemical bombs that have been thrown into burrows, and none of it has worked.

And so if you want to find a pathway through to balance with animals, just attacking those animals is never really gonna be the solution.

So w- I'm wondering, what do we need to change about the way we think about this issue?

Synanthropes, derived from the Greek for together with man, are wild creatures that have found a way to survive and thrive in human-modified environments.

These are not our pets or our herds of domesticated animals, but something like our oldest frenemies, beings from which we have long sought and failed to separate ourselves, that now reside within our communities and that have become an ineluctable part of the tapestry of our lives.

They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering in our walls at night, and why we take such pains to affix lids tightly to our garbage cans.

But they are so much more than that.

Soil churners, waste disposers, epidemic vectors, ecosystem partners, spiritual lodestars, and sometimes sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces.

These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet's future, and a key influence on the continuing evolution of our species.

This podcast is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.

It's the myopia of the city dweller.

Synanthropes, derived from the Greek for together with man, are wild creatures that have found a way to survive and thrive in human-modified environments.

These are not our pets or our herds of domesticated animals, but something like our oldest frenemies, beings from which we have long sought and failed to separate ourselves, that now reside within our communities and that have become an ineluctable part of the tapestry of our lives.

They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering in our walls at night, and why we take such pains to affix lids tightly to our garbage cans.

But they are so much more than that.

Soil churners, waste disposers, epidemic vectors, ecosystem partners, spiritual lodestars, and sometimes sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces.

These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet's future, and a key influence on the continuing evolution of our species.

This podcast is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.

It's the myopia of the city dweller.

[chuckles] That's just not something-

Yes.

Yeah.

It wa- it was totally surprising.

I mean, and really this is the result of the research of one pretty incredible marine ecologist named Aliza Heary, who lives in Seattle, and it's outlined in the book.

And her story to getting to understanding this strange new adaptation in giant Pacific octopus is fascinating, and I don't wanna spoil it for readers, but, you know, it's got romance and heartbreak and financial ruin and nuclear waste and all kinds of things.

But the long story short is in Seattle, Aliza Heary discovered that the population density of giant Pacific octopus, and this is a octopus species that is indigenous to the Pacific Coast, basically from Alaska down to Baja, California.

So if you want to talk a little bit just about your books, The Invisible Siege, but also City of Omens, which is also shining a light on those vulnerable, often invisible members of society.

You had to lay the groundwork, I think.

Yeah, but I've lived in a city, like in a big city, in a bunch of big cities that don't have that level of kind of obvious natural spaces in them for pretty much my entire adult life.

So I think, like a lot of people, I think we're all drawn to want to be in nature.

A lot of people feel this kind of nostalgia around lost natural spaces, and we hear a lot about climate change and habitat destruction and things like that.

So yeah, I think I went into this book with this idea of, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reconnect the feelings of my youth by finding animals.

But I have to say that's not how it went down because what I learned from some really interesting ecologists, especially younger ecologists who are profiled in the book, a lot of people were like, "Look, you can't think about the world with nostalgia.

You can't think about the natural world with nostalgia 'cause that's kind of a dead end." If you're an ecologist, if you really wanna understand what's happening, you have to look at the world as it is now.

Right, like which ones do we kinda be like, "You can stay"?

[chuckles] That's just not something-

Yes.

Yeah.

It wa- it was totally surprising.

I mean, and really this is the result of the research of one pretty incredible marine ecologist named Aliza Heary, who lives in Seattle, and it's outlined in the book.

And her story to getting to understanding this strange new adaptation in giant Pacific octopus is fascinating, and I don't wanna spoil it for readers, but, you know, it's got romance and heartbreak and financial ruin and nuclear waste and all kinds of things.

But the long story short is, in Seattle, Aliza Heary discovered that the population density of giant Pacific octopus, and this is a octopus species that is indigenous to the Pacific Coast, basically from Alaska down to Baja California.

So if you want to talk a little bit just about your books, The Invisible Siege, but also City of Omens, which is also shining a light on those vulnerable, often invisible members of society.

Yeah

... to just sort of get you excited.

Um, and so synanthrope is, uh, you know, a creature that has found a way to live in human modified environments.

And you know, from there, I just sort of followed that thread, and it opened up an entire world that honestly has just been kind of hidden from me, and I think from a lot of people, which is the vast biodiversity and the ecological complexity of cities and towns and other urban environments.

And you know, that was a really, really exciting moment for me.

Uh, and I, and I hope that that excitement is, you know, that readers get that as well reading this book, where, you know, you don't have to leave- Your city or your town to connect with nature.

Yep.

And, you know, that, that is an invitation, I think, for us to think about our cities in different ways and, and to see them in different ways, to appreciate the connections that we can make with the natural world.

So how did you get involved in, first, epidemiology, and how does that dovetail into your work in writing books like Our Wild Familiars?

Well, it is a long and circuitous journey, probably best told over a stiff drink.

But I actually started out as a freelance journalist, and I worked in, uh, publishing.

And then I, through a series of events, got a job as a communications support person in an NGO that was working on issues around the war on drugs and drug trafficking internationally.

And, you know, as part of that work, I just became exposed to this whole, what felt like to me like a shadow history of the world that could be told through the movement of illegal drugs.

And so I was really drawn to what felt like to me really interesting and largely misunderstood narratives.

So I did lots of research.

And so if you're defining it as such, how do we start treating them or an alleyway or a city park [notification sound] as these vital ecosystems? How do we maintain that mentality but also lean into our stewardship or responsibility as far as what is happening in our natural world?

It's just not something-

Yes.

Yeah.

It wa- it was totally surprising.

I mean, and really this is the result of the research of one pretty incredible marine ecologist named Aliza Hirie, who lives in Seattle, and it's outlined in the book.

And her story to getting to understanding this strange new adaptation in giant Pacific octopus is fascinating, and I don't wanna spoil it for readers, but, you know, it's got romance and heartbreak and financial ruin and nuclear waste and all kinds of things.

But the long story short is in Seattle, Aliza Hirie discovered that the population density of giant Pacific octopus, and this is a octopus species that is indigenous to the Pacific Coast, basically from Alaska down to Baja, California.

So if you want to talk a little bit just about your books, The Invisible Siege, but also City of Omens, which is also shining a light on those vulnerable, often invisible members of society.

[chuckles] That's just not something.

Yes.

Yeah.

It wa- it was totally surprising.

I mean, and really this is the result of the research of one pretty incredible marine ecologist named Aliza Heary, who lives in Seattle, and it's outlined in the book.

And her story to getting to understanding this strange new adaptation in giant Pacific octopus is fascinating, and I don't wanna spoil it for readers, but you know, it's got romance and heartbreak and financial ruin and nuclear waste and all kinds of things.

But the long story short is in Seattle, Aliza Heary discovered that the population density of giant Pacific octopus, and this is a octopus species that is indigenous to the Pacific Coast, basically from Alaska down to Baja, California.

So if you wanna talk a little bit just about your books, The Invisible Siege, but also City of Omens, which is also shining a light on those vulnerable, often invisible members of society.

Synanthropes, derived from the Greek for together with man, are wild creatures that have found a way to survive and thrive in human modified environments.

These are not our pets or our herds of domesticated animals, but something like our oldest frenemies, beings from which we have long sought and failed to separate ourselves, that now reside within our communities and that have become an ineluctable part of the tapestry of our lives.

They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering in our walls at night, and why we take such pains to affix lids tightly to our garbage cans.

But they are so much more than that.

Soil churners, waste disposers, epidemic vectors, ecosystem partners, spiritual lodestars, and sometimes sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces.

These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet's future, and a key influence on the continuing evolution of our species.

This podcast is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.

It's the myopia of the city dweller.

This podcast is supported by the Jan Muszalski Foundation.

It's the myopia of the city dweller.

There are no animals here, at least none other than lapdogs broken by training or genetics, and therefore no danger or spontaneity.

All we see anywhere is us, staring back at ourselves with vacant looks.

Nature, if it still exists, is something somewhere else.

But that's not the real story.

Look a little harder and a little longer, and there they are all around us, the synanthropes.

that were

Synanthropes, derived from the Greek for together with man, are wild creatures that have found a way to survive and thrive in human-modified environments.

These are not our pets or our herds of domesticated animals, but something like our oldest frenemies, beings from which we have long sought and failed to separate ourselves, that now reside within our communities and that have become an ineluctable part of the tapestry of our lives.

They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering in our walls at night, and why we take such pains to affix lids tightly to our garbage cans.

But they are so much more than that.

Soil churners, waste disposers, epidemic vectors, ecosystem partners, spiritual lodestars, and sometimes sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces.

These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet's future, and a key influence on the continuing evolution of our species.

This podcast is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.

It's the myopia of the city dweller.

Synanthropes, derived from the Greek for together with man, are wild creatures that have found a way to survive and thrive in human modified environments.

These are not our pets or our herds of domesticated animals, but something like our oldest frenemies, beings from which we have long sought and failed to separate ourselves, that now reside within our communities and that have become an ineluctable part of the tapestry of our lives.

They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering in our walls at night, and why we take such pains to affix lids tightly to our garbage cans.

But they are so much more than that.

Soil churners, waste disposers, epidemic vectors, ecosystem partners, spiritual lodestars, and sometimes sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces.

These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet's future, and a key influence on the continuing evolution of our species.

This podcast is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation.

It's the myopia of the city dweller.

[chuckles] That's just not something-

Yes.

Yeah.

It wa- it was totally surprising.

I mean, and really this is the result of the research of one pretty incredible marine ecologist named Aliza Hirie, who lives in Seattle, and it's outlined in the book.

And her story to getting to understanding this strange new adaptation in giant Pacific octopus is fascinating, and I don't wanna spoil it for readers, but you know, it's got romance and heartbreak and financial ruin and nuclear waste and all kinds of things.

But the long story short is in Seattle, Aliza Hirie discovered that the population density of giant Pacific octopus, and this is a octopus species that is indigenous to the Pacific Coast, basically from Alaska down to Baja, California.

So if you want to talk a little bit just about your books, The Invisible Siege, but also City of Omens, which is also shining a light on those vulnerable, often invisible members of society.