Feral Cities by Tristan Donovan

fox, he was perhaps worried by people or a dog. He was running through the street and goes down into an underground station where there was a train standing with the door open. He goes in and the door shuts and the train starts moving while he is inside.”
    After passengers reported the fare jumper, the train stopped at Hermannplatz, a busy commuter station where two of Berlin’s underground lines meet. “At first they wanted to shoot the fox but then they decided no, there are people, press, and electronics inside the train to worry about, so they rang me up,” says Derk.
    â€œSo they bring me up to the station by police car with the sirens going. I went down and it was full of people. People on the gate, policemen, people from the fire service, more than forty people, and they are all in a half-circle around the fox in the train, which was crying.”
    Derk told everyone to get out and to clear the stairs leading out of the station. “After a minute or two, I went into the train to check on the fox and it runs through my legs, up the stairs and out.”
    While much of Derk’s time is spent dealing with the times people and animals clash, he is happy that wildlife is part of life in Berlin. “It’s brilliant to see that we are not alone in cities and most people are happy about that,” he says.
    The challenge is getting those who object to the wildlife to stop feeling threatened. “It is not necessary to change the way we live. It’s a change in how we think, to have a coolness, a tolerance. If people are angry about some animal, maybe they do not know about it. The fox, for example, it is not dangerous for the kids and it is normal to have a fox in the city.
    â€œFor example, some people came to me and said children are playing in the playground, and every day a young fox comes there. They wanted me to promise that the fox is no danger. So I said, ‘I will make a deal with you. If the danger increases we will shoot it.’ Then, they say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t want you to shoot it. Why don’t you just take it away?’ I said, ‘No, we can’t just take it away. Where would it go?’
    â€œThe foxes have changed their lives. They have no dens in the soil. They have their dens in the houses or basements. They prefer to look at the garbage and not at the forest.”

ROMANCING COYOTES
Looking for Coyotes in Chicago and Los Angeles
    Shane McKenzie said I wouldn’t be able to miss him, and he wasn’t wrong.
    From the moment I saw the dark blue Ford Ranger heading toward our meeting spot at Chicago’s Cumberland metro station, I knew it was Shane. The huge chrome aerial sticking out of the cab gave it away. It’s enormous, held aloft by a four-foot-tall mast. The antenna juts out horizontally from the top of the mast, extending five feet, its length crisscrossed with short metal rods.
    â€œSo, you saw the giant antenna,” grins Shane as I get into the passenger seat. “It’s called a Yagi. That antenna allows us to pick up the VHF signal that the radio collars on the coyotes are producing.”
    Inside the cab is the bottom end of the mast. It is poking through a circular piece of wood affixed to the underside of the roof. A grubby disc of laminated paper with angles marked out in degrees has been glued onto the wood. Sticking out of the base of the mast is a makeshift metal handle that ends in a skewered golf ball and is used to rotate the antenna from within the pickup. A thick blackelectrical cable runs out of the mast and into a blue 1970s radio receiver covered in dials, switches, and ports. In an age of GPS the kit looks dated but, then again, the Chicago coyote-tracking project predates the smartphone era.
    The man behind the project is Ohio State University ecologist Dr. Stan Gehrt. It started in 2000 back when Stan worked for the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, the research charity founded by the eponymous