I’ll settle for some bob-tracks in the snow, or perhaps a trail camera photo captured by the Nature’s Network program. Partnered with the City of Calgary and shepherded by the non-profit Miistakis Institute, the program aims to understand how wildlife moves through three major city corridors. As part of that work, Jordan-McLachlan has been walking this route for more than seven years. She can name the diseases that cause fuzzy galls on plants and identify birds by their trilling. Bobcat images she collected from the cameras, alongside a 15-year record of bobcat reports submitted to the city by residents, became part of her graduate research to understand the prevalence of urban bobcat sightings. Were sightings increasing? Was bobcat distribution changing over time? 

She found that between 2005 and 2020, bobcat populations spread across the city from west to east. Based on available records, it appears this is an expansion of bobcat range in Alberta, rather than a return to it, says Jordan-McLachlan. In 2020, few cats had found a way across the Deerfoot Trail freeway. But since then, the clever kitties have made it to the other side in numbers and are now found citywide. Though the number of bobcats living in the city is unknown, Calgary parks and green spaces like school fields are bobcat central. They are usually found no more than 200 metres from these environments, though some have ventured as far as a kilometre away to hunt or den. Having bobkittens in backyards may keep them safer from predators like coyotes, Jordan-McLachlan says. “You’ve got a deck to den under? The bobcats say, ‘thank you!’”

“Cities create all these weird little habitats because of so much human alteration,” says Tracy Lee, who oversees Nature’s Network as director of conservation research at the Miistakis Institute. “We water things to death. We plant things that aren’t native.” Sometimes that has unexpected consequences. For example, bobcats have been reported rolling in catnip planted in backyard gardens.

Sometimes, we also introduce animals that weren’t there before, like the black morph of eastern grey squirrels, which were accidentally released into Calgary in the 1930s. Now, the squirrels are rattling on from every tree, announcing themselves as a tasty bobcat snack. Lee would know — in December 2024, she and her son saw two bobcats flush one from a spruce and kill it in her yard. With groomed lawns and mature trees, many Calgary neighbourhoods are excellent habitat for the rabbits, rodents and birds that carnivores hunt. “We’ve created this new kind of biodiversity,” says Lee.

Tiziana Gelmi Candusso is an urban wildlife ecologist based in Toronto. Between 2020 and 2021, she collected videos of wildlife along the city’s urban trails. In one clip, a fox passes into
camera view, hears a sound behind him, then tentatively backtracks to investigate. You can see the “uh-oh” moment when he sees the coyote coming and bolts into the trees like a mark trying to ditch their tail. After it passes, the fox pops back out and continues on its way. “For me, that was so interesting, because in the scientific literature, we think these animals are spatially avoiding each other,” says Gelmi Candusso. But it seems that in cities, depending on resources, they overlap much more. This avoidance is happening on a much finer scale, one that could not simply be seen on a map of their home ranges. “I don’t think we realize what they are doing to coexist.”

Living in the city requires wildlife to be constantly assessing risk and reward. Throw in human food sources, and rewards get more tantalizing. Wildlife are tempted by a smorgasbord of pet food, fast food and food waste. When one well-meaning Torontonian erected a birdfeeder near one of Gelmi Candusso’s video cameras, the nut and seed spillover caused a feeding frenzy. Red foxes, squirrels and raccoons scarfed down the grains side-by-side. It wasn’t always harmonious. At one point, Gelmi Candusso says, a gang of fierce raccoons forced a fox into a submissive position — lying down as if waiting for its next command. “It was unexpected, because, I mean, I would expect the predator to be the one that was on top.” 

“Wildlife will take advantage of the resources presented to them,” says wildlife biologist Sarah Benson-Amram, associate professor at the University of British Columbia and head of its Animal Behaviour and Cognition Lab. In Vancouver, raccoons are attracted to trees that bear fruit. Picking and cleaning up downed fruit is one way to prevent conflict, as is keeping dogs inside at night when raccoons are more active. It’s also important to prevent wildlife from losing their fear of people by not feeding them and teaching them wariness of humans — especially carnivores. This means not actively harming them but making it unpleasant to be around us. For example, the Edmonton Urban Coyote Project website advises directly approaching coyotes “while throwing objects [such as a tennis ball or stone], carrying a protective stick, and shouting or shaking a can containing coins.” Says Benson-Amram, “So much of it comes down to human behaviour and management.” 

In the scope of all interactions between people and wildlife in cities, conflict is rare, says Aime, but it happens. Animals that show problem behaviour could be hazed, relocated or, in worst-case scenarios, killed. However, people can help prevent these outcomes. Anticipating natural wildlife behaviour is one way.

“We’re advocating for as much non-lethal management as possible,” says Benson-Amram, and “by understanding the cognition and behaviour of these animals, they can potentially be managed in a more effective way.” Benson-Amram and her students are exploring whether city life might select for more intelligent animals, and how that relates to the kind of people-trouble they get in. “It’s possible that actually, when you’re smart, you’re the animal that’s going to be doing things like opening a trash can or breaking into an attic or opening up a chicken coop and stealing some of the chickens,” she says. And it may be that for some of those clever animals, humans are stimulating a kind of “cognitive arms race.” A raccoon breaks into a garbage can, so we put a bungee cord on it. They solve that, so we add a brick. It’s an unintended training program, and so far, the raccoons are here for it. The real question is: who is training whom?