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Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
221–230 of 318 posts
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
That reminds me about stories of people trying to record nature untouched by man-made sounds. It has become increasingly difficult to find locations which are purely nature. I wonder how much easier it has become since the number of people generating "work noise" has fallen so much? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/24/machine-...
Maybe in Europe, but in the US there is a ridiculous amount of untouched space a <20 miles from almost every major city with the exception of California and the north east.
It turns out there is no where you can go in the United States that is more than 20 miles from a paved road.
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#223Here in Santiago, Chile, where many neighborhoods are in complete lockdown, a wild Puma was seen roaming the streets[1]. This was their natural habitat before the city was established, and many of them still live in the mountains, which are not far from the busiest streets of Santiago. https://www.france24.com/en/20200324-wild-puma-captured-in-d...
I live south of San Jose up against the mountains and our neighbors will post pictures once in a while of mountain lions drinking out of the swimming pools in their back yards. It’s more common in bad drought years.
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading. Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife. When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By…
Native Americans arrived less than 80,000 years ago. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. They were not the natural predators.
I think the phrase natural predator just means the predator in the environment that keeps some other species in check.
80,000 years may be a blink in an eye in evolutionary terms but it does not take that long for a predator to come into an environment and become entrenched as the natural check on some other species.
I would say https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1111 for example of introduction of species
something like this https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/285705 for how dominance of predator works.
However not sure how well the Native Americans were actually keeping animals in check given the many species they have been shown to have helped bring to extinction.
That said not sure how long it would take from being a natural predator to being a keystone species.
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#225What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist. Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. North America had more large wildlife than Africa. Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. Walruses in the Thames in London. I did a couple video essays on what I learned from a wonderful book The Once and Future World : My video essays: https://yout…
Wildlife encounters by Lewis And Clark
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/994/254987
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#226The other day I saw a video of a spotted Malabar civet walking through urban streets of Kerala, India. It is an endangered species https://twitter.com/DGrieshnak/status/1243077554224787457?s=...
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#227What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist. Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. North America had more large wildlife than Africa. Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. Walruses in the Thames in London. I did a couple video essays on what I learned from a wonderful book The Once and Future World : My video essays: https://yout…
If you put a 20 mile perimeter around every point of North America that had continued human activity, what percentage of North America would be covered? Is it more than we'd expect? At a first glance, it seems like there are still vast reached of North America that remain completely untouched by humans.
Nevertheless, is so sad that humans have effectively pushed animals outside of their habitats. Animals are smart enough to avoid humans, just as a deer is smart enough to avoid a wolf, but at some point the world is only so big.
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#228As an early morning runner in SF, I see coyotes in SF every week or two, including at Twin peaks as mentioned in the article. One morning in Golden Gate Park I warned a few people walkings dogs since there were about 4 coyotes around the corner. From my first hand experience, I'd assume any wooded area with cover in SF has a coyote living there.
Coyotes are pretty adapted to city living. I know in my city (Vancouver) they are not uncommon to see, even in some pretty densely populated areas of town. I once had one walk right in front of me in a residential area one night, it wandered by so casually that I was sure it was a dog until I was about 5 feet from it.
Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#229Re: Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
#230The "earth is healing, we are the virus" narrative is overblown (and ecofascistic), but it's good to remember that humans are not special. We push other life forms out of our spaces, but many of those life forms continue a marginal existence. The end of humanity would not be the end of life and being reminded of that is a useful check on our tendency to put ourselves at the center of "the" world (instead of just the…
Taking comfort in the potential extinction of humanity because at least there would be some non-sapient critters still around strikes me as an odd value system. Couldn't you make the analogous argument that the extinction of all life on Earth would be fine since it would have absolutely no effect on the vast majority of the universe?
The entire milky way galaxy being swallowed by a super massive blackhole would have absolutely no effect on the vast majority of the universe.