The Alleys Have Eyes: Books about Urban Wildlife Hiding All Around Us

By NYPL Staff
April 16, 2018
Parkchester Library
Taco the opossum

Meet Taco. He's an opossum, the only type of marsupial native to North America. While marsupials are nocturnal, and prefer to stick close to their burrows, Taco decided to come say hello to us at Parkchester Library last Thursday, before he was safely removed from the premises (and before we snapped a photo or two).

Opossums seem more like woodland creatures at first glance. But opossum sightings are a common-enough occurrence in the five boroughs to warrant a short entry on the NYC Parks official website about urban wildlife. Urban wildlife is the designation given to animals who are native to forests, but who live amongst the skyscrapers, brownstones, and parks of New York City, home to over 600 different types of wildlife species!

In honor of the four-legged, furry, scaly, and feathered friends that share our concrete jungle—and our friend, Taco—here are some books about urban wildlife that readers of all ages might enjoy (synopses from each book's respective publisher):

Children’s Books

Epposumondas book cover

Epposumondas by Coleen Salley

Mama and Auntie simply adore their pet possum and care for him with all the affection in the world. But they have to be careful what they say around him because, in his efforts to please them, Epossumondas takes everything way too literally.

 

 

 

 

 

Urban Animals book cover

Urban Animals by Isabel Hill

Come to the city and you will find, animals, animals of every kind! Discover donkeys on grilles, boars guarding stoops, and elephants supporting flagpoles. The fantastic architectural animals and playful illustrations in this rhyming book will introduce children to the fanciful world of our built environment. Young children will enjoy the game of identifying animals, while older children and adults will pause over the quirky architectural details. This book includes a glossary of terms with simple, clear definitions that will empower children with new words and phrases about architecture.

 

Wild Animal Neighbors book cover

Wild Animal Neighbors by Ann Downer

What kinds of animals are making cities their new home? How can they survive in our ecosystem of concrete, steel, and glass? And what does their presence mean for their future and ours? Join scientists, activists, and the folks next door on a journey around the globe to track down our newest wild animal neighbors. Discover what is bringing these creatures to our backyards—and how we can create spaces for people and animals to live side by side.

 

 

 

Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon book cover

Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon by Kate DiCamillo

Deckawoo Drive's intrepid Animal Control Officer meets her match—or does she? A funny, heartfelt, and fast-paced romp from the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Francine Poulet is the greatest Animal Control Officer in Gizzford County. She hails from a long line of Animal Control Officers, and has battled snakes, outwitted squirrels, and stared down a bear. "The genuine article," Francine's dad always called her. She is never scared—until, that is, she's faced with a screaming raccoon that may or may not be a ghost. Maybe Francine isn't cut out to be an Animal Control Officer after all!
But the raccoon is still on the loose, and the folks on Deckawoo Drive need Francine back. Can she face her fears, round up the raccoon, and return to the ranks of Animal Control? Join a cast of familiar characters—Frank, Stella, Mrs. Watson, and Mercy the porcine wonder—for some riotous raccoon wrangling on Deckawoo Drive.

 

 

 

YA and Adult Books

The Urban Bestiary book cover

The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Haupt, Lyanda

From the bestselling author of Crow Planet comes this journey into the secret lives of the wild animals at our back door. In Acclaimed nature writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt journeys into the heart of the everyday wild, where coyotes, raccoons, chickens, hawks, and humans live in closer proximity than ever before. Haupt's observations bring compelling new questions to light: Whose 'home' is this? Where does the wild end and the city begin? And what difference does it make to us as humans living our everyday lives?
In this wholly original blend of science, story, myth, and memoir, Haupt draws us into the secret world of the wild creatures that dwell among us in our urban neighborhoods, whether we are aware of them or not. With beautiful illustrations and practical sidebars on everything from animal tracking to opossum removal, The Urban Bestiary is a lyrical book that awakens wonder, delight, and respect for the urban wild, and our place within it.

 

 

 

Central Park in the Dark book cover

Central Park in the Dark by Marie Winn

Like her bestseller, Red-Tails in Love, Marie Winn’s Central Park in the Dark explores a once-hidden world in a series of interlocking narratives about the extraordinary denizens, human and animal, of an iconic American park. Her beguiling account of a city’s lakes and woodlands at night takes the reader through the cycle of seasons as experienced by nocturnal active beasts (raccoons, bats, black skimmers, and sleeping robins among them), insects (moths, wasps, fireflies, crickets), and slugs (in all their unexpected poetical randiness). Winn does not neglect her famous protagonists, Pale Male and Lola, the hawks that captivated readers years ago. But, this time, she adds an exciting narrative about thirty-eight screech owls in Central Park and their lives, loves, and tragedies there.

An eye-popping amount of natural history is packed into this entertaining book—on bird physiology, spiders, sunsets, dragonflies, meteor showers, and the nature of darkness. But the human drama is never forgotten, for Central Park at night boasts a floating population not only of lovers, dog walkers, and policemen, but of regulars young and old who, like Winn, hope to unlock the secrets of urban nature. These “night people” are drawn into a peculiar kind of intimacy. While exploring the astonishing variety of wildlife in the city park, they end up revealing more of their inner lives than they expected.

 

Unseen City book cover

Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness by Nathanael Johnson

It all started with Nathanael Johnson’s decision to teach his daughter the name of every tree they passed on their walk to daycare in San Francisco. This project turned into a quest to discover the secrets of the neighborhood's flora and fauna, and yielded more than names and trivia: Johnson developed a relationship with his nonhuman neighbors.

Johnson argues that learning to see the world afresh, like a child, shifts the way we think about nature: Instead of something distant and abstract, nature becomes real—all at once comical, annoying, and beautiful. This shift can add tremendous value to our lives, and it might just be the first step in saving the world.

No matter where we live—city, country, oceanside, or mountains—there are wonders that we walk past every day. Unseen City widens the pinhole of our perspective by allowing us to view the world from the high-altitude eyes of a turkey vulture and the distinctly low-altitude eyes of a snail. The narrative allows us to eavesdrop on the comically frenetic life of a squirrel and peer deep into the past with a ginkgo biloba tree. Each of these organisms has something unique to tell us about our neighborhoods and, chapter by chapter, Unseen City takes us on a journey that is part nature lesson and part love letter to the world’s urban jungles. With the right perspective, a walk to the subway can be every bit as entrancing as a walk through a national park.

 

Field Notes from a Hidden City book cover

Field Notes From a Hidden City : an urban nature diary by Esther Woolfson

Field Notes From a Hidden City is set against the background of the austere, grey, and beautiful northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen. Esther Woolfson examines the elements—geographic, atmospheric and environmental—which bring diverse life forms to live in close proximity in cities. Using the circumstances of her own life, house, garden, and city, she writes of the animals who live among us: the birds—gulls, starlings, pigeons, sparrows and others—the rats and squirrels, the cetaceans, the spiders, and the insects.

In beautiful, absorbing prose, Woolfson describes the seasons, the streets, and the quiet places of her city over the course of a year, which begins with the exceptional cold and snow of 2010. Influenced by her own long experience of corvids, Woolfson considers prevailing attitudes towards the natural world, urban and non-urban wildlife, the values we place on the lives of individual species, and the ways in which man and creature live together in cities.

 

 

Darwin Comes to Town book cover

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution by Menno Schilthuizen

Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our man-made environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be.

With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”), and must be able to live either in the semi-desert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-ranging dogs and cats). In addition, traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; and food sources are mainly human-derived. Yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving.

Darwin Comes to Town draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.