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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

This is all well and good in the UK. Bee bricks and bat boxes are great. But the largest predators in the UK are badgers. The real difficulty is how one accommodates bear and cougars. Even large deer can be a problem. Up to 200 Americans are killed by road accidents involving deer every year. Do we continue to close schools and break out the dart guns every time someone sees a bear in a tree? Or do we develop neighborhoods with pathways through which the even non-cuddly animals can pass without conflict. That costs far more than the occasional bee brick.

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there's simply no way to build cities in a way that accomodates bears or cougars, because they need a territory far larger than the area we could possibly provide in a city.

building for cougars or bears means building dense cities that perserve as much wild space outside the city as possible for animal habitats.

i like the idea of adapting buildings to be less hostile to animals that find themselves in the city, but anything that increases sprawl is the worst thing you could possibly do for wildlife.

I appreciate seeing more people understand that density is our way to preservation. Thank you! :)

I think it is starting to be one of those things that most people on this site have come around to realizing. I'm eager to see whether it permeates the rest of society and what actions we start taking in that direction.

I lived in a neighborhood (Vancouver) where bears were regular back yard visitors. Cougars were around but rarely seen. Many California suburbs seem to get alone with local predator populations. I think the key is not to fence things off in a manner than gives them no easy escape route when confronted.

The big issue with California and predators is in what they end up eating in the suburbs: trash and poisoned rats. A lot of businesses in CA have a box in the back full of rat poison. The rat eats that then walks off and dies someplace, the coyote/couger/bear/owl/hawk/vulture finds the carcass, eats the poison, and also dies. There aren't many sources of high quality food in CA suburbs for predators. You don't get large populations of deer, like in suburbs out east that were clearcut from forest, since suburbs in CA are developed out of farmland or pasture or oil fields generally and there isn't much habitat surrounding most of these developments that support larger game populations like out east (compare satellite imagery of Sacramento to Cleveland and see how stark the differences in forest cover are in CA vs a typical eastern city.

Adelaide is an interesting case study. There is a river and nature reserve that stretches from the hills to the coast that cuts right through the city. They do incur on the edges of it in a few locations but for the most part it's got native vegetation for the full length of it. It's one of the many nature corridors there, and the network of nature corridors continues to expand throughout suburbia. They also have a ring of parklands around the CBD all of which have native vegetation in at least some areas if not quite the whole area.

They're not unique in having a river cutting through the city, but they were lucky to have the foresight of a city planner who felt there was some value in keeping the native vegetation all the way back at the city's inception.

There is beautiful and diverse birdlife throughout the city and that's in no small part due to the amount of native vegetation kept around throughout the city and suburbia. From the surrounding hills, the suburbs just look like a regular forest with some buildings poking out here and there, it's incredibly green. There is about as much parklands as there is real estate in the CBD itself.

https://d31atr86jnqrq2.cloudfront.net/images/aerial-city-ade...

Surprisingly, London has a huge amount of parkland and multiple rivers - you only have to fly over it to see it all (or live there to experience it). And lots of varied creatures living there.

Holy cow that looks paradisiac compared most major US cities.

The aerial view says otherwise:

https://www.google.com/maps/@-34.9082898,138.5203148,29616m/...

We have our concrete jungle like most places, but the parklands surrounding the city are great (though parts resist activation) and older/richer areas are typically very green with street trees and creek systems running through suburbs. It's a great place to live (third most liveable, supposedly) but the downside is you're a long flight from most of the rest of the world.

Zoomed out, yes the larger part of Adeliade looks similar to most cities but that part looks great from aerial as well. You can see the corridor.

In fairness, I got the feeling that the author of the article was writing in the context of western Europe. While Western Europeans have a hard time understanding the large and dangerous wildlife populations that exist in North America, it's hardly surprising since they don't live there. The author's prescriptions sound like nice and (relatively) easy things people in the UK can do to make life a bit richer there. It's doubtful he'd suggest pathways for bears through American or Canadian suburbs :-).

There's a lot you can do in terms of building for biodiversity that will benefit 10s of thousands of species before you have ti to worry about the handful of apex preditors that harm humans.

> The real difficulty is how one accommodates bear and cougars.

One doesn't. Bears were exterminated in Britain 1500 years ago. And cougars were never native here.

> But the largest predators in the UK are badgers.

Fine by me, badgers aren't a threat to humans.

> Do we continue to close schools and break out the dart guns every time someone sees a bear in a tree?

No, we exterminate them like my ancestors did 1500 years ago, because they were sensible (my ancestors, not the bears). Maybe put some in a wildlife park or zoo.

> Even large deer can be a problem.

In the UK also - I've had several near-death experiences in a car at night with deer in North London.

Not that I want to get rid of them.

This happens a lot in the Midwest also. Deer are really dangerous because they walk across roads in the night and they freeze up when they see a bright light.

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