The new golden age of wildlife in New England | Hacker News Reader

The new golden age of wildlife in New England

bostonglobe.com

107 pointsnkurz133 comments

It’s nice to see articles that help confirm some of my anecdotes. I live in Connecticut, and in the last year I’ve seen both a bear and a moose in my yard. And, it’s not like I live somewhere crazy rural - I live on a 0.3 acre lot near UCONN. My neighbors, many of whom have been here for 50 years, comment about how many more eagles, ospreys, fishers, fox, and deer there are today. However, there hasn’t been data to back up these anecdotes.

For the most part, people enjoy it, but there’s a growing cluster of outdoor house cat owners who are dismayed when nature does its thing and Sir Fluffsalot meets his end after an encounter with a fox or eagle.

Cats shouldn't be allowed outside. My neighbor has a cat and it always shit on my lawn and if it find something soft it scratches

New Haven, CT has seen a bear in a public park, lots of foxes and turkeys and deer. I’ve heard of wildcats a little further out. Also agree that housecats need to stay indoors to stop killing birds. We built an enclosure for ours to be outside but not freeranging.

We're right outside Boston, and this spring was the first time we've had an owl hooting pretty much every night since March.

> there’s a growing cluster of outdoor house cat owners who are dismayed when nature does its thing and Sir Fluffsalot meets his end after an encounter with a fox or eagle.

Here in Oregon - known for its thriving wildlife - the number 1 complaint on Nextdoor is "coyote sighting, bring in your pets!".

> For the most part, people enjoy it, but there’s a growing cluster of outdoor house cat owners who are dismayed when nature does its thing and Sir Fluffsalot meets his end after an encounter with a fox or eagle.

Outdoor cats do far more damage to wildlife populations than they receive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

It's cool to see some commentary regarding how hunters and federal policy helped (and hurt).

The National Wild Turkey Foundation is solely responsible for the reintroduction of the turkey across most of the entire US. The entire purpose of the mission was to bring wild turkey populations up for hunting, and that hunters would be the best way to conserve and manage the population.

An excellent podcast done by Steve Rinella (another hunter/conservationist, famous for his Meat Eater TV Show) about the topic: https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-104-turks.

From the episode: the way the NWTF and DOW people captured Wild Turkeys was to design a gun that could shoot webs, capture the turkeys, throw them into a van, and drive them out and drop them off in the woods in another state.

Hunters were the bulk of the original conversation/nature pushes historically, since they want lots of outdoor space and large animal populations. They bumped heads a bit with preservationists, but at the time most people felt nature was something to be conquered or done away with in the pursuit of progress (up until shockingly recently, frankly).

Judging by the flat green lawns and lack of trees in most suburbs in New England, I get the impression that a lot of people still feel that way.

Flat lawns and few trees doesn't sound like any New England I'm familiar with.

Certainly not in rural Maine or Vermont, but huge tracts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are like this.

Where? I grew up in the coastal area of MA, most of the yards had trees as far as I remember. Is this a Middle Mass thing?

I'd believe they clear cut their yards in Connecticut, but that's just because Connecticut is devoted to doing things as wrong as possible while still being part of New England.

Huge tracts of New Hampshire are flat and have no trees? Ahhh……The Lake District.

I only live about 25 miles from Boston and I don't have any idea what you mean here.

Yea but it's also because people aren't able to connect the dots. Like I live in the suburbs in Ohio, I want to preserve nature, but I'm kind of trapped in my environment. We've planted trees, we do gardening, and we're adding plants that attract pollinators, but there's only so much we can do.

I don't know which part of New England you live in but the part I see is the most tree-lined residential area on the globe.

This sounds more like new developments (where they level the land before building anything). Most older neighborhoods are much more diverse.

Conservation of what and for whom? In England the hunting land was for the royalty. Anyone caught in royal hunting grounds was severely punished and probably executed for hunting.

Piggybacking off this.

If anyone reading this has the gut reaction that hunting and conservation don’t go hand in hand, please listen to Steve Rinella and Shane Mahoney’s podcast episodes about the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.[0][1]

As an American, it is a huge source of pride.

[0] https://www.themeateater.com/listen/the-hunting-collective-2...

[1] https://www.themeateater.com/listen/the-hunting-collective-2...

Second this one. Absolutely amazing listen, especially if you grew up thinking hunters just go around shooting anything that moves, which admittedly, I did.

> gun that could shoot webs, capture the turkeys, throw them into a van, and drive them out and drop them off in the woods in another state

Sounds like one hell of a gun.

I live northwest of Boston, bordering a wildlife refuge. I refuse to have cameras inside my house but the woods around it are well instrumented. I have many video clips documenting everything from 'buns' to bobcats, coyotes, foxes, and of course deer.

With regard to outdoor cats, they wouldn't last a fortnight around here. Too many predators now and I am thankful for that. As a result, the bird population borders on riotous in the spring.

I expect that we will see a bear before too long.

-edit- oh, but those ticks... I have a jumpsuit treated with permethrin for working out back.

Now time to reintroduce wolves.

(Will also help with the tick epidemic.)

I also live in Boston and my poor dog got hounded by those ticks. I assume it wolves eating deers is what would help with that?

For peopled areas, chickens do an amazing job clearing the ticks. They mainly need somewhere to sleep safely at night and can take care of themselves in groups during the day.

Untill the hawk population recovers

that's what the guard dogs and guinea fowl are for

>guinea fowl

Forgive my ignorance, do they keep the hawks at bay by alarming every time there's danger? Cause I can't imagine the ones we have here fighting off anything

Yeah, they usually kept as predator alerts for mixed flocks. They are also known to kill/scare away snakes, which is nice because I live where there are poisonous rattlesnakes

We have chickens, living on the edge of a regional park where the hawks thrive. They are reluctant to hunt near the house, probably mainly because the low tree cover severely limits their maneuverability.

Oooh, the hawks are pretty well inside the 128. I routinely pick up squirrel and rabbit ‘chunks’ from on my yard. In the winter, I’ve see occasional red stains in the snow.

And when the wolves attack humans? Lobbyists have long claimed that there are no documented cases of healthy wild wolves attacking humans, but there are actually dozens of documented cases [1][2]. Wolves are nothing like dogs. They're large enough to hurt/kill humans, and they have regularly done so whenever wolf and human populations overlapped.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_attack#North_America [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks_in_North_...

More people have died in cars hitting the reintroduced turkeys mentioned above than are in that list.

(a lot of those are also due to rabies and a few sound completely made up)

> I refuse to have cameras inside my house…

For any purpose?

It's implied that they meant surveillance cameras.

Indeed, that was poorly phrased.

They position wildlife surveillance cameras inside of individual homes?? ( I am not being intentionally dense, I just haven’t heard of such a practice.)

I hope that the insect and bird populations also start to recover. We don’t see that many bugs in the Boston area, and the cities spray mosquito fog every summer because of EEE.

Our birds of prey in Eastern MA are being impacted by rat poison - they eat rats which have been poisoned.

Certainly there are improvements, and we should celebrate those. But we should also recognize that there’s a way to go.

As someone who lives just outside of 95, I assure you, the bugs are doing just fine.

In Boston I do see a fair number of birds of prey. Most memorably I was biking along the Charles in Cambridgeport and stopped to observe one (a falcon, maybe?) feasting on a squirrel not five feet from the path, unperturbed by the passers-by.

I've seen red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, and peregrine falcons in downtown Boston. One of the coolest things I've seen was a hawk gliding down the bike path about 6 inches from the ground near a large playground, as it tried to sneak up on some squirrels. It did the nap of the earth flight for a couple hundred feet and then pounced on a squirrel. It was utterly unperturbed by the foot traffic around it.

I also lived in a high-rise, and a peregrine falcon used a ledge outside of my son's bedroom window as a perch to launch attacks on pigeons and seagulls.

And then there was that time a coyote was spotted in the North End: https://patch.com/massachusetts/charlestown/coyote-spotted-i...

I grew up outside of Boston in the 70s and 80s. Never saw a turkey, coyote, or bald eagle. I thought the latter were extinct east of the Mississippi.

The Charles River was still a polluted mess from years of neglect and old industrial use. There was a derelict watch factory in Waltham next to the river, former vehicle assembly works in Watertown and Cambridge, and all kinds of old industrial sites further upriver. There's one section of Waltham Mass still called "the bleachery" which was the site of a dye factory, which, of course, emptied right into the Charles up until the 1950s.

I live a few miles from my childhood home now. The factories are gone, and the riverside has mostly been cleaned up. I see all of these animals plus many more including foxes and waterfowl. At night we hear great horned owls and the yipping of a local coyote pack. There are news stories about bears making it to within route 128 (the innermost ring road) and even the outer reaches of Cape Cod, which requires crossing a major bridge. https://www.wbur.org/news/2012/05/31/cape-cod-bear-twitter

"which requires crossing a major bridge." - The biologist quoted in your linked article believes the bear likely swam across the canal.

Habitat is the major factor for wildlife populations.

In 1900, Vermont was 30% forested after settlers cut down the forests for wood, farmland, and mining. Now, Vermont is over 70% forested. Tax structure is a large factor, but certainly not the only one.

Unfortunately, the trend is reversing. Sprawl is a factor. Dense cities matter.

https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/report-vermont-losing-1500-ac...

In a perfect world, we would have dense cities, we would have wild land that belongs to nature, and we would have farmland; and most land would fall into one of these classifications. While we might see "market share" fluctuate between these, a relatively stable population guarantees that we would not see a huge loss of wild land.

In reality, every state, every city, and every town are in a de facto competition for tax dollars, and there is no central planning. So instead of adding dense housing to desirable Burlington, we clearcut forests or replace farmland to add low density housing 10 miles away in a subdivision near Shelburne. That family that was charmed to move to Vermont by the shops on Bank st will end up driving to the nearby big box store in Shelburne instead. The traffic will get worse, local farmland starts disappearing because suburban land is more valuable on a square foot basis, and once all the farms are gone the process begins again another 5-10 miles out.

It's a vicious cycle, and it creates an ecosystem where most people can't even enjoy the city they came to love in the first place because they live miles and miles away (and good luck with traffic and parking)

Yes. Cities should build up instead of out. That means changing building codes and zoning laws to reduce restrictions on building heights. It also means investing in transportation that can move people around with less space, like light rail.

Refusing to build up will lead to sprawl. Car-centric transportation infrastructure will lead to sprawl and traffic jams. Sprawl a bad scenario for everyone, including car lovers.

Building up destroys the desirability of places. No-one wants to live in cypherpunk environments. See https://www.clemensgritl.com/video

Building up doesn't mean building a cypherpunk environment.

Building 4/5 story buildings with units for families is enough for healthy urbanization.

I agree, but would probably place residential height limit around 3 stories (jump out of the window rule), and then for things like hospitals you can go a little taller maybe up to 20 stories.

We have a serious problem in talking past each other though. When people talk about building density the conversation starts around skyscrapers (bad) like Hong Kong or something, but what we need is just medium-density, mixed use development so lots of single family homes, narrow streets, walking/biking, and of course town houses and apartments so we can get variety and mixed income levels living in the same place. The rich family has the giant house on the corner. The young couple fresh out of school lives in an apartment down the street. They see each other every day at the coffee shop or at the park in the neighborhood, or maybe even a local church, gym, or office.

And in building this way we can weave in healthy natural aspects, trees, flowers, gardens, etc. and animals that are better adapted for these environments can live or "visit" these areas. Then as you get further away from this town/city you just get more and more hills and countryside and independent farms.

We know how to do this. We choose not to. It's not profitable for Mercedes if we all walk to work. It's not profitable for Conagra if we grow our produce or buy from an independent farmer. Not that these companies are necessarily (although sometimes they are) evil or anything, it's just an incentives alignment. And unfortunately government officials literally just do not understand what we need to do, so they're like empty vessels chasing things like Sidewalk Labs in Toronto or the Smart Cities Challenge in Columbus where all it amounts to is a corporate handout because the only way to solve a lot of the problems we have is just to build correctly. No amount of EVs fixes our problems (I have an EV btw). What does fix our problems is when families have 1 car per family instead of 2-4, and 90% of their day-to-day activities are within a short walking distance. We need a lot less of this giant SUV to Costco 30 miles away because you're cosplaying living in nature attitude.

This is what an appropriately dense city looks like:

https://twitter.com/trad_arch_bdays/status/15171411856676003...

This is what a correct neighborhood looks like:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/9b/26/379b266652e0a2013c0c...

This is an anti-pattern. It’s devoid of life.

https://facts.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/edward-he-uKyzX...

This is also absolutely dead. There is no nature here.

http://media.beam.usnews.com/70/0d/89b92a674c3b894107a03641e...

Idk what it looks like yet but I'm going to figure out a way to fix this.

Also, FWIW, the anti-pattern (shanghai skyline) is the central business district of one of the most populated cities on earth (30+ million people). It wouldn't make sense to propose buildings anywhere that scale anywhere but a handful of very rich cities.

Even in Shanghai there's plenty of neighborhoods full of life at a human-appropriate scale. Just not at city center.

Right - but I think when we have these conversations people envision being "forced" to live in something that resembles that central business district, and I want to make it clear to others that at least in the interest circles I run in, this would be considered a bad idea too.

I question whether we should even have cities with 30 million people. That's probably a problem too. People like to point to what appears to be lower c02 emissions, but that's not the only metric that matters. Metrics that I care about would be something like independent farmers per-capita, bikes per-capita, distance of travel for produce, etc.

Right on

> People like to point to what appears to be lower c02 emissions, but that's not the only metric that matters.

On that note, central business districts & skyscrapers aren't actually that great environmentally, although the city model as a whole is much better environmentally than their suburban counterparts.

And it's certainly possible to build a dense, urban city housing even millions of people without a massive central business district. I think, more than anything, the central business district is an artifact of how we organize ourselves economically (IE the economy is dominated by relatively few massive corporations). This is harder to change but certainly not impossible.

Yes! I think it's a historical anomaly, product of nation states which we are just now (or perhaps we just were) winding down from. WW1 and WW2 begot General Electric, The European Union, IBM, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Central Business District which were needed to create the organizational scale and ability to conduct war on the nation state level.

When people left the military they went to familiar environments. You "paid your dues" just like a private did. You stayed with the same company. Etc. But that's all changing. Historically that was not the case (well historically we didn't really have companies for that long, but you get the point). So I think we will revert to a more natural flow, which is more decentralization and fragmentation. I think this is inevitable, but I wish/hope/want to avoid the waste of resources in creating these things in the first place.

You paint a very inviting image, that makes a lot of sense - until you realise that low-income, three-story living units often looks more like

https://www.fotocommunity.de/photo/plattenbau-dessau-tobias-...

... which clearly is not what encourages building a community like you imagine.

Before someone comes and says that I picked the worst image I could find ... nope. This is the standard for "affordable multi-story apartment housing" in my rather affluent country. In many parts we actively demolish them because no-one wants to live there (location is often semi-suburban) and because they are breed a social-problem-area.

Couldn't agree more. We should stop building bullshit like that (i.e. modern style that is soulless and devoid of humanity) and instead just build great looking apartments. Typically people will say "oh but that's so expensive look at how much these cost" but they're expensive because we don't build them, and they are highly desirable.

These are just some random examples in Paris. We should build more like this. We can. There are no barriers. None.

https://bonjourparis.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Montmart...

https://www.girlsguidetoparis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08...

If this is true, why do the cities with the tallest buildings have the highest cost per unit area of housing and commercial real estate, population density and GDP per capita?

These "tallest buildings" usually are not mass-available apartment buildings - they are mostly office buildings and house few, exclusive apartments. Once you pack thousands of people into flats in such buildings, the appeal shrinks, quickly.

I kinda want to live in a cyberpunk environment but I also don’t have kids which makes that an easier choice. My spouse and I take our vacations in dense urban centers instead of tropical or rural destinations precisely because we like the culture and energy of super high density environments

"Cities should build up instead of out. That means changing building codes and zoning laws to reduce restrictions on building heights."

I'll probably be hated for this, as usual... You also have to have people who want to live there. Personal preferences and overall population seem to be important factors overlooked (or conveniently ignored) by many during these conversations. It's more convenient to focus solely on zoning.

I think most places with this sort of zoning discussion (cities) have no shortage of demand for housing

It can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. It depends on what type of demand there is too (sfh vs apt, etc).

If the majority of people had a preference for condos, then we wouldn't see large single family homes being developed. Even in areas where zoning is more lax (many suburbs).

> If the majority of people had a preference for condos, then we wouldn't see large single family homes being developed

I'm saying that these sort of zoning discussions are most common in areas that are (a) very high demand broadly across the entire housing stock, and (b) very restrictive on what can be built where

For example, I live in Cambridge, MA. There is a critical housing shortage. There is very little choice in what gets developed; development generally only happens if you have a large team to push the development through the necessary approvals and reviews, such as telling the zoning board that if they allow your non-compliant building then you'll sponsor a park and set aside 10% of your units as income restricted. Even the existing structures tend to be "illegal" because they were grandfathered in from the 1920s or earlier, when zoning did not exist. The only new developments that meet this bar are ultra expensive condo buildings and offices.

Whether the demand exists is not in question. Whatever gets built, people will live in it. But there is very much a question of what is allowed to be built. Some people want more condo buildings. Some people say it ruins the neighborhood character. But whether a condo building can find residents isn't really in question.

"But whether a condo building can find residents isn't really in question."

That wasn't questioned. It was questioned if zoning will actually prevent development of natural lands. Unless everyone want to live in high density housing, there would be a point where additional condos would not find willing tenants (much higher than current levels for some localities).

The point is there are a significant portion of the population that want low density housing and the sprawl will continue.

And on the overall population side, increasing resource demand will continue to tax the natural world. We will need more land for feeding/clothing/etc the increasing population.

You’ve got a point on there being a demand for low density housing but wouldn’t zoning be able to prevent the sprawl the same way it’s currently encouraging it? They could easily(for certain values of easy, it’s probably politically infeasible) zone land as not developable

There are places that zone for conservation. There are also organizations that buy land and place deed restrictions against developing it, then resell it.

There are areas around me that do these as well as allow for high density housing. These areas are suburbs, small towns, and small cities in the Philly region. We still have sprawl, and prices are relatively high. Even though it's possible to build high density housing in many areas, most people don't. They can get more for large sfh since there's a lot of demand for that. There are some apartments and condos being built, but it seems most of them are pretty expensive or upscale. So even though the zoning is permissive, sfh are the primary construction due to preferences. The conservation can also inflate prices by restricting supply and introducing regulations to deal with.

Just an aside on the regulations... some of them can be extremely stupid, like a prohibition on impermeable surfaces being interpreted to include stuff like gravel. If gravel is an impermeable surface, then maybe we can take the regulator to the desert and pour their water on some gravel and come back in a few days...

Suburbs have some of the strictest zoning, frequently mandating SFH, often with even more extreme requirements stacked on top of that (lot sizes, height restrictions, etc). Our R1 housing supply is artificially high because of zoning restrictions. Suburbs with lax zoning tend to see a lot of condo development.

But in a general sense you don't actually see massive SFH sprawl when you don't have R1 zoning. You tend to get denser areas, often with a belt of SFH around them. Realistically that's fine, and is a model that works around the world.

Also, housing trends just have a lot of inertia. It takes decades of policy change to alter the landscape. Much of the US was either zoned R1 or build up that way because of social and political forces that aren't necessarily relevant any more, but moving away from that is a glacial process.

I guess that's true for some suburbs. Maybe ones that are even closer to the city. Or in certain regions. In my area there seems to be an openness to multiple uses, lenient zoning, and variances.

I agree with the inertia part. I think some of it is 'build it and they will come' situation. But not about housing. Rather I think a lot of it is about infrastructure like public transportation and even better distribution of jobs. Also communities that share common values (tends to spur civic engagement and neighborly attitudes).

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I think we've largely become disconnected from out neighbors and even us-vs-them in our communities in general. If my neighbor wanted to put in a garage apartment or in-law suite type thing, then I'd be fine with it. So even if the zoning doesn't permit it directly, if I were to support my neighbor in a variance request, they would likely succeed. Similarly, if I were thinking about something that might impact my neighbors, then I try to get some input from them. Make sure that if they have some concerns I can try to address them. Maybe I'm just weird or have great neighbors, but it seems many people just want to sic the government on their neighbor at the first opportunity.

The great thing about libertarian arguments is that the liberty is a built-in safety valve. We can say all we want about how dense cities are better, but as long as we're saying "quit zoning for suburban development and let people decide for themselves how high of a floor they want to live on," and not, "drive humanity by threat of force into towering Warhammer-40k-esque hive cities," there's very little chance of accidentally walking into a nightmare. If we're accomplishing it with liberty, we retain the ability to walk out.

I'm not talking about forcing people. I'm saying even if zoning is changed to higher density, demand will still see more sprawling sfh development because that is what many people want. So the higher density zoning isn't going to prevent additional development of natural areas (in the context of the article).

If anyone wants to live in the high rises, each one of them is one less house in the sprawl. I'm not saying that everyone will decide they like city life better, only that some people will and it will help the situation. That may even be enough to stop the extinctions.

"each one of them is one less house in the sprawl."

Sure, maybe it slows it. But that's also less competition, which means the supply-demand equilibrium will shift so that when people who want to live in low density areas can have larger lots and houses. Pretty much offsetting the choices of the others.

Not to mention any increase in population will lead to increase in resource utilization, thus increase in natural resource exploitation.

> Sure, maybe it slows it.

correct. You can't stop sprawl just by upzoning, but maybe you can slow it. It takes a suite of urban planning effort to really combat sprawl, and allowing people to construct and live in dense neighborhoods of their own free will is just the first baby step in that direction.

> the supply-demand equilibrium will shift [..] Pretty much offsetting the choices of the others.

There's no basis for this statement. It sounds like you're suggesting that farmland and woods already don't exist, so if people move into dense regions, then we're just shuffling the remaining land zero-sum among those who would prefer not to live in the city.

There are, in fact, plenty of places that haven't yet been taken over by humans. And when people looking to move to a city can move to the city, companies are less incentivized to develop and subdivide 20 miles from the city.

So, it's not zero sum. Allowing more people to live in the city decreases the demand for development out of the city.

>You can't stop sprawl just by upzoning, but maybe you can slow it.

Population growth appears to be leveling off globally, which implies that if sprawl was slowed enough it could be stopped completely.

"There's no basis for this statement."

Basic economics, really.

"There are, in fact, plenty of places that haven't yet been taken over by humans."

That's shrinking rapidly. You could watch A Life On This Planet for some insight on the scope of development/utilization.

I'd have no problem living in dense housing if codes mandated GOOD noise insulation. So many apartment walls seem to be made out of cardboard, it's ridiculous.

Not just noise insulation, but fire protection too. I lived in older apartments that were made of concrete. They were generally great. Some occasional noise from hard shoes the floor above, but that was about it. A new apartment building in the area had a fire and it tore through a bunch of the units.

The big issue for me would be not being able to do a bunch of my hobbies - garden, woodworking, beekeeping, etc.

Competition can't be it because sprawl is terribly uncompetitive by almost any metric. It seems more like there is a large skew between what people think will make them happy and what actually does work out to produce happiness.

It's a local optimum. Wealthy suburbs are better than small farms for tax dollars. There's lots of demand for housing due to a neighboring municipality's desirability (Burlington, VT). Ergo, it's worth replacing small farms with suburbs that supply this demand.

>between what people think will make them happy and what actually does work out to produce happiness.

People aren't all the same some like having a yard, a garden, and no people living right next to their walls.

Right, there's a LOT of rural and semi-rural places in Vermont already if you aren't a fan of cities. In particular though, we're seeing subdivisions of housing sprout up in municipalities neighboring Burlington, typical suburban developments that prey off the desire to live in/near the city but avoid the high city prices (And the high city prices stem from the fact that the city itself, already more or less "fully" developed, has no incentives to upzone and plan for growth)

For example, take this listing https://www.zillow.com/community/kwiniaska-ridge/29091765_pl...

Look at the descriptions used to sell it:

> Just minutes from the lake and downtown Burlington you have everything you need and already do.

This isn't aimed at people looking to escape the city. This is aimed at people looking to buy into the city at a lower price point.

That or it's aimed at people trying to have it both ways.

I know a couple of people like this, they claim they want to get out of the city, but also aren't willing to live more than 5 minutes from a supermarket. The result is a compromise: suburban sprawl.

Having it both ways is best serviced by cities that reduce sprawl. If you want to be where things are happening, it's right there. If you want nature, it's just outside of the city. Sprawl creates miles and miles of area that isn't nature and isn't the center of activity. It's a huge amount of infrastructure for a design pattern that has a lot of environmental downsides and doesn't help most people.

>and every town are in a de facto competition for tax dollars,

So (mostly) turn off the faucet and make everywhere pay closer to their own way.

Not getting $1-$1.10 back on the dollar isn't gonna bankrupt rural areas. It just means you the yuppies will have to suffer through the state highway to the u-pick orchard being replaced every 12yr instead of 10.

The whole "pay taxes and then let whoever you paid them to give you them back with strings attached about exactly how you use it" model and designing to qualify for funding that said model incentivizes is exactly how you wind up with boondoggle sprawl. If places were using their own money things would look very different.

> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Since when is "the community" roughly analogous to "yuppies" and since when is being a yuppie a bad thing?

At least some would identify with the lifestyle, etc you deemed “yuppie”. You understand what you are doing with comments like that, it’s divisive and not productive.

Edit: I won’t edit my comment to better address your comment since you edited after I responded.

Surely some identify as yuppies but I think that's immaterial here. Yuppie isn't a slur. It's a colloquial expression for a set of demographics.

You know what's divisive and not productive? Drive-by low effort comments quoting the guidelines and projecting offense on other's behalf.

Are you kidding? It's been a slur for a long time and you were clearly using it as one.

You are intentionally being obtuse and abrasive, please reconsider.

Dense areas generally subsidize sparse areas.

Urban spending is disproportionately police. If each area pays their own way, urban areas get basically nothing but a ton of police. Then the cops, who live in the suburbs, take that money (and its potential tax revenue) elsewhere.

You will note that this is already a problem, because we already have a partial pay-your-own-way system.

>>Urban spending is disproportionately police.

I don't think that is even close to true, NYC latest budget for example is $92.3B (2022), Police got $5.42B, about accounts for ~6% of the total.

Education, social services and 'other' account for almost 70% of the total.

https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...

> That family that was charmed to move to Vermont by the shops on Bank st will end up driving to the nearby big box store in Shelburne instead.

Frankly, I don't think this happens with any frequency.

The thing that makes Burlington so nice is how quiet, clean, and spacious it is. Nobody moves to Burlington expecting it to be NYC. If you try to make Burlington into NYC, you will ruin it.

People move to VT to be in nature. To be spread out. And it's a nice benefit that they can visit a cool, small city every once in a while.

> People move to VT to be in nature. To be spread out.

This describes the vast majority of Vermont, but not Burlington. It's not NYC but it's also not Montpelier and it's definitely not Stowe.

Burlington is the "small city" for people who want everything local - local brewers, local farms, co-ops and farmer's markets, etc.

I'm not suggesting that Burlington should build highrises everywhere. I'm suggesting that the building forms that already exist in downtown Burlington - tightly packed 2-4 story buildings - should perhaps continue a little further out. It's possible to have urbanism that isn't Manhattan.

With unchecked suburban sprawl, Burlington is going to become the opposite of what it represents now - generic big box stores and chains.

Precisely. Just look at what's happening to the Front Range in Colorado -- Boulder and Fort Collins specifically -- for a peek at the future of Burlington.

In addition to dense cities suburban areas could have more natural planting instead of dead lawns.

Yes...but, the deer population is out of control and demand greater reintroduction of predators.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03781...

The issue is that deer effect forest regeneration, and there needs to be an increase in seedlings to keep the habitat healthy. Deer definitely effect oak trees, and so the forest makeup in places like CT is shifting to more maple and less oak. As a result it makes it harder for other species that depend on mast trees for food.

The solution isn't for us to just exterminate deer, but we need to be careful about that population growing out of control.

Deer like the edges of forests. Lots of wildlife departments purposely shape forests to have more edge areas in order to increase the deer population so they can sell more hunting licenses.

Cambridge and Boston are fantastic for spring migration birding and fall migration birding, especially Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. There's a resident barred owl and red tail that swoops in quite close when walking about. https://ebird.org/hotspot/L207391

If you are taking a day hike in the Blue Hills, take main road before the hill summit to right for about a mile to the trailside museum. I discovered by accident and it's super cool as it has a public wildlife sanctuary attached with foxes, otters, eagles, snowy owls and other cool animals.

NB: the photographer, John Tlumacki, won a Pulitzer Prize for the images he captured in the moments after the Marathon bombings!

I live a little south of Boston. In the spring I often get large rafters (herds) of turkeys on my lawn. Sometimes there are 30 or more going through my neighborhood.

My 1-year-old loves staring at the window and pointing at the toms (males) with their giant plumes. They look like peacocks when they spread their tail feathers out to attract a hen. I have to sit my daughter at the window while we eat breakfast because she just has to stare at them.

Apparently turkeys prefer to mate in fields, so they like doing their thing on lawns. Good to know that at least something wile benefits from mine.

Any time a website greets me with a giant page-filling banner that I can't close, or they cut off the article after a few words in order to get me to sign up, I close the tab.

You can add to that the allow notifications dialog, has anybody ever clicked yes on one of those?

fyi in Chrome you can turn those off for all sites in the settings:

chrome://settings/content/notifications

It is nice but I could do without the bear that demolished our compost bin in the backyard twice last week (I live in town in a small village in Western Massachusetts). Seeing bald eagles fly right over your head with a fish they just caught in the Deerfield River is pretty cool though.

> funding the recovery of the game species through the sale of licenses, tags, and stamps, as well as a 1937 federal law that placed an 11 percent excise tax on hunting weapons, including guns, ammunition, and archery equipment.

The Pittman-Robertson tax raises nearly a billion dollars a year for conservation and wildlife management.

I was visiting Boston this past weekend for the marathon. Saw two turkeys on separate days in the Lexington area near Minute Man park. I was really cool for a tourist like me and added to the Thanksgiving/colonial vibe.

https://archive.ph/vR1G6

Yeah I wouldn't be proud of having all those deer given how large of a vector they are for ticks...

Reducing deer populations doesn't actually reduce the spread of Lyme disease, unless you completely eradicate all deer. Ticks get Lyme from feeding on mice, the deer is just one part of their life cycle.

I don't like how they declare a golden age while native species are still endangered. It's like saying we're in a golden age of peace because we're fighting in less wars.

This metaphor doesn't make sense to me. Isn't less war good for peace?

If you have much less credit card debt than before and still have student loans to pay, would you declare yourself financially golden? Probably not.

better is still better.

For animals, sure, things are pretty good.

For plants things kinda suck. Lots of invasive species have taken root over the last 200yr and are holding down native species.

I do not know why you were down-voted, but this is true. I those invasive vines I would see everywhere in the deep south are starting to appear here. Probably due to climate change. Never mind about the various water plants coking out native water plants.

Hydrilla verticellata, Lemna minor, and phragmites are coming for your cattails and Elodea :(. All of the poor fish will not survive.

About half of the trees in a New England forest are "invasive." They've been here so long someone like me doesn't even know what's natural and what isn't.

Earthworms are also invasive in New England. They're everywhere, ubiquitous, and apparently the natural forest doesn't have them.

Earthworms would have once been native to New England, they were just killed by the advancing glaciers of the pleistocene epoch, which ended 12,000 years ago. They've been advancing northward slowly ever since (though other species were brought by colonists).

A cultural shift towards eating invasive species or both flora and fauna would really help. Use that human tendency to cause extirpation for good.

That works for animals to a degree but you can't eat chestnut blight.

Also disease and blights have decimated certain trees like Elm and Chestnut.

This is us:

https://xkcd.com/1871/

Boston does have a lot of good buns

Randall also lives in MA I believe so yeah it’s also him

The Boston North Shore suburbs seem to have so many more bunnies than other similar areas in the northeast. Different climate? Lack of predators? Better food?

They're not supposed to be there. They were introduced a hundred years ago and are competing with the native cotton tail.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_cottontail

Interesting, I assumed they were the native cottontail! Is there a reliable way to tell them apart?

Edit: Wikipedia says that they are morphologically almost identical. Is the species distinction just a matter of genetics at this point? Normally I am bothered by invasive species, but somehow this doesn't seem to be such a problem, if you literally can't tell them apart without molecular analysis or looking at minor differences in their skulls.

I am aware that similar situations have happened with house sparrows and starlings, where they have so successfully outcompeted the natives that you would think they were the native dominant species. At least starlings are easy to identify and can't be confused with anything native, but I don't think I could tell apart the different sparrows.

Sparrows are easier to differentiate by their vocalizations (mostly). Many have a species-distinct opening to their song.

Different species of sparrow also occupy different habitat, and fill somewhat different ecological niches.

I'm less familiar with rabbit vocalizations. :)

ehh, what's up, doc.

They can honk a bit when excited or growl. Probably won’t see a wild rabbit doing any of that.

Rat extermination efforts have also removed a predator. When rats are abundant they will wipe out rabbits as they will enter their warrens and prey on the rabbit kits. I was in Somerville when they broke ground on the green line expansion which drove the rats that had been nesting in untouched government land for years into the neighborhood. Over the course of ~2 months we went from rabbits everywhere to them becoming locally extinct and having been replaced by rats

Where I am, there were lots of buns, plus song birds. But 3 neighbors got cats and they let them out all the time, after 6 months the bunnies and song birds are now all gone.

I wish NE would do what I heard New Zealand is now doing, forcing people to keep their cats indoors.

But nice cartoon, I do not know how I missed it, I read xkcd daily.

Conversely, my neighborhood on Cape Cod is absolutely overrun by bunnies, to the point where we could probably use a few cats to keep things in balance.

Things used to be more reasonable, but as more people started living here full time, it seems the foxes were pushed back out of the immediate neighborhood.

Disturbingly, our dogs have a knack for finding nests and tossing around the baby bunnies, apparently without any intention to kill and eat them. They sound EXACTLY like squeak toys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com