Christine Wilkinson: The fun thing fun or not fun thing about a lot of the species we've talked about, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, coyotes, et cetera, is that behavioral flexibility also means that the individual animal has its own personality and experiences, and that can alter how it behaves toward us, right?

So it's not just my entire population of raccoons in my city does one thing or another. It's one raccoon can have a certain personality that's bolder and they do this certain thing. My colleague, Dr. Lauren Stanton studies that exact thing, cognition and boldness in raccoons and problem solving and individuals can be very different from one another.

So what you really wanna do is try to prevent these bold phenotypes from popping up, right? From these animals, learning that they can get rewards from people is often what's linked to conflict down the road. And if you can do that for one individual or the whole population in your neighborhood, the better.

Josh Wilder: [00:01:00] Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting, we've been dedicated to conserving the planet's natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources in this podcast. We host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.

Kenny Coogan: Good day everyone. I am Kenny Cogan, and joining me on this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends is Dr. Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist, carnivore ecologists and the incoming curator of community science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Dr. Wilkinson's research explores how carnivores move through human dominated landscapes in places like Kenya and California, and [00:02:00] how communities can engage in equitable lasting conservation.

Today we're diving into what coexistence with wildlife really looks like. Especially for homesteaders managing gardens, chickens, and compost piles in urban and suburban settings. Dr. Wilkinson, thank you so much for being here and we're excited to have this conversation, which is gonna be very applicable to our listeners.

Christine Wilkinson: Great to be here.

Kenny Coogan: So let's start with your journey. What drew you to this kind of conservation work? I imagine human dominated landscapes is becoming more popular.

Christine Wilkinson: I spent my initial childhood in Queens, New York, and I spent a lot of time getting well acquainted with the urban animals that are so resilient in cities.

And so I loved, like even the rats, right? Which I call our puppies in New York City 'cause they're so big. Cicadas, all these different things that I would run around looking for in the [00:03:00] city, pretending that I was the David Attenborough of Queens. But I think I also was using wildlife as a little bit of an escape from a bit of a rough home life.

And so I was like, okay, great. I'll be shy. I'll just go and work with wildlife and people I don't have to even think about them. That's what I'll try to do. Of course, I had a huge wake up call when I got to university and started actually trying to do conservation work and realized that people are the key to good conservation and lasting coexistence.

And I had to step out of my comfort zone and start working with people learning about what they think is important, what they've experienced on the landscape, and how that influences how they feel about wildlife, how they act toward wildlife. So really branching out from just thinking about the perceptions of our wildlife and how they behave, but also how people behave and their perceptions and how those come together to create hopefully coexistence across both urban to rural locations.

What Does Coexisting With Wildlife Mean?

Kenny Coogan: You just mentioned the word coexistence at least twice, so you [00:04:00] get bonus points for that. And what does that really mean in urban and suburban settings, and how does it differ from conservation in wild or rural areas.

Christine Wilkinson: Yeah. Coexistence is a really fun word to try and define, and people have tried, entire careers have been built around defining what coexistence really means because it means different things to different people.

Overall we've as a field landed on this idea of having a level of risk that we're willing to accept in our different communities, willing to tolerate. And acknowledging that we share landscapes with wildlife and with the environment around us, and figuring out how we can put in place preventative efforts to prevent conflicts with wildlife as well as to manage them.

In urban and suburban spaces, these interactions with wildlife can really happen at close quarters, not just with the wildlife, but with our fellow human beings who have perhaps very different opinions and feelings than we do about wildlife. We all come together [00:05:00] from many different backgrounds in these urban spaces as opposed to rural spaces where.

You might have a lot more spread out landscapes or maybe even more culturally monolithic landscapes in some cases where people tend to approach how they deal with wildlife in a different way than how you would an urban space where everyone has different opinions. And so I think it really presents a lot of fascinating, unique challenges to do coexistence work in urban and suburban spaces because of all the different backgrounds of people coming together.

Because of just how resilient and innovative the wildlife can be that managed to survive alongside us in these urban and suburban spaces.

Kenny Coogan: My background is a bird trainer at different zoos throughout the US and some of the really fancy zoos would have a maribou stork or an African pied crow, and I just came back from Uganda and there were people in the landfills going through the garbage and the food for themselves, [00:06:00] and right next to them we're five foot tall, maribou storks, African pied crows and baboons.

Christine Wilkinson: Yes, they can really make it work. I love all three of those species, by the way.

How Mammals Are Adapting to Human Landscapes

Kenny Coogan: So most of our listeners are from the US and just a couple of months ago we had a really great podcast about the California Condors and how the Peregrine Fund is helping educate hunters on how to live sustainably with them. But I wanna talk to you about mammals. Can you talk about how some mammals, hopefully in the US have adapted to these human dominated landscapes? And what species have you noticed thriving?

I'm sure our listeners have also noticed which ones are doing really well too.

Christine Wilkinson: I'm sure they have. So the general tendency of which species are gonna be thriving alongside us and in the mammal world as well as any [00:07:00] other taxa is typically they have generalist tendencies. So that's animals that can survive off of many different types of food and in many different landscapes and be flexible to what they eat. So that's in cities you'll often see mammals like coyotes, raccoons, gunks, of course, my dear rats that I mentioned earlier. And others that can really exploit different food sources.

Anything from wild prey like rodents to things like insects, to things like avocados, right? Even coyotes have even scavenged on whales or hunted seals. All sorts of different food that they can get into. That aspect of being a generalist typically goes hand in hand with what's called behavioral flexibility.

Which means essentially when animals are able to shift and be adaptive to these different types of landscapes that they live in depending on what they have around them. So they're able to den in lots of different places. I've seen coyotes, dening in concrete pipes, right? They're able to decide whether it's a [00:08:00] hunt or forage or scavenge depending on what they have on the landscape.

Coyotes. My colleague Dr. Tally Casby did an awesome study in San Francisco where she found that coyotes that had more restaurants in their home ranges and more developed areas in their home ranges tended to have more anthropogenic, so like human foods in their scat. So they're able to shift and make it work.

These animals that are behaviorally flexible can do things like shift their behaviors to be at different times of day to avoid people or even to take advantage of when people are active, to be able to get snacks from them. I think coyotes are a fantastic example about shifting your behaviors to be more active at night because actually people are really worried in a city when they see a coyote during the day.

But that's the natural behavior of a coyote. They're what's called ephemeral. They're able to be active both day and night and shift their behaviors accordingly. And typically when we have more people in the landscape a lot of different taxa, including mammals, will shift their behaviors to be at night.

[00:09:00] So then you'll be thinking, oh, these animals are supposed to be active at night, when really they're not. So that's all of the things I just listed are features of what's called behavioral flexibility, which these mammal species will show.

Humane Strategies to Deter Wildlife from the Homestead

Kenny Coogan: So let's shift to the homestead. Many of our listeners are managing gardens, pet chickens, and compost piles. What are some effective humane strategies to determine mammals like raccoons, foxes, or a possums without harming them? And the mammals you did not mention were dogs and cats. Pretty much once a month we have a poultry themed podcast, and that means once a month we talk about how domestic dogs also kill people's pet chickens.

Christine Wilkinson: Yeah. Luckily for you, y'all homesteaders the strategies you would use for a lot of the wild mammals are similar to what you might use to deter. Our feral and escaped domestics like [00:10:00] dogs and cats. For things like livestock, small stock chicken coops, that kind of thing, you really wanna remember for actually anything you wanna remember what the behavior of that animal's going to be that's trying to get in, right?

So we know coyotes can dig so can other various mammal species, raccoons can dig, et cetera, et cetera. Dogs can dig. So you wanna have your chicken put coops and your other livestock enclosures with sort of a wire mesh, like a hardware cloth or even something thicker that goes underneath the ground so that it makes it harder for these animals to dig quickly underneath a fence, right?

Or underneath an enclosure. A lot of animals can, a lot of these animals can scale fences, right? Maybe dogs can't. Some dogs can jump as high as coyotes, but many cannot. But cats can get over a fence. Raccoons possums, et cetera, can get over a fence. And of course, coyotes can scale fences up to eight feet tall, perhaps even higher.

Who knows? So there are a lot of things you can think about with either completely enclosing your chickens or your other livestock [00:11:00] into, in a completely enclosed space that doesn't have an opening at the top. Or if you're like, that seems really infeasible for my situation. If you're trying to deter things like coyotes or even feral cats.

You can put up these things called coyote rollers, which are essentially these metal. Hollow tubes that you install on top of your fence, which also needs to be a tall enough fence so that the animal that's trying to get over can't really gain purchase on the top. They end up like rolling off and you can watch videos of people using this for, preventing their huskies from getting it out of the yard.

And it's quite satisfying. A little bit amusing to watch the frustration of the animal. But I've seen it work on cats as well. Ideally you'll have a fully enclosed enclosure though. Same for your compost, right? If you're making a compost, try to have the compost be inaccessible in the same way that you would have your chickens be inaccessible, right?

You put on that hardware cloth, you create a fully enclosed space that can't be dug into. You may also consider if you have fruit trees or things like that, you wanna remove [00:12:00] any easy attractants. Be really diligent about picking up fallen fruit. Securing your garbage and compost. And if you have a larger piece of land, you might consider some guardian strategies like dogs for instance.

We know livestock guardian dogs are. Pretty effective against things like coyotes. I don't know if anyone's ever studied how they work against feral dogs, but I would imagine it would be the same thing, right? That's of course for maybe a larger place or if you happen to have a good breed for livestock guardian dogs.

And if you're really feeling, just last

Kenny Coogan: month we had a podcast on livestock guardian dogs.

Christine Wilkinson: That's amazing. That's fantastic. I also hear that llamas work, if you're feeling really avant-garde and donkeys work against pumas, which are less common in urban areas, but can be common in suburban areas.

If you happen to want a donkey, it's a nice thing to have around as protector of your other livestock. From what I've heard.

Detering Moles and Voles from Vegetable Gardens

Kenny Coogan: So that's all great advice. I just moved from Florida to North Carolina and I have a little more than an acre. I [00:13:00] have this beautiful vegetable garden, huge vegetable garden, and I notice when I'm walking around there's these little tunnels and these little holes, and the earth feels a little spongy, and I don't know if this will work, but I heard that if you plant onions and garlic, that could deter the voles and the moles.

Christine Wilkinson: I've heard that as well. I've also heard that planting hot peppers or sprinkling hot pepper around is really useful for that kind of thing if you have a persistent digger. But I don't, I am not a hundred percent sure which things have been empirically tested on that front. Yeah.

Kenny Coogan: Then the other thing is we have, I believe, a red shouldered hawk and a family of red shouldered hawks, so we want to encourage them to stay around in the area and.

Keep patrolling our property.

Christine Wilkinson: Yeah, wherever you can implement. So first of all, I'm gonna use the word pest, but to me, one man's pest is another man's treasure. But [00:14:00] wherever you can implement the natural pest control that's out there already on the landscape the better.

How Are Small Predators Important for the Environment?

Kenny Coogan: So let's say all of our listeners, we are sustainable. We wanna grow our own food, we wanna harvest the land, we wanna raise our own animals. But our neighbors might not realize what role those native mammals are playing in soil health or pest control or pollination. Can you maybe list like why skunks and raccoons and o possums and coyotes are important to the environment?

Christine Wilkinson: Yeah, for sure. We call meso predators so these medium-sized carnivores that you see often in cities and in suburban areas are definitely regulating the rodent populations. Again, one man's pest is another man's treasure. I'll say it again, but we typically as humans don't like having rats and mice around that can.

I know I had a lot of a bunch of rats getting into my tomatoes last summer, for instance, and it's a pain in the [00:15:00] butt. So it's nice to have those animals around regulating that. Skunks are also out there eating insects and getting rid of some of the other types of smaller pests that we might be plagued by when we're making a vegetable garden.

Scavenging species can also help clean up carryon and other things. And we, the jury's out on whether they're doing a good job of reducing disease spread in cities, but the jury remains to be seen and is not saying no. So if you're reducing things like pest species and cleaning up carryon, typically that does mean that you're helping out with that disease spread as well.

And then I know we sometimes the diggers get on our nerves, but. In the long run, these rodents and small mammals are actually aerating the soil through burrowing, so they're actually helping to make that soil a little bit healthier over time.

Kenny Coogan: Do you know the mained wolves in South America?

Christine Wilkinson: I

love mained wolves.

Kenny Coogan: Are they pollinators?

Christine Wilkinson: I feel like I've heard that, but I don't. I'm not a mained wolf expert. However, if you haven't, if you're listening now and you haven't looked up what a [00:16:00] maned wolf looks like, please do yourself a favor. Yeah.

Kenny Coogan: Do you know if any mammals in North America pollinate?

Christine Wilkinson: I think there are some bat species that are pollinators.

I'm not sure. I know there are a lot of insect eating bats that live in urban areas. I don't know which of the pollinator bats are living in urban areas, but they do exist.

Kenny Coogan: All right. We're gonna take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor and we'll be right back.

Kenny Coogan: Welcome back to Mother Earth News and friends.

Myths About Urban Wildlife

Kenny Coogan: I am Kenny Coogan, and we are talking with Dr. Christine Wilkinson about urban wildlife conservation and how homesteaders can coexist with wildlife in meaningful sustainable ways. Christine, let's tackle some common myths. What are some misconceptions about urban wildlife? That you wish were more, that you wish more people understood, [00:17:00] especially those trying to live in a sustainable lifestyle.

All I envision is a little raccoon tipping over the garbage can. When we think about urban wildlife,

Christine Wilkinson: They are so good at that. Okay. I would say all of the misconceptions about urban wildlife that I might list out are linked back to this idea of people wanting to be separate from nature. Now, I don't think the audience listening to this podcast feels that way. So we're starting from a different level here of folks who really are interested in sustainability and in coexistence. But people think of these urban spaces, especially to some extent suburban spaces, as these spaces where wildlife shouldn't be and people should be. And the there are like these acceptable.

Wildlife species that we like to see in cities. And the ones that are like, oh gosh, if I see it, it must mean it's rabid or something's wrong. And like acceptable ones are things like butterflies and honeybees and different song word species and unacceptable as I saw raccoon nearby in the trash.

And I am [00:18:00] so livid about that. So those are the kinds of, sort of separations and acceptability things that we hear that underpin all of our misconceptions about urban wildlife. So number one misconception is that these urban mammals don't belong there. When in fact, cities are obviously a part of their adapted range.

Whether or not we've. Had a hand in making cities more amenable to these animals by leaving our trash out everywhere and feeding feral cats and all these other things we can argue all day about. But I think the evidence shows us that's the case. And a lot of the time I hear things like they weren't here before.

Sure it is true. Coyotes have expanded their range to the east coast over the past century or so. But here in California, I still hear that coyotes weren't here before. And they were here and they were killed off, and then they came back because they're resilient and behaviorally flexible to do that.

And that's the case for a lot of urban wildlife is that they do actually belong in these spaces and they've just been able to make it work despite what we throw at them. And that annoys [00:19:00] us. So they do belong. Another misconception I hear is people will get really frightened when they have.

An encounter with an urban mammal they're worried something must be wrong. And that's like kind of a misconception as well. So not all encounters are aggressive or something's wrong, or there's a disease going on. A lot of these species, the, these individuals will just avoid direct conflict. And they're just living their lives and it can be frightening for us to actually run across them.

And there are a number of different things that you can do to help prevent any sort of negative encounters. And all encounters are not negative. Another misconception I hear is that we should be able to remove the animals from the cities, right? We should reduce their populations, relocate them, or lethally, remove them, and all will be well again because we can stay separate from these mammals.

Removal is not effective. Whether you're talking about relocation or lethal removal, most of these animals, their populations will bounce back. And so ideally you are, quote unquote, going to [00:20:00] train your resident wild mammals how to not be habituated to you, right? Rather than killing them off and having to do that over and over again when they come back, even if you wanted to do relocating these species in most states, I believe is illegal, right? It counts as harassing wildlife. And for an animal that's territorial like a coyote, for instance you would essentially be dropping a coyote if you could catch it, which they're very difficult to catch. You'd be dropping that coyote into another coyote's territory and probably sentencing it to a slower death anyway.

So it's not really ethical either, even though it seems like an ethical option on the surface. Then the other thing that I see is people are worried. This is the last one I'll say, and there are many more. People are really worried that feeding that they need to feed wildlife because these wildlife don't have any food.

That's like the number one thing is that people are like, they mustn't have any food. They're hungry, they're thirsty. They need me. To feed them. And unfortunately, that only leads to habituation and likely to conflict. As we say, fed wildlife equals dead wildlife. These animals are usually fine. They're in the city for a [00:21:00] reason, they're making it work.

Without your help. And your help can lead to detrimental issues, not just for the wildlife, but also for people. If there are increases in conflict.

Kenny Coogan: I mentioned that my background was doing free flight bird shows at different zoos and aquariums across the US and one of the things that we never wanted to say was the grip strength of a raptor. We would never wanted to say oh, they can squeeze this much PSI per foot. But instead we would say, "oh, this Redtail talk can eat 200 mice in a year." We didn't want them to say, oh my goodness, they have 500, PSI per foot.

Because then when they see them in their backyard, they're gonna say, wonder if 500 PSI is strong enough to pick up my pet chihuahua or small cat. But we did want them to remember "oh wow the reason why this animal's important is because it takes care of 200 mice a year."

Advice on Educating Neighbors on the Importance of Urban and Suburban Wildlife

Kenny Coogan: [00:22:00] Before the break, you were mentioning like all of the positive roles, native mammals and native animals play in urban settings around homesteads. Do you have any other advice on how homesteaders can educate their neighbors and local communities about peaceful coexistence? I go to these library talks once a month and they teach us about organic practices and things like that.

But I always mention we need to be telling our neighbors about this too, when they're spraying their yard or their non-native grass yard. And then it comes into our property.

Christine Wilkinson: That's so true. I'm glad you asked because some parts of my work on coexistence and I work on human wildlife coexistence in urban spaces, in rural spaces and everything in between, in various places around the world.

And one thing that we've seen across the board globally is that what your neighbor does can influence what you do as far as coexistence goes. And sometimes it's. [00:23:00] Even less about figuring out the exact empirical answer for what works and more about figuring out what can be culturally acceptable, affordable, and building a bit of a coexistence culture around the tools that are out there.

So they, the tools can like proliferate socially. So I would say if you're able to share success stories with your neighbor. Showing that coexistence is possible and beneficial. If you've put in a helpful, I don't know, catio for your cat or sort,

Kenny Coogan: We also have a podcast on that!

Christine Wilkinson: Awesome. Y'all are on top of it. If you've put in a certain type of chicken coop that's really working well and you had some issues before and now you feel better about it, like really sharing like it, I love the stories actually where you're really vexed by something that's happening with wildlife and then you figure out a solution and it actually is a solution for you.

So you can do that informally when you're just chatting with folks. There are a lot of for better or worse, a lot of great ways to connect with your neighbors online, like Facebook and Nextdoor and all of those [00:24:00] that you can be sharing these success stories on. If you're more of an introvert and you don't have easy access to talking to a bunch of neighbors I really like the idea of folks hosting when you're doing things like block parties and that kind of stuff, you really get to know folks, but maybe you could have a wildlife coexistence themed block party where people kinda share what they've experienced and what they're trying out in their homesteads or in their yards and gardens around securing attractants and securing your livestock and all of that. And then the other thing that I think is really important, especially in urban areas is that I mentioned that folks are coming from all different backgrounds, and unfortunately, what you can see is that. The person on this end of the block knows that you shouldn't feed raccoons or put out, leave out food for feral cats that then raccoons and coyotes and so on get into because that can then trickle down into more conflict. And the person over here thinks that the raccoons have no food, right?

And they really don't know any better, even though they are very well-meaning and compassionate toward wildlife. And [00:25:00] so if we're really talking and then what that person does, can influence the entire block, right? Or the entire neighborhood down the road. So if we're sharing these sort of pockets of knowledge and experience together around not just what works for coexistence, but also basic ecology and behavior of these animals I think that what you hear from your neighbor and your friends is gonna stick a lot more than what you hear from someone like a stuffy scientist like myself.

Stop Wildlife From Eating Your Tomatoes and Vegetables

Kenny Coogan: Do you have any advice on how to deal with rats or maybe a small mammal, like eating your tomatoes?

Christine Wilkinson: The fun thing fun or not fun thing about a lot of the species we've talked about, squirrels, skunks, raccoons, coyotes, et cetera, is that behavioral flexibility also means that the individual animal has its own personality and experiences, and that can alter how it behaves toward us, right?

So it's not just my entire population of raccoons in my city does one thing or another. It's one raccoon [00:26:00] can have a certain personality that's bolder and they do this certain thing. My colleague, Dr. Lauren Stanton studies that exact thing, cognition and boldness in raccoons and problem solving and individuals can be very different from one another.

So what you really wanna do is try to prevent these bold phenotypes from popping up, right? From these animals, learning that they can get rewards from people is often what's linked to conflict down the road. And if you can do that for one individual or the whole population in your neighborhood, the better.

So that's gonna be like things like securing your attractants like I've talked about earlier. Things like for squirrels when you're, so a lot of, in a lot of states, secretly feeding birds is actually illegal. And I know the jury's out, especially with bird flu going around harming birds on, but I still have to acknowledge a lot of people do like to feed birds, right?

So if you're gonna do something like that. You're gonna wanna use like tree guards or other things that really prevent the squirrels from getting habituated to your yard and [00:27:00] getting into the bird feeders, and then staying for other things that you don't want them to get into, right? Same thing with securing your gardens.

Using that hardware cloth, thinking about what's underneath the the plants that things can dig into and trying to protect the underneath as well is really important for preventing these animals from getting used to what's going on in your yard.

The Future of Urban Wildlife

Kenny Coogan: So you're mentioning that what your neighbors do could influence you, you could influence your neighbors.

Can we zoom out and talk about how suburban wildlife conservation- what's the forecast for species across the globe? Are there ripple effects from local action? Are we just trying to think positive and it's not really working?

Christine Wilkinson: It's a great question. So I think that you're like touching up against this idea of that I see often, which is that [00:28:00] people living in urban and suburban places think that maybe what they do around their house is important, but it doesn't necessarily scale up to what's important across a landscape or in general. And I wholeheartedly disagree, at least starting, even starting from the philosophical standpoint.

So we know that by 2050 or earlier a whole lot, most of the world's gonna live in urban and suburban places, right? They already do already. And these urban and suburban locations are gonna be our litmus test, our Petri dish, of how we're going to co-exist and create better conservation strategies in human dominated landscapes as we move forward into the next century.

Especially with the onset of more and more climate change and that kind of thing. So how can suburban and urban. Locations and communities be really being the beacons of coexistence and the beacons of conservation in these highly human dominated places and showing that it can work. And so even if you think, okay, [00:29:00] does that really matter?

Does my little ecosystem of raccoons and skunks and coyotes and rats actually matter in the broader scheme of things, what you do really does matter because what you do can inspire folks. Who are just learning how to live with wildlife or who, or wildlife who are just entering these human dominated landscapes that are encroaching on their space. Help those places to know what to do ahead of time instead of reinventing the wheel.

Kenny Coogan: Just watched the Hunger Games, which I think is talking about the future, and they had zero animals in their cities.

Christine Wilkinson: That's so true.

It's true.

Kenny Coogan: 2050 is not very far away.

Christine Wilkinson: It isn't, some folks have actually talked about some of these animals may be having cities as a sanctuary, right? Like a sanctuary for coyotes, which is an interesting thought and I'm sure a very controversial one. But just thinking about how, in this country I think [00:30:00] over half of us states you can actually shoot coyotes on site without a permit. Of any kind or a hunting license. And we don't even know how many coyotes there are in the US because people aren't counting even the dead ones, let alone the living ones.

And there's a lot of historical colonial legacies around killing predators in the country that we're slowly working our way. To figuring out alternatives that are both more effective, less costly, and of course more ethical. And so a lot the folks who are thinking about coyotes as sanctuary or cities as sanctuaries for coyotes are thinking along those lines.

But I'm not sure how, whether urban dwellers would ever all agree on such a thing.

Humans Are Part of the Equation

Kenny Coogan: What's one thing you wish every homesteader or sustainably minded person would do differently when it comes to wildlife?

Christine Wilkinson: I think that if every sustainably minded person was able to recognize that we are part of the equation, humans are part of the equation, part of the [00:31:00] coexistence culture then that would underpin all of the things that I'm talking about about not unintentionally or intentionally feeding wildlife about, thinking carefully about which wildlife can get into their trash bins, educating themselves and their neighbors about the basic ecology and behavior of wildlife so that you can create preventative measures and not end up being completely pissed about the wildlife living near you.

Thinking about planting native plants in the area so that you're local. Miniature ecosystems and food webs can play out naturally within these shared landscapes. And thinking of yourself as a neighbor to wildlife, not just a manager or a ruler of the wildlife and ecosystems around you.

Kenny Coogan: Thank you Christine, so much for your insights. Your work is a powerful reminder that conservation isn't just about protecting remote wilderness it's about reimagining how we live alongside wildlife in our own backyards. Thank you so much.

Christine Wilkinson: Thank [00:32:00] you.

Josh Wilder: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.motherearthnews.com/podcast. You can also email us at [email protected] with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Kenny Coogan, Alyssa Warner, and myself, Josh Wilder.