Your City Is Wilder Than You Think

Urban wildlife, Chicago coyotes, city ecology, biodiversity, AI, camera traps, rats, climate change, and conservation are revealing a hidden ecosystem all around us.

Most of us do not think of a city as an ecosystem.

But underneath the traffic, buildings, sidewalks, and millions of people is another city entirely.

Coyotes move through neighborhoods without being noticed. Flying squirrels live in Chicago cemeteries. Beavers, muskrats, raccoons, deer, rats, birds, and countless other species have figured out how to live alongside us.

My guest today is Dr. Mason Fidino, senior quantitative ecologist at Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute and faculty member with the University of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology.

Mason uses mathematics, statistics, computer programming, camera traps, acoustic monitoring, satellite imagery, and increasingly AI to answer a deceptively simple question:

Where are animals actually living in our cities?

We talk about how scientists track coyotes across Chicago, why diseased coyotes behave differently, how artificial intelligence is processing millions of wildlife images, and why rats are forcing us to rethink the way cities approach pest control.

But this conversation goes beyond wildlife.

We explore how green space can benefit both people and animals without contributing to green gentrification, why cemeteries and golf courses can unexpectedly become important wildlife habitat, and how climate change is already changing the species that can survive in our cities.

One of my favorite ideas from this conversation is simple:

Nature is everywhere.

You do not have to travel to another continent to discover it.

You may only need to walk outside, slow down, and start looking.

Because how can we expect people to care about protecting wildlife across the planet if we do not even know what is living in our own backyard?