Ever think, while watching a flock of pigeons spackle a statue white or while scraping up the trash that raccoons spilled to get at your leftover lasagna, that you were watching evolution in action? Not a pretty picture, right?
The subject of trash animals – the pest species overrunning your neighborhood, those uncharismatic, unloved critters unlikely to be nominated as spokes-animals for environmental causes anytime soon – arose for me during a late-night drive early this summer. Piloting his behemoth SUV through Eugene’s upscale South Hills, my fishing buddy, Steve, pondered his neighborhood deer problem. The overabundant animals were wreaking havoc in the neighborhood; “Horned rats,” he called them. He was at his wit’s end trying to keep them out of his prized organic tomatoes.
We pulled up next to his sprawling house – a symphony of picture windows, open spaces and wood trim. As if on cue, a small, velvet-horned buck materialized in the headlights beside Steve’s ornamental front-yard pond. Leading me into the house, he told me it wasn’t just landscape-destroying deer that plagued his neighborhood. Hormonally charged wild turkeys flocked out of the hills every mating season, their lusty serenades raising a racket.
In my low-rent, decidedly bohemian neighborhood we have no deer or turkeys. But we do have a surfeit of crow-related noise pollution … and there are the raccoons. Oh yes, the raccoons. Raccoons don’t seem liked they’d be much of a problem, until they’ve snatched the bug-eating fish from your garden pond or ripped out the bottom of your five-year-old’s new wading pool during an impromptu late-night belly-flopping contest, which, by the way, is neither as far-fetched nor as infrequent as one might think. It only takes one time getting between a raccoon and the cat food dish to know that they’re not the cuddly, fur-faced cherubs they play in the movies. They’re more like rank-smelling, undersized bears with Napoleon complexes. At least we don’t have cockroaches, though I’ve lived in plenty of places that did.
It seems that compared to animals you see every day, encountering a rare creature that most people haven’t seen, or an animal that our grandkids probably won’t get the chance to see at all, taps into something wild, something primordial within us. No one thinks twice about the squirrel, dropping half-eaten acorns from the grandly spreading branches of the driveway oak, nor the gaggle of crows feasting on road-kill down the street. But it’s a world of difference to see rare animals, the ones pushed to the edge of extinction. Mention that you’ve just bumped into a giant tortoise or a Blue Footed Booby and you’ll surely capture someone’s attention.
Sadly for rarities such as these, the avalanche of extinction isn’t slowing and nature’s uncommon species seem to be increasingly at the losing end of the deal in terms of evolution. The prospect of global climate change adds nothing but doom and gloom to the picture.
Looking ahead, maybe the everyday animals we scoff at and complain about will be all that are left in the not-too-distant future. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate the trash animals. Their staying power is certainly something to be respected.
Take the planetary longview. Mass extinction is nothing new, evolutionarily speaking. The cause of the most recent wave, human industrialization of the planet, however, is. The geological record is littered with mass extinction; think of the Permian or the Cretaceous periods. Think of all the exotic species we meet only in fossil records. Catastrophes have happened before; climates have changed and so many of those fantastic animals didn’t make it. They didn’t adapt. Nature has a nasty habit of creating a dizzying array of species and then wiping the slate clean.
Well, almost. Some species, through their tenacious adaptability, have hung on every time. Species like the decidedly uncharismatic mini-mammals that outlived the dinosaurs. They made it through the dramatic changes of the past and flourished. Their descendants, ourselves included, populate the planet today.
We don’t usually think of our human habitat – our cities, suburbs and towns – as nature. But the fact is, we’re rapidly replacing the places we do think of as nature with that kind of habitat – human centered habitat. Those annoying trash animals, products of nature as they are, have been able to adapt to our habitat, our appropriation of nature. They are the ones that will be around when we’ve curbed our destruction and finally learn how to live in balance with nature again … or when climate change curbs us.
Those wonderfully adaptable pests will radiate out into all the newly created or newly vacant habitat niches and evolve into the next batch of critters our descendants will ooh and aah at. If we’re lucky, or adaptable, enough, that is.
We should go on appreciating the charismatic, vanishing species of today and continuing to make sure less of them vanish. But, at the same time, we’d better rethink the way we feel about the resilience of the trash animals, even if we can’t keep them out of the tomatoes or the kiddie pools.
Ephraim Payne is an environmental journalist and University student