Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City
   Anne Matthews
  2001 North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
    ISBN: 0865475601


Deer in Manhattan, coyotes in the Bronx, wild turkeys flying down Broadway among the traffic & tall buildings of America's most urban terrain, another city -- suppressed & segregated during daylight, exceedingly lively from twilight to dawn -- has begun to stake a new claim.

“For humans and nonhumans to covet the same real estate is no light matter ... nature/culture confrontation is becoming part of urban, suburban, and periurban routine ... Archaeology, history, and the earth sciences all tell us that other citified cultures, in other centuries, met such tests too. Most failed -- some gradually, some with spectacular rapidity -- for reasons already repeating themselves ... Messing too much with the natural world generally hands an urban culture one of three outcomes: a transformed life, a lesser life, a long night...”

Wild Nights is a startling tour of this other New York, revealing how stubbornly nature reasserts itself, adapting its survival strategies to even the most violently resculpted locale.

“Billions of migrating birds rush over North America twice a year, seeking breeding grounds and winter homes, heading north with the spring and south in fall ... Some long-distance commuters like to call to each other as they fly ... you can stand on Wall Street in the small hours and hear the migrants calling, faint and high, as they stream above the sleeping city ... travel[ing] singly, some in groups: a kettle of hawks, a siege of herons, a wedge of swans ... over Manhattan nearly every night of the year...”

This is the first predominantly urban period in Our Story & if we care to come out from our concrete caves & wander about our night time cities, we will witness the confrontation & competition between the natural world & ours, right there, in The Big Apple.

“...to an ecologist, New York is most interesting as an ecotone, a place where natural worlds collide -- northern and southern climate zones overlapping, land melting into ocean, saltwater mixing with fresh. Six natural habitats define the city of New York: estuary, salt marsh, woodland, beach, freshwater river, and prairie. Some of these ecosystems are relics now, like the improbable patch of virgin forest in upper Manhattan's Inwood Hill Park, and some are remakes, like the re-created Eastern grassland at Brooklyn's old Floyd Bennett Airfield...”

Anne Matthews has a keen wit & eye for the absurd & a strange rollicking turn of phrase that keeps you loping along, even as you gasp for a second wind as she explores the everyday occurrences, some charming, some full of dread & some we've badly misunderstood. She examines the implications of this unexpected & powerful resurgence & extrapolates the nature of the fate of a world of megacities & suburban hypersprawl.

“...Being a [land] developer is the only influential American calling -- except for journalism -- that requires no license, and it shows: 80 percent of everything in America has been built in the last fifty years. During the 1990s, development of farmland and forest doubled, to a rate of 3.2 million acres a year. some older industrial cities, like Chicago and Pittsburgh (and New York), try to encourage rehabbing and infilling, but their newer suburbs and exurbs, their galactic spume of housing developments and office parks and malls, are nearly always modeled on low-density, car-mad Sunbelt towns like Atlanta, where fifty acres of forest are felled each day to make suburbs for the 95,000 newcomers who arrive each year; like Las Vegas, which cheerfully admits it will run out of water by 2020; like Phoenix, where raging development devours Sonoran desert at the rate of an acre an hour...”

Consider the horseshoe crab in the sandy coastal waters off New York, Delaware Bay and the Yucatan. Their mad sex life will bring a smile, their mad annihilation will grip your heart.

“...Americans like the low-density life, crave the privacy of the air-conditioned house and heavily watered yard, insist on keeping the car keys, and enjoy the galactic city's scatteration of uses. As geese and deer accept the golf course as habitat and the sport-utility vehicle as predator, so fewer and fewer of us remember a common landscape in four sharp clear flavors: urban, suburban, cultivated, wild. The edge of town is becoming an idea from the postwar past, like dialing a phone, or putting on a record; suburban cul-de-sacs once rimmed by cornfield or woods now border only on other cul-de-sacs. Our only constant is the car culture...”

In considering our darling & ubiquitous neighbor -- the white-tailed deer, we must remember the 30,000 or more kills they rack up as we heedlessly barrel along in our autos. That's 30,000 of us dumb humans getting offed by Bambi's daddy! & don't forget the car-moose collisions which the moose, weighing in at nearly a ton, usually wins, sort of.

Consider the curious, well fed & bored coyotes who now number twice as many as before America's Civil War. Then consider the city rat, consider it well for it is “...what every epidemiologist fears: an omnipresent, intelligent carrier with a track record. Rat saliva, rat droppings, and rat fleas all carry disease, from typhus to plague to rat-bite fever. The city of New York has eight million people, but twenty-eight million Norway rats, maybe more -- some rat gurus claim four for every human, others think a more accurate rat/human ratio is six or seven or even eight to one...In Brooklyn, rats have been observed jumping into subway cars, waiting politely under the seats, then getting off at the next stop...you go home to your small expensive apartment, stare at the brick on your toilet, and brood...”

Anne Matthews' Wild Nights: Nature Returns to the City is a grand read! A fascinating unusual journal with a unique perspective of the life & times of our natural kin, making their way around our roaring cities & our hurried human existence, busy about their business just as we are about ours.

Very, very well done -- much to think about, much to chortle at & much, much to be regretful about. You should give yourself a treat & buy this one for your city nights will never be the same after you've spent a few hours with Anne Matthews & her Wild Nights.

More from Anne Matthews: Where the Buffalo Roam & Bright College Years.
(08/19/01)

Rebecca