![]() In contrast, Bjorgaas, a Norwegian expert on lichens, hardly leaves her Oslo neighborhood except for the opening passage where she is working as a tour guide for cruise passengers visiting Antarctica. His chapters on cities conceived as garden paradises, the re-wilding of cities through land reclamation projects, the importance of urban trees and parks for climate resilience, urban food production, and water use are full of statistics and eye-catching examples. Wilson, author of a number of popular histories, soars like a falcon over global cities on five continents while leading the reader through centuries of history. “Secret Life of the City” and “Urban Jungle” differ in the scale and scope of what they narrate. When food runs low in the forests, black bears move into Aspen, Colo. The peregrine falcon lives in Manhattan at the greatest densities of any place in the world. The same is true, Wilson points out, for the gray-headed flying fox in Australian cities or the golden lion tamarin in Brazil. Bjorgaas reports that seagulls in the northern Norwegian islands are near extinction, but great clouds of the endangered gulls mass in Oslo. Foxes, raccoons and coyotes live in greater densities in American cities than they do in rural areas. In “ Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City,” Ben Wilson points out that Chicago’s raccoons have more offspring and are healthier than their country cousins. ![]() But cities aren’t amenable just to the birds. That means humans and crows bump into each other in their daily lives. ![]() They like the same kind of open spaces with just a few trees that humans also enjoy. Thanks in part to these capacities, crows live all over the world and often near human settlements. ![]()
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