Episode 4: Cats and Coyotes

(FT Nelson Melendez)

Who is tiptoeing past your door tonight? Is it a cat? Is it a coyote? Is it a coyote with a dead cat in its mouth?

Troi and Riana of Your Wild Life‘s Cat Trackers bring da Rouckus and give us a glimpse into the secret lives of our cats, which just happen to be this episode’s synanthropic organism!

Coyote expert Chris Mowry talks coyotes and his own Metro Atlanta Coyote Project (and explains that the cats might actually be low on the coyote menu. Damn).

We also chat with Keith Goldfarb about the new journal, the Urban Naturalist (really, how could we resist?), and about what cities have to offer wildlife.

Bog turtle researcher Nelson Melendez joins us to lend some expertise on tracking and modeling. Our own tranquilized bear, Tony Croasdale, regales us with tales of Old City wild canids and Siamese cats eating Thai geckos.

Want to learn more about urban cats and coyotes? Check out this famous study on their interaction, and this much-less-famous but still fabulous Grid article by yours truly. And if you’re the last urban naturalist on the planet who hasn’t seen that Coy Wolf documentary, here it is.

(Thanks for listening. Here’s that gory Philly coyote photo we promised you)

dead coyote

Welcome to Season One!

UrbanWildlifePodcast01

Welcome to Season One of the Urban Wildlife Podcast, the world’s finest podcast dealing with urban wildlife topics.

We are starting with our first three episodes, and we’ll be posting another one every two weeks until the end of the season. When we’ll that be? We’ve got another seven or eight episodes to go.

Episode 2: Right under our noses?

(FT “President” Tykee James)

Wildlife can be big, and wildlife can be small. In either case it can be right under our noses without our knowing it. In Episode 2, we turn to some of the smaller critters we don’t know are living all around us.

Tony and Billy teamed up with guest host Tykee James, of Wild West Philly, who tells us how to tell a dogwood from the other trees of the forest.

We talk with Isa Betancourt, whose insect sampling project with the Academy of Natural Sciences featured a historic fountain in Center City Philadelphia. Here’s a photo of her badass cuckoo wasp.

Betancourt CuckooWasp Profile

We joined Billy on an urban forest expedition to see Philadelphia’s other Rocky, the common but secretive southern flying squirrel.

113014.flyingsq.2

Last we get to the Kirtland’s snake, nearly-endangered, but oddly common in Midwestern Cities. It hasn’t been seen in 50 years in Pennsylvania. Will 2015 be the year that citizen scientists find it in Pittsburgh? We talk with Brandon Ruhe of the Pennsylvania Amphibian and Reptile Survey, and Ohio herper extraordinaire Peter Kleinhenz.

https://flic.kr/p/e89DYH

(photo Peter Kleinhenz)

Check out these Grid articles for more on Wild West Philly, Temple University’s bird-strike prevention work, and the Swann Fountain Insect Survey.