Corridors

Today's pointless photo is of snow on a rock.

We don't have that much snow now.

Sorry, Toronto office.

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I was reading a paper this morning in the current edition of the Canadian Field-Naturalist detailing how a group of Eastern Coyotes (which are slightly different from the coyotes here in the west. I suppose that's why they're not called Western Coyotes) was able to move between two isolated habitats in a city by using narrow corridors like train right-of-ways. For those not in the conservation business, we often talk about how important corridors or passageways between habitats can be. An isolated habitat acts like an island in that the populations living there often suffer genetic degradation (and other things. Gah. This is starting to sound like one of my old university papers) simply because they are isolated from other populations. Provision of corridors can help prevent or at least slow down the island effect, and the paper I was reading made the point that even micro-corridors can be important to the movement of wildlife.

I was almost more struck, though, by the paper later on in the same edition that described the death of the study's coyote family by an unthinking jackass who decided to illegally poison them. The poisoning itself was pretty disgusting, but what interested me was that there were obviously people in the neighbourhood who had taken an interest in the coyotes and were hurt or at least bothered by the unnecessary destruction. That this came through even in fairly dry scientific writing -- and believe me, I've read enough dry scientific writing to have a feel for it -- was something.

People cared about those coyotes. They were willing to give the scientists information about the animals' movements while they were alive, and they weren't happy about the deaths. Apparently some people in the neighbourhood had even been feeding the coyotes to help them through the winter.

So what was it that made people interested in a family of coyotes living in a cemetery? Coyotes are often considered pests, and in urban environments can be blamed for everything from spreading disease to eating pets. Did these particular coyotes just happen to live in a neighbourhood of nature lovers? Did people become interested in them when they noticed they were wearing radio collars and being monitored? Did the scientists' enthusiasm for the coyotes rub off on the coyotes' neighbours?

Hey, look! It's questions! And what follows questions, boys and girls? Me saying I don't know, of course.

Well, I don't know. There are lots of corridors that can lead people to become interested in things they might not have cared about (or even disliked) before. Shared enthusiasm, seemingly out-of-place things like coyotes in a city, general curiosity... they can all help people to a greater understanding of the life around them in just the same way that a railroad track can help a coyote get to the next greenspace.

The hard part is figuring out which corridors are the likeliest to lead somewhere, I suppose.

And that's what I try to remember when I'm in the middle of trying handling yet another group of school kids who may not seem to care about anything but the fact that they're on a field trip. You never know what might cause someone to discover a corridor.

You never know where it might lead them.






And you know, that's a pretty neat thing when you think about it.