Urban Wildlife Podcast on Cats and Coyotes
Posted 20 Sep 2015 / 0
Urban Wildlife Podcast “Episode 4: Cats and Coyotes”
What I really enjoyed about this particular episode of the Urban Wildlife Podcast was the interaction between topics covered. The effects of both cats and coyotes are still largely unknown, even as both animals are fairly common in urban areas. Domesticated cats are pretty easy to track if you have a bunch of enthusiastic cat owners willing to go do-it-yourself and turn their beloved fluffy into a citizen science data point. But are these the right cats to follow? Do feral cats have a bigger impact on small mammals and birds?
And what about coyotes? Can they exert control over mesopredators like domesticated cats, and does that mean that tolerating coyotes is a good way to sustain other forms of wildlife?
What’s great about this episode is that it gets pretty deeply into all that we don’t know, and just how hard it is to get good data, even on species that are right under our noses in major urban centers.
A Minor Post, Animal Domestication, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Birds, Canids, Coevolution, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Felids, Habitat Fragmentation, Methods, Predation, Radio & Podcasts, Temperate Forest, Tracking, Urban Ecology