Protect urban wildlife with smart measures

There are days when encounters with other people in Ottawa can be most unpleasant. For instance, when you're jogging or biking in your lane and someone in a car decides they only need to look one way before making a right turn and nearly takes you out of the game. And it's not even the most egregious behaviour displayed by Local Area People Behind Steering Wheels.

But when they're interacting with nature instead of driving, the humans who call Ottawa home are a fine bunch indeed. Full of care, concern and empathy, as you can read in the just-released wildlife survey conducted before a planned review of our 2013 Wildlife Strategy. The majority of us want wild animals to be protected and for the municipal government to be proactive in ensuring human-wildlife encounters are positive for all involved.

We're not just talking bunnies munching on your dandelions, skunks taking up residence under your back deck or the notoriously evil Canada geese. There's a lot of Ottawa that's near areas where wildlife includes large bears, coyotes and oh so many deer.

Ottawa residents insist on resolving human-wildlife conflicts in ways that preserve the safety of animals. And I agree, at least in theory. In my experience, it's remarkable how quickly wildlife enthusiasts can change their minds when rodents invade their own personal basement. One's position on this issue is often context-specific.

The large coyote that strolled past me one early morning as I was waiting for a bus didn't need to be chased away. It was already on its way to somewhere else and posed no threat to me. I might feel differently if the same fella came sniffing around a backyard where toddlers splash about in a kiddie pool.

That's why black-or-white solutions don't always work so well.

Certainly some measures are no-brainers and should be adopted right away, such as bird-friendly design guidelines to reduce the number of birds killed when they fly headfirst into a window. The survey also included suggestions that the city offer training and public education programs to help residents learn how to better manage wildlife encounters, which I'm sure is necessary. There also were “significant concerns” expressed over the lethal trapping of beavers. Concerns that were shared recently by Citizen readers, aghast to hear that we kill 150 of them every year.

Good wildlife management is something the people of Ottawa say they want. I'm not a specialist, but cursory research into this subject strongly suggests there are innovative and creative ways to design our environment so as to minimize negative interactions between species, including sponge parks, wildlife passages or flow devices — three measures that happen to have been suggested by well-informed Citizen readers. Ottawa's renewed wildlife strategy should lean heavily into those innovative ways to prevent or manage conflicts and to avoid harming animals.

The key is to move beyond simplistic choices, which is true in other areas as well.

For instance, New York City just opened the Office of Livable Streets, the first of its kind in the United States, that aims to “create streets that are beyond the binary,” according to the office's associate deputy commissioner Sean Quinn. It's not about cars versus not-cars. It's about creating “a place for community, a place for activity, a place for cycling, a place for pedestrians, commerce, commercial development, all of that stuff.”

There's a million of us humans in this town, and who knows how many species of animals, all sharing the same space. It's not humans versus beasts. Or pedestrians versus drivers. Most of us want to be safe and wish the same for others. There are ways to design our shared spaces to maximize pleasant encounters and minimize difficult, dangerous and deadly ones. We even know many of the solutions. All we need is the will to implement them.