There are animals hiding in New York City, and ecologist Myles Davis plans to find them.
The biggest city in the US might seem like the last place to find wildlife, save for rats and pigeons. But ask Davis about biodiversity in the area, and he is eager to tell you that the city is teeming with fascinating creatures.
“New Yorkers – we just don’t really know what’s in the city,” says Davis, who grew up in Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough. “No one really knows what’s around. No one really knows how species are changing over time.”
Advertisement
Davis is trying to change that. He and I spent a July day checking on the largest-ever camera survey of wildlife in the New York City area. As part of his master’s work at Columbia University, he placed 40 motion-activated cameras in a 50-kilometre-long stretch of land preserves in Long Island, just outside of the city. We drove east out of Brooklyn and through suburban neighbourhoods of Long Island’s Nassau County, and the concrete-clad landscape faded into one punctuated by forested land preserves.
If all goes as planned, the cameras will have caught a glimpse of animals that usually stay out of sight.
The car tires crunch into a gravel parking lot of Stillwell Woods Park on Long Island and we set off into the thick understory to find the first camera. After a few minutes of trekking, we spot it: a camouflaged device fixed at knee height on a tree trunk, the same kind of camera used by hunters to spot game.
Davis unlocks the camera from the tree and opens the protective cover, brushing away a few insects that have moved in. He checks the battery’s charge and notes the total number of photos taken since he set the cameras up 14 days ago. This first camera has more than 1000 images. When Davis sees my excitement, he warns me that the collection probably includes many falling leaves, pet dogs and ankles of passers-by that have unwittingly tripped the cameras.
Despite my eagerness to see what the cameras have captured, it will be weeks before Davis sorts through all of the images he is currently amassing. He must first upload the collection to a publicly accessible website called , which uses machine learning to identify animals in camera-trap images. He showed me highlights from the batch of images he collected the spring, including Eastern coyotes, striped skunks, raccoon and a piebald white-tailed deer.
Davis’ cameras are the latest addition to the (UWIN), a nationwide effort that includes more than 20 camera-trap networks in the US and Canada to better understand how people and animals come into conflict in urban spaces. Camera traps provide an unobtrusive window into how wild animals use urban spaces, which can help guide efforts to improve trash storage, preserve green areas and monitor the spread of zoonotic disease – those that jump from animals to humans
The UWIN devices are deployed in four times a year for 28 days at a time, contributing to the largest repository for urban wildlife data in the world.
This is Davis’ second season using the cameras and he is already finding skittish and secretive creatures that usually avoid detection. “There are skunks and possums in Prospect Park and Greenwood Cemetery – I didn’t think they were there,” says Davis. “In Queens and Nassau [county], we’re seeing some coyotes on camera. If you tell anyone who lived in New York City that there are coyotes here, they’re just going to think you’re making something up. So, to catch some on the camera traps is really rewarding.”
Davis will compile information about species abundance from his images, which he and his collaborators can use to reveal changing patterns of urban wildlife. He is particularly eager to find mesocarnivores – mid-sized meat-lovers like raccoons and possums.
“Mesocarnivores find themselves, more so than other mammals, right in people’s business,” says Davis. “They’re the ones messing with your trash, your pets or sometimes even with people.”
As we check the final camera of the day, I ask Davis if he expects to find a greater abundance of wildlife on the fringes of the city. He says it could be the other way around, especially for trash-loving species. “We might actually see more raccoons closer to the city centre, or only certain species actually appearing in the inner city and not in these outer parts,” he says.
So far, Davis has detected 10 different mammal species, from Virginia opossums and cottontail rabbits, to Eastern grey squirrels and brown rats. He is curious to see if the recent batch of images captured a red fox – something he hasn’t found yet.
Because New York’s green spaces rapidly expanded following the 2007 launch of a project to , the abundance and type of wildlife is probably already shifting – and Davis’ camera traps could reveal how.
One of the reasons he wants to collect this data is to help stem animal-borne disease. In 2009, two Brooklyn residents developed life-changing neurological complications like loss of muscle control and blindness after contracting Baylisascaris procyonis, the racoon roundworm. The parasite hides in the animals’ faeces until it can infect a new host.
And New York’s Staten Island suffered a recent boom in its white-tailed deer population, which has brought residents into close contact with new pathogens such as Lyme disease and the covid-19 variant. Most of the city is still Lyme-free, but that might not hold true if deer start moving into Brooklyn and bringing Lyme-carrying ticks with them.
“We’re lucky here. We can just frolic on the grass,” says Davis, referring to Brooklyn. “But if we have deer that start to move into the city, that changes everything.”
Sign up for Wild Wild Life, a free monthly newsletter celebrating the diversity and science of animals, plants and Earth’s other weird and wonderful inhabitants
