Coyotes wandering the car-lined streets just off Inman Square; red-tailed hawks diving for pigeons in the middle of Porter Square. Is Cambridge in the middle of a wildlife invasion?
Mark McCabe, director of the Cambridge Animal Commission, notes that although sightings of hawks and coyotes in the city have steadily increased over the last decade, there has been a particular spike in coyote sightings in recent weeks. Most wild animals venture into the concrete jungle in search of food, said McCabe, who has worked as an animal control officer for 22 years, and the increase in coyote sightings is in part attributable to the same phenomenon.
"A coyote comes into the city and finds rats, mice and garbage," he said. "The city offers them all the things they need - food, water, shelter - without any real threat of predators."
With spring mating season just around the corner, he explained, the coyotes are active not only from dusk to dawn but during the day as well, because they are "looking for food to get ready to mate."
John Maguranis, an animal control officer in neighboring Belmont, tracks coyotes by observing their paw prints and droppings, or scat. He believes that the coyotes seen in Cambridge are members of two main families that den throughout Belmont, Arlington, and Lexington as well. He says the animals' scat indicates they feed predominantly on rabbits and mice.
Coyotes, which resemble medium-size dogs with thicker, usually tawny brown fur, pointed ears and an elongated muzzle, will attack household pets on occasion, McCabe cautioned. As a precaution, domestic animals should be fed indoors and either restrained or supervised when outdoors.
"Coyotes see cats and small dogs as food and they'll see larger dogs as a challenge to their territory," he said.
McCabe, who has two small dogs that he takes outside every evening, recently saw a coyote no more than 40 feet from his own backyard as he stood watch over his pets. After putting his dogs in the house, he followed the coyote - "from a distance and in my car" - to the bike path leading to the Alewife T station.
"He was in the field area and there was a person coming up from the T side, about 100 feet away," McCabe said. "The coyote lifted its head, looked at the person and bolted off into the woods. The person probably never even saw it, never knew it was there."
While coyotes are generally reclusive creatures that flee in the presence of humans, they are often perceived as dangerous predators that will "grab a baby out of a carriage," McCabe said. According to Maguranis, coyote attacks on people are extremely rare.
The animals were noted in Massachusetts 57 years ago, as the product of interbreeding between wolves and Western coyotes. Since then, he said, there have only been three confirmed coyote bites on humans, two of which were by animals infected with rabies. Rabid animals are virtually a species unto themselves, McCabe added, noting that their extreme disorientation - they appear to be "out of their mind" - makes them easy to identify.
"When any of the wildlife are sick, you don't need to be an animal control officer or even someone who is familiar with animals to say, 'That's a sick animal,' " he said. "Their central nervous system is just gone."
According to the state Department of Public Health, which releases annual reports on rabies, the saliva-spread virus affects wildlife species throughout the state.
During the first nine months of 2007, 5.6 percent of all animals submitted for testing had rabies, including one coyote, one dog, and six cats, the agency reported, while 32 percent of the raccoons tested had the disease.
While raccoons are the most frequently sighted wild animal, Cambridge is also home to skunks, bats, and hawks. More elusive species spotted from time to time include possums and, most recently, fishers, members of the weasel family known as one of the porcupine's few natural predators.
McCabe says that most calls he receives from residents about wildlife involve animals getting into exposed garbage materials or taking up residence in open attics or under porches.
"The invention of plastic rubbish bags was probably some raccoon's idea many years ago, whispered into somebody's ear," he said, laughing. " 'Tell everybody to throw their rubbish in plastic bags - these metal trash cans are killing us.' "
"With Massachusetts cutting down 40 acres of land a day . . . animals are being put in a position where they urbanize themselves or they perish," Maguranis said, adding that some city dwellers consider their presence a nuisance. "A lot of people say to me, 'Look, I didn't move to the city to have wildlife in my backyard,' " he said.
McCabe takes a different perspective, noting that many wild animals are indigenous to the region and do not observe city boundaries.
"Even if we remove every wild animal from the city of Cambridge, if we don't do it in Somerville, Medford, Burlington, they're gonna move right back in again. Removal of healthy wildlife is not the correct solution for a problem where two things, wildlife and people, have to live together. . . . We can coexist."
