Shrinking Habitat Makes Unhappy Neighbors of Suburbanites, Wildlife

When the creek rose almost to the patio and the mosquitoes began to drive his family crazy, Albert McJoynt decided he’d had enough.

He called in a trapper to exterminate the beavers that were homesteading in his suburban back yard.

“It pained me to do that. We love wildlife,” says McJoynt, who moved into this wooded neighborhood outside Washington 12 years ago. “But when animals start destroying your house, you have to do something.”

McJoynt is one of a growing legion of suburban homeowners who complain that nature is squeezing a bit closer to their neighborhoods than they’d like.

Residents of Princeton, N.J., will decide soon whether to decrease the town’s overgrown deer herd. The animals wander through residential areas, nibbling on valuable bushes and trees. They’ve caused hundreds of automobile accidents.

The slopes surrounding some Western mountain communities are bristling with cougars, some of which slink into back yards to stalk pets--and occasionally people. Earlier this year a mountain lion killed a jogger in Idaho Springs, Colo.

Wildlife invasions of suburbia usually aren’t that traumatic, but they are becoming more common. Wildlife biologists explain the trend as an animal housing problem that will only grow worse with increasing development.

Every year the United States loses 1.5 million acres of natural lands. Since the turn of the century, 90% of the nation’s wetlands have been paved or drained.

Many bird and animal species have dwindled or disappeared. But Canada geese, white-tailed deer, beavers, coyotes, armadillos and about a dozen other animals are setting up housekeeping in America’s back yards and pocket parks.

“The most adaptable species establish themselves in the suburbs,” Lowell W. Adams, a research biologist for the National Institute for Urban Wildlife, tells National Geographic.

Metropolitan America has welcomed them. Hundreds of communities have set aside areas for wildlife. In the past three years, the wildlife institute has helped 65 organizations set up comprehensive in-town animal refuges.

Individual homeowners have joined in. The National Wildlife Federation receives hundreds of requests a week for its pamphlet on creating a back yard wildlife habitat. Feeding wild birds has become a billion-dollar-a-year business.

So hospitable is the suburban environment that some species fare better there than in the wild. One study found that Washington, D.C., has the country’s densest known population of raccoons.

But success breeds its own problems. With plenty of food, water and cover to sustain them, animals flourish and multiply--sometimes with a vengeance.

Colorado’s mountain lion population, for example, has quadrupled in 25 years. Princeton’s deer herd is six times the size it was two decades ago. In some creeks and rivers outside Washington, proliferating beaver colonies have built dams 50 feet wide.

Burrowing armadillos have churned up lawns throughout the South. Geese and ducks have fouled community ponds in almost every state. Coyotes have rebounded widely, reviving their image as varmints by snatching pets. A child was killed by a coyote in Glendale, Calif., 10 years ago.

Close encounters inspire some remarkably tolerant reactions. A majority of Americans surveyed say they appreciate having wildlife within a mile of their homes.

Coexistence is the animal control officer’s way of walking the line between tolerant public opinion and frustrated homeowners who want animal pests removed immediately. Callers are told how to live around nuisance animals by using physical barriers or non-chemical repellents like hot pepper sauce.

“Animal populations will always outgrow habitat,” says Bobby R. Acord, chief of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s animal control division. “Communities must start looking ahead to how they’ll handle it when it happens--and that may involve lethal control.”

But even lethal control has its limitations, as Albert McJoynt learned in Alexandria.

When neighbor John Travers, an animal rights advocate, heard that beavers were being killed in the creek, he vowed to put a stop to it.

He kept removing the killing traps until the trapper took him to court. When the court ordered Travers to desist, he slept by day so that he could spend nights by the creek, shunting the animals away from the traps with a long pole.

The feud finally ended when Travers trapped the last remaining beaver alive and transported it to a secret location. But Travers and McJoynt know that they’ll probably tangle again.

“This is a prime beaver location. There’ll be more,” says Travers. “But killing them is not the way we’re going to deal with it.”