Kangaroos, Koalas, and Wombats! Why Don’t They Live In Cities?
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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids all over the world, and it's our job to find people to help answer them. On today's episode, we're going to talk about animals, specifically animals that live in cities.

my name is Elsie I am five years old I live in Sydney Australia my question is why do cities not have many animals like wombats and kangaroos and like koalas and why do you like countryside have like like have so many like kangaroos and like wombats and like koalas

If I had a nickel for every time I've had a wombat in my garden, I would have zero nickels. Wombats only live in Australia. But I do sometimes get black bears coming through my yard. They like to try to get our bees. We keep bees for making honey in my family.

But you see, I live in a very rural part of a rural state, which means I share the landscape with a lot of big wild animals. But in the city where lots of humans live, there are often fewer big animals and animals that are shy or require a lot of territory. In a little while, we're going to answer Elsie's question about why some places have more animals like wombats than others. But first, let's focus in on one particular city-dwelling animal.

You might not recognize that sound because we don't get to hear it very often. These animals are mostly out and about at night. They're nocturnal. They scurry along from trash bin to trash bin dressed like a bandit with a mask over their eyes, stealing leftovers from dumpsters and compost bins. Now, what animal looks like a bandit?

Of course, raccoons! Raccoons live in North America. And in case you don't, let me describe them to you. They're about the size of a big cat or maybe a smallish dog with a pretty solid body. They're covered in brownish-gray fur, and their tails have rings on them. Some people think they're rodents, like squirrels and rats, but they're not. They're actually part of the same family as ring-tailed cats and kinkajous.

Raccoons have hands with five fingers like us, and they can hold and grip things really easily. They are very clever animals, by the way. But the most distinctive feature of a raccoon is that black fur around their eyes that make them look like they're wearing a mask.

Raccoons are wild animals, but a lot of them live in cities. They have adapted very well to living with humans. And that's not always a good thing. Here's a question from Roger. My name is Roger, and I live in Toronto, and I'm four years old. And my question is, why do raccoons eat garbage?

Raccoons have been causing big problems in Toronto. It has one of the biggest urban or city populations of raccoons in the world. Some people say there may be as many as 300 raccoons per square kilometer in Toronto. A kilometer is about two-thirds of a mile.

The city wants people to separate their food scraps from their garbage so the food scraps can be turned into compost, which then turns into dirt and helps other plants grow. But that means there's a lot of good food stuff that raccoons like to eat just sitting there in compost bins. That's probably one of the reasons why raccoons love Toronto so much.

We asked Suzanne McDonald, a biology professor at York University in Toronto, to answer some questions about raccoons. She studies animal behavior, and one of the things she spent a lot of time studying is how raccoons and people interact or live together. So she's in the right city for that kind of work, isn't she? Here's Roger's question again. Why do raccoons eat garbage?

Thanks, Roger. I can tell by your question that you live in Toronto because we are very familiar with seeing raccoons in our garbage bins. Raccoons and humans have a lot in common. We are both called omnivores. That means we can eat everything. Meat, vegetables, fruit, cheese, cookies, potato chips, whatever you've got. Humans and raccoons eat it all. This makes raccoons different from your dog or cat. Dogs or cats, as you probably know, eat mostly meat.

Because raccoons are omnivores, they've been able to survive really well in our cities, which is not the case for most animals. Most wildlife doesn't survive very well in cities, but raccoons do super well, certainly in Toronto. And this is probably because we provide a constant source of food. We put it out in big bins every week or even every day that we fill up. And to us, it looks like garbage, but to raccoons, it looks like a buffet.

They can sort through everything we throw away and pick out all the good bits, the leftovers, the takeout food, the scraps from the table, stale bread, anything that is edible and

to us maybe doesn't look so great, but to a raccoon looks wonderful. And the problem is just like us, they eat a lot of junk food. So things that are high in fat and sugar and salt, and they don't get enough exercise because they live in the city and they have very small territory sizes. They don't, they don't actually walk a lot during the day. So the city raccoons are a lot fatter than their cousins in the country who don't live near humans. So

So we're not doing them any favors by letting them eat our garbage. So we have to make sure that we always keep our garbage cans and our garbage bins securely locked so we can keep our raccoons slimmer and they'll be healthier.

It turns out, though, keeping garbage bins locked is a lot harder than it might seem. That's because raccoons are smart. They can figure out how to get into most bins, even the kind that are designed to keep them out. And Toronto has spent a lot of time trying to design trash bins that raccoons can't figure out how to get into.

But it's not just about keeping the raccoons healthy. When raccoons knock over garbage bins, they cause a big mess, and most people aren't very happy to have to clean it up. As humans try to create more and more difficult-to-get-into trash bins, the raccoons work harder and harder to figure them out. Suzanne MacDonald thinks over time, this back-and-forth between the humans and the raccoons is actually making these city raccoons smarter. Here's another raccoon question.

My name is George, and I'm from Minnesota, and I'm five years old. And my question is, how long do most raccoons live? Thanks for your question, George. Wild raccoons only live for a couple of years, two or three maximum. But raccoons in zoos and captivity can live up to 20 years. So why don't wild raccoons live as long as raccoons that live in captivity?

Well, wild raccoons aren't vaccinated, so they can get diseases like rabies and distemper. And they get parasites, they get worms, they can get sick. And they also have to live outside through the cold winter. So lots of them die over the winter months. If they don't have enough food or they don't have enough body fat, they can unfortunately die. Wild raccoons also get hit by cars. That's probably the number one way that wild raccoons die early is they get hit by cars.

Raccoons in captivity though, they have veterinary care, they get lots of good food, they have a safe place to live and so they can live a really long time. 20 years is longer than most cats and certainly longer than dogs. So raccoons in captivity can live really well. It's just unfortunate that the ones in the wild only live a few years.

Jack had a question about one of the cutest features of the raccoon. I live in New Mexico. I'm six years old. And my question is, why do raccoons have masks? I think the markings on raccoon faces are the reason that we find them to be so cute. They look just like little bandits. But nobody really knows why raccoons have masks. When they're born, their faces are all one color and they don't have a mask at all. It actually develops around the second week of their life, around 10 days of age.

And depending where the raccoons are from or found in North America, they may be really light in color and the masks may not show up as much. But the raccoons we usually see and we think of as raccoons are the eastern subspecies and they have a pretty dark mask.

Again, we don't really know why they have a mask, but we think that the mask might help reduce glare when the raccoons are foraging at night. So raccoons work at night, they find food at night. And just like when you watch a football game and you see sometimes football players put smears of black paint or whatever that goo is that they put on their face to reduce glare from lights,

We think that that may actually work. The black fur of the raccoon's mask may actually help them see better. So it enhances their vision at night.

Personally, I don't know if that's true. I think the mask is there as a way to help raccoons recognize other raccoons. And I know when I'm out observing raccoons, that's the way I can tell the difference between them is their masks are slightly different. And so it makes their faces look different. So if I can tell them apart, I think they probably use it to tell each other apart too. I think that's pretty cool that Suzanne can tell raccoons apart by their face masks. Do you think you could do that?

Raccoons are pretty neat animals, and you might see them if you live in cities or out in the country in North America. The city raccoons are pretty used to humans, so they might not be very scared of you. But they are wild, and they can get diseases, so you should be as careful around raccoons as you would be around any other wild animal. Enjoy watching them, but keep your distance, and try to keep your trash away from them.

Thanks very much to Professor Suzanne MacDonald from York University in Toronto for answering raccoon questions for us. One more thing while we're talking about raccoons. You might have heard someone call a raccoon a trash panda. I didn't actually know this name, but it's kind of a funny thing that I guess people say sometimes. While raccoons might resemble little pandas, they're not actually pandas or even related to pandas. Scientists use family to classify animals into groups.

Pandas are part of the bear family, and raccoons are in their own family. And actually, to make it even more confusing, red pandas, which live in Nepal, China, and Myanmar, are in an altogether different family from both raccoons and pandas. Coming up, we'll talk about why some animals live in cities and others don't.

This is But Why. Today we're talking about urban animals. We spent a lot of time on raccoons, but there are lots of different kinds of animals that live in an urban or city environment. And some animals even seem to do better in cities around humans than they do in the wild. Raccoons might be one of those species. They get food more easily by living near humans. Another ubiquitous city-dwelling animal is the pigeon.

As you might remember from our live show with the bird diva Bridget Butler, pigeons are one of the world's fastest birds. They can fly at over 90 miles an hour. That's faster than cars can drive on the highway. Pigeons are known for their excellent navigation skills. They can find their way back to their nest from over 1,000 miles away from it.

And where there are pigeons, there are pigeon predators, like hawks. In New York City, one red-tailed hawk has been living among the skyscrapers since the 1990s. That means more than 20 years now. And he's so famous, he even has a name, Pale Male. He does live near a big park with lots of trees and squirrels and small birds for him to eat, in addition to all those pigeons.

So that's one reason why these wild animals can exist in the city. If their food sources are there, whether it's crumbs and hot dog buns dropped by hungry humans, or berries, or little rodents, birds, and other animals. Now, rodents. There are a lot of rodents in cities. Mice and rats are also ubiquitous. There's that word again. Ubiquitous. I used it before. Did you catch it?

ubiquitous means everywhere. It's actually one of my favorite words.

Anyway, rats and mice are ubiquitous. If you ever take underground trains known as the subway or the T or the tube or the metro in the cities you visit or live in, you can sometimes see little mice scurrying to and fro. Rodents love cities for some of the same reasons raccoons do. They love to eat our trash and they can fit into small spaces and adapt to almost any environment.

Do you know what a group of rats is actually called? A mischief. I just learned that and I love it. So there are packs of dogs, flocks of geese, mobs of kangaroos, a prickle of porcupines, and a mischief of rats. Of course, cities are also full of insects like ants and bees and flies. And they count as wildlife.

You might see cockroaches scurrying across the sidewalk in the city you live in or visit. Cockroaches have been around for millions of years, and they're pretty indestructible. They can go without eating for a month and without water for two weeks. They can even hold their breath for 40 minutes. There are lots of species of cockroaches, and they live all over the world, even in the Arctic.

Now, many of us will be familiar with rats and mice and cockroaches and sparrows. House sparrows live all over the world, too. They're one of the most widely distributed birds on the planet. But some of the wildlife you see in the cities near you is going to be different from what a kid on another continent sees.

Where I live, in the northeastern United States, we get lots of birds and squirrels and insects in our cities, but they are animals that are already native to our region. And occasionally we get moose or deer or coyotes or other big animals that wander through but don't really live in the city space. If you live in India or Thailand, though, you'll definitely have different birds and insects and maybe monkeys. There are cities in those countries where monkeys have taken up residence.

Sometimes the monkeys get fed by the tourists, and sometimes they steal from them. That brings us back to the question I played at the very beginning of this episode. Our question from Elsie. I am five years old. I live in Sydney, Australia. My question is, why do cities not have many animals like wombats and kangaroos and like koalas? And why do like countryside have like

Like have so many like kangaroos and like wombats and like koalas. We thought we'd better ask an Australian expert for help with Elsie's question. So I reached out to the Australian Museum in Sydney and we got some information back from Mark Eldridge. He studies terrestrial vertebrates. That means land animals with spines at the Australian Museum Research Institute.

There are several reasons why large animals like kangaroos and koalas and wombats are not found in cities. The main reason is that the habitat of these animals, the type of forest or woodland that they live in, isn't found in cities anymore because it has been replaced by shops and houses and roads. Things that we humans have built, our habitat, has replaced their habitat.

Now, sometimes a city will have a big park or lots of trees, and it seems like maybe a good spot for one or two animals to make a home. But Mark Eldridge says a little bit of space just isn't always enough. Even if small patches of bushland or woodland remain in the city, these are often too small for large animals to live in. There simply isn't enough space for them. The city is also a difficult place for large animals to live and survive.

Because with roads and cars and dogs and fences, it is very difficult and dangerous for large animals to move around. Now these things aren't issues in the countryside where there still is large areas of forest and woodland and grassland.

So there is still plenty of habitat for these animals to live in. And so they're much more common out in the countryside than they are in the city. But remember, just because you might live in a city and not have big wildlife like wombats and kangaroos and koalas, it doesn't mean you don't have any wildlife to observe. Although we don't have many of these large animals or any of these large animals, we do have lots of smaller animals that do survive in the city. And if you go to your local park...

or out into your garden, you'll often find a great diversity of animals. There's insects and spiders, there's birds and frogs and lizards, and a whole range of other species that do survive in the city and have learned to adapt. That was Dr. Mark Eldridge, Principal Research Scientist of Terrestrial Vertebrates at the Australian Museum Research Institute. Thanks, Mark.

Hey, remember when I was talking about what different groups of animals are called? I really love finding out the different ways people have come up to describe groups of animals. I actually have a whole book about it. Elsie, you and your brother Bruce might like to know that a group of wombats are called a wisdom. It's a wisdom of wombats and a mob of kangaroos. There isn't a name for a group of koalas, though, because koalas don't tend to move around in groups.

I could go on. There are tons of names for groups of animals, but I promise I will let you go. So that's it for today's episode. Tell us about the animals that like to hang around where you live. Send a note to questions at butwhykids.org.

That's also where you can send your questions. We love getting your questions, and we'd love your suggestions for interesting ways we can feature more of them. Melody and I love making this show, and we don't really have enough time to make more episodes more frequently, but we want to find a way to feature your questions, even if we can't crank out more episodes. Got an idea? Let us know.

And don't forget, have your adults record your questions on a smartphone. Tell us your first name, where you live, and how old you are. We like questions about all kinds of things. You send us a lot of science questions and animal questions, and that's great. But we are open to the whole universe of ideas.

But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. And we have help at VPR from Jonathan Butler, Noah Cutter, Angela Evansy, and many, many others. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PR.