XI. Feral Cities: Adventures with Animals in the Urban Jungle


Street Hunters: Living with Boars and Raccoons in Berlin

Wild boars are just one member of what Derk calls Berlin's "big five,” the animals that cause the most complaints. Red foxes and rabbits are also members of this club of troublemakers, as are

the stone martens. Also known as beech martens, these weasel-like omnivores are just under half the size of a domestic cat and have fur that ranges from dark brown to a pale stony brown. Traditionally these nocturnal creatures live in forests and mountains, but these days are they equally at home in the cities and towns of central Europe.

Stone martens were first seen in cities back in the 1940s, but unlike the boars and foxes, they rarely get fed by people despite their cute faces. Instead, they have retained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, seeking out fruit, birds, and rodents to eat. Their diet varies from city to city. In the Polish city of Kraków, birds top the menu with pigeons the prime target, but in Budapest scavenged fruit is the number-one snack.

One problem caused by the urban martens is that they set up homes in attics and empty buildings, since the rock crevices and trees they use as dens in the wild are in short supply. But it is not their homemaking that has secured their place among Derk's big five; it's their obsession with cars.

The martens' car fetish started in the Swiss city of Winterthur, about thirty miles northeast of Zürich. It was 1976 and all across the German-speaking city people were getting up in the morning and finding that their cars, which worked fine the day before, wouldn't start. When mechanics checked the vehicles, they found a wide range of damage in the engine compartments. Some of the cars had severed ignition cables or mangled electric cables. Others had sliced up windshield washer tubes or shredded noise insulation mats.

Oddly, none of the damage could be explained by wear and tear. It seemed as if someone was deliberately sneaking around the city at night, opening hoods, cutting cables, and tearing up insulation mats. The mystery was finally solved when a biologist was asked to check the damage and found teeth marks in rubber tubes and hair that proved stone martens were the malicious car wreckers. The discovery only made the mystery more intriguing. Why were the stone martens destroying cars? And why just the ones in Winterthur?

The initial theory was that the martens were eating car parts, but the lack of missing pieces from the scene of their crimes quickly disproved that idea. Some thought the martens might be entering engine compartments because of the warmth, but the tests showed that this wasn't the case either. Others suggested they were resting in the cars, but this was found to be too rare an occurrence to explain the number of attacks. Another study tried to see if juvenile martens were inflicting damage while playing, much like a puppy might try eating shoes before realizing that footwear isn't very tasty. But, again, the evidence was scant.

While the biologists continued to struggle to solve the mystery, something strange began to happen. First, the attacks on cars became more frequent and then they began to spread beyond Winterthur. By the 1990s the stone martens in southern Germany and the French-speaking cities of western Switzerland were also using their sharp teeth to damage cars. Since stone martens live throughout mainland Europe, the steady outward spread of the behavior from Winterthur could only mean one thing: the stone martens were teaching their young to attack automobiles, passing down the ritual from generation to generation.

Since then the car attacks have spread throughout Germany and been embraced by urban stone martens in Austria, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Poland. Within the past decade, the martens in Budapest have also joined the car frenzy.

Mercifully, the martens do not bite through brake lines, but the damage they do to cars hits people hard in the wallet. In 2007 Germany's stone martens damaged a hundred and eighty thousand vehicles, resulting in a $55 million repair bill. Such is the cost that a mini-industry of anti-marten devices has been created in response to the threat. These protection systems range from high-tech tricks, such as UV lights for the bottom of cars and electric defences that zap any marten that gets too close to the engine compartment, to more homespun solutions such as using chicken wire to keep the creatures out.

Changes in car design have also helped to keep the problem in check. Many modern cars have engine compartments that are harder to access, which helps to keep the martens out.

On the plus side, at least the scientists have now worked out why the stone marten has turned against the automobile. The clue that cracked the case was the seasonal pattern of the damage. Most attacks take place in the spring and early summer, which is when these normally solitary animals are busy with preparations for their July to August breeding season. In preparation for finding a mate, stone martens become increasingly territorial. They start expanding their range, claiming as much of the city as they can by marking their turf with urine, and start to patrol the boundaries more and more frequently.

It turned out that as part of these territorial patrols, martens were running from parked car to parked car, doing handstands and peeing on the rear axles to signal to any intruding marten that this area has already been claimed. The problem with the martens' plan is that cars move. So when a marked car is taken into another marten's territory, the smell of the rival's urine provokes it into attacking the vehicle.

But although the behavior is now understood, it is a habit of urban wildlife that central Europeans are just going to have live with. "From time to time it's not easy to live with the marten, but on the other side there is no possibility of abolishing them," says Derk. "If you hunt them, they are replaced by marten after marten after marten. We have no chance of a world free of marten."

 

The final member of Derk's big five wild troublemakers is an animal that shouldn't even be in central Europe: the raccoon.

Their presence there is fashion's fault. Back in the middle of the 1920s, full-length raccoon fur coats became all the rage in the United States. The craze started when Ford Model T owners took to wearing the distinctive black and gray coats to keep themselves warm when driving in the winter. In the process, these wealthy car owners turned raccoon pelts from the cut-price choice of frontiersmen to a symbol of aspiration. So, when celebrities like the Chicago Bears' halfback Red Grange and teen idol Rudy Vallée adopted the look, Ivy League college students rushed to embrace the fad.

Soon big, thick raccoon coats were everywhere, joining the Charleston and flappers as an icon of Roaring Twenties youth culture. America's new look did not go unnoticed in Germany, where the young fashionistas of the Weimar Republic also adopted the raccoon look. But imported coats from the United States were expensive, so enterprising farmers started bringing raccoons over to Germany so they could breed them for their fur.

One of these fur farmers was Rolf Haag, who lived in the state of Hesse in central Germany. As well as being a farmer, Rolf was a keen hunter, and after becoming familiar with raccoons through his business, he began thinking it would be great fun to hunt them. Trouble was there were no wild raccoons in Europe, so Rolf decided to change that. He contacted the local forest supervisor and persuaded him that releasing these bandit-faced creatures would not only provide good sport but also make the local fauna more interesting. On April 12, 1934, Rolf released four raccoons-two males and two pregnant females-close to the Edersee Reservoir, some fifty miles west of the city of Kassel.

Rolf's release was only the start, and when a stray bomb hit a fur farm east of Berlin in 1945, the raccoons staged their own great escape with around twenty fleeing into the forests. Today, there are around a million descendants of Rolf's quartet and the farm escapees living in central Europe. Most live in Germany, but they have also spread to every neighboring country as well as Hungary and Slovakia.

As in North America, where city raccoons have been around for more than a hundred years, Europe's raccoons are supreme urban adapters, moving into cities such as Kassel and Berlin as well as spreading around the countryside. Derk estimates there are around six hundred raccoon "families" living in Berlin, representing at least a couple thousand individuals.

The city's most famous raccoon was Alex. His moment in the limelight came in 2008 when he moved into the underground garage of the thirty-nine-story Park Inn hotel in Alexanderplatz. After the raccoon was spotted raiding the trash cans of the nearby Burger King, the hotel manager saw a PR opportunity. The manager named the raccoon Alex after Alexanderplatz and informed reporters that while he was very proud the animal had chosen the Park Inn, he wanted someone to get rid of his unusual guest.

It did not take long before Derk got wind of the plan to throw Alex out of the hotel. “About twenty minutes after he sent out the news release, the first newspaper rang me up. What the hotel manager didn't know is that relocating the raccoon is not allowed." Raccoons might not be endangered or even part of Germany's natural wildlife, but the law was clear: Alex could not be removed.

"It created waves the poor hotel owner would never have imagined,” says Derk, who thinks Alex came from a group of raccoons that live near the Brandenburg Gate. "There were tens of reporters and television news crews outside the hotel, and they all wanted to film the raccoon. I called up the boss of the hotel and told him that he was not allowed to tell people to come and capture a wild animal-it doesn't work like that."

The hotel had no choice but to let Alex stay free of charge. "Alex ended up staying there for a year and a half before he left for another part of the city to find a wife," says Derk. "But for that year and a half the hotel manager would get calls and cancelations from people who told him, 'You're this bad, bad owner who wants to get rid of the raccoon and I don't want to stay in a hotel run by a killer.""

As Alex's stay in Alexanderplatz shows, raccoons get by just fine even in the most urbanized areas. A large part of the raccoon's urban success is down to its sharp intelligence and its front paws, which are similar to human hands and allow raccoons to open garbage cans, jars, and refrigerators as well as turn doorknobs and use water spigots. Their cleverness and dexterity also makes them a nuisance as they break into attics through weak points in wood-framed houses, rifle through bins, and use pet doors to enter homes.

Despite the problems, Derk admires raccoons. "I like raccoons. They are so pretty and so intelligent-they are the most intelligent mammals in Europe. They can smell with their paws. Where they come from in North America the streams and rivers they use are muddy so they cannot see, so they use their paws to figure out what is worth exploring more. 

"Urban raccoons do the same thing with trash cans. They open trash cans and put their hand on top of it to figure out where to go for the good stuff with their paws."

Raccoons have also turned sewer and storm drains to their advantage. One city where raccoons make the most of the drainage networks is Milwaukee. They are so popular with raccoons as a way of getting around the city that Scott Diehl, wildlife manager at the Wisconsin Humane Society, calls them "the raccoon subway." "They use the storm-sewer system to travel without fear of people and predation, and get in and out through the large sewer grates near curbs," says Scott, who has been helping injured wildlife in Milwaukee for the past twenty-five years. 

But adaptable and clever as they are, raccoons do make mistakes, and each year the Wisconsin Humane Society rescues around ten raccoons who get stuck in sewer grates. One of these hapless raccoons was Blake, who got his head stuck in a grate in 2009 while trying to climb out of a sewer in downtown Milwaukee. "Blake misjudged one grate and got stuck," says Scott. "He made a lot of noise. He was screaming and crying. I had to sedate him to get him free."

Although most of the several hundred raccoons the society helps each year have been hit by cars, they find plenty of other ways to get themselves into trouble too. Among the trickiest raccoons Scott has had to rescue was the one found near the top of the Milwaukee County Courthouse. "There were renovation works and scaffolding set up on the outside of the courthouse. The raccoon climbed up the scaffolding overnight and had gotten up into the rafters of this scaffolding shelter. The workers couldn't do their jobs with the raccoon up there, so we were called on."

Scott soon had to play daredevil, trying to catch the raccoon thirty feet above the ground. "We put up an extension ladder and I put on a safety harness and went up. When I got up to the rafters there was a metal apparatus I was able to click onto so I was comfortable that I wasn't going to fall, and then I had to use a pole snare to capture the raccoon before carrying him down." 

After bringing down the raccoon, the team set him free a short distance away. "We didn't want to take him so far away that he wouldn't know his neighborhood anymore, so we took him to a nearby green space that evening and released him."

 

Derk has his own wildlife rescue stories, the most dramatic of which is the time a red fox took a ride on a U8 subway train. "From what people said it was early in the morning and this young fox, he was perhaps worried by people or a dog. He was running through the street and goes down into an underground station where there was a train standing with the door open. He goes in and the door shuts and the train starts moving while he is inside."

After passengers reported the fare jumper, the train stopped at Hermannplatz, a busy commuter station where two of Berlin's underground lines meet. "At first they wanted to shoot the fox but then they decided no, there are people, press, and electronics inside the train to worry about, so they rang me up," says Derk.

"So they bring me up to the station by police car with the sirens going. I went down and it was full of people. People on the gate, policemen, people from the fire service, more than forty people, and they are all in a half-circle around the fox in the train, which was crying."

Derk told everyone to get out and to clear the stairs leading out of the station. "After a minute or two, I went into the train to check on the fox and it runs through my legs, up the stairs and out." 

While much of Derk's time is spent dealing with the times people and animals clash, he is happy that wildlife is part of life in Berlin. "It's brilliant to see that we are not alone in cities and most people are happy about that," he says.

The challenge is getting those who object to the wildlife to stop feeling threatened. "It is not necessary to change the way we live. It's a change in how we think, to have a coolness, a tolerance. If people are angry about some animal, maybe they do not know about it. The fox, for example, it is not dangerous for the kids and it is normal to have a fox in the city.

"For example, some people came to me and said children are playing in the playground, and every day a young fox comes there. They wanted me to promise that the fox is no danger. So I said, 'I will make a deal with you. If the danger increases we will shoot it.' Then, they say, 'Oh, well, we don't want you to shoot it. Why don't you just take it away?' I said, 'No, we can't just take it away. Where would it go?'”

"The foxes have changed their lives. They have no dens in the soil. They have their dens in the houses or basements. They prefer to look at the garbage and not at the forest."

 

Tristan Donovan, Feral Cities: Adventures with Animals in the Urban Jungle, Chicago Review Press, 2015, 61–68.

Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © Tristan Donovan 2015