Betsy Mason

What urban wildlife can teach us about cognition, survival and how to be good neighbors. Standing in a thicket of poplars, surrounded by tangled brush and magpie chatter, there’s an air of wilderness. But reminders of the urban world beyond the trees are everywhere: the whir of a passing car, a dog’s bark, a discarded sneaker. “That shoe’s been around for a long time,” says wildlife biologist Sage Raymond. “I have a really cute picture of a coyote pup chewing on that shoe.” This remnant of forest sits on the sprawling northwestern edge of Edmonton, Alberta, surrounded by two-story, vinyl-sided homes with tidy lawns. At about two hectares (4.5 acres), the pocket park is small enough that we never completely lose sight of the surrounding houses through the leafless, late-winter trees. Yet it’s big enough to hide two coyote dens. The morning is sunny and uncharacteristically mild for mid-March as we tramp through the crunchy remains of snow, which up until a few days earlier obscured the carpet of dead leaves and was crisscrossed with