Urban Wildlife Biology
Writer Gavin Van Horn spent a day in the field with Seth Magle, a wildlife ecologist at Lincoln Park Zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute, riding along as he checked motion-triggered cameras across Chicago. The result is a vivid, ground-level look at what urban wildlife research actually involves: downloading camera data in cemeteries and golf courses, navigating drug-dealer-occupied parks, and stumbling upon mink living beside a creek littered with discarded 1980s televisions.
Magle leads the Urban Biodiversity Monitoring Project, which uses roughly 120 cameras placed across the city to build a comprehensive picture of Chicago's wildlife. The cameras have captured everything from coyotes and white-tailed deer to flying squirrels and beavers. Because the volume of images is too large to process alone, the team partners with citizen scientists through the Chicago Wildlife Watch platform.
The piece also touches on a broader tension in the field. Urban ecology has long been treated as less legitimate than research conducted in remote or exotic locations, and Magle faced that skepticism head-on during his doctoral training. But Van Horn sees the work as part of a larger, necessary shift: one that recognizes cities as genuine ecosystems and asks how humans and animals can share them more thoughtfully.
