{Photograph} courtesy of Cat Kerr
Sitting on my porch one afternoon, I heard a wierd thud. I regarded up from my laptop computer and noticed a juvenile opossum—sufficiently old to be out by itself, however younger sufficient that it won’t have developed all its survival abilities but—frozen nonetheless and looking out a bit dazed. It had fallen out of a tree and landed in my condo advanced.
The opossum’s choices weren’t nice. To get out, it’d need to both navigate by means of the road and safety gate or climb the fence and cross the barbed wire on the prime. To spare the opossum from danger of harm, I did what any animal lover who has labored in zoos and nature facilities would do: I ran out to the opossum, threw an outdated towel over it, and carried it again to the place it fell from. In the identical tone I exploit to speak to my cat, I inspired it to go dwelling. It hissed at me, then waddled over to its tree and began the ascent.
This animal was my neighbor. I used to be geared up to assist the opossum, so I did—the identical as I’d for another member of my neighborhood.
In fact, there are a lot of sorts of nonhuman residents who name Atlanta dwelling, not simply opossums. It brings me pleasure to stroll round Inman Park most evenings and verify on them. Pigeons peck within the gravel underneath the John Lewis Freedom Parkway bridge, its graffitied concrete partitions reverberating their light coos. Within the mornings, robins and blue jays splash in puddles fashioned from sprinkler runoff simply past my porch. Final spring, I watched a brood of fuzzy mallard ducklings develop up, sharing their pond within the Inman Village Pocket Park with turtles who sunbathed on the floating synthetic logs. Each oak tree appears to host a squirrel, and infrequently once I’m strolling dwelling late at evening, I catch a glimpse of a brown rat boldly venturing out to forage for snacks.
All of us share this place. Town and the wild are one and the identical.
Science has taught us that, like my human neighbors, these animals are people with distinct wants, pleasures, and pains. However not like us, they’ll’t talk their subjective experiences to the general public; nor can they vote, or remark at a metropolis council assembly. They’re constituents of Atlanta, however they don’t have a say in how Atlanta’s fast development and altering panorama will have an effect on them, so it’s as much as us: If there’s one thing we will do to make Atlanta a greater place for wild animals to reside, then I feel we should always. I hope sometime we’ll implement insurance policies that profit them instantly, however for now, we will not less than look out for those in our personal backyards.
Being the Metropolis within the Forest is one thing to be happy with, and it comes with the duty of stewardship. All our neighbors deserve our care and compassion—human or not.
Should you discover a wild animal in want, contact an expert wildlife rehabilitator. For a listing of rehabilitation facilities in Georgia, go to georgiawildlifenetwork.com/rehabbers or view the county-by-county map linked on georgiawildlife.com/sick-injured-or-orphaned-wildlife.
This text seems in our February 2025 problem.
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