99% Invisible - 352- Uptown Squirrel

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities from pioneering expeditions around the globe. But this latest gathering was held to celebrate the first biological census of its kind –an effort to count all of the squirrels in New York City’s Central Park. Squirrels were purposefully introduced into our cities in the 1800s, and when their population exploded, we lost track of how many there are. Uptown Squirrel

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This past fall, 200 people gathered at the Explorers Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse to famed naturalists and explorers. Now it's an archive of ephemera and rarities from pioneering expeditions, from treks to the world's tallest mountains, the North Pole, and the Moon. Woolly mammoth tusks frame a fireplace, a menacing polar bear towers near the landing with claws at the ready. And a cheetah rumored to have been shot by Teddy Roosevelt sits on a plinth just upstairs. The gathering was an honor of a

new expedition. One in search, not of a single animal, but a thousand. Best reporter, Caitlin Swaljay. The club was hosting a biological census. An ecological survey so difficult, so complicated, so taxing, that it had never been attempted before, and may never be attempted again. It is a really big project. Like, I don't think we've ever been involved in a project of this scope in our lives. It's like moving a little, a small little army around.

This is Jamie Allen. The census was his idea. And when he started, it was a small operation. But now Jamie is merely the tip of a vast pyramid Census was his idea. And when he started, it was a small operation. But now Jamie is merely the tip of a vast pyramid of Census-related personnel, including a logistics chief, a chief cartographer, a veterinarian, an epidemiologist, a specialist from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and of course, a web team. And that's just the core staff.

Below them are the foot soldiers, the volunteers who must go out into the field and do the actual counting. 300 plus volunteers, counting 700 hectares, 100 meter by 100 meter, and 3,000 plus sheets of paper that we have to... It's... yeah. A vast filing system, multiple offices, and a team of hundreds, all for the sake of answering one question. I want to know how many squirrels are in Central Park.

Squirrels, they're counting squirrels. Date, October 14th, 2018. Time, five, twenty-six. On a chilly Sunday evening, I'm following Stu. One of the Central Park Census volunteers around the Parks and Northern end. We're on the hunt for Eastern Grey squirrels, which is like the squirrel. It's what you'll find in just about any American city, but especially Central Park. So we need to be on this path down there. OK. How do we get it?

Well, I'm going to, I'll pretend you're not here, right? I just keep doing it. Yeah, yeah. Following his lead, we head off the path over fences and through tall brush. My face is going to be covered in poison. I'm going to stare. We're slowly making our way to his designated area,

Hector 38E. Hector is our plots of land that measure a little less than two and a half acres each. The job of a census volunteer is to count all the squirrels they can find within their assigned hectares and only their assigned hectares. Although this doesn't stop stew from getting incredibly excited by every squirrel he sees. Oh look, this is cool. I can't count you buddy, you're not in my Hector. Come on back. See you later. After every Hector in the park has been surveyed, all the data will get plugged into a wildlife counting formula popularized by the great mid-century Danish American squirrel biologist Vaughn Fleeger.

The formula will account for squirrels that were double counted and ones no one managed to find. And then finally spit out a number that the world has been waiting for. The formula will account for squirrels that were double counted and ones no one managed to find. And then finally spit out a number that the world has been waiting for. The squirrel abundance number, the total population of Eastern Grey squirrels in Central Park. Give or take. At which point you would be totally justified in asking, as many do, what precisely is the point in knowing the Squirrel abundance number? What they're saying is like, you're counting squirrels.

Like, squirrels have a specific context in people's minds. And it's to be ignored. Like, it's assumed, I think, that because they're so common, we know everything we need to know about squirrels, but it's the opposite's true. The very fact that no one has bothered to do a Central Park squirrel census before, together this most basic of data points about one of the most common animals in our landscape, reveals a kind of societal blind spot we have in regard to squirrels. For a long time now, we've taken them for granted, including the story of where all these

squirrels came from. The squirrels we see in our cities and towns are so every day, so ubiquitous, so just there, that it's easy to assume they've always been there. But the truth is, they haven't. In the mid-19th century, you could walk through a place like Boston or Philadelphia or Manhattan and you would not see a single squirrel. This is Etienne Benson. He's a historian of environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania. And he says the cities of the early 19th century were effectively squirreless. These were animals you could only see if you left the city.

And then even perhaps left the farm, right, and went deep into the woods. And it was only when you went deep into the woods that you would have the chance to see something like a squirrel. In fact, squirrels were considered so elusive, the very wealthy like to keep them as exotic pets. In 1856, an article in the New York Times described how one such pet escaped from its owner's home in Manhattan and when it was discovered in a tree, a crowd of people gathered in amazement trying to lure it down. Eventually the crowd grew so large and rowdy that the police had to forcibly disperse it. So how did these eastern grace girls, these reclusive woodlandland creatures make their way into our urban spaces.

Well, for starters, as Etienne, they didn't, at least not on their own. What was so fascinating to me was to find out that they had been intentionally introduced. The scrolls that we all take for granted as we walk through the park or on our way to the gym or the office are only there because we put them there. They were deliberately brought into cities and fed and sheltered. The first city that we know of to introduce squirrels was Philadelphia in 1847.

Like many East Coast cities of the mid 19th century, it was already a highly urban environment. People yearned for a taste of the wilderness that the squirrel was seen to embody. They were captured in the wilderness, brought into the city, and placed on a single tree, almost as if they were animals in a menagerie or a zoo. The tree was in the middle of a small public square, and it was equipped with a wooden shelter and a fence,

so the squirrels could stay safe from the elements, and any would-be predators in their little squirrel home. A few other cities like Boston replicated this model, and at first the number of squirrels was teeny tiny. Philadelphia started out with only three. Think of it as a trial run. Only this first trial run? It went terribly.

When I started working on this topic, I thought, okay, you introduce a few squirrels into an urban park. In a few years, you're, you introduce a few squirrels into an urban park. In a few years, you're going to have thousands of squirrels, no problem. But at the very beginning, they were essentially incapable of surviving. The cities of the 19th century just didn't have the kind of large parks an extensive tree cover we see today. When you thought about urban landscapes, they were very unfriendly to an animal that required trees for food.

In the classic storybook image of a squirrel, it's always clutching an acorn. And that's basically true. A wild squirrel requires deciduous nut bearing plants such as oak trees in order to survive. Without trees, the city had to provide for the squirrels. But the squirrel feed often proved to be either insufficient or nutritionally worthless. So those first squirrels either died off, were killed, or were adopted as pets. In 1855, a reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript described the introduction of squirrels as, quote, an absurd and reprehensible experiment. All of which raises a question. Why are there now squirrels everywhere in American cities?

I think it's more a model of if you build it, they will come. Gabriel Willow is a naturalist who specializes in animal species that live in urban environments. So I study nature and educate people about the natural world, specifically in New York City. And he says that in the late 19th century, green spaces like New York's were undergoing a transformation. Areas of an open land, once multipurpose fields

used for everything from cattle grazing, just lotter houses and militia training, were being transformed into spaces of leisure. And by the 1870s, city dwellers were leaving behind small busy squares in favor of large idyllic parks. And although they were designed for people, these new urban oasis just might be the best thing to ever happen to the eastern gray squirrel.

Because the parks weren't just big, they were also designed to mimic the natural world. Take Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, for example, both designed by Calvert Vox and Frederick Law Homestead. They were working with the existing geology and hydrology. They took naturally existing small ponds or marshy areas and made lakes out of them. They also chose to keep the areas dramatic rocky outcroppings, instead of blasting them away, as have been done with the rest of the city's grid. And so they were working with certain natural elements.

These natural parks were filled with hedges and lakes and streams and lots and lots of trees, including to the great fortune of squirrels everywhere. Oak trees. Red oak is very common, white oak is very common, pin oak is very common. There's a lot of acorns around. Everything a would-be squirrel resident might want or need. And it was in this oak-dotted acorn-stroon landscape in Central Park in 1877 that a handful of eastern gray squirrels were introduced for a second trial run. And it was in that landscape that these schools virtually exploded in population. By the turn of the century, what had started as just a few dozen squirrels now numbered in the...

actually, this is around the time that people just stopped counting. I mean, how could you, with so many squirrels running around? Guesses ranged from the high hundreds to over 5,000. In central park and beyond, squirrels became as commonplace as fire hydrants and telephone poles and all the other newfound accessories of the urban landscape. And as this new approach to urban park lands spread to other cities, so did the idea of populating them with squirrels. Eastern gray squirrels were introduced again to places like

Philadelphia and Boston and west coast cities like Seattle Vancouver and San Francisco. Eastern Grey's were also introduced overseas to England, Italy and South Africa. And it wasn't just the oak trees in these newly lush environments that were providing sustenance for the squirrels. At the time, people considered it their moral duty to feed them. Up until the early 20th century, the dominant way of understanding the proper relationship between humans and animals in this city is centered on charity. It's centered on the idea that humans have an obligation, a responsibility,

to create a friendly, welcoming environment for certain kinds of animals to flourish. The ideal city was one that provided a home for good animals and banished the bad. So, if you go back even and read like John James Audebond's account of bird species, he might talk about the bloodthirsty hawk or the wily raven. And so, people used to shoot hawks and falcons and

eagles and other birds of prey because they're predators because they would eat other animals people thought oh they're just mean. Whereas other animals like pigeons and of course squirrels were considered peaceful. More than that they interacted with humans. The site of an undemesticated animal not only approaching you but effectively communicating with you by soliciting food, was a sign of its civilized nature. So it was only proper that you should feed them. Historians would later give these wild animals and the residents who brought them into the city a name, the more than human community.

So the idea was to create a kind of, you might even call it kind of fantasy world in which every animal that is in the city is kind of living peacefully with the others at the indulgence of the humans that run the place. Thanks to the more than human community model, urban squirrels lived large for decades. Nuts, trees, and humans feeding them extra food and killing off all their predators. They had it made. And in the case of New Haven, for example, there's even an article that I found that describes them as becoming so obese that they began to fall from the trees.

As the 19th century led into the 20th, and the squirrels were busy spreading out into suburban addicts and college campuses, no one stopped to wonder if there could be such a thing as too many squirrels. But as hard as it is to admit there is now evidence to suggest there might actually be too many. There is an ongoing attack against the power grid and it's being led by squirrels. Matthew Harper is an information security expert with 20 years of experience and he says when it comes to threats to the US power network, forget terrorism, forget Russian hackers. In the case of the utility infrastructure, it's the humble squirrel that's causing most of the issues.

By some estimates, one out of every five power outages in the United States are squirrel-related. To be fair to the squirrels, they really start out with the best of intentions. Squirrels need to build mess, and they usually build those nests and trees, but they also build them in anything that looks like a tree, like utility poles or transformers, and like all rodents, a squirrels and size

or teeth never stop growing, so they have to chew to keep them filed down. They mostly chew bark and branches and nuts, but they also chew things like power cables. So inevitably, some unlucky squirrel will nod through the insulation of a power line, or step on two exposed wires at the same time and… Oh. Killing the squirrel and shorting the system. To keep track of all those system shorts, Matthew runs

a website called CyberSquirrel1. Which is a website which tracks squirrel activities and attacks against the power grid. And yes, this is real. CyberSquirrel1 consists of a big map marking the largest power outages caused by squirrels in the past 30 years. Pick a year and you can find hundreds of pins indicating squirrel incidents, splaid out across the lower 48 in Canada.

There's a drop-down menu if you want to see outages caused by other animals, but don't bother. When it comes to power problems, it's mostly just squirrels. Can you give me some examples of squirrel related power outages? I'm just pulling it up now. Squirrel, here we go. Last year 2018 at college in California actually I'm having to cancel classes. Then in November of 2018 a single roving squirrel knocked out three substations in upstate New York causing a string of power outages for more than 12,000 people. That same month, another squirrel took out a polling station in Virginia on the

day of the presidential election. Then in December, a squirrel cut the power of an entire shopping mall in South Carolina, one week before Christmas. A particular case in Canada back in April of 2009 impacted 55,000 people. And those are just the big ones. In Austin, Texas, squirrels were responsible for over 400 separate outages in 2015 alone. But the greatest rodent-related outage of all occurred in December of 1987, in the last place you'd ever expect to find an electrocuted squirrel. That story, and more, after this.

It happened on December 9, 1987. It's kind of sad for me because I am a true animal lover. Joseph San Germino is a retired member of the New York Stock Exchange. That means he used to be one of those guys. You'd see yelling and screaming on the trading room floor. And it's simply this. Back in the day, you know, back in 1987, the New York Stock Exchange was everything to the world. Back then in the 80s, the exchange controlled 85% of the global stock market.

And so traders like Joe, they were the kings of Wall Street. We were the place to go. We were so proud to wear our white badges with our numbers on it and say we worked on the Florida-New York Stock Exchange. But there was also another exchange in town that was slowly chipping away at their market share, their biggest rival, Nasdaq. The Nasdaq was an automated exchange that ran on computers. It didn't need floor traders and the traders that the New York Stock Exchange who made trades

in person by hand hated it. So Joe still remembers the glorious day a rumor began to spread among the 4,000 traders on the floor of the exchange. We started hearing that Nasdaq was kind of technical glitch and by the time it got from one end to the exchange to the other it might have talked about 30 seconds. And it just word of mouth, it just flies. Finally, the electronic ticker tape, scrolling along one of the walls of the exchange lit up with the news.

And the ticker tape, the ticker tape was just flying across and we knew. Their deepest, darkest wish had come true. Nasdaq had failed. It was really a magnet. It was a dream and the trading floor erupted. I mean, you could, it was deafening. For 82 minutes on December 9, 1987, Nasdaq was offline, losing an estimated 20 million trades.

And then we find out that it wasn't a squirrel. A squirrel had chewed through a power line in Connecticut, where Nasdaq drew its electricity, but it did not affect the New York Stock Exchange, much to the everlasting joy of traders like Joseph San Gio Mino. To Nasdaq, that squirrel was Godzilla. To us, on the New York Stock Exchange, Jimino. America's squirrels have also been wreaking havoc overseas.

In Great Britain, Eastern Gray squirrels introduced in 1876, quickly began to displace the native Red Squirrel, driving it to near extinction. And the Eastern Gray Squirrel might be cute, but the Red Squirrel is super cute. To Google it is to love it. And now there's only a few small pockets of red squirrels left in Northern England and Scotland. This despite a massive eradication campaign, to keep the American invaders out of the Scottish Highlands.

In Europe, they're officially an invasive species. But even as American squirrels were taking out shopping malls and stock exchanges and invading foreign countries, the very things that allowed them to proliferate in the first place were slowly being taken away. Starting in the mid-20th century, ecologists, wildlife managers and park officials started to re-examine America's approach to wildlife. They began to argue that predators like coyotes and hawks should no longer be hunted for the sake of a more than human community. That starts to get replaced with a really different view, right? This ecological view in which we understand those relationships

of predation as essential to the ecosystem as a whole. In this new ecological model, the ideal environment was no longer one that corresponded to notions of civilized versus uncivilized species, but one in which a variety of species, predator and prey alike, maintained a natural population balance with only minimal human intervention. It took a few decades for this idea to spread from the national parks into the cities, but by the 1980s it had arrived, along with the predators. Which for an ecologically-minded naturalist like Gabriel Willow is a wonderful thing. Like, Hyodes are coming back on their own.

We're not bringing them back. Ravens, Ravens are nesting in New York City within the last 15 years. We did not reintroduce them. The red-tailed hawk came back of its own accord. Other species we intentionally reintroduced like Paragon Falcons, and their thriving New York City has the highest population density of Paragon Falcons in the world. For most of us, the death of a few squirrels seems like a small price to pay in exchange for this new found biodiversity. Today, there's no shortage of webcams,

set up by people who have discovered a hawks nest outside their 12th floor apartment window. And while we've been busy welcoming the squirrel's predators back into our cities, we've also begun to finally withdraw our charity. I think everybody should go check out squirrels. They're pretty cool. I'm team squirrel, you know? I just don't think we need to be feeding them.

Gabriel and other naturalists think feeding squirrels has no place in the new ecological model. Providing bread and other unnatural foods can lead to a variety of health problems. An acclimating squirrels to hand feeding can make them overly dependent on humans and possibly prone to unstable population booms, none of which is ultimately good for the squirrels or the larger environment. Which is why 142 years after welcoming squirrels into the fold of our more than human community, New York City is done given handouts. Good morning.

Today is March 1st, 2019, and the time is 12.05. Welcome to Palme Fritz Recreation Center. This past winter, the New York City Parks Department held a hearing for a proposed rule change that would make it illegal to feed any wild animal in the parks. This hearing is tended to solicit comments regarding the proposed rule changes. These comments will become part of the public record. Gabriel Willow was there too. Although it didn't go down quite the way he thought it would.

I didn't really expect it to be quite as skewed as it was in terms of almost everybody there I was speaking against the regulations. His criminal act that runs against the morals and rules of the civilized society. New York Park says that the squirrels, they should be squirrels, they should be animals and flies like they do in the wild except for one thing. The parks aren't the wild. I don't know that I've encountered that many squirrel and pigeon feeding fans in one place before. And although they agreed the animals should be eating healthy food, they were not buying

into the ecological model. Here, the parks are not nature. They're an artificial situation. We are part of your environment. You can't change that. When people express concern that certain animals in certain parks might starve, Gabriel tried to stand up for the hands-off approach. The problem of them starving due to lack of food is because there's a higher population,

because they're being fed. It's a cycle. But the applause was tepid. Thank you. It was not as poorly received as the founder and director of the Wild Bird Fund. She was also against feeding. She was actually booed. Exactly what effect the blanket ban would have on wildlife populations is unclear. But regardless of the ecological impact, the biggest takeaway from the hearing was that

the concept of the more than human community that was still going strong. I'm here today as a voice for New York City's non-human residents because I see what's happening to our wildlife neighbors as really truly tragic. The feeling that these animals are fellow citizens and should be treated with the same consideration has never fully gone away. It is not just about what we want, it's about what the squirrels and all of the other than human beings in our parks want to and they are constituents of New York City. People love to feed the animals in the park.

On any park bench in any city, you'll see people throwing crumbs to the birds and the birds approaching for more. It's one way we feel a connection to nature. For just a moment, both human and animal are doing something together. That shared experience between species, that's what the people at the hearing didn't want taken away. Gabriel Willow also believes that there is value in connecting with these animals, but he sees it as a reason not to be them. I think people really crave a direct interaction and connection with nature, and so what I was saying when I spoke was like look.

Please go to the park observe wildlife feel that connection you don't need to touch them you don't need to pet them you don't need to hold them you don't need to feed them like it's actually more. Interesting and more valuable to stand back and see an animal exhibiting a more natural behavior. Watch a squirrel long enough and you'll see it play tricks on other squirrels. If a squirrel carrying an acorn believes it's being watched, it will dig a hole, pantomime putting the acorn in the hole, and then cover the hole back up, all while hiding the real acorn in its mouth, just to throw its fellow squirrels off the scent.

Squirrels have been seen carefully organizing their acorns by size and shape before they bury them. Biologists believe it's a mnemonic device that helps the squirrels remember what they buried where. They have a specific call when they see a predator, so if you learn a little bit of squirrel language, like I know the hot call, so if I hear that, I'll look up and often see a hawk. So for them to just sort of allow us to be there,

but go about their day-to-day life is so much more powerful for me. There's more than one way to connect to the animals with whom we share our cities, whether it's listening to the yipping of coyotes in the middle of the night, setting up a webcam for the hawk nest outside your window, or counting all the squirrels in Central Park. In March, Jamie Allen and the other team members of the squirrel census finished gathering their data.

They plan to reveal the squirrel abundance number in June. Atian Benson's, as he doesn't know how many schools there are in Central Park, but he thinks he does understand why everyone is so eager to find out. You know, one of the appeals of a school census is just the same appeal that has existed since the 1850s, which is it's clear to people that the world around them is not only inhabited by humans, but it is this multi-species place. And I think there is a need and a desire there to know something about your neighbors.

The census is a form of appreciation, a way of recognizing that the squirrels are there. And that in, is beautiful. 99% of Vizbo West produced this week by Caitlin Swaljay and edited by Joe Rosenberg. It makes him tech production by Sheree Fusif, music by Sean Rial. Additional music in this episode was composed by Jenny Conley-Drizos, John Newfeld, and

A Query. Kitty Mingle is a senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor, Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffman, Emmett Fitzgerald Terran Mazza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Susan Kirby and Andrew Christopher, whose interviews we did not get to include in the episode But without whose help we could not have made this story As for the squirrel census

Following the announcement of the squirrel abundance number there will be a squirrel masquerade ball and dance party Held at the Explorer's Club in New York City for details. Check out the squirrel census dot com in the coming weeks New York City. For details check out the squirrelsensors.com in the coming weeks. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on the show at 99PI org.

Run Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you can join the rest of us in the more than human community at 99yanipi.org Radio to be on you