Feral Cities Read online

  “He thinks you’re predators and are about to eat him alive,” explains Bryan as he flips the lid off the bucket.

  He moves in, snake hook at the ready. The diamondback rattles even faster.

  “Oh, crap! Oh my goodness!” squeals the woman. “He is so big! Oh my God!”

  Bryan stretches his arm out and twists the hook so it slips underneath the snake’s body. He carefully lifts the snake into the air and gently tips it into the bucket before slapping on the lid. We’ve been here less than ninety seconds.

  “That’s awesome!” says the man.

  The high-pitched woman looks stunned. “That’s it?” she asks.

  “That’s it,” confirms Bryan.

  “What you going to do with it?” she asks, putting down the rake. “I’m going to let him go,” replies Bryan.

  “Not around here,” says the woman, staring at the hissing bucket.

  “No, but I do have to release him within a mile. But he won’t come back. This is the scariest thing he has ever experienced. He thinks he is dying right now—he thinks that something has eaten him. So even if I put him right outside, this garage was a near-death experience and he won’t come back in.”

  Reassured, she recounts the discovery of the snake. “He was on my son’s clothes. I pushed it, and then I saw it was moving, and then I freaked out.”

  “Did you leave the garage door open?” asks Bryan. She nods.

  “This is a cave,” says Bryan. “If you’re a snake and you see this thing, it’s a cave. It’s a nice way to get out of the sun. Rodents will come in too, sometimes, and the snakes will track them into here.”

  “The bobcats!” exclaims the woman suddenly. “What about the bobcats? They poo! Do you pick up bobcats?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the bobcats,” says Bryan.

  “But they are in my swimming pool,” she says, excitedly. “I cannot swim. I cannot swim. They’re wicked. A mom and two children. With the snake here and the bobcats in the swimming pool—all kinds of poos!”

  “The bobcats will just run off if you go outside. They don’t attack,” says Bryan.

  We return to the truck and load the trapped snake in the trunk. As we leave, Bryan explains that situations like this are typical. “See all these rocks?” he says, as we look at the front yard. “They are like the perfect habitat—it’s what the rattlesnakes look for.”

  We look at the untouched desert right next to the house. “It’s amazing that someone who lives here is so shocked. They should have seen a rattlesnake before, but they get shocked because they are not from here. They are shocked, shocked, that there is a snake in Arizona.”

  They’re not alone, or even the worst. One time a lady called Bryan because a hawk was in a tree. “She was the perfect mix of town, animals, and ignorance all in a bundle.” It seems as if people have a mental block when it comes to urban wildlife. We move to the city and expect it to be free of bugs, snakes, carnivores, and just about everything else too. Even, it seems, when the land right next to our homes is untamed desert.

  Snakes show up all over the Phoenix area, though, not just on the edge of deserts. A couple of days before I arrived, Bryan picked up a diamondback from the parking lot of a hotel in downtown Scottsdale. “He had been living in this hotel parking lot for years and years. The gardeners say they’ve seen him numerous times. He didn’t rattle, didn’t bother anyone and then one day they were like you’ve got to get rid of him. I don’t know what to do with him. I can’t put him in the desert—he is old, he’ll just crawl around and die, and no one wants him as a pet because he is a big, old, ugly diamondback. He is old and crusty and his color is fading.”

  Then there was the hot tub. “It was in the spring. The guy opened his tub for the first time since winter and there’s a gopher snake lying half in, half out of the hot water. I got there an hour later and he was still lounging in there, like ‘Yeah? What do you want? I’m in the hot tub.’ I felt bad taking him out of there. He seemed pretty happy.”

  Hot tub snakes aren’t that unusual. “In the summer I get calls in the night from super-drunk people, really drunk people, who’ve gone out to the hot tub. A lot of almost successful dates people have had have been interrupted by a snake in the hot tub.”

  Rattlesnakes tend to be found close to desert parks, but sometimes they end up in more urban places. “There’s this one area where there are still rattlesnakes that come in from the desert deep into the city because there’s this old drainage canal,” says Bryan. “If it rains there are these torrential floods that just go through the city, and that’s when these diamondbacks get washed into those neighborhoods.”

  For the most part, though, it’s the gopher and king snakes that have really taken to the city. “King snakes especially, they love golf courses. The snakes that are more generalist than the rattlesnakes do well at adapting to the city. Gopher snakes and king snakes can be found throughout the city. I’ve caught them in downtown Phoenix.

  “Some of them do better in the city than they do in the wild. In Paradise Valley there are consistently larger, healthier, and older gopher snakes than out in the desert because they are eating roof rats and living in these lush backyards and swimming in the pools. They are doing pretty good there.”

  Another city success is the night snake. “They get into pipes a lot, so if someone in the middle of the city calls me and says there is a snake on their bathroom counter, I know exactly what it is,” says Bryan. “It’s weird because they are specialists but they’ve figured out how to live in the town very well. They eat lots of bugs, and in the city there’s new, exciting bugs like cockroaches and crickets for them to eat. They also do well because there’s no predation pressure.”

  Phoenix’s city parks, which by and large are just patches of preserved desert surrounded by buildings, also work well for snakes. “The snakes that are there are eating the rats that are eating the granola, garbage, and rotting bananas that hikers throw on the ground.”

  After releasing the western diamondback we head to Anthem, where Bryan’s booked to check a house for rattlesnakes. Fifteen years ago, Anthem consisted of little more than a handful of show homes thirty miles north of Phoenix. Today, it covers nearly ten square miles and around twenty-five thousand people live there.

  “It’s a planned community. They planned an entire town, complete with schools and stuff, and then just built the entire thing at once, sold it, and incorporated it as a town,” says Bryan on the drive there.

  When we arrive I see what he means. Anthem has an unreal feel about it. The countryside around it is desert, but the town center is an expanse of neatly clipped lawns kept on life support by an army of sprinklers and small, man-made lakes. It clashes so much with the dusty wilderness around it that it looks as if it’s been airlifted in from North Carolina.

  The problem with plunking lakes and lush grassland in the desert is that it doesn’t just attract people, it also draws in the local wildlife. “They made this huge city park and lots of people use it, but at night you don’t want to go there because there’s tons of animals there,” says Bryan.

  Among the animals that have taken to the streets of Anthem are javelinas, also known as collared peccaries. They look like wild pigs but evolved separately and are about as closely related to pigs as they are to hippos. At night, packs of javelinas roam the streets of Anthem, tipping over garbage cans, feeding on people’s plants, and digging into the soil for tubers. They may be vegetarians but they can cause problems. Sometimes they chew through irrigation hoses, quench their thirst at backyard swimming pools, or take shelter under mobile homes.

  They also hate dogs. Really hate dogs. In the wild, dogs and coyotes are their main predators, so when javelinas encounter a dog they turn aggressive. And, as some Anthem residents have discovered while walking their dogs, their sharp teeth can deliver a nasty bite.

  Between 2003 and 2013, the number of reported incidents involving javelinas in the Phoenix area quadrupled. The Arizon
a Game and Fish Department puts most of that down to urban expansion bringing more people and their dogs into contact with the animals.

  Rattlesnakes turn up in Anthem too. “One woman had been feeding rabbits in her backyard, giving them little baby carrots and stuff,” says Bryan. “She went out there one day and there was a rattlesnake. It had eaten all the baby rabbits. She lost her mind at that, but it’s like don’t feed the rabbits—that’s why the rattlesnakes are here.”

  The family at the home we’re visiting in Anthem has spotted a couple of rattlesnakes in the past week. The first was found coiled on their front porch late at night. The second was seen a few days later slithering along the driveway at about ten in the evening.

  Bryan reckons the snakes were just passing through. September’s a busy time of year for rattlesnakes; they are preparing for winter, so they tend to move around a lot.

  He checks out the front and back yards, poking leaf litter with his snake hook, checking inside the outdoor BBQ, and looking for holes in the decorative rocks by the pool that could make a nice spot for a resting snake. Nothing.

  He spots a woodpile and knocks it several times with his hook to see if a snake is in there. Again, nothing. The fencing around the backyard also looks secure, and there are no snake tracks in the gravel or wood chips, either. The house is rattlesnake-free; the snakes were just passing through.

  It looks as if the Scottsdale rattlesnake is all I’m going to see. But then, as Bryan drives me back to my hotel, his phone rings again. There’s a snake in Paradise Valley.

  We arrive at the house to find a gopher snake that has gotten itself wedged in the hard plastic sprinkler cover in the front lawn. It looks much like a rattlesnake, with black diamond-shaped blotches running along its otherwise gray-yellow body, but without the distinctive rattle at the end of its tail.

  The similarities with rattlesnakes are not lost on gopher snakes, which specialize in hunting small mammals. When threatened they coil up just like rattlesnakes and rapidly shake their tails in the hope of fooling their foes. But this gopher snake is in no position to fool anyone thanks to the pale pink sprinkler cover that is stuck almost exactly halfway along its body, which is about four feet long.

  Bryan heads over and starts feeling the snake, which—fast as lightning—bites his hand. Bryan shrugs it off and continues trying to figure out how to get the snake free. A few seconds later blood starts seeping from the bite in his hand.

  “He got you in the finger there,” says the man who called in the snake. “Yeah, it happens. I get bitten a lot,” says Bryan, prodding the snake carefully. “I’m trying to determine if he has something in him or not, like food.”

  The man’s teenage daughter comes out of the house to watch and spies Bryan’s bleeding hand. “He’s bleeding. Snakes are venomous,” she says.

  “It’s OK. He’s not,” says Bryan.

  He stares at the trapped snake. “He is just really stuck in there.”

  “I wish he would bite you again so I can see it,” says the teenage girl. Maybe Bryan was right about teenage girls and snakes.

  Figuring that freeing the snake is going to be a challenge, Bryan asks the man if he can take the snake and the sprinkler cover away.

  The man looks unsure and starts fumbling around for a reason why not having the sprinkler cover would be a big problem.

  “His guts are all squashed up in there, and if you don’t do it right it can really injure him more,” explains Bryan. “So I’m going to try and cool him down so he is calm and is less tense, put some cooking spray around the hole and see if I can squeeze him out. His ribs are stuck.”

  “Does it have bones?” asks the man.

  “Yep, it’s a vertebrate,” says Bryan.

  The man relents and lets Bryan take the sprinkler cover away with the snake. Bryan’s hand is still bleeding but he’s relieved: “I was really hoping that that guy wasn’t going to get too upset that I needed his lid. About the time he asked if they have bones was about the time I was thinking he might just say, ‘Why don’t you kill it and give me the lid back?’”

  After loading the snake into the truck, Bryan washes out his wound. “It’s easy to get infections from the bites,” he says. “I wouldn’t have handled a rattlesnake as cavalierly as that. If a gopher snake bites me, who cares? But a rattlesnake? It’ll be a whole different situation.”

  He wraps a bandage around his hand. Spots of blood start to show through. He glances at the bucket where the gopher snake is now locked away. “Moves pretty quick, doesn’t he?”

  A few days later the snake, aided by copious amounts of grease, will work its way out of the sprinkler cover, fine except for a few broken ribs. The man will get his sprinkler cover back.

  We resume the journey to my hotel, and as we near it Bryan tells me about another member of Phoenix’s wildlife. “There’s this species of scorpion—the Arizona bark scorpion. If you went to a desert and flipped over some rocks, you’d see a few. Here in the city, they are everywhere, scampering up the walls. If you find a flower pot that’s wet or a garbage can and tip it up, there will be three under it, every time. They are all through the city and that’s always been the case.”

  As we pull into my hotel he adds: “At your hotel tonight, go outside and look around the walls and you’ll find North America’s most venomous scorpion crawling all over them. Sleep tight.”

  VOODOO CHICKENS

  Miami’s Chicken, Snail, and Snake Invasions

  “Where we’re going today, it’s what people call the hood,” Jill Turner informs me as we set off.

  Jill handles community outreach for Miami’s Neighborhood Enhancement Team, and the area in question is Little Haiti. In the 1990s it became notorious after being engulfed in street battles between rival drug gangs armed with AK-47s and Tec-9s. Things have improved since then, but there’s no escaping the signs of poverty. Even the bright, upbeat Miami sunshine can’t bleach that away.

  We drive past pastel-colored homes with doors and windows shielded by iron bars and front yards populated by aggressive-looking dogs and sofas that have seen better days. At one point our route is blocked by parked police cars, lights still flashing, and officers searching for suspects. Later we pause by a house to work out where to go next, only to notice we’ve pulled up alongside a car surrounded by shady looking men talking to someone inside the vehicle. It looks for all the world like we’ve interrupted a drug deal. We glance at them. They don’t look pleased to see us. We quickly move on.

  But we’re not here for trouble. Or drugs. We’re here for the chickens. Miami is full of them. There are thousands of feral chickens roaming the city streets, and it’s the job of the Neighborhood Enhancement Team to round up nuisance poultry.

  As we drive, Garry Lafaille, the team administrator, tells me that the main complaint about the birds is that they rip up people’s gardens. “Those two little legs are very powerful—they will tear apart the garden within minutes,” he says. “That’s how it all came about: people started to complain and now we are their security among other things that we have to take care of.” He shows me the list of complaints the team is responding to today. Each comes with a brief summary of the problem. “Roaming chickens.” “Too much chicken.” “Chickens roaming on the sidewalk across the street.”

  We head to the first complaint site, where chickens and roosters have been hanging out in large numbers on a vacant lot. There are usually a couple dozen birds wandering around here, says Garry as we enter the road. He scans the street. “Look to the right,” he says. “Two. Two, right in there.” Sure enough there’s a chicken and a rooster strutting around. The pair clock the team’s white truck and run. “They’ve seen us coming,” says Garry, as the birds vanish into the undergrowth of the lot.

  It turns out that Miami’s street chickens have gotten wise to the team. “They are very intelligent little creatures because now they recognize us,” he says. “When they see us coming they crow and—boom—they start spreading
and running. In the beginning they didn’t run as much. We’d corner them, capture them. But now when they see us coming, they start running, start flying. It’s like they can see us a mile away now.”

  I glance back over at the lot. The chickens are long gone.

  Thwarted, we head to the next address. This time, Garry has a plan. As we approach the problem area, he slows the truck to a crawl, rolls down the window and starts calling: Kik-kik-kik. Kik-kik-kik. Kik-kik-kik.

  It’s a trick he learned on the job. “There was an old lady who did not realize I was there. She came out with the corn and goes kik-kik-kik, kik-kik-kik and starts throwing the corn. The chickens hear it and they start flocking. So I thought I will do that since maybe they will think that it’s feeding time and, sure enough, even if they don’t run to us, they stand up and move around just to see what’s going on.”

  He leans out of the window. Kik-kik-kik, kik-kik-kik. Warily, the chickens roaming the street stir. We get out of the truck. Soon there are about half a dozen chickens on the street, where the rest of the team are already waiting, armed with the Miami chicken catcher’s tool of choice: large green fishing nets.

  We eye the chickens. They eye us back.

  “We’ve got a little competition going on where we see who catches the most,” says Garry as he gets out his own net. Jill’s the scorekeeper. At the moment, Vernon, a neighborhood service worker with shoulder-length dreads, is the reigning champ with fifteen catches to his name.

  Then, suddenly, one of the roosters across the road lets out a shrill cry and the chickens start heading for cover. “They’re sending a warning,” says Jill. The team members fly into action. Vernon closes in on one, net held aloft ready to strike. The bird veers left and dives through a small gap in a wooden fence. “Aw! He’s gone,” says Vernon in frustration.

  The other chickens have followed the rooster’s lead, moving off the street and into gardens and behind fences. Calls and clucks ring out as if the birds are well aware that the city employees cannot enter private property uninvited to remove them. Defeated again, we return to the truck and head to the next location.