Opinion | New York Is Wilder Than You Think

New York is about to get really wild. Every spring, millions of birds fly from South and Central America along the Atlantic Flyway, heading for northern breeding grounds. Many of them choose to fly through New York City, sometimes stopping to rest in Central Park. You can take the subway to 81st Street, stroll across the way and maybe see a maraschino-cherry-red male scarlet tanager with black wings, fresh from the foothills of the Andes.

As the migration picks up in the weeks to come, millions of wild birds will pass through the city. But New York is also home to wildlife year-round. Humans share the city with hundreds of species of wild animals, from red-tailed hawks and coyotes to pigeons and rats.

It might sound odd to call a pigeon or a rat a wild animal. These notoriously urban animals might seem too much creatures of the human world. If they take the subway and eat churros and pizza, can they truly be called wild? But red-tailed hawks and coyotes eat these dubiously wild rats and pigeons — so does that mean they aren’t wild either?

The confusion arises because “wild” can be defined in several sometimes contradictory ways. One definition is “uninfluenced by humans.” A wild place is a place that humans have not shaped. A wild animal is an animal whose life is led outside the sphere of human influence. But if we define wildness as “uninfluenced by humans,” then there is probably no complete wildness left. Thanks to climate change, pollution and the vast conversion of land for food production, all animals and all places are now influenced by humanity, at least to some degree.

But this definition of “wild” is premised on the idea that humans are categorically different from other species, that we are somehow outside nature, despite being very clearly and closely related to other animals. We may be very fancy apes, with our iPhones and our airplanes, but apes we remain. Why does just one kind of ape have this magic power of reducing or destroying wildness?

In addition to being based on an unscientific division of humans from all other animals, the idea of wildness is tangled up with a long history of racism. In the Americas, land that was managed by Indigenous people was often characterized by colonists as “wild,” either out of ignorance of how management like prescribed burning, managed hunting, planting and tending had shaped the landscape or out of an unwillingness to see Native people as having any agency at all. Characterizing people’s homes as wilderness implies that the people who lived there weren’t human.