North America
Many North American species have successfully adapted to urban environments and are thriving. Typical examples include coyotes, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, opossums, deer and red foxes. This has led to conflict with humans, as these animals open garbage bags in search of food, eat food left out for pets, take the pets themselves, feed on prized garden plants, dig up lawns, and so on. Coyotes pose a risk to small children, who should not be left unsupervised in areas coyotes are known to inhabit; they are large enough to easily kill/eat a child and lack the fear of humans most wild canids exhibit. While there are media accounts of alligators being found in sewer pipes and storm drains, most experts think that such 'sewer alligators' are unlikely to sustain a breeding population in such an environment. The National Zoo of Washington, DC has breeding populations of tropical geckos throughout its steam tunnels; which venture into Rock Creek Park and develop limited breeding populations during the spring/summer, however these populations die out during the fall/winter.
Animals known to dwell within human habitations include house mice, cockroaches, house centipedes (scutigera coleoptrata), silverfish, and firebrats.
Read more about this topic: Urban Wildlife
Famous quotes related to north america:
“We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)