Even as our metropolitan area grows, so too does Knoxville's wildlife population. Is this a good thing?

by Jack Neely

On a lush island in a slow-moving river, tall trees hang with vines. From your canoe, you peer into the dense green but can't tell at first what that is you see in there. In the corner of your eye, you see movement, but by the time you look, it's gone. You hear an odd crying sound, look high up in the trees, and see it, a large nest where an exotically tall, long-necked bird roosts. You notice just one. Then there's another, and another, and as you get used to looking for them, you've counted 50 of them.

But then, you let your canoe drift too close to shore, and you hear a horrible noise and look to see another kind of bird, which for a moment seems bigger than you are, flapping toward you, angry that you have come to this wild place.

This is not Madagascar or New Guinea or the upper Amazon—though a photographer might find it great fun to shoot a roll of this island and see if he could fool the editors at National Geographic. You're actually in city-limits Knoxville, hardly a river-mile downstream from the biggest sewage treatment plant in East Tennessee, right between busy Alcoa Highway and densely developed Sequoyah Hills. This is Looney Island, and you've just been attacked by an angry urban goose. Until you got here, the geese were spending a peaceful afternoon with their loftier, more graceful neighbors, the wild blue herons.

It's only the most impressive of several water birds we're not used to seeing in such numbers. Ducks, cranes, coots, cormorants, even seagulls have been more populous lately.

And shore birds are only a subset of the wildlife that has chosen Knoxville to make a seemingly unlikely comeback. Crows, once a country bird, skulk over Kingston Pike. Foxes traipse across backyards within a mile or two of downtown. Wild peacocks amble through Maplehurst, a dense downtown neighborhood. Coyotes howl in North Knoxville. A falcon butchers his prey a hundred feet above Church Street, on the logo of the Hilton Hotel. Raccoons, long absent from Tennessee's urban areas, raid garbage cans and dogfood bowls.

Suddenly, it seems, Knoxville is fairly howling with wildlife. Whether that's a purely good thing or not is a much more complicated question.

For an American city, Knoxville's relatively old. That there's any wildlife left here at all after 212 years of hunting, clearing, burning, paving, dumping, and multiplying may seem surprising. Since the year Davy Crockett was born, in fact, we've been trying to beat back the wilderness in this valley where the rivers flow together. With some wild species, we succeeded utterly. The buffalo that once grazed in these fields and forests have been driven out of Tennessee.

Some species were nearly extinguished by legislation. From the 1790s to the latter 1800s, the Tennessee legislature offered bounties on wolves and wildcats, even allowed settlers to pay their taxes in furry scalps. Now the timber wolves and mountain cougars that once battled for hunting grounds are gone too.

River otters, hunted for their pelts, declined and went elsewhere. The passenger pigeons that once darkened Tennessee skies no longer bother us with their droppings. They are entirely extinct.

But in spite of—or, in some cases, because of—their absence, other species are flourishing.

Knoxville's metropolitan area has been growing faster than those of most American cities. Why our population of wildlife should also be growing is a difficult question, but one that has to be considered in light of our own growth.

If you've never been to Ijams (pronounced i-yums) Nature Center, on the south bank of the river just past Island Home, you need to go. Newly expanded across 80 acres of riverside forest, it's a dense sanctuary of wildlife from bluebirds to possums.

Arrive 10 minutes early for your appointment with the director of nearly any organization in Knoxville, and you'll be told to sit on a couch, listen to Muzak, and read an old magazine about golf. But go to Ijams Nature Center and arrive 10 minutes early for your appointment with Bo Townsend, director of Ijams, and you can take a quick hike, roam through the woods, scare a groundhog, be astonished by a river vista you didn't know about, watch a heron glide over the new-formed Tennessee. And be back in time for your appointment.

Townsend's office is decorated with stuffed ducks—four different indigenous species.

"We're seeing a lot of certain species of animals," he says, "but that doesn't tell the whole story." He recalls his astonishment at seeing the Looney Island heron colony.

The most obvious reason for the return has been the fact that due to pollution measures put in place over the last 30 years, the air and water in Knoxville is much cleaner than it once was. Townsend gives some credit to the Clean Water Act. Though water pollution remains a serious problem that makes most of our streams unsafe for human (or animal) contact, through legislation, source-specific pollution problems have been greatly alleviated.

Specifically, DDT, which nearly killed off herons, falcons, and other bird species, was banned in 1972. What we're seeing now may be their bouncing back after the DDT holocaust.

A second positive cause for wildlife's return is that hunting and trapping is more under control. Legislation and enforcement is a big part of it, but demand for pelts has declined in recent years. Aimless rural kids who used to take potshots at birds and other creatures have other diversions. Some also credit education with giving people an enhanced sensibility about animals. Benefiting as much as any other species from the cease fire is the river otter, which once nearly vanished from the region. Townsend says they're back and in greater numbers than they've been in 100 years; though rare in the city, they've seen some here at Ijams.

Randy Wolfe, the former birdman at the Knoxville Zoo, has for the last decade or so made a living as chief executive officer of a company called Varmint Busters. He specializes in trapping wild pests live and releasing them in the wild. (What makes an animal a pest, he remarks, is often in the eye of the beholder; pigeons are held in much higher esteem in Europe, where Venetians and Londoners worry if the pigeon population slips a little in Piazza San Marco or Trafalgar Square; Knoxville, on the other hand, has been unsuccessful trying to drive pigeons out of Market Square for decades. "I think it's a cultural thing," Wolfe speculates.)

Wolfe has been working at it for only a dozen years or so, but in that time he's already seen a shift in the fauna, reflected in the kinds of animals he gets complaints about. "There are two things we're seeing more of," he says. "Raccoons—we've seen more in the last two years than in the previous eight-to-10 years. And beaver complaints." He says there are beavers "in just about every creek." The ones behind the former East Towne Mall last year were only the most famous. He says the return of raccoons to the region once famous for coonskin caps may be part of a natural flux, a recovery from a distemper epidemic some years ago, or recovery from the days of fur-trapping and hunting.

However, there are other reasons for the prevalence of urban wildlife that may seem a little more sinister. Ironically, it may have been Knoxville's rapid metropolitan-area growth that accounts for part of the abundance of wildlife in the city. The natural habitat of various species, especially along the rivers, has been vanishing. To shorebirds whose ancestors lived off of the wild Southern rivers for millennia, the city's beginning to look about as good as any other available place. They've lowered their standards.

"We're expanding into natural areas, so there's more contact," says Townsend. "They're having to adapt to us." With several species, like foxes, he says, "We may see them more often, but there are not necessarily more of them."

Also, ironically, the explosion of fast-food joints has something to answer for, especially in attracting raccoons, crows, several kinds of rodents, and even seagulls. "Skunks and possums you'll find living in greater density in urban areas," Wolfe says. For them, humans bring food, in the form of garbage and pet food—and shelter, in the form of attics and crawlspaces. "Food and shelter—that's two of the four things animals need to survive." Water, of course, is third, and space—for which different animals have very different requirements—is fourth. As for seagulls, he says, they're avian scavengers who seek out garbage wherever they can find it—even if it's 400 miles from the coast.

We also see more of some animals because we've killed off the beasts that used to eat them. Townsend says Tennessee's deer population is currently at a 100-year high. Some, in fact, believe we have more deer now than when Stephen Holston first floated the river 250 years ago. Wolfe says people's attitudes about deer change overnight. Though occasionally spotted in Knoxville, deer have become more a problem in the Oak Ridge area. Typically, Wolfe says, suburbanites are surprised and charmed to see a deer grazing in their yards—"but then, the next day, they have no flowers." He expects deer to become an increasing problem in the Knoxville area in the near future, in the form of more collisions with cars and more agricultural and horticultural damage.

And we also have another beast that we've never seen here before, one Davy Crockett wouldn't have recognized: coyotes. Hardly ever seen east of the Mississippi until the 1980s, coyotes have now covered Tennessee and are known to pick off a small pet now and then; they've even been heard within city limits, in North Knoxville. The reason we've got coyotes is the same reason we have more deer than ever: We no longer see much of a Tennessee native, the wolf.

"I'd rather have wolves around," Townsend says. "Coyotes don't care about eating your dog or cat. Fido in the backyard, that's prey to him. A wolf wouldn't do that."

"Nature abhors a vacuum," says Townsend. "We kill the passenger pigeons, the starlings come in." European immigrants, starlings were never seen in Tennessee before the 20th century.

Pete Wyatt is wildlife diversity coordinator for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency's 21-county Region 4, which includes Knoxville. He remarks that what Knoxville is gaining in wildlife sightings it's losing in diversity of indigenous species. The Knoxville area has lost a number of songbirds, including the whippoorwill, the wood thrush, and the bobwhite. The reasons are diverse, including infestations of cowbirds, which take over other birds' nests like viruses. Though seemingly a natural phenomenon, Wyatt says the cowbird plague actually commenced when their natural hosts, the buffalo, were nearly killed off over a century ago.

In cow pastures and residential areas, natural fields are replanted with fescue instead of the seedier native grasses that offered birds much more to eat. Townsend adds that the widespread use of insecticides on lawns has also undermined the food chain.

Wyatt is critical of reckless development that has afflicted large parts of Knox County; the paving of forests and fields has greatly reduced birds' nesting and feeding area. Though he praises the greenway system as a small step in the right direction, Wyatt criticizes Knoxville's slowness to develop a significant park system comparable to those of other cities, like Portland, Ore. However, his greatest criticism of human impact on native wildlife is surprising.

"The number-one threat to animals that people bring," Wyatt says, "is their inability to contain their domestic animals. A domestic cat—I mean a tabby with a food bowl that has his name on it—may kill literally thousands of songbirds and reptiles."

In exchange for the decline in songbirds, Wyatt says, we've now got starlings, English sparrows, pigeons, and we're breeding rodents like—well, like rats. The rats most common in homes today—the black rat and the Norway rat—are European imports who love the pet-feeding, garbage-producing, fast-food-consuming American lifestyle. Our indigenous Tennessee rodent, the wood rat, is still around, but you might never see him. He's secretive, and doesn't like to be around people. Those mod Euro-rats are much bolder.

"We're blessed in having a high diversity of animals," Wyatt says, mentioning that nearly 400 different species of birds, many of them migratory, may be spotted in the Knoxville area. He says there are "more species of mussels in the Clinch River than in all of Europe." (Our region also has more of some orders of animals, salamanders among them, than anywhere else in the world.) Wyatt remarks on the impressive heron colony on Looney Island, which he says would be an especially large one even if it were in the wilderness. He adds that Tennessee has more species of endangered animals than any U.S. state without a shoreline—a distinction which, he admits, is a somewhat sinister compliment.

Townsend adds that warblers are on the decline. Wood ducks and bluebirds, assisted with human intervention, are on a sort of life support system. Ijams has a busy bluebird house right in its parking lot. Townsend's fond of them, but he's hardly complacent. "When we have to go out and build nesting communities," he says, "it seems to me there's something wrong."

Wyatt and Townsend both seem to suggest that Knoxville's natural blessings, especially in regard to the unusual diversity of wildlife species we started out with, may mask our carelessness about caring for it. Knoxville's provisions for parkland and green spaces has always been under par, even compared to other urban areas. Both Townsend and Wyatt commend the mayor's greenway initiatives as a small step in the right direction. Townsend and the mayor's office are at work on helping develop—or, rather, undevelop—the Eastern State Wildlife Management Area, comprising several hundred riverside acres within the eastern city limits, as part of an urban wildlife corridor which might include Ijams.

The collision of civilization and wildlife is sometimes all too literal. From the air, asphalt can look a lot like water, and it baffles several shore birds. Townsend recalls, "I was driving to work along Neyland Drive. Three beautiful mallard ducks came in to land on the river—but they landed on asphalt. A truck killed one; the other two got away."

Townsend was eating at the Lunch Box when he happened to spot a coot swooping in over the pavement, perhaps making the same mistake about Gay Street. A shorebird rare in urban areas, a coot looks something like a fat, unwieldy duck. Alarmed, Townsend got up from the table in time to see the coot hit by a car. It survived the blow, but the lady who hit it took the coot into her car and wouldn't give it up. The police finally recovered it and took it to UT Veterinary Hospital.

"When man and animal come in contact, the animals lose. People may think it's fun and charming" to see wild animals in the city, he says. "But it's a dangerous situation."

"Raccoons are extremely opportunistic," he says. As people feed them, they lose their fear of man. Later, he says, they may well bite a child.

When animals lose, the lucky ones wind up at the UT vet school's small-animal clinic. One ward is devoted to "exotic and avian species"—a catch-all phrase that includes everything besides farm animals and the most standard pets.

Dr. Susan Orosz is a veterinarian and professor of avian and zoological medicine at UT. She oversees this wildlife-rescue ward. Occasionally, during a two-minute lull between emergencies, you might find time to talk to her. Dr. Orosz says she's impressed with the diversity of wildlife here, which she says is largely due to the proximity of dense forests, as well as the multitude of man-made lakes which she says may be increasing our shorebird population. But she hesitates to suggest that Knoxville actually has more wildlife than other American cities. Most people who are from Toledo don't tell you they're from "the Mississippi Flyway," a migratory route used by many species of birds, but to Dr. Orosz, that's what makes her hometown interesting. She has seen lots of birds in her time and isn't necessarily overwhelmed by Knoxville's sudden embarrassment of shorebirds.

In this emergency room, the two operating tables are nearly always occupied. Right now, it's a falcon with a leg injury and a ball python who crawled over the wrong piece of jagged garbage and sliced his belly badly. (It's not indigenous, of course, but an escapee.) Yesterday, they had a monkey—a macaque, to be specific—that had been roaming north of town along I-75 and bit somebody who had gotten too curious. He's still a mystery—no one has reported him missing.

In a cage in the heated room adjoining the operating room is a four-foot-long iguana that police found ambling down a Main Street sidewalk a couple of years ago. Nearby is a box turtle that, from an injury of unknown nature, has a hole in its shell the size of a silver dollar, exposing the soft flesh. She'll be undergoing reconstructive surgery soon, her shell patched with fiberglass enforced with pins and wires. "We do a lot of shell repairs," says Dr. Orosz, especially this time of year, when turtles are nesting and on the move. In one cage is a groundhog recovering from injuries sustained on 11E; in the next, a covered cage, is a barred owl peering out. "Don't get too close," Dr. Orosz warns. Owls are disarmingly swift and have been known to snap at things through the openings in their cage. Here's a robin rescued from the jaws of a cat, there a red-tailed hawk who, if not for the nasty cut on his left leg, would happily eat many of his fellow inmates.

Nancy Zagaya, a supervisory technician, is feeding Gerber rice baby food to five orphaned raccoons, barely a month old. Watching them climb the cage screen, you may remark that "they play like monkeys"—but then, having said that, you might well wonder: Why do you think of an exotic tropical mammal to describe one that has lived in Tennessee for centuries?

Dr. Orosz believes Americans know "exotic" African species better than these Tennessee natives. Sometimes our ignorance is comical. She recalls a call from a woman who was somewhat concerned that "There's a dinosaur in my backyard!"

Dr. Orosz says, "The lady was convinced it was a dinosaur." Busy and unconvinced it was worth a paleontological expedition out to the lady's house, Dr. Orosz asked if the lady could draw a picture of it and bring it into the clinic. She replied that she was an artist and would be happy to. "She brought in a perfect picture of a big old snapping turtle."

But human ignorance has a lot to do with why Dr. Orosz, Dr. Zagaya, and their colleagues are busy all day. "Our number-one problem is kidnapping," Zagaya says. That is, people finding a young animal, whether it's a robin fledgling or a fawn, and assume it's in some kind of trouble it can't get out of without human rescue.

The old wives' tale that a young bird's mother will reject it if it has been touched by human hands still has a hold on the local imagination, and accounts for some "patients."

"We're really a critical-care facility," she says. "We're not the home for orphans. People want to do good, want to do the right thing. But people ought to leave it alone, if it's at all possible."

It's not supposed to be an orphanage, but there are several baby animals here today whose only complaint is they don't have a mother. Among them are two grackles, proof that Dr. Orosz and company don't discriminate.

Like most emergency rooms, the clinic gets its share of gunshot wounds and automobile injuries. Add cat bites and deliberate poisonings, and it seems clear that wild lives are more dangerous lives than ours. An eagle came in a few months ago with mercury toxicosis, but avitrol—an organophosphate poison used to control grain-eating birds—is a more common source of poisoning cases. Dr. Orosz says it disrupts a bird's neurological system; after ingesting avitrol-laced grain, an afflicted pigeon begins flopping around, scaring away its mates. Fifty percent die. Dr. Orosz says she sees a lot of it in the fall, many cases brought in from central Knoxville.

Like Townsend and Wyatt, Dr. Orosz isn't ready to offer Knoxville any awards for wildlife preservation. She says that in the mere eight years she has lived in her West Knoxville subdivision, some species, especially bluebirds, have dwindled markedly.

The phone rings. A bird has somehow fallen into a vat of oil. "What do we do for oil-soaked birds?" Dr. Orosz asks her students. One hesitates. "A mild detergent. Dawn?"

A correct answer. "Dawn. Great," Dr. Orosz says, calling to an assistant, "Get some Dawn dish washing detergent."

They treat about 2,700 patients annually in this ward—a larger caseload of avian and exotic animals than any other teaching veterinary hospital in America. More than half of that total are pet birds, snakes, or lizards, but nearly 1,000 of their patients are wild. Dr. Orosz thinks they're treating more wild animals than they were when she started eight years ago. Only about 45% of their patients survive whatever trauma brought them here, a proportion typical for a wildlife clinic. They try to patch each patient up and get them out to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator in 48 hours, for eventual re-release into the wild.

Some don't make it. If a wild animal can no longer survive in the wild—if a bird can't fly or if a mammal can't see—they're euthanized. Dr. Zagaya says they've been getting in an unsettling number of congenitally blind deer. She says it's apparently part of a national trend that's not fully understood but adds that a predominance of the cases she's familiar with come from the Oak Ridge area.

You've been listening for just a moment and when you look back there's a large white duck on the counter. He looks fine, standing on his own two feet, alert but easy-going, as ducks always look. But someone has spotted him in a crowd of ducks, noticed he was being a little standoffish and unducklike. A good thing, because when the vets examined him, they found he had a bit of a fever and, underneath his right wing, a perfectly round, dry hole deep into his flesh. They'd already begun feeding him antibiotics pending further diagnosis.

Occasionally they get something unexpected. The alligator in the swimming pool almost goes without saying. "We rarely but occasionally get a loon," a bird more common up north, Dr. Orosz says. Not long ago, they admitted an egret, native to Florida, which had apparently been blown up to the Appalachians in a storm.

Last year, not one but two wild turkeys showed up from North Knoxville. Injured foxes usually come from West Knoxville, where roads and developments have sliced up their customary domain. Bald eagles aren't as much a rarity as they once were; they're also seeing more hawks and even an occasional osprey.

Sometimes wildlife comes in on its own. The vet school is on UT's peninsula, closer to this lively river than any other part of the college. Recently, some double-crested cormorants mistook a parking lot near the vet school for a new lake and crash-landed there.

Many respectable professionals in medicine, law, accounting, and public relations will try to convince you that you need their services, whether you really do or not. Wolfe, head Varmint Buster, spends a good deal of time trying to convince potential customers that they don't need his services. Snakes, for example. Wolfe says venomous snakes are extremely rare in Knoxville. He's seen only six in his 10 years as a Varmint Buster— copperheads, all on the outskirts of town. "Most snakes are good to have around," he says, even when they live in your house. He adds one proviso: "unless it's going to cause you to have a heart attack." That's when they're dangerous.

The former birdman thinks reptiles and amphibians are the most misunderstood of animals.

"Here's the weirdest thing," he says. "Believe it or not, one or two times a year I get a complaint about a frog chorus—just spring peepers, calling out, vocalizing at night. Who doesn't want to hear a bunch of frogs? If you've got a nice population of frogs, that's a good indicator that things are going well with the environment."

The message all our wildlife experts seem most anxious to convey is, concerning anything wild, keep your distance for the animal's sake as well as your own—but pay close attention. In keeping an ear out for frogs and other things with four feet or two wings, we might find clues to our own survival.