Wild City: A Guide to Nature in Urban Ontario, from Termites to Coyotes

by Doug Bennet, Tim Tiner

Wild City is full of fascinating natural histories of the most common plants and wild animals found in Ontario’s cities, packed with a satisfying mix of little-known information, vital and amusing facts, trivia, and lore. It features 130 species found in urban habitats such as lawns and gardens, rivers, ravines, vacant lots, embankments, and buried streams. It describes how to make your garden or balcony more attractive to wildlife, and explains weather phenomena and the day and night sky. Species range from moths to coyotes, downy woodpeckers to dog-strangling vine, cockroaches to carp, and the geographic range is from Windsor to Ottawa.

This is a book for the many thousands of nature lovers who keep the ever-popular Up North books at the cottage and would like a “city” version for home, and for the many thousands more who don’t have a weekend getaway and want to get better acquainted with the wildlife on their doorstep.

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[K LF · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written, engaging and such great detail - includes historical facts, indigenous cultural references, ecological links (flora/fauna) and so many interesting details.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bennet & Tiner make a worthy pair of nature enthusiasts, compiling cleverly written tid-bits on all major species of critters and plants that thrive in Ontario cities. I learned a lot about the cat-like features of foxes, or the incredible networks of fibers underlying the mushroom world. There's a roughly equal emphasis on birds, insects, mammals, reptiles & amphibians, and plants. Here's a sample of the detail, concerning "book lice": "Many other insect bibliovores are loosely referred to as 'bookworms,' including silverfish, the caterpillars of certain moths, and cigarette, drugstore and wood-boring beetle grubs. These creatures are in turn chased through the pages by crab-clawed book scorpions no bigger than the periods at the end of sentences."