Nola asked Tristan Donovan:

How did you pick what to cover in Feral Cities? Were there other stories for which there wasn't room?

Tristan Donovan Hi Nola, thanks for the question.

I began by making a list of animals and places I thought would be interesting to write about. Some started as animals I read about in research papers or stories, like the London foxes. In some cases, like Miami, I started off by thinking about cities that might be interesting to look at.

After that it was a case of balancing budget, range of animals and access. The latter was really important as without someone who knew the area and the animals to show me round it would have been very difficult to track down the animals in the time I had.

One subject, for example, that I would have loved to have covered was the feral dogs on the Moscow Metro. Unfortunately I never got hold of someone in Moscow who could, for want of a better word, be my 'guide' so it never happened.

As for stories that got left out there weren't any big ones, more a few small side stories that either took up too much space or would have broken the flow of the chapters to add in. One example would be the beavers that have started coming into Berlin via the rivers and destroying trees along the banks - it was sort of interesting (although there's not many of them so there weren't many tales to tell) but felt like it was one story too many for that chapter.

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