Walking through the expansive green of Fort York and the adjacent Garrison Common one sunny Monday morning, Lesley Sampson, founding executive director of Coyote Watch Canada, points out a spot tucked into the brush where the late coyotes once made their den. “If we look at coyotes as our community, our eco-thermometer…if we look at how they’re living, their reaction to situations, where they’re traveling to in [the] community, it gives us some really good insight into where we’re failing,” she says. She points out the places where the coyotes could scavenge human food, or have had it left out for them. She counts the off-leash dogs walking by, despite the abundant coyote caution signs and leashing rules. She takes numerous photos of dog feces left behind by pet owners, which attracts rats, who in turn attract coyotes. “Aversion conditioning,” the process of firmly shoo-ing away coyotes with noise and body language until they avoid people, “changes animal behavior. It does not change human behavior, and therein lies the nucleus of what is actually happening here.”

Coyotes live at the edgelands of city life, sharing the space with foxes and rabbits and other wildlife we know to make their homes in the green interstices of our urban landscape. Our relationships with these creatures, and the role they play in our public imagination, is often dictated by how wide a berth they’ll give us; whether they’ll respect our imagined border between human life and animal. But growing a city means constantly pushing up against that border—whether through densification, development, or just the inevitable cascading effects of human intervention on the surrounding landscape—compelling our nonhuman neighbours to either enter our world or recede further into theirs.

In the end, the Critter Gitter remained elusive, hiding himself away from a public that has strong feelings about his line of work that they’re not afraid to share. But I was pleasantly surprised to find, in my search, that Sampson and Johnny know each other well, and share no animosity. They’re teammates, two different points on a spectrum of human response to a constantly shifting natural world.

In our new issue, Wild Wild City, launching this week and continuing through June and July, we explore the unexpected places where human life collides with the wildlife around us. We cover a range of creatures beloved and reviled, from local birds susceptible to bird flu to urban turtles protected by an Indigenous conservation group. We explore the growing lice removal industry and the dying world of exotic zoos. Executive Editor Nicholas Hune-Brown gets obsessed with bunnies and race horses, and I go inside Ontario’s unparalleled worm harvesting sector.

The issue launches with Alexandra Kimball’s immersive feature on cormorants, the dinosaur-era colonial waterbirds nesting at Tommy Thompson Park and now, increasingly, on the Toronto Islands. The birds are much maligned, and since 2020 have been widely hunted everywhere in the province but Toronto. But Kimball sees a beauty in them, and she’s not alone. “I’ve been researching these animals for over a month and have lost my objectivity,” she writes. “It’s not that the people who dislike the birds are wrong, it’s that there’s more. I’ve fallen in love with cormorants, and their black wings beat in my heart day and night.”

Alexandra’s writing asks a question pertinent to any less-than-desirable animal, including the city’s coyotes—what is the answer to sharing space and land with creatures we don’t always like? In a city that aims to be rigidly planned and carefully maintained, this issue is about the wildness that sneaks in through the cracks.