Living with Wildlife

Abstract

Nature is often untidy and many people brought up to expect a well- kept city landscape find it difficult to accept the informal appearance of thriving wildlife habitats in a town. In fact, so culture bound are our aesthetic feelings that even the most ardent urban ecologists occasionally find such sites jarring to their sensibilities. So at best our attitude to urban wildlife sites as visual landscape is ambivalent. From early May till the end of October, they are colourful places alive with flowers, insects and the chirping of grasshoppers; in this condition they provide a useful foil to more formal areas of landscape. For the rest of the year, however, dead plant material is one of their chief characteristics.