Jenny McBride – Cougar
From Chicago Tribune: A cougar ran loose in Chicago on Monday for the first time since the city’s founding in the 19th Century. But by day’s end, the animal lay dead in a back alley on the North Side, shot by police who said they feared it was turning to attack.
No one knew where the 150-pound cat came from, though on Saturday Wilmette police had received four reports of a cougar roaming that suburb, roughly 15 miles from the site of Monday’s shooting.
Whatever its origin, the 5-foot-long cougar’s unlikely journey ended in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, where residents reported sightings throughout the day to the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control.
From NPR: Chicago’s Cook County now has over 60 coyotes fitted with radio collars (plus a good many uncollared ones) roaming parks, alleys, yards and thoroughfares in one of the biggest cities in America.
The animals earn their keep eating small rodents, especially rats and voles. The Cook County, Illinois, Coyote Project calls itself “the largest urban study of coyotes in the world.”
From the coyote in the downtown Chicago sandwich shop
To the cougar shot in the same city
Having walked all the way from South Dakota
To tell us that Earth is still alive.
Wild things bursting at her seams
Our planet glows with
The answers to our problems.
Life springing back to life all around us
Wild things running through our cities
On a relay of hope
The thrill of living
Jenny McBride
November-December 2009 Earth First!