Pigeons and squirrels, rabbits and crows: all familiar sights for the inhabitants of American cities. But a bobcat? And yet there one was, peering at Peter Alagona from the bushes just beside the suburban bike path he routinely took to work. “We locked eyes for several seconds,” he writes, “two mammals in the ancient act of sizing each other up.”

 

While perhaps his most startling encounter, the bobcat was far from Alagona’s first run-in with urban wildlife, and he knows he’s not alone. “So many people have all of these stories because they see these creatures; they live with them; they interact with them,” said the environmental historian, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara. “But people don’t always know why they’re there; what they’re doing; or how they make a living.” 

 

It was these questions that prompted his second book, “The Accidental Ecosystem,” which tells the story of how American cities filled with wildlife. Alagona hopes the book catalyzes a conversation about how to reimagine our cities as shared, multispecies habitats.