• Mammals,
• Reptiles and Amphibians

Sustaining The Nature of New York
A new course is offered this spring at CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise. [more]

Cleaner waters
Hudson River Foundation issues report showing that health of New York Harbor has improved. [more]

Real-time monitoring
Stevens Institute of Technology launches New York City's first marine observatory. [more]

Deep Urban Nature
Explore some of New York City's best nature preserves with the Parks Department. [more]

The latest Buzz? Rooftop Honey
Wild Honey Bees roam the Cityscape in search of flowers to pollinate. [more]

A Cooler New York
Learn how green roofs can bring temperatures down and improve water quality. [more]

Mammals

Medium-sized mammals that are well adapted to urban and suburban habitats of NYC include Raccoon, Opossum and Skunk. In densely populated urban areas, opportunistic mammals such as squirrels impact local populations of trees in urban forests. By gorging themselves on the preferred acorns of white oaks in NYC, squirrels unknowingly propagate red and black oaks by discarding their tannin-rich acorns.

With forest cover increasing in the Northeastern United States, many large mammals are making a spectacular comeback, and have begun to reestablish populations in suburban and even densely populated urban areas in the Tri-State area. These include White-tailed Deer, Coyote and even Black Bear in nearby New Jersey suburbs. While many larger predators are useful by reducing the impact of emerging infectious diseases such as Lyme disease, their impact on human communities are a source of notable conflict. Numbers of many mammal species, notably those of the white-footed mouse, can actually be enhanced by urban sprawl and the ensuing fragmentation of remaining natural habitats at the City’s borders.

Useful links

• Co-existing with urban mammals
• Adaptations of urban wildlife

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Reptiles and amphibians

The fauna and flora of the New York metropolitan region have evolved in an ever-changing environment. Since the end of the last ice-age, when ice-sheets retreated after covering most of the NYC area, plants and animals have “reinvaded” the NYC region from all cardinal points, leading not only to an exceptionally high biodiversity but more interestingly to a unique blend of plant and animal species of different bio-geographical origins. This ‘melting-pot’ effect is particularly true of reptile and amphibians, with the lower Hudson Valley harboring one of the highest diversities of fresh water turtles on earth.

Of specific habitat importance to many local reptiles and amphibians are wetlands, notably vernal pools; important breeding grounds for many frog, turtle and salamander species. Saltwater marshes and lagoons too, such as in Jamaica Bay, Queens are prime habitat for reptiles and amphibians, notably the Diamond-Backed Terrapin, a unique aquatic turtle adapted to salt and brackish waters that comes onto land in the early summer to lay its eggs.

Today however, most slow-moving and highly local reptiles and amphibians in the Tri-state landscape are deemed functionally extinct. Isolated in fragments of available habitat, subsisting in a de facto archipelago, their numbers are essentially dislocated, small relict populations surrounded and cornered by the tangle of highways, roads and imperviously covered lots and strips brought on by sprawl. Many individual animals can no longer travel in search of potential mates and their diminished, remaining populations would be incapable of migrating if, in the advent of global warming, a rise in sea-levels were to inundate large areas of coastal New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

Complete inventories of turtle, snake, salamander, frog and toad species have been established for both NY state and the NYC area.

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