City Slickers, Country Cousins

In my younger years I lived in several metropolitan areas and became rather acclimated to that environment. Then in my early 40s I emigrated from the city to reside in this rural area. Many is the time I have pondered the differences in how my life has played out in these contrasting environments—usually in the context of being grateful for having been able to leave the frenetic city scene and settle in these backwoods.

Recently I began musing on the fact that city-country contrasts go much further than just human lifestyle. There are also significant differences in the flora and fauna. I’ll look at animal dissimilarities in this post. I have found animal metro life to be very different from that out here in the boonies. I know that may seem an obvious statement, but here are several curious distinctions that I’ve noted over the years.

To begin with, I’ve observed that country houseflies are slower than their city cousins. It must be because city people have inadvertently bred quicker flies there, by swatting at them so much. Slow city flies die young and never get a chance to pass their genes on, while the quick ones prosper. Country flies, however, are more laid back. They have to contend with less lethal and slower threats, like cows’ tails. Soon after I moved out here I noticed the difference, as my fly-swatting success markedly increased. Shoot, I even could catch some with my bare hand!

Mocking birds are fascinating to listen to, and the country types will treat you with pretty much every indigenous songbird call, when they launch into one of their marathon singing sessions. Listen to a city mockingbird, however, and you’re just as likely to hear it copying sirens, car alarms, and other electronic sounds. I wonder how many have recently learned those cute cell phone rings.

When we lived in the city we had a dog who moved out with us. She had learned her city habits so well that she simply couldn’t let go of them (a case of an old dog not learning new tricks). Her bowel business in town was expeditiously accomplished by stepping into the back yard, walking about 10 feet and dropping her load. She kept that habit out here; we never could get her to go deposit her poop in the woods. It was always a just few feet (in fact, under foot!) from the door. We even acquired a country dog to show her how to go off into the woods to do her toilet routine, but she never got it.

Besides differences in habits between city and country, there are several animal species that you see in the city that are very rare in the country: pigeons (we’ve got doves instead), rats, kitchen cockroaches (country roaches hide in wood piles, although they can learn to inhabit country kitchens), and fat squirrels (in the country pickings are leaner and bird feeders farther apart). On the other side of the coin, the list of common rural animals that are rare in a city is much longer. Examples are groundhogs, buzzards (no carrion allowed in town), woodpeckers (dead trees get quickly removed), whippoorwills, foxes, coyotes, bears, etc.

I wonder how animals would describe the contrasts they see between city and country people. They might have some amusing observations about how my spouse and I appeared so urbane right after moving out here. They probably chuckle at the ways in which we still are so citified—sort of like our dog, we are slow to learn new tricks.