Photograph courtesy of Cat Kerr
Sitting on my porch one afternoon, I heard a strange thud. I looked up from my laptop and saw a juvenile opossum—old enough to be out on its own, but young enough that it might not have developed all its survival skills yet—frozen still and looking a bit dazed. It had fallen out of a tree and landed in my apartment complex.
The opossum’s options weren’t great. To get out, it’d have to either navigate through the street and security gate or climb the fence and cross the barbed wire at the top. To spare the opossum from risk of injury, I did what any animal lover who has worked in zoos and nature centers would do: I ran out to the opossum, threw an old towel over it, and carried it back to the place it fell from. In the same tone I use to talk to my cat, I encouraged it to go home. It hissed at me, then waddled over to its tree and started the ascent.
This animal was my neighbor. I was equipped to help the opossum, so I did—the same as I would for any other member of my community.
Of course, there are many kinds of nonhuman residents who call Atlanta home, not just opossums. It brings me joy to walk around Inman Park most evenings and check on them. Pigeons peck in the gravel under the John Lewis Freedom Parkway bridge, its graffitied concrete walls reverberating their gentle coos. In the mornings, robins and blue jays splash in puddles formed from sprinkler runoff just beyond my porch. Last spring, I watched a brood of fuzzy mallard ducklings grow up, sharing their pond in the Inman Village Pocket Park with turtles who sunbathed on the floating artificial logs. Every oak tree seems to host a squirrel, and occasionally when I’m walking home late at night, I catch a glimpse of a brown rat boldly venturing out to forage for snacks.
We all share this place. The city and the wild are one and the same.
Science has taught us that, like my human neighbors, these animals are individuals with distinct needs, pleasures, and pains. But unlike us, they can’t communicate their subjective experiences to the public; nor can they vote, or comment at a city council meeting. They’re constituents of Atlanta, but they don’t have a say in how Atlanta’s rapid growth and changing landscape will affect them, so it’s up to us: If there’s something we can do to make Atlanta a better place for wild animals to live, then I think we should. I hope someday we’ll implement policies that benefit them directly, but for now, we can at least look out for the ones in our own backyards.
Being the City in the Forest is something to be proud of, and it comes with the responsibility of stewardship. All our neighbors deserve our care and compassion—human or not.
If you find a wild animal in need, contact a professional wildlife rehabilitator. For a list of rehabilitation centers in Georgia, visit georgiawildlifenetwork.com/rehabbers or view the county-by-county map linked on georgiawildlife.com/sick-injured-or-orphaned-wildlife.
This article appears in our February 2025 issue.
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