Foxes and raccoons can be found all over the city. They like to climb houses and play around in gardens and parks, they can even be found next to busy streets. The entire city of Berlin has become habitat for foxes. In fact, studies show that there are now more fox dens in the city than in the forest. But there are also lots of boars, martens and rabbits hopping crossing the streets.
Not to mention birds. Berlin is the city with the largest amount and variety of birds in Germany. We have songbirds, raptors like the white-tailed eagle - and in the past few years, we also have large seagulls breeding here. There is a huge colony of wild grey herons at Berlin's Tierpark that actually love it there because they eat the zoo animals' food. [...]
Take a fox for instance. Usually a wild fox would run for its life when confronted with a human, because they have been hunted so intensively. Not so in Berlin. Berlin's city foxes don't have this so-called flight initiation distance. They'll approach a human very closely, and stare him or her in the eye - and so citizens are often worried that something might be wrong with that fox, that it might have rabies, because they're not used to such behavior. [...]
It's important that we don't just keep building without leaving enough space for animals to survive. Especially the population of small birds like the great tit is rapidly decreasing - because we are overexploiting our green areas, and so the birds have nothing left to eat.
