Feral Cities Read Free Page B

little more than a handful of show homes thirty miles north of Phoenix. Today, it covers nearly ten square miles and around twenty-five thousand people live there.
    â€œIt’s a planned community. They planned an entire town, complete with schools and stuff, and then just built the entire thing at once, sold it, and incorporated it as a town,” says Bryan on the drive there.
    When we arrive I see what he means. Anthem has an unreal feel about it. The countryside around it is desert, but the town center is an expanse of neatly clipped lawns kept on life support by an army of sprinklers and small, man-made lakes. It clashes so much with the dusty wilderness around it that it looks as if it’s been airlifted in from North Carolina.
    The problem with plunking lakes and lush grassland in the desert is that it doesn’t just attract people, it also draws in the local wildlife. “They made this huge city park and lots of people use it, but at night you don’t want to go there because there’s tons of animals there,” says Bryan.
    Among the animals that have taken to the streets of Anthem are javelinas, also known as collared peccaries. They look like wild pigs but evolved separately and are about as closely related to pigs as they are to hippos. At night, packs of javelinas roam the streets of Anthem, tipping over garbage cans, feeding on people’s plants, and digging into the soil for tubers. They may be vegetarians but they can cause problems. Sometimes they chew through irrigation hoses, quench their thirst at backyard swimming pools, or take shelter under mobile homes.
    They also hate dogs. Really hate dogs. In the wild, dogs and coyotes are their main predators, so when javelinas encounter a dog they turn aggressive. And, as some Anthem residents have discovered while walking their dogs, their sharp teeth can deliver a nasty bite.
    Between 2003 and 2013, the number of reported incidents involving javelinas in the Phoenix area quadrupled. The Arizona Game and Fish Department puts most of that down to urban expansion bringing more people and their dogs into contact with the animals.
    Rattlesnakes turn up in Anthem too. “One woman had been feeding rabbits in her backyard, giving them little baby carrots and stuff,” says Bryan. “She went out there one day and there was a rattlesnake. It had eaten all the baby rabbits. She lost her mind atthat, but it’s like don’t feed the rabbits—that’s why the rattlesnakes are here.”
    The family at the home we’re visiting in Anthem has spotted a couple of rattlesnakes in the past week. The first was found coiled on their front porch late at night. The second was seen a few days later slithering along the driveway at about ten in the evening.
    Bryan reckons the snakes were just passing through. September’s a busy time of year for rattlesnakes; they are preparing for winter, so they tend to move around a lot.
    He checks out the front and back yards, poking leaf litter with his snake hook, checking inside the outdoor BBQ, and looking for holes in the decorative rocks by the pool that could make a nice spot for a resting snake. Nothing.
    He spots a woodpile and knocks it several times with his hook to see if a snake is in there. Again, nothing. The fencing around the backyard also looks secure, and there are no snake tracks in the gravel or wood chips, either. The house is rattlesnake-free; the snakes were just passing through.
    It looks as if the Scottsdale rattlesnake is all I’m going to see. But then, as Bryan drives me back to my hotel, his phone rings again. There’s a snake in Paradise Valley.
    We arrive at the house to find a gopher snake that has gotten itself wedged in the hard plastic sprinkler cover in the front lawn. It looks much like a rattlesnake, with black diamond-shaped blotches running along its otherwise gray-yellow body, but without the distinctive rattle at the end of its tail.
    The