But with the rise of tools and technology, man ceased to be just another primate in the ecosystem. He became man the technological dominant, with the potential to alter fundamental ecosystem processes through technological rather than ethological or evolutionary changes. Suddenly, the ecological time frames of earth moved to a new and more rapid beat.

It is postulated that among the earliest victims of man's technology may have been some of the extinct large ungulates known to have lived in North America. Animals such as the Giant Bison are presumed to have been brought to extinction by man the technologically-armed hunter.

The first large—scale alterations to ecosystems however would come when man's developing technology enabled him to shift from subsistence hunting and food gathering to domestication of livestock and the establishment of plant cultivation. These actions seem to have given rise to the city as we know it, a center of developing technology and the economy now aimed at supplying man's wants usually in excess of his needs.

Although it is often presumed that agriculture preceded the development of the city, it is just as reasonable to assume that the city as an ecosystem arose as a technological development of man and made possible the rise of agriculture and the widespread creation of human ecosystems.

The natural ecosystems that man systematically altered to produce his agricultural and urban ecosystem gradually underwent some irreversible changes. The object of plant and animal husbandry is to proliferate a few wanted species In contrast to others deemed either as competitive (and therefore to be eliminated), or worthless (and therefore to be replaced.) Man's increasing technology enabled him to occupy more and more land with agriculture and urban development, and the chopping up of the great natural ecosystems began.

As those areas most suitable for agriculture came under the planting stick or the plow, the landscape and its natural ecosystems began to shift and change. Man's livestock came to occupy the grazing lands, pushing out of existence the animals that normally occupied those ecosystems. It in not true that man's activities merely drove the extant animals into more remote habitats. All of the gazing lands of earth were completely occupied before man began his great technological development. The animals that were driven off the land could not "retreat"—there were no vacant lands for them to fall back on. They simply died. Those that survived were on lands not desired by man or those that could coexist with man. Animals that preyed upon man or his livestock were simply killed as the opportunity permitted. The predators that coexist with man today do so not out of man's compassion for ecosystem diversity, but simply because man has been unable to eliminate them. The coyote comes immediately to mind.

As the original vegetation patterns and ecosystems were altered by man, new ecosystems formed. Primitive agricultural ecosystems at first were confined to grazing lands, which often were extensive in area, and to tilled lands. Early man simply did not have the tools or the technology for large scale development of the landscape, and when he did acquire them, they were used first to regulate water. Thus man's earliest urban technological triumph gave rise to the irrigation civilization of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon in the Fertile Crescent, to the Egyptian development of the Nile Valley, and to the Chinese development of the Yellow River Valley. In these, the earliest of civilizations, the city and agriculture evolved simultaneously, cities rising like volcanic islands out of a sea of agriculture.

The consequent pattern of development provided urban admixtures of the original vegetation, the agriculture vegetation and domestic and wild animals. The city as an ecosystem became a collection of niches that provided habitats for man as well as for other animals and plants. The variety of urban niches in some ways actually provides more diversity than can be found in many ecosystems unmodified by man.

Cities were not planned to include wildlife, nor were they meant necessarily to exclude plants other than shade trees, turf, and ornamentals. In most cases, man does not decide what plants and animals will inhabit a particular city; this decision is imposed upon him by environmental circumstances—climate and the prevailing environmental conditions that make it possible for certain plants and animal life to inhabit an area.

We are accustomed to think of modern city vegetation only in terms of street plants, i.e.. shade trees, grass, turf, flowers, and similar cultivations. But in those rare areas of cities that man has not invaded and used for his technology, we are more likely to find the plants and animals that are typical of the surrounding countryside.

In the first cities no doubt there was a continuity of habitat from the surrounding countryside into the city, and probably a great deal of wildlife was present in these cities; we know that many agricultural animals—chickens, sheep, goats, horses, cattle—were kept in cities and considerable agriculture was carried on. Zoning laws against chickens, horses, cows, etc., came late in city life.

It is equally certain that predators and other animals from the surrounding area were frequent visitors to early cities. The cities protected people from the predators that were the natural denizens of the locality and the commons of these cities provided grazing for sheep and other domestic animals under conditions that protected them from marauding wildlife.

Even today there are recorded instances of wildlife wandering into cities that stand adjacent to their habitat. In cities located in the deciduous forest of the eastern United States—Pennsylvania for instance—it is not uncommon for deer to wander through the towns. In the early 1921 a black bear was shot in the kitchen of the Hotel Duluth in Duluth, Minnesota. This intrepid beast was stuffed and is now exhibited in that hotel's cocktail dispensary—the Black Beer Lounge.

As cities developed in size and complexity, gradually progressing from villages and crossroad market towns to huge metropolitan areas, their impact upon the habitats of natural ecosystems grew enormously. In addition to altering the existing ecosystems, the development of cities created hundreds of thousands of new habitats and new ecosystems.

The city, then, began as a new form of earthly habitat, carved out of natural and agricultural ecosystems that hitherto had harbored only wildlife. In other instances, human use of the land has extirpated the wildlife, or the construction of buildings has destroyed the animals' habitat. Most cities still are contiguous to a rural hinterland of natural ecosystems which provide a continuity of habitat and some cities are even surrounded by native ecosystems. In this way, wildlife still is provided with avenues into and out of similar habitats in the cities, allowing them to be populated by animals from the surrounding countryside.

When we think of the wildlife of the city, we tend to think only in terms of conservation. We think of birds, squirrels and rabbits; in short, those animals that are largely innocuous so far as man is concerned. More realistically we must recognize that city wildlife includes rats, vermin, insects, and all manner of other animal life that does not fit our picture of ideal living conditions for man.

The environment of the city has been modified to provide a habitat for man and to provide the locale and the means to operate man's technology. The animals present fall into three categories: Those that man wants—dogs, cats, horses, chickens. etc.: those that always accompany man wherever he goes and which all on his waste products—rats, mice, lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, and so forth: and those that are well—adjusted to the habitat created by man's activities such as pigeons, English sparrows, starlings and bass.