Wherever people live, animals live also.
TheLiving Town
Living Close to Peoople.
At night, when most people are asleep, many animals are moving about in our towns. Some of them, such as raccoons and opossums, are surprisingly large, but they may be harder to spot than small ones, such as rats, rabbits, and bats. All these animals live in urban areas as well as in the country. Many of them feed at night and rest during the day.
Rabbits need plenty of graass to eat. You may see them at dawn or dusk feeding in parks or in large gardens. Black and brown rats will eat almost anything, but black rats prefer fruit and brown rats like to eat cereals. Urban raccoons often overturn garbage cans and spread litter in their search for food.
High-Rise Life.
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The buildings that make up our towns towns and cities provide homes and places of work and leisure for people. However, to many kinds of wildlife, these buildings are good substitutes for natural habitats. Tall office blocks and warehouses are treated as inland "cliffs" by some kinds of birds. The pigeon, for example, has evolved from the rock doveer, which lives on rocky coasts. The pigeon roosts and nests on tall buildings. Seagulls also nest on tall buildings. Urban gulls usually breed more successfully than their coastal relatives.
As as as the sun sets in many large towns and cities, the twittering and chattering of huge flocks of starlings may be heard above the noise of the traffic. Starlings, and
pigeons, gather together on the ledges and sills of buildings to roost for the night.
In the beginning, the sky was close to the earth, and the people didn't have to work for their food. All they had to do was cut away a piece of sky to eat. It tasted delicious, like meat or corn or honey or anything else they felt like eating. Since they didn't have to huntss for their food, all they did was weave and carve and tell stories all day.
Once every year, there was a great festival in Oba's kingdom in celebration of this greatness. All the people looked forward to wearing their best clothes, dancing all day and night, and feasting on wonderful foods.
Oba's servants prepared magnificentss food. They pulled pieces of sky down and shaped them into flowers and animals and every imaginable form. They coloured them and cooked them and placed them on huge platters so that the food looked tempting and inviting.
The people came in gorgeous robes. Music played, and everyone danced. Soon the people became hungry and started to eat. The food was so delicious that they ate and ate until everything was gone.
But the people were greedy and wanted to eat more, even though they were no longer hungry. They pulled down great quantities of sky and gobbled them up. What they couldn't stuff into themselves, they threw on the garbage heap. Greedy and wasteful, they forgotla all about the sky's warning.
word
"People of the earth," the sky boomed, "you are wasteful and greedy. I warned you. I will no longer give you food. You will have to work to eat."
The sky sailed up high above the earth, far out of the reach of the tallest person. Ever since thein, no one has been able to reach up and grab a piece of it, and the people must work hard on farms and in factories for their food.