Who would have thought that in the city almost at every step you can meet wild animals? Many insects, birds and mammals have adapted to live here. A bustling city is their usual habitat. Take a closer look! Wild animals are literally everywhere here: they rustle in the grass, flutter over flowers, dig underground tunnels, build nests on balconies and run in attics.

Predators have been skillfully using the neighborhood with humans for a long time, in times of famine, visiting villages and towns in search of food, not being afraid to enter large cities. The fact is that in search of food and shelter from predators, many birds fly to cities where they have never been met or were rare (wild pigeons, jackdaws, rooks, crows, etc.). And predators, losing their usual "food base", rush after birds and rodents closer to human habitation. In addition, in the city, besides usual food on hungry days, they can also find human food. RJ - a raccoon from the cartoon "The Woodsmen" - tried to prove to his forest comrades that the city is "a gateway to a wonderful life, where strange creatures, called people who live to eat, not eat to live, live." But in fact, animals do not appear in the city in search of a "sweet life", but simply try to survive.

Foxes that appear in the city cause panic among the population. Although it happens because of people. In addition to foxes and all familiar dogs and cats, martens are often seen in Kharkiv. These predators gradually became closer to humans and changed their natural habits. They live in attics and basements, from where they go hunting every night, use human buildings for reproduction, populate the voids of heating mains and sewer systems, and thus lose contact with suburban biotopes. Within the city, martens feed on rats, mice, pigeons, sparrows, and do not hesitate to waste in garbage cans.

Rarely, hares or wild boars can be found on the outskirts of the city. In winter, hares live near arable lands with winter and perennial grasses. During severe snowstorms in the steppe regions, it becomes difficult for animals to find food, so they live near settlements, where they can find the remains of garden crops, bark and branches of fruit trees, hay and straw supplies.

Wild boars get their food mainly by digging, eating underground parts of plants, as well as soil vertebrates and small animals. Being omnivorous animals, wild boars are quite closely related to humans, finding food for themselves in carelessly cleaned fields or dumps of human waste.

Many bird species have settled in cities. Tits visit feeders, sometimes, they fly up to the windows, looking for insects in the window frames, which gives the impression that they are demandingly knocking on the glass, if a piece of bacon was not hung out of the window in time.

Predatory birds have also become frequent in the city. For many years, under the roof of one of the buildings of Karazin University, small falcons - kestrels nest, and in the summertime on the outskirts of the sleeping areas of Saltovka and over the "possessions" of Kharkiv gardeners, small eagles-buzzards soar.

Some representatives of owls (a house owl, a long-eared owl and a grey owl) live in Kharkov practically on "legal rights", but their nocturnal lifestyle makes them invisible to us.

A man, mastering all new spaces, sometimes leaves no room for the animal world. So wild animals have to adapt to changed living conditions.