London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, and falcons all in one city – and not at London Zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of urban microclimates teeming with wildlife.
Sam Davenport, director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, highlights the sheer variation in habitats found in UK cities. 'If you think of going out into the countryside where you have arable fields, it’s really homogeneous. But if you walk a mile in each direction of a city you’re going to get allotments, gardens, railway lines, bits of ancient woodland,' he said.
Animals thrive in cities because urban winters are milder than in the countryside. 'It’s not uncommon in cities to see queen bumblebees foraging over Christmas,' Davenport noted. 'When it’s cold, the city is warmer. We have a microclimate that invertebrates can make use of.' Species such as otters and herons also benefit from waterways that are less likely to freeze.
Among the notable residents are yellow-tailed scorpions, thought to number over 10,000 at Sheerness dockyard in Kent, with a second colony in east London docklands. They arrived in the 1800s in shipments of Italian masonry. Regent’s Park hosts the UK’s main population of Aesculapian snakes, olive-coloured constrictors believed to be escapers from a former research facility.
The River Thames, declared biologically dead in 1957, has been revived. Otters can be seen near Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and harbour seals sometimes wander inland from the Thames estuary. More unexpected residents include demon shrimp from the Black Sea and short-snouted seahorses thought to have drifted in on the Gulf Stream. Red-eared terrapins, abandoned pets from the 1980s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze, now thrive in urban ponds.
Peregrine falcons, the fastest animals in the world, also thrive in central London, demonstrating the adaptability of wildlife in the capital's unique microclimates.
