By Squirrel For Mayor
Living in an urban forest isn’t just about having trees nearby or pockets of green space stitched between streets and buildings. It’s about place—and the many spaces required for life to unfold across species, seasons, and scales.
In this short video, we see black-tailed deer teaching their young, a Cooper’s hawk navigating food spaces, and a Northern flicker foraging—each using the city differently, yet together. This is what biodiversity looks like when it’s allowed to persist: not as decoration, but as relationship.
The Garry oak ecosystem tells this story especially well. Co-evolved over millennia, Garry oaks are not solitary trees; they are keystone organizers of a living network—supporting hundreds of species of plants, insects, birds, and mammals. Meadows, mosses, bulbs, cavities, bark, and light gaps create niches. Fire, drought, and deep time shaped resilience. Care, stewardship, and continuity sustain it now.
To live in an urban forest, then, is to recognize that cities are not separate from nature. They are habitats. It means designing and protecting landscapes that make room for movement, nesting, feeding, shelter, and refuge—for deer paths and hawk flyways, for woodpecker cavities and pollinator blooms, for people learning how to live with the lives around them.
This is not just green space.
This is multispecies community.
This is the Garry oak ecosystem—still here, still teaching us what belonging can look like.