As a student, I heard the line “graduate school is stressful” so many times that it began to bear no meaning:

Sure, there were campus resources that encouraged healthy behaviors, including deep thought, and the benefits of self-care, but self-care sounded expensive and time-consuming to me; I had work to do. And I was not a fan of deep thought: The thought of sitting still for 30 minutes only caused me greater stress. But one thing I couldn’t stay away from was walking my dog.

Tessa is a six-year-old lovely coonhound that I got as a gift to myself, for completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. I first saw Tessa as a thin and little dog in a photo on the Internet. She was found, huddled up with her friends, in a deserted house in Alabama.

Because of Tessa, I took frequent walking breaks while studying for a master’s degree in public health at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I discovered the best corners and crannies on campus, including the sloping grass land behind the school, filled with squirrels and sticks — a safe place for dogs. I found a tree accidentally with a swing, overlooking the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, which offered the best sunset view in town. On our daily walks, I found calm in the woods and quiet in the early morning enveloping the city streets.

Now, as I work from home, Tessa continues to help me deal with a lonely existence. Just like in graduate school, she demands that I stop working, however briefly, and accompany her on a walk. These forced breaks throughout the day take me away from my computer and help me to stay active, greet my neighbors and come back to work refreshed. And although I certainly haven’t escaped from stress, and I am still trying to find my footing in research, I will continue to make time for walks every day. I recommend it very much.

Seth Magle is an urban ecologist in Chicago. In 2021, he started building a network of fellow urban animal lovers from around the world. They’re working to collect information so that it can be compared in different cities.

With the goal of trying to create more wildlife inclusive cities, the network helps reduce human wildlife conflict and increase human wildlife coexistence in the massively urbanizing areas.

In Chicago, Magle and his team have been watching their city’s wildlife for about 10 years. All together, they have over 100 camera traps set up across different types of urban environments from the downtown Loop and city parks to nature preserves and suburb golf courses.

During times of recent extreme heat, we do definitely see animals reduce movement and just stay where they are. It’s probably energetically difficult to move around when it’s so hot. Although this works for a short term in high temperature, it’s not ideal over a longer period because it means less time to search for food or a new mate.

As Magle and his network of urban researchers look toward the future and climate change, they predict bigger shifts. Temperatures everywhere are projected to warm, so wildlife in urban settings and beyond will likely have to shift their normal regions a bit further north to where it feels more comfortable and to what they’re already used to. We don’t have armadillos in Chicago, but we have them in the southern part of the state. And they seem to be migrating north.

Only time will tell how our urban wildlife reacts to these longer-term shifts in temperature.

For now, it sounds like urban animals — so long as they’re healthy — are totally capable of handling a few days of extreme heat here and there.