Ruud Vlek

Wild animals in the city of Amsterdam, shouldn’t you look for them primarily in the City’s Zoo? However, what do we know of the wild fauna of our inner city’s biotopes, outside the cages of the Artis Zoo? About that we have a very fragmented knowledge indeed.

Cities, and certainly inner cities, seem to be very poor in animal life, because due to human overcrowding and few green areas they provide for many species no attractive place for reproduction and food supply. Only the true city birds, successfully following and adapting to human cultures and practices, are abundant because they virtually lack natural enemies in these city environments.

At closer look, however, there exists an impressive diversity of wild animals in the inner city of Amsterdam. This is caused by a great variety of urban biotopes, which exist together and supplement each other, and between which there is a mutual interchange.

The biotopes available for the diverse groups of animals in the inner city are rather different of volume. Besides describing their main characteristics we have to calculate the available space for each of them. In this article we will then explore the typical and more general as well as special animal species living in these urban biotopes, as well as a number of irregular and rarer species occurring in Amsterdam’s inner city.