A wanderer and writer with a doctorate in religion, Gavin Van Horn inhabits a big city. And that city (Chicago) has offered him something to compliment and complicate the solitude of the woods or a remote mountainside: a window onto the attractiveness of cities to animals. What was once in his mind essentially a nature-free zone turns out to be a bustling environment where millions of wild things roam. He came to realize that our own paths are crisscrossed by the tracks and flyways of black-crowned night herons, Cooper’s hawks, brown bats, coyotes, opossums, white-tailed deer, and many others who thread their lives ably through our own.

In his book, The Way of Coyote, Van Horn describes this urban amalgam in prose that weaves myth with science, ecological loss with abundance, and reflects on the role wildlife can play in waking us to a shared sense of place and fate.

Also consider registering for Van Horn's walk, Cultivating Wildness Where You Are, on Apri 4.

Cost: $5 member, $10 nonmember, free for students

Learn more about and RSVP for Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds.