We were on a boat to Alaska recently and I got to talking to someone about all the bald eagles we were seeing while gliding along the long stretches of uninhabited forest. I noted that I hadn’t seen any ravens, to which she replied, “Wait till we get to Juneau.” And she was right. I think of ravens as birds that live out in the woods, perhaps visiting the periphery of human settlements. But in Juneau they were everywhere, the way I see crows in Seattle.
By coincidence, during the trip I’d been reading a back issue of the New Yorker that had an article about deer on Staten Island in New York, and how they’ve thrived in green areas close to cities. The article introduced me to a word that was highly relevant to all this: synanthrope. As the article describes the term …
… these are the tiny minority of wild animals—not livestock or pets—that have adapted to thrive in the places that humans like and are forever building more of.
Note the distinction that the author makes between synanthropes and pets and livestock. Dogs and cats have done extremely well in the company of humans. And counting just by population (if not fate), so have cows, pigs, and chickens. But these are all domesticated animals.
Synanthropes, on the other hand, are wild animals that have found niches in a human-dominated world. The NYer article recounts the surprising history of deer, which at one time were what today we’d consider a threatened species in the Northeast. Not only did they recover, but they’re now a pest, at least as seen from certain perspectives. Other synanthropes are rats, mice, opossums, coyotes, crows, insects like fleas and lice, and of course pigeons.
The first part of synanthrope is syn-, which is ultimately a Greek root that means “together, with.” We see that in synonym (“together-name”), synchronous (“together-time”), synapse (“together-touch”), and synergy (“together-work”). Among others; I’m sure you can think of more syn- words.
The anthrope part is another Greek root, this one meaning “human,” as in anthropology, the study of humans, basically.
You might have noted that synanthrope seems like it follows the pattern of similar words like philanthrope (philo-, “love,” and anthrope) and misanthrope (miso-, “hate,” and anthrope). The resemblance is not a coincidence, or at least not according to Merriam-Webster. Per their etymological note, synanthrope was originally coined in French in 1878 as an adjective, based on the pattern of those other words. They say that synanthrope was first used in English in the 1940s. You won’t find a lot of information elsewhere about the word synanthrope—it’s missing in most dictionaries. Even the OED includes only synanthropic (first cite 1938) but not synanthrope. (The OED search function did however offer a nice Did You Mean list that included lycanthrope, or “wolf-human.”)
Although my introduction to synanthrope concerned animals, the word was coined by a botanist to describe plants. I suppose that anyone who’s got a nice lawn is familiar with at least one synanthropic plant, namely dandelions.
Depending on how you feel about all these synathropes, you might take comfort from the fact that if we humans disappeared, the synathropic species would likewise have a tough go of it. Those ravens cawing so cacophonously in Juneau? They’d just have to go back to the woods and fend for themselves.
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