Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  Derk has his own wildlife rescue stories, the most dramatic of which is the time a red fox took a ride on a U8 subway train. “From what people said it was early in the morning and this young fox, he was perhaps worried by people or a dog. He was running through the street and goes down into an underground station where there was a train standing with the door open. He goes in and the door shuts and the train starts moving while he is inside.”

  After passengers reported the fare jumper, the train stopped at Hermannplatz, a busy commuter station where two of Berlin’s underground lines meet. “At first they wanted to shoot the fox but then they decided no, there are people, press, and electronics inside the train to worry about, so they rang me up,” says Derk.

  “So they bring me up to the station by police car with the sirens going. I went down and it was full of people. People on the gate, policemen, people from the fire service, more than forty people, and they are all in a half-circle around the fox in the train, which was crying.”

  Derk told everyone to get out and to clear the stairs leading out of the station. “After a minute or two, I went into the train to check on the fox and it runs through my legs, up the stairs and out.”

  While much of Derk’s time is spent dealing with the times people and animals clash, he is happy that wildlife is part of life in Berlin. “It’s brilliant to see that we are not alone in cities and most people are happy about that,” he says.

  The challenge is getting those who object to the wildlife to stop feeling threatened. “It is not necessary to change the way we live. It’s a change in how we think, to have a coolness, a tolerance. If people are angry about some animal, maybe they do not know about it. The fox, for example, it is not dangerous for the kids and it is normal to have a fox in the city.

  “For example, some people came to me and said children are playing in the playground, and every day a young fox comes there. They wanted me to promise that the fox is no danger. So I said, ‘I will make a deal with you. If the danger increases we will shoot it.’ Then, they say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t want you to shoot it. Why don’t you just take it away?’ I said, ‘No, we can’t just take it away. Where would it go?’

  “The foxes have changed their lives. They have no dens in the soil. They have their dens in the houses or basements. They prefer to look at the garbage and not at the forest.”

  ROMANCING COYOTES

  Looking for Coyotes in Chicago and Los Angeles

  Shane McKenzie said I wouldn’t be able to miss him, and he wasn’t wrong.

  From the moment I saw the dark blue Ford Ranger heading toward our meeting spot at Chicago’s Cumberland metro station, I knew it was Shane. The huge chrome aerial sticking out of the cab gave it away. It’s enormous, held aloft by a four-foot-tall mast. The antenna juts out horizontally from the top of the mast, extending five feet, its length crisscrossed with short metal rods.

  “So, you saw the giant antenna,” grins Shane as I get into the passenger seat. “It’s called a Yagi. That antenna allows us to pick up the VHF signal that the radio collars on the coyotes are producing.”

  Inside the cab is the bottom end of the mast. It is poking through a circular piece of wood affixed to the underside of the roof. A grubby disc of laminated paper with angles marked out in degrees has been glued onto the wood. Sticking out of the base of the mast is a makeshift metal handle that ends in a skewered golf ball and is used to rotate the antenna from within the pickup. A thick black electrical cable runs out of the mast and into a blue 1970s radio receiver covered in dials, switches, and ports. In an age of GPS the kit looks dated but, then again, the Chicago coyote-tracking project predates the smartphone era.

  The man behind the project is Ohio State University ecologist Dr. Stan Gehrt. It started in 2000 back when Stan worked for the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation, the research charity founded by the eponymous electrical equipment tycoon.

  “During the 1990s coyotes started showing up in areas where they had never been seen before,” Stan told me over the phone before my meeting with Shane. “There was a lot of concern because, at that time, the idea of coyotes living in or around cities was not common. So in 2000 we got funding to do a one-year study.

  “It was basic stuff. We were going to try and catch some coyotes, which we weren’t even sure we would be able to do, put a few radio collars on them, and find out if these animals were really living in the Chicago area or just passing through.”

  Stan remembers being skeptical about the project’s future. “The thinking was that there weren’t many coyotes to study in Chicago and it would be a very temporary thing. But we were lucky and managed to catch some animals right off the bat and, in the first few weeks, we realized that we were completely underestimating the way that coyotes are using the urban landscape and so the project has never stopped.”

  Stan didn’t know it at the time, but the arrival of coyotes in Chicago was no one-off. All over North America, coyotes were moving to the city. Today there are coyotes in St. Louis, in Boston, in Nashville, and in Washington, DC, to name but a few. Even New York City, once seemingly immune to the coyote influx, has now been colonized by the medium-sized omnivores, which resemble small wolves.

  Stan thinks the rapid urbanization of the coyote is due to the collapse in demand for the animals’ grayish brown to yellowish gray fur back in the late 1980s. “Obviously we weren’t doing research on them before they got here, so it’s pretty much speculation, but Illinois is typical of most states in that hunters and trappers can take as many coyotes as they want. There’s basically no restrictions.

  “So there was this constant removal of coyotes in rural settings that kept the population at a certain level. But at some point in the late 1980s, early 1990s there was a crash in the pelt prices and with it a huge drop in the interest and effort to hunt and trap coyotes.”

  With the hunters and trappers gone, the coyote population boomed and the resulting overcrowding encouraged many of them to seek a home in the urban sprawl. “Coyotes have a very territorial social system, and as their population builds coyotes are constantly getting pushed out into abnormal habitat. So probably what happened was the rural population grew during the late ’80s and early ’90s and caused the animals to explore new habitats, and the only habitat that was left that wasn’t already occupied by other territorial coyotes were the huge metropolitan areas.” The coyote baby boom also coincided with efforts to make America’s cities greener, a trend that helped to ease the coyote’s transition from rural to urban life.

  Since 2000 Stan’s project has put collars on hundreds of coyotes in the Chicago area. Shane’s job is to spend nights cruising the streets and using the Ford Ranger’s aerial to locate the coyotes and record their whereabouts.

  “Our nights always start at sundown,” says Shane, as he turns onto I-294 and we head toward the suburb of Northbrook to find the first coyote of the evening. “That’s when they start moving. They know the traffic patterns—they know the times when it is busy. So they all wait until it dies down and then they come out.”

  Many of the sixty or so coyotes that currently have collars live in the city’s forest preserves, but tonight we’re focusing on the more urbane individuals. “The animals we’re going to go to tonight are much more comfortable being seen by people and being around cars,” says Shane. “There are a few of them where I can sit with the spotlight on them and they just turn their eyes away until I turn away the spotlight and then they just continue on.

  “They don’t worry at all. I think they know the truck, for when we pull up they start watching us, whereas the ones in the forest preserves will run away right away. They never stick around.”

  First on the list is Coyote 390. She was collared as a pup back in 2009 and the team have nicknamed her the Northbrook Animal. “She began her life in the Highland Woods area, which is about eight to ten miles away from where she now is,” says Shane.

  Coyote 390’s early life was uneventful. She stuck to the golf cou
rse she was born on, found a mate, and had a litter of pups. But then, around the age of three, she was struck with wanderlust and took off to find a new place to roam.

  Her decision to pull up stakes was a tense moment for the team. The radio signals sent out by the collars can only be picked up within a mile radius and so tracking down a wandering coyote can be a challenge. “Usually it will take months before we’ll end up finding these animals again, but we got really lucky with her—we found her within a week. Her home range now, half of it is forest preserve—the Des Plaines River forms the boundary line for her—the other half is a residential area she uses.

  “What’s really cool is that she was actually absorbed into another forest preserve pack, which according to Dr. Gehrt is very rare. Usually when an animal comes to a new forest preserve there’s already going to be a pack there and they are not going to be too friendly, so she’s a special case. She’s one of my favorites.”

  Shane has plenty of stories about the secret lives of Chicago coyotes, tales that have been pieced together from snatches of geo-location data, dissected scats, pathology reports, and genetic tests. “Just recently, we had the oldest coyote on the project—Coyote 125—die on us,” he says. Coyote 125 was like some grand old coyote queen. At the peak of her reign, she controlled almost half of the vast Poplar Creek forest preserve. “She ended up settling down with her mate and slowly divvied up her territory until what was once a huge home range became concentrated in these two very small blocks. All she and her mate did was travel between those two blocks. It was almost like she was given a small piece of territory—her little senior living home—within the areas of all these other packs.

  “Eventually we found her dead one day. Unfortunately it was summer and the body had already gone through an advanced stage of decomposition, so it was not obvious what did her in. We sent her to the Brookfield Zoo to do a necropsy. I’m pretty sure they didn’t find anything abnormal other than old age.”

  Then there’s the Campton Hills Animal, who caught mange—the nasty skin disease caused by the mite responsible for scabies in humans. “He had pretty bad mange a while back,” says Shane. “He’s actually gotten over it, but he was a very visual animal during the middle of the day when he had mange. He’d just be walking down the streets and in backyards.” It is thought the fur loss caused by mange can make it harder for animals to regulate their body temperature and this encourages coyotes to be active in the daytime when it’s warmer.

  “The residents were very concerned about it. Dr. Gehrt had a lot of conversations with residents who were asking us what were we going to do about it. But we’re observers, that’s all we are. We’re not introducing coyotes, we are just collaring them and following them and watching what they do. Luckily, he started to become less visible as the summer progressed and the calls about him have pretty much tapered off.”

  As we reach Northbrook, Shane switches on the VHF receiver. It fills the cab with a constant hiss of static, but then, as we reach the intersection between I-294 and Dundee Road, a faint but regular pulse of beeps becomes audible over the white noise. Pip, pip, pip, it goes.

  Shane pulls onto the verge, grabs the golf ball on the handle, and starts rotating the giant aerial clockwise. The beeps get louder and then quieter. Shane stops and starts turning the aerial counterclockwise. The beeps grow louder and louder and then quieter. He continues swinging the aerial back and forth in ever-smaller increments before settling on the point where the beeps are at their loudest.

  “She’s on the edge about three degrees or so,” says Shane as we look into unlit forest preserve we’ve parked next to.

  This is just the first reading. Shane needs more to calculate exactly where Coyote 390 is. “Typically it takes four different bearings to get an accurate triangulation. You only need three, but one will usually be off at some point. But she could just cross the road right now as we’re taking these bearings. It gets very frustrating if she’s moving quickly.”

  We return to the road to relocate the signal from different angles. We race up and down the roads, listening as we go for the telltale pips. We pull into driveways and onto the shoulder, each time scanning the area to get the loudest signal. “We do a lot of creeping in front of people’s houses like this,” says Shane, as he takes the fourth and final reading.

  And how do people react to having a dark truck with a whopping great rotating aerial pulling up outside their house? I ask. “I get a lot of people who come out and talk to us. Most are pretty friendly, but every so often you get someone who doesn’t believe you and thinks you’re listening in to their cell phone conversations.”

  Shane inputs the four readings into a tired-looking PalmPilot PDA. It crunches the numbers and adds the approximate location of Coyote 390 to the records. “She is somewhere in the trees out there,” says Shane, pointing at the dark forest.

  We may have found her but she’s staying well out of sight tonight, so we move on.

  The second coyote on Shane’s list is another suburbanite, the Palatine Animal. “She is from an area we nicknamed Melonhead’s Marsh. We’ve got time what with the drive, so I’ll tell the story,” says Shane as we begin the drive south to Palatine.

  “The first female ever caught for the project was Coyote 1 in March 2000. She was named the Schaumburg Female because she was from the Schaumburg suburb.” One day the Schaumburg Female found a mate, another collared animal: Coyote 115. “His nickname was Melonhead, because he had a giant head. Those two had countless litters and so they had to change their home ranges. They gave it up to their kids essentially.”

  Coyote 1 eventually passed away in May 2010 at the age of nine or ten. “When she died, Melonhead left the area, because they are monogamous animals and the only time in which they will split is when one passes. He left his home range to try and find another mate. But his collar was, unfortunately, dying. He settled down in an area that we nicknamed Melonhead’s Marsh.”

  When the batteries on Melonhead’s collar finally ran out, the team tried to capture him again, laying traps around Melonhead’s Marsh, but they never found him. What became of Melonhead is a mystery, and unless the team get lucky with a genetic test, they will never know if he ever found love again.

  But while the traps never caught Melonhead, they did get the Palatine Animal. She was just a juvenile then. “She grew up in an urban setting, in the city parks not forest preserves, so she’s much more comfortable in using the roads and using the residential areas. She’s in a residential area, using small city parks and stuff.”

  This isn’t unusual. Coyotes can be found all over the city. They live in cemeteries and parks, hide under tool sheds, sleep in compost heaps, dig dens in the sides of gravel pits, and wander Navy Pier after dark. The project even found one, now deceased, coyote that spent her days snoozing in an elementary school. “Every time I came to look for this female during the day I would find her under a deck at this school,” recalls Shane. “So there’s little kids running around there, and I know exactly where this coyote is right underneath the deck and they are none the wiser. I’m sure if the school knew they would have her removed right away, but the fact that the animal had chosen to stay in that area with all these people around her is just amazing.”

  Coyotes are extremely good at concealing themselves, and cities are full of hiding places that are near-invisible to us. “There’s a lot of nooks and crannies in the urban landscape that are relatively hidden from people even when people are walking by,” says Stan. “In downtown Chicago, believe it or not, there’s shrubbery down along the lakeshore and crevices in the rocks that they use. There could be a trash pile somewhere and they would burrow underneath that during the day.

  “That’s an aspect that’s still amazing to me. You put radio collars on these animals and they show us what the landscape looks like to them as opposed to humans. It was quite apparent from early on that there’s a lot of features in the urban landscape that you or I don’t notice or take for gr
anted, but those little features—a little bush in a parking lot, tall grass, a corner between two buildings—can make a difference to whether a coyote can live there or not.”

  These easy-to-miss hideaways, together with the railroad tracks they often use to travel around unseen, have helped coyotes go deep into the city. They are so common in downtown Chicago that Lincoln Park Zoo now brings the flamingos indoors every night so the coyotes don’t get them.

  Coyotes also wander amid the skyscrapers of the city’s business district, the Loop. One time a young coyote even walked into a Quizno’s in the Loop and decided to cool down in the sandwich shop’s drinks cooler. It sat there unfazed by the commotion of the crowd that gathered, until animal control officers came and took it away. Most coyotes in the Loop keep a lower profile, and what they get up to there is unknown; the dense towers block radio collar signals, turning the area into a blind spot for the study.

  Coyote 441 is one of those that roams the Loop. She often hangs around Lincoln Park and patrols Navy Pier, but she also makes regular trips into the Loop. “She has a GPS collar, and watching the movements of coyote 441 is amazing,” says Shane. “You see how far she travels, going down Michigan Avenue and then into the dead zone in the true downtown area, where all of sudden the points stop and later pick back up on the other side of downtown.

  “You’ve got to wonder, what is she doing? Is she just running straight down the streets? Is there an underground area that she uses? How is she moving from one side of the Loop to the other safely every single night crossing countless roads?”

  Traffic may be the biggest killer of Chicago coyotes, but many of them have mastered road safety. “If they want to cross a road that’s fairly busy with traffic, they will sit by the road, watch very carefully, and wait for breaks in the traffic,” says Stan. “They also understand the direction in which the cars are coming from. If it’s a divided highway, the coyote will only focus on traffic oncoming to them—they don’t spend time looking in the other direction.”