Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  If the median dividing the highway is large enough, coyotes will cross to the median and then wait for gaps in the traffic on the other side too. Others have learned to wait at intersections for the stoplights to change. “They will sit at a corner, literally just like a person waiting to cross,” says Stan. “They wait until the traffic stops at the light, and once the traffic stops then that’s when they go across. It looks like the coyote is actually looking at the lights and waiting for the red light, but that’s probably not happening since they don’t really have good color vision. But in any event they still take advantage of the light, even if they are not necessarily watching the light.”

  In Chicago the animals even cross the busiest roads, including freeways that carry as many as a hundred thousand vehicles a day.

  The Palatine Animal is one of these habitual road crossers. “Her range is pretty big,” says Shane as we reach Palatine. “When we started, her home range crossed Route 53 and she would go from this side to that. In the past six months, though, she has stopped going to the other side.” Today her range is on the east side of Route 53, an area of residential streets and city parks.

  Shane turns the receiver on and we listen for pips, but there’s nothing. We circle the area, looping round and round the suburb. Still nothing. “This can be a frustrating time, trying to find the animal for the first round of readings, searching and searching and trying to be careful about the speed you’re traveling.”

  As we patrol, I ask Shane whether he ever imagined he would end up tracking coyotes in his home city when he started his career in wildlife research. “No. It sounds silly, but even throughout college I never realized the size of the coyote population here in Chicago,” he says. “When I started on this project I was shocked how many were actually out there and how deep into the city they go. It just blew my mind.”

  Fifteen minutes become half an hour and there’s still no sign of the Palatine Animal. The strip mall with the CVS that we’ve passed over and over again comes back into view. After the best part of an hour searching in vain, we admit defeat and move on to the next coyote, which lives in Schaumburg.

  This time, the signal is there from the moment the receiver is switched on. Shane takes an initial reading and then heads into a residential area to get further readings. Shane sighs as we enter the twisty suburban streets. “One of the hardest things of this job is just learning the ropes, learning the cul-de-sacs,” he explains. “Suburban settings can be a nightmare because most of the new ones don’t like grid systems. Everything has to be curved so you’ll think you’re going east and then, all of a sudden, you’re turning and you’re like ‘Noooo! Now I’m going west.’ It can be quite a nightmare.”

  As we drive through the mazelike streets, we pass a man unloading shopping from his car. He doesn’t even register the strange truck with the big aerial. The residents are probably used to it by now, says Shane. “We’ve been here for ten years and a lot of the residents know us, but in other areas people will sit there and point and watch you drive by.”

  We eventually track the coyote to Hackberry Court, a quiet cul-de-sac that ends in a small roundabout. “There,” says Shane in triumph, “old 571.”

  Between two of the houses there’s movement and the unmistakable silhouette of a coyote. Shane flicks on the truck’s spotlight, illuminating the yard and revealing the yellow gray coyote. She stops moving and looks toward us.

  “She is one of them that doesn’t care,” says Shane. “As soon as I turn off the light, she will continue with whatever it is she’s doing. She’s also one of the animals that moves around during the daytime. You find her hanging out by bird feeders a lot.”

  Sure enough, when the spotlight goes off, Coyote 571 gets back to business and calmly wanders behind one of the houses and out of sight.

  Coyotes might be recent colonizers of cities, but it’s already clear they are well suited to city life. The death rates say it all. The annual survival rate of Chicago coyotes is twice that of rural coyotes living outside protected areas, a figure that puts the coyote on a par with raccoons and ahead of red foxes when it comes to urban survival.

  Yet while raccoons thrive on what we throw away, coyotes usually turn their noses up at the idea of eating trash. Even in Chicago’s forest preserves where open-lid Dumpsters make discarded human food readily available, coyotes prefer to eat fresh rather than rifle through the garbage with the raccoons.

  “The assumption that many of us made at the beginning of the study was that if coyotes were successful in urban areas it had to be because they were eating our rubbish and things like that,” says Stan. “But when we did the diet analysis, we found that human foods were actually a very small component of their diet and many weren’t eating any human food at all. We thought that garbage and pets would be the two food items that would be at the top or near the top of list, but they are at the bottom and did not make up a large part of their diet. Diet studies in other cities tend to show the same pattern.”

  Instead rats, mice, and rabbits dominate the menu, supplemented with side helpings of fresh roadkill and fruit. “They like fruits, but not fruit from garbage—fruit from off the plants,” says Stan.

  Deer fawns are another target. For a separate study the team has been putting radio collars on fawns born within the Chicago area. Around three-quarters died before adulthood, most ending up as coyote supper.

  The coyote’s taste for hunting has benefits for Chicagoans. As well as eating rats and mice, their consumption of ground squirrels and woodchucks seems to help prevent these burrowing rodents from damaging golf courses, and there is evidence that coyotes scare away cats and other animals that eat songbirds.

  Coyotes are also keeping the city’s problematic Canada geese in check. Canada geese have taken to North American cities in a big way, drawn in by grassy parks with ponds and causing plenty of trouble in the process. They irritate people with their noisy honking, ruin parks and lawns, and pollute water with their waste. Their presence in large numbers near airports is especially concerning because of the risk of them getting sucked into jet engines and causing potentially fatal engine failure.

  So it is good news that coyotes have a taste for goose eggs. Their raids on goose nests are not enough to reduce the total number of Canada geese in the city, but they do seem to be slowing the growth of the birds’ population.

  But the coyote has an urban enemy: us. Although coyotes may have learned to cross roads, cars are still the big killer for urban coyotes, and a diet of rats and mice makes them vulnerable to poisoning. In Los Angeles around one-quarter of coyotes die from eating poisoned rodents.

  A few get shot. “There have been cases where we believe animals have been illegally trapped in some way and we will find them dead with maybe a .22 in their head,” says Shane. “Some animals we collar take off and leave the city, so every so often we will go up in a helicopter and listen for lost animals. They found one way out in western Illinois and the signal was coming from a house. So they knocked on the door and said ‘Have you seen a coyote?’ The guy is like ‘Oh yeah! I’ve had this mounted for about a year now.’ It turned out the homeowner had shot the coyote, stuffed it, kept the collar on it, and had it in his living room, collar still beeping away.”

  Intentionally or not, we pose the greatest threat to urban coyotes, but on other hand they can be a threat to pets and, to a much lesser extent, people. But while people tend to think the worst of an animal Mark Twain famously deemed “friendless,” the risk coyotes pose to pets appears small. Study after study has found that cats, including feral ones, rarely make up more than 1 percent of urban coyote meals and dogs even less.

  Of course that’s little comfort to those who have their pets eaten by coyotes, and the diet figures do overlook the unknown number of pets that coyotes kill for territorial reasons rather than for food.

  “For the most part coyotes living next to people has posed very little risk to people and largely little risk to some domestic
animals,” says Stan. “Most dogs are fine, but there are the occasional dogs that are taken and then there’s a much greater risk to cats. Some people have had to modify their lifestyle because of coyotes living nearby, but most people have not had to make any changes at all.”

  What is unknown is whether this will change. “This is a natural experiment that is going on. It is something that has never happened before, so we don’t know what the outcome may be. We don’t know exactly what the coyotes in the cities are going to mean for people in the long run.”

  One place that may offer some answers is Los Angeles. Coyotes have been living in the City of Angels for decades, and most of the 160 or so incidents in which the animals have bitten people during the past thirty years happened within L.A. County, usually when people are trying to protect their pets.

  Officers Gregory Randall and Hoang Dinh of the City of Los Angeles’ Wildlife Program spend their lives on the frontline of where humans and coyotes clash. Gregory is the veteran. He joined the city government in 1989 and in 2002 cocreated its wildlife program. Although he was born into a L.A. family that was well plugged into the city’s showbiz industry, animals always appealed to him more than Tinseltown.

  “When I was a child I lived up in Hollywood Hills, and wildlife was around all the time—coyotes, deer, everything,” he tells me when I visit him and Hoang at their office in Lincoln Heights.

  “When I was about nine, dad rescued a roadrunner bird that had been hit by a car and I tried to bring it back to health. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just didn’t want it to die, and it just continued from there. My fondness for wildlife has just grown and grown and grown.”

  While Gregory honed his expertise through hands-on experience and a voracious appetite for reading anything and everything about wildlife, Hoang’s career started with a zoology degree. “Prior to working here I only read about animals and wildlife,” says Hoang, whose family moved from Vietnam to Orange County when he was two. “It’s been my interest since I was a kid, but all my knowledge was coming from textbooks, so I’m now getting to see the textbook come to life.”

  Between them they deal with almost all the wildlife issues in Los Angeles. And with nearly four million people and goodness knows how many wild animals living in the city, the work never stops.

  Gregory shows me the software he uses to log the complaints they get. It plots each complaint on a map, but the streets are almost invisible, covered up by thousands of icons representing everything from striped skunks and opossums to coyotes, crows, and red foxes. You can almost hear his PC creaking as it tries to display the cluttered map without crashing.

  He scrolls the map over to Atwater Village and, after a pause, the map fills up with miniature skunks. “See all the skunk symbols? I couldn’t understand why this area was so inundated with skunks until I discovered that a trapper was releasing every skunk he caught in this area. The trapper has since been turned over to Fish and Game for violating his permit.”

  Gregory drags the juddering map south to the coast. The computer stalls briefly, but then the area lights up with raccoon, cat, and squirrel symbols. “This is San Pedro. Their big issue is raccoons,” he says.

  This time deliberate feeding is the problem. The area has a large colony of feral cats that are constantly being fed by people, and the resulting abundance of food has attracted large numbers of raccoons, squirrels, and other animals. Some of the feeders go to extraordinary lengths to fatten up the San Pedro wildlife. “There’s a couple and they drive there three times a week from Barstow, which is really far away—a good four-hour drive—to feed the stray cats that live at the beach at Point Fermin. They’ve got a cart that they roll with the food on it and feed the cats.”

  Add to this the food people chuck on the ground, and there’s so much free grub around that the local cats and raccoons have given up trying to eat each other, probably because it’s far too much effort on a full stomach. “There’s a trash bin enclosed by a wall nearby, but people are too lazy to go in so they throw their trash at the bin and miss most of the time. On top of that there are people putting plates down for the raccoons.”

  The raccoons also raid yachts docked on the gangways. “The raccoons go into the vessels through the portholes, and that’s when it is dangerous because the raccoon is cornered,” says Gregory. “I went down and the big problem was that people were leaving food in the open in the yachts, so the raccoons look through a porthole, see food, and go in. The people come in and there’s like Cheetos bags ripped open and whatever. I recommended that they start closing up the portholes.”

  Gregory shifts the map over to South L.A. Symbols representing Virginia opossums pop up. They are another source of complaints, often because people mistake North America’s only marsupial for giant rats. It’s an understandable mistake. They do, after all, look a bit like super-sized rats, albeit ones with scruffy gray coats and white-furred faces topped with Mickey Mouse ears.

  Opossums are, however, one of the least troublesome animals, says Hoang. “People blow things so out of proportion. One of the great examples is the opossum, one of the most harmless creatures. Not only are they slow but also they don’t attack. When you corner most animals they want to fight back, but these guys it’s the last thing they do. At their most desperate moment they just fall over and play dead.”

  Opossums are found in cities all over North America, but their urban success is rather surprising, for not only will they faint rather than fight, they are short-lived and rarely make it to their second birthday.

  But they do have some “superpowers,” says Mason Fidino, who is trying to learn more about these understudied urban residents for Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute in Chicago. “One is that they have loads and loads of children, and when females are pregnant they often disperse and colonize a new area, so that is a really great way to have a new population start. On top of that they don’t really need to eat that good a food to survive,” he says.

  “They are also just a little bit more cryptic than raccoons. So if someone has their trash tipped over and they don’t see who did it, they are going to go, ‘Arrgh, cursed raccoon.’ They are not even going to think about the opossum, so the opossum skips through wildlife conflict simply because there are easier things to point the blame at.”

  But even if they do tip over people’s trash, it’s hard not to feel sorry for opossums, which have an especially hard start to their short lives. “They have something like twenty offspring, but the females only have thirteen teats,” says Mason. “Because they are marsupials they get born really quickly—it takes like two weeks for gestation and then they crawl up into the pouch and clamp onto a teat, so it is a race to get to a teat.” As if a life-or-death race to a teat two weeks after conception wasn’t tough enough, not all the teats work. “So if they clamp onto the wrong one they are out of luck,” says Mason. “It’s really hard to be an opossum.”

  Amid the opossum icons clouding South L.A. on Gregory’s map are a smattering of snake symbols. Among them are the rattlesnakes that Hoang once got called out to deal with. “These two juveniles called me and go, ‘There are three rattlesnakes in the yard,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘No way. Not in that area.’ I learned later that they stole air conditioning units from out in the desert and these rattlesnakes came crawling out of them. Talk about karma.”

  But when it comes to wildlife complaints in L.A., the coyote tops the list. In response, the wildlife program has amassed a large collection of oddball deterrents that clutter its small two-desk office. Gregory shows me a plastic tub filled with what looks like the contents of a child’s toy box. “This is the wildlife scare kit I take to community meetings to show people what they can use to deter wildlife,” he explains.

  He plunges his hand into the tub, pulls out an air horn, and presses the button, letting out a deafening blast of noise. Next, he grabs a rainbow-colored umbrella and opens it up. “You know how animals pump themselves up to make themselves
look bigger? Well, you get this and all of a sudden you’ve just become gigantic to that animal, and if you do this,” he says, quickly opening and closing the umbrella, “that really scares them.”

  The inspiration for the umbrella was, oddly enough, a golden eagle. “I was watching this golden eagle and a coyote. Golden eagles are huge. They can take out an adult coyote. So this coyote comes up to try and take the eagle’s prey. The eagle flaps his wings and the coyote is gone. I have never had a coyote stand its ground with this.”

  He puts down the umbrella and starts rummaging through the container, yanking out cooking pans, a megaphone, and a can wrapped in aluminum foil that is filled with coins. Eventually, he finds what he is looking for. “This one is my favorite,” says Hoang as Gregory hauls it out. “This is something I bought at Wal-Mart,” says Gregory. “It’s a girl’s ribbon gymnastics toy, a little spongy thing with Mylar strips. I went to Griffith Park in an area where people were feeding coyotes, sat down, and waited for about eight coyotes to gather around me and then did this.” He twirls the ribbons fast above his head, causing the plastic strips to make a loud whooshing sound. “The coyotes took off,” he says.

  Other bizarre animal deterrents are spread over the office. On one filing cabinet is a Haunted Hedge. “It’s a Halloween item. It was designed to scare trick or treaters, but it works for wildlife too,” says Gregory as the hedge lets out a spooky laugh.

  Over in a corner is a deterrent Gregory hacked together from different objects—a large kite designed to look like a giant owl. “I’m always trying to make extra things and adapt two items together to make another scare source. So I have this owl. Normally, it’s just a kite you hang in a tree that flutters. For animals that are afraid of owls, like raccoons and skunks, it is very effective on its own. But what I did is I took part of another device to make it hoot and light up and added a motion sensor so it reacts more realistically.” He switches it on. The owl’s eyes light up and noisy hoots echo around the office.