Feral Cities

by Tristan Donovan

  “The idea is to create a generation of wildlife that is more afraid of humans again because the trend has been in the other direction. From seeing us all the time and from being around us, they are getting into closer proximity and begging food.”

  Another example of Gregory’s handiwork is a motion camera encased in foam and painted to look like pale brown rock. But this isn’t for the wildlife; it’s to help Gregory catch people who are feeding coyotes. He has spent the weekend perfecting the camera’s camouflage and today he is going to put it to the test.

  After Hoang, who has been working the night shift, heads home, Gregory and I head off to plant the camera. As we drive, Gregory tells me that most of the problems coyotes cause start with people feeding them. The Barstow couple who provide meals on wheels for San Pedro’s wildlife are, he says, not unique. “There was this two-story house in the Hollywood Hills, and the neighbor complained because the guy was feeding coyotes in a very unusual fashion. He said to me ‘You’re going to have to come out and see it to believe it.’”

  Curiosity aroused, Gregory headed over to the house early one morning. “The neighbor says, ‘Just wait in my yard.’ So it’s six in the morning and I’m there down in the bushes, and I could have reached out and petted the coyotes from where I was sitting. Then, I see this platform lowering from the second story with plates of food. Next to that I notice a motion sensor that rings a doorbell in the house to let the man know the coyotes are there so that he can lower the food.”

  Feeding coyotes is a crime in Los Angeles, and so Gregory headed to the front door to have words with the homeowner. “As I come round to the front door, I see him put peanuts into one of the planters outside and go back into the house. So I knock on the door and as I’m waiting for him to come to the door, I feel this tug and there’s a squirrel sitting on my shoe, as fat as can be, holding onto my pant leg. This big, fat squirrel that’s been eating all the peanuts.

  “The first thing he says to me after he sees my uniform is ‘How did you know?’ I said, ‘How did I know? Look at the squirrel. C’mon!’ I asked why he was feeding the coyotes and he says, ‘Well, so they won’t kill my cats.’ He thought if he feeds the coyotes and the other animals the cats will be fine.

  “So I write him a notice to comply with the law and, as I’m doing this, a lady walking her dogs comes up and goes, ‘Oh, you’re not going to give that man a ticket. He’s so nice. He feeds all the wildlife in the neighborhood.’ It’s like, ‘You’re not helping him, ma’am.’”

  Far from making coyotes less dangerous, those who feed them are making them less afraid of people and instilling the expectation that people will give them food on demand, and back in 2008 the actions of one coyote feeder in Griffith Park had serious consequences. “This woman was in this green area near where people had been leaving plates of food for the coyotes,” says Gregory. “She was stretching and exercising, and there was a coyote sitting there near her. People in Griffith Park are used to seeing coyotes, so she just continued exercising.

  “Anyway, she was texting on her phone, and the coyote came up and bit her on the shin and then went back and sat down. This is what we call notification. It is not an aggressive act. It’s the coyote telling her, ‘Where’s my food?’ Coyotes do that to each other, but they don’t break the skin because their skin is very pliable and has fur. But in a human that’s a very thin area of skin, so it didn’t take much to puncture her skin.”

  The wildlife program has a saying that “a fed coyote is a dead coyote” and that was certainly the case in that incident. After the woman was bitten, three coyotes that had become used to food being provided had to be killed to ensure they didn’t bite anyone else.

  Not that that stopped the feeder. A year later Gregory got another call. “A guy was lying in Griffith Park with his shoes off and felt a bite on his foot. The coyote had bitten him and gone back and sat down. Another guy chased it off with a stick, and the guy reported it to the Department of Health and Safety, who told us. Then, three weeks later, I get a call from a guy saying, ‘I was in Griffith Park and was bitten on my foot by a coyote.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah. You were bitten three weeks ago.’ He says, ‘No, I was bitten yesterday.’ I was like, ‘What the hell is going on? We’ve got a coyote with a foot fetish.’”

  Following the incidents, the Department of Agriculture came in and killed nine coyotes that had been begging for food. The coyote feeder whom Gregory is after today has been dishing out food where Griffith Park meets the upmarket houses of the Hollywood Hills.

  As we drive up the twisty roads we get an early sign of the results of the feeder’s activities. In the bushes overlooking the road is a coyote, staring down, presumably waiting for its food. It looks at us for a moment and then moves on. We’re obviously not the delivery he’s been waiting for.

  Gregory’s theory is that it’s not a lone feeder they are after but a coyote feeding conspiracy organized by a woman who is hiring people to go feed the coyotes on her behalf. Conspiracy sounds like an overstatement, but as Gregory points out it really is a conspiracy if the woman is paying people to commit crime on her behalf.

  But to secure a conviction, the city needs evidence, and that’s where the camera comes in. The first attempt to get the feeder on film came unstuck when a tree branch fell in front of the lens. “So I’ve got to try and do this again,” he says as we stop close to the feeding site. He is hopeful the disguised camera will do the trick. “I spent a big proportion of my weekend making this foam rock to conceal the camera and making sure it matches the rocks in the area.”

  The guy has already had a ticket from a park ranger, but if he comes back, Gregory hopes the motion camera will catch him. “If he keeps coming back in spite of getting the ticket, he is going to get a felony whether he likes it or not.”

  We head up a dirt path to a secluded ridge. Gregory scrambles up the side and plants the camera, which he covers in dust and dirt for good measure. “It’s a crap shoot, this,” he says. “Hopefully we will get lucky.”

  Trying to stop wildlife feeders is a never-ending battle, Gregory says as we return to his truck. He tells me about one woman who has been feeding raccoons. She has been ticketed, but instead of stopping she has put a tarp over her garage door so the raccoons can come in and feed out of sight.

  “It is not legal for me to look into her garage beyond where I can see normally, but you see the raccoons going in,” he says. “Because she’s already had a warning it’s going to end up as a $1,000 fine. We try to start with a written notice because it’s hard to be hit with that amount of money. A good amount of people will stop but some are stubborn. It’s getting to the point where park rangers are now writing tickets right off the bat when they catch someone feeding the animals because people are argumentative and you really have to hit them in the pocketbook to get them to wake up. It’s sad that it has to be that way.”

  The next job on the list is to head over to Mount Sinai Memorial Park. It has been a regular stop for Gregory ever since a pack of coyotes took down a deer on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. One of the problems at the park is that people bring food when they visit. “They leave food residue behind, like they leave food for the deceased. I’m sure the cemetery doesn’t want to change their policy. I’m sure they want people to be able to come here and do that, but as long as that happens coyotes are going to take advantage of what is left behind.”

  With the policy unlikely to change, Gregory has begun making regular visits to chase away coyotes that stay during the daytime. As we drive through the grounds, Gregory says you have to look carefully to spot them. “They blend in really well. You’ll see something that looks like a rock and it’ll be one of the coyotes.”

  We do a circuit and then, just to be sure, we go around a second time. “Is that rock, flowers, or coyote?” asks Gregory. We drive closer. It’s flowers.

  But a little further on we see them. Two coyotes snoozing under a tree, almost unnoticeable as they lie flat in t
he shade. Gregory stops the truck and asks me to wait while he heads off to deal with them. He wanders down the path and then, suddenly, starts running across the grass straight toward the coyotes, waving his arms as he goes.

  The head of one of the coyotes shoots up. It looks at the uniformed animal services’ officer tearing toward them for a moment and then starts running. The second coyote immediately jumps up and starts running too.

  The coyotes race through the graveyard, every so often looking over their shoulders to check if Gregory is still charging after them. Eventually, they dive into the hedge that hides the Ventura Freeway from view and head out of the memorial park.

  Gregory returns, panting. “This is the other thing the cemetery doesn’t like,” he says, looking at a gravestone where a coyote poop sits next to the words “Devoted wife and mother.”

  Chasing will only do so much, he says, wishing he had his paint-ball gun on hand to reinforce the message. “Running at them isn’t that much of a deterrent, although it is keeping the fear of humans, which is really important. But it really needs to be done in a much more assertive manner. In an hour they will be back. In the same spot probably.”

  When it comes to the threat to pets, Gregory thinks coyotes often get blamed for crimes they did not commit. “You ever seen those movies where the guy finds the victim and the knife, and then three other people come round the corner and see him with it and say ‘That’s the guy who did it’? Same thing happens with wildlife. Yes, they do kill cats, but a lot of times wild animals like coyotes and raccoons are nature’s vacuums, picking up the dead,” he says.

  “We had a deer hit by a car by the observatory, and ten coyotes were on that thing right away. Everyone who saw it after was saying the deer was brought down by the coyotes, which wasn’t the case. Another time a coyote was seen running down the street with a cat in its mouth. Guy saw a car hit a cat—a coyote came and picked up the cat almost instantly and ran around the corner. A person round the corner saw the coyote with the cat and called it in.”

  While coyotes may be wrongly accused in some cases, pets left out in yards are vulnerable to them. “The coyotes aren’t looking for pets per se, but during the course of their natural hunt for food they are going to come across pets in yards. If a pet is out in the yard while a person is at work, it can’t really go anywhere. It’s like self-contained food for a coyote.

  “So while they are not the target animal, pets in the five- to ten-pound range end up being part of it. People hear about this and, because coyotes are the most vilified animals in North America, it doesn’t take much to get people going.”

  This deep-rooted fear is something unscrupulous trappers take advantage of, telling tales of coyotes killing seventy-pound dogs and leaping over six-foot-high fences. “I had a lady who called me. She had a 120-pound Great Dane and actually believed that the coyote could pick up the dog,” recalls Gregory. “We’re talking about a dog that’s four or five times the size of a coyote. That would be like Supercoyote, a coyote with a great big S on his chest. I said, ‘Ma’am, the day that happens I’m leaving this job.’”

  People should be more worried about getting attacked by their own pets. “There are roughly four million dog bites in the United States every year and between one to five incidents with a coyote per year per state. It’s not that many.”

  Nonetheless, the scaremongering works. Another problem Gregory is dealing with is an area in the west of the city where people hired a trapper who put down illegal snares. “I confiscated the snares and the public is really pissed off at me,” he says. “So I was driving through this area one day, just to see what was going on, and this guy who looked like Santa Claus—big white beard, big belly—starts yelling at me. ‘HEY YOU, MOTHERFUCKER. I’M TALKING TO YOU.’

  “I’m like what the hell? He goes, ‘I heard you’re the guy who took away those traps, you asshole, blah, blah, blah.’ I said, ‘Sir, wait a second.’ I had one of the snares in my truck and the guy’s concerned about his cat getting killed by coyotes. I said, ‘You see this? This is what was being set at openings to fences. Any animal can get caught.’

  “He went from cursing at me to cursing at the guy across the street who called the trapper and said, ‘I’m sorry I yelled at you. I didn’t get the whole story.’”

  The reality is, says Gregory, that trapping coyotes is not going to solve the problem. Coyotes are not going away, and people who are worried about their pets need to think twice about leaving pets outside and alone or consider building pet enclosures in their yards.

  “I try to equate this to if there is crime in your neighborhood and a burglar is arrested that has been burglarizing homes,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that everyone who would burglarize homes from that point forth goes, ‘I’m never going to burglarize on that street because somebody was arrested there.’

  “People have a false belief that if the coyote or raccoon or skunk is trapped that that will be it and it will never happen again. That’s like believing if you remove a human there will be no more humans. That’s just not realistic. In the last two centuries millions of coyotes have been killed by trappers and shot on farms and so forth. Possibly eighty million or more coyotes killed by humans. Have we solved coyotes? No. It doesn’t work.

  “At some point people have to stop beating their head against the wall and realize there’s got to be another way.”

  THIEVES IN THE TEMPLE

  Monkey Trouble in Cape Town and Delhi

  Jimmy was trouble. An outlaw who grew up among the destitute. An infamous gangster who terrorized the people of Simon’s Town, South Africa. A thief. A killer.

  Jimmy was also a baboon. His gang? A troop of baboons living on the mountains that overlook the coastal Cape Town suburb.

  His life of crime began at Happy Valley Shelter, a local shelter for the homeless that was once a naval barracks. There he mingled with some of South Africa’s poorest, joining them in the soup kitchen queue.

  Justin O’Riain, head of the Baboon Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, still remembers the first time he saw Jimmy’s troop at the shelter. “I’ll never forget the first time we went there. We saw these people lining up for their free food. It was like Oliver Twist. Everyone was lining up for the food and sometimes they get given stale, leftover food from bakeries or what have you,” he recalls.

  “That day, everyone was being handed out doughnuts. The humans tried them and went, ‘Oh, these are stale’ and they, literally, held their arms out and just behind them or next to them was this baboon troop that would go up to each person, reach out their hands and take their doughnuts. So these poor people got leftover food and, when they didn’t take it, the baboons got it.”

  Jimmy got his taste for human food there. Sugar-coated donuts were, after all, far more appealing than the fynbos shrubs he and the other chacma baboons on the Cape Peninsula usually ate. Even if the doughnuts were stale.

  Soon the baboons were supplementing their soup kitchen visits by rifling through bins and stealing unguarded food. Eventually, the baboons’ presence in the town came to the attention of city authorities. “The new biologist service provider for Cape Town came on board, goes, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and starts trying to drive the baboons away,” says Justin. “Then all manner of war erupts, because the baboons are not happy with this and they fought back. They started raiding more aggressively.”

  Most aggressive of all was Jimmy. His heists became legendary. He began breaking into houses, smashing windows in the dead of night to access kitchens. He raided the school, the stores, and even the naval base to load up on human food.

  Jimmy was no Robin Hood. He stole from rich and poor alike. The Happy Valley Shelter, where he once ate alongside the people, also became a target, and it was there that Jimmy’s actions turned deadly. “Jimmy had gone into a dormitory and picked up a bag of sugar from one of these poor people, and the guy was pretty cross,” says Justin.

  A chase ensued. The man raced afte
r the thieving primate, who bolted out of the dormitory, bag of sugar in hand. “There was an old man shuffling down a ramp, which had quite a steep drop off the edge. Jimmy wanted to get past him in a hurry, so he jumped on the old man and, with all four limbs, pushed off him to change direction and go up an alley.”

  In the process, Jimmy pushed the sixty-nine-year-old off the ramp’s edge. “It wasn’t a big fall, but the man was old. He died of his injuries.”

  What’s amazing, says Justin, is that the man’s death wasn’t enough to bring Jimmy to justice. “Jimmy wasn’t killed for that. Jimmy, an inveterate raider who would steal from poor people, wasn’t put down for that.”

  Jimmy followed up that incident by breaking into the home of the navy admiral’s wife. “He got into her house and they had a huge fight. She tried to hit him with a broom. Jimmy grabbed the broom and started shoving it back into her. They were tugging to and fro. But even that wasn’t enough to remove Jimmy the baboon.”

  Jimmy finally crossed the line when he found a new gang, a baboon troop to the south of Simon’s Town. There he discovered the Black Marlin, a restaurant and tourist hotspot overlooking False Bay. Inevitably, Jimmy couldn’t resist the temptation to help himself to some of the Cape Malay seafood curry and grilled crayfish being served to the tourists.

  “Jimmy would jump onto tables full of tourists,” says Justin. “The tourists would squeal in horror and, of course, it would be the highlight of their stories when they went home, how this baboon jumped on them and how amazing it was. But Jimmy started pushing the envelope. He started nipping them.”

  In a way, it was good thing Jimmy only nipped people, says Justin. “Baboons have huge teeth and they are immensely strong. They could be killing us every day of every week and they don’t. They just never seem to use their amazing weaponry on us. Even when we try to take food back from them, they will give a nip but they never use those big canines like they do on each other.”