The deepened intimacy that tracking yields is a kind of modern survival knowledge. The connection might be lightly perceived at first—here are two animals, one human, one not, sharing the same sounds, sky, smells. But as we come to follow an animal’s story more deeply, we realize that, in a sense, its trail is our trail. As an animal moves through its life, it affects the place where it lives, the place where we also live. There can be no absolute separation between us. With this frame of mind, we enter the bestiary as true observers—as participants and inhabitants among the unfolding stories of wild life.
Collecting Tracks: A Wild Guest Book
A tracking box can help you learn to identify tracks in your backyard or even inside your house. Make a wood frame out of four-by-sixes (tracking schools recommend a minimum of four feet by eight feet for an instructive box), and fill it with sand. Play sand is great—it is light and lump-free, and especially good for small birds. Construction sand or beach sand works too. Dampen the sand enough so that it holds a shape without becoming runny. You might want to put a little food bait (peanut butter or raisins are classic) in the middle to attract nocturnal creatures. Besides framing a unique window into the at-home wild, such a box can enhance tracking skills in other ways. Try visiting tracks as they age, as they fill with debris, as they are affected by weather. If no wild animals come, then practice with domestic ones. Try walking your dog through the box when he is hungry, when he is full, when he has to pee, when he doesn’t. Try getting him to prance or to run, or do these things yourself—see how the imprints are affected. I know of one naturalist who set up such a box in her New York apartment and tracked her cat as well as visiting ants and roaches!
A box is best, because it offers a controlled, contained substrate, but if you are like me and possess unreasonable aesthetic tendencies that keep you from setting up wooden boxes of sand in your garden, then you can still benefit from the idea by leaving damp sand or soil edges around your yard. I have experimented with these loose-form tracking boxes, sometimes baited, sometimes not, at the borders of our koi pond (sprinkled wildly with raccoon tracks) and our vegetable garden (mouse, squirrel, rat, opossum) and beneath our cherry tree (more of all of the above)—all of them small wild entries into the loveliest guest book I have ever kept.
PART II
The Furred
Coyote
Urban-Wild Trickster
Dominic and Crystal’s border collie, Earnhardt, rules the world—he rules the sofa, the sidewalk, the upscale Seattle neighborhood in which he lives, and all the neighborhood’s dogs. Earnhardt likes to bark. He barks at children, moms with strollers, the postal carrier, the UPS guy, dogs he likes, dogs he doesn’t like; he barks when he is crabby, when he is playful. He prances, struts, plays, eats, and barks; that is the sum of Earnhardt’s favorite life activities. But one day when Dominic and Crystal and Earnhardt were all out walking, a coyote appeared on the sidewalk. When Earnhardt saw the coyote, he did not bark. He yelped. A high-pitched, feral yelp that his owners had never heard before and would not even have believed him capable of. After the yelp, Earnhardt hid behind Crystal’s legs, refusing to continue on the walk, even though he hadn’t pooped like he was supposed to. The coyote was thin and light, not much bigger than Earnhardt, certainly not as big as the dogs Earnhardt liked to bark at. The coyote was shaped like a dog, was in fact a member of the genus Canis, just like Earnhardt. The coyote trotted away quickly, almost running, as if he’d accidentally gotten himself into this overly urban area and was anxious to get out of it; he did not threaten Earnhardt or even take much notice of him at all. What is this? This wildness that is so obvious, so true, so beyond language and cultural conditioning that it is primally recognizable in less than an instant, even to the utterly domestic cock of the walk Earnhardt? The coyotes among us open the door to such questions, pad through, then glance over their shoulders to make sure we are following.
Coyotes are slender, sinewy, more fur than flesh. Their snouts are long; their fur is mixed goldens and browns, like the prairie grasses of their native habitat; their bushy tails are tipped with black and usually hang down, never wagging upright like pet dogs’ tails; their ears seem a little too big for their heads, funnels for the minute sounds they must sift through in their lives as hunters; their eyes, close-set on the fronts of their heads in classic predator fashion, are striking yellow with round black pupils (domestic dog pupils are browner, fox pupils vertical and narrow); their toenails are worn smooth and blunt and are not used much in capturing prey—coyotes catch smaller animals in their jaws, which are lined with forty-two sharp teeth.
Stories of human-coyote interactions in urban areas are increasing. As urban and suburban sprawl encroaches on woodland areas, coyote habitat morphs into a complicated blend of forest and neighborhood edges. There was a coyote on the Golden Gate Bridge this spring, and coyotes in Central Park. We don’t really know how many coyotes live with us—just a couple of decades ago, there was no perceived need for studies on urban coyote habits and populations (there were both fewer coyotes and fewer humans living in urban haunts), and wildlife biology is just beginning to catch up with the changing face of the urban ecosystem. Even in cities where coyote populations have been studied extensively, like Chicago and Los Angeles, no one is sure exactly how many coyotes are really there, but it is likely to be far more than we imagine. Once the ghosts of the plains, coyotes have become the ghosts of the cities, living among us, watchful, quiet, and largely unseen. The ones we happen to glimpse are just the ones we happen to glimpse. Stan Gehrt of Ohio State University has studied urban coyotes as much as any wildlife researcher. Over the course of his decade-long study of coyotes in urban Chicago, he and his colleagues radio-collared more than two hundred individuals that they then monitored day and night, giving unprecedented insight into the activities of urban coyotes. One of the biggest surprises to Gehrt was that there were so many coyotes living right in the urban matrix. Whereas at the beginning of his study he thought there might be just a hundred or so, he now estimates there are somewhere between several hundred and two thousand (even after years of research, precision is elusive). There are thriving coyote populations in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Jersey, Seattle, New York, and many other metropolitan places. There was also, this week, coyote scat on the sidewalk just a few doors down from my house.
Coyote Tracks and Sign
Coyote scat is one of the easiest wild-mammal droppings to recognize, especially in winter. In summer and early autumn, coyotes enjoy so many fruits and insects in their diets that the scats become seedy and crumbly, resembling that of many other creatures. But in winter, the scats are wide, tidy twists of fur and bone, nearly an inch around (real trackers carry calipers for accuracy in such measurements; I am perfectly happy to eyeball), and typically taper to a thin, curling point on each end.
Of course, you shouldn’t go around picking up coyote poop with your bare hands, but with a stick or gloves, it is perfectly safe to inspect it. Unlike dog poo, it doesn’t stink.* Using two sticks, you can pull the scats apart and see what the coyote has been up to. In urban places, the fur is usually short rodent fur, and it includes lots of rat. There are typically crunched-up little bones and some whole ones—tiny mouse or shrew jaws and femurs are the most likely to survive the digestive tract intact. Berries in the coyote diet are easy to identify by seed and color, as are the shimmering exoskeletons of beetles and grasshoppers.
Coyote tracks are very similar to domestic dog tracks, but notice the more circular shape of the dog track. Size is not a good indicator, as both dogs and coyotes vary in size with breed (in the case of dogs) and age, though a very large canine track is likely a big dog. The pattern of the tracks, their trail, is worth investigating. If you’ve ever walked a dog, you know that dogs are not much interested in going anywhere efficiently—they wander, and investigate, and backtrack. Coyotes, and foxes too, will leave trails that are far more direct, pretty much a straight line; this is particul
arly true in urban settings, where they are wary of the environment.
As I was enjoying my examination of this curbside coyote scat, the couple in the neighboring house came outside. I forgot to worry that I might look a bit odd, picking through sidewalk poop, and stood up to say excitedly, “This is coyote, right here outside your house!” Thankfully, they were game for such a discussion. “We thought that might be what it was,” the woman said. “That’s so cool!” We all turned to look as their little Jack Russell terrier trotted brightly out the door. “Yeah.” She nodded. “We keep him in at night.” There is a chain-link fence around their house, which might inspire a sense of safety, but coyotes can leap fences up to six feet high. They don’t bound over them like, say, a deer. They jump up and hang from the very top of the fence by the tips of their front paws, then climb up with their back feet and push themselves over. People serious about coyote deterrence install rollers along the tops of their fences, which keep the coyotes from grabbing on with their toes.
Not everyone is as sanguine as this nice couple about sharing the neighborhood with coyotes. In general, though most of us enjoy the idea that “the wild” somehow surrounds our neighborhoods, we tend to like our urban wildlife somewhat smaller, more predictable, and less carnivorous. We prefer that it have smaller teeth, or none at all. We have deliberately built orderly perimeters of physical and cultural civilization from which we can delight comfortably in the ideas of wilderness and wildness. How did this animal cross these boundaries, more or less uninvited? More than any other animal, the coyote represents the urban-wild trickster—a creature that inhabits our imaginations as richly as it does the edges of our neighborhoods. Trickster figures regularly turn up in the narrative mythology of native cultures in North America and around the world. Part of the trickster mystique lies in a refusal to be defined, but typically tricksters are animals (often ravens, hares, coyotes, or raccoons—Br’er Rabbit and Bugs Bunny are modern tricksters) that take on some human capacities as they dance through life and do their primary work: turning our preconceived social norms upside down. Tricksters dwell in a self-made amoral world, neither good nor bad, and in a tangle of contradiction: footloose, irresponsible, callous, but also funny, lovable, clever, and, as we will see in the case of coyotes, irrepressibly sympathetic. They create a “margin of mess,” writes folklorist Barbara Bannick, the chaos that contains all possibility.
No matter what we know of native mythology, all of us know on some inner level (just like Earnhardt does) something about Coyote. Coyote represents a sensibility that does not stay neatly inbounds. Coyote is both wholly other and an intricate part of our human story. Coyote will inspire our poems. Coyote will eat our cats. Coyote’s life is messy, wary, prancing, a life that cannot avoid pain, or death, or dirt, but is nevertheless enlivening: ears pricked, alert, lean, wild, delighted.
There are many reasons that we are seeing coyotes more regularly in the city these days. The main one is that buildings and roads and malls and homes sprawl farther and farther into semirural habitat that was once the coyote’s favorite haunt. Though historically, coyotes have been wary of living too close to humans, there are simply lots of coyotes, and they need someplace to live—they are scrappy, adaptive, opportunistic, omnivorous, and smart. They are making do with changing circumstances. So it’s not just a perception and the hype of social media—humans and coyotes really are living in closer proximity, and consequently, we see more of them.
Coyotes have lived on the edges of our neighborhoods for decades, and in this time, they have remained largely nocturnal. In wilder places, this is generally not the case; coyotes are more crepuscular—that is, active in rhythmic cycles throughout the day and night. In urban places, they adapted to the presence of humans by avoiding us—denning or sleeping during the day (like bird nests, dens are used for whelping and protecting young pups, not for year-round sleeping—coyotes sleep aboveground) and coming out at night for hunting and all the other coyote-life essentials. We have lived this way for years, the coyotes and us, avoiding what wildlife biologists call the human-wildlife spatiotemporal interface. But now we are seeing coyotes during the day, mostly in the early morning or after dusk, but sometimes at bright stark noon. As my husband, Tom, and my daughter, Claire, and I were walking in the wooded periphery of a golf course the other day, we saw two handsome coyotes prancing about, loping, sniffing, playing. When golfers approached, we thought the coyotes would disappear into the woods, but they didn’t. They barely registered the people’s presence. Coyotes are learning several things: that most people don’t hurt them; that people often feed them, either intentionally (yes, many people, enthralled by the presence of coyotes, leave food outside for them at night or toss a leg of fried chicken from the picnic basket in a woodland park) or inadvertently (in the way of pet food left on the porch, messy birdfeeders, rats attracted by these same birdfeeders, garden fruit, and fat outdoor cats); and that human habitations are typically home to refuse cans with ill-fitting lids, full of all manner of coyote-worthy foodstuffs: peaches, pizza, the fat from a filet mignon.
We have coexisted alongside coyotes with very few incidents for a long time, but there is concern over what appears to be an increase in daylight sightings of less wary coyotes in urban places. When I talked with Stan Gehrt about this, he agreed that it would be best for everyone (humans and coyotes) if urban coyotes continued their general habit of staying out of sight between dawn and dusk, but he cautioned against interpreting daylight sightings as a trend to worry over. “With more coyotes around,” he tells me, “exceptions become more prevalent.” We see the few individuals that are bolder, and with such animals we are right to be cautious, but that doesn’t mean urban coyotes on the whole are becoming less watchful.
Our perception of coyotes is distorted in part by the proliferation of social media. Just a few years ago, if someone saw a coyote, she might get really excited and tell her friends. Now she posts it on Facebook accompanied by a photo, then, for good measure, sends the photo and story to the neighborhood blog. All of this can be immensely positive. Sharing of wild stories is a lovely and ancient human practice, one that evolved with our cultural habits. Evening tales around the campfire after a day’s gathering and hunting are now stories of neighborhood wildlife sightings posted on the interwebs; we participate in the storyteller’s art and lineage by spinning our “everyday” wild tales. Most neighborhood blogs pair sightings of animals like coyotes with good public education and pertinent reminders to keep cats and Chihuahuas indoors. But the response to all this sharing can be a wild card—stories on the web of urban coyote sightings are followed by comment sections that regularly degenerate into an onslaught of unvetted misinformation that can reach thousands of people. Emotions about urban coyotes run high, fueled more by speculation, false myth, and fear than by an understanding of coyote habits. The dearth of studies on urban coyotes means that the shaping of the public perception is left largely to the media, and even in the supposedly filtered media of television and newspaper, misinformation is rampant. Stories unfold in an intentionally hyped-up, headline-grabbing response to a coyote sighting or complaint, and they are often framed by outworn pre-ecological perceptions that breed fear and hatred rather than by good science or calming common sense. The language used to describe coyotes is loaded and inflammatory: instead of intelligent, they are “cunning”; smaller animals are not hunted by coyotes for food—they are “mauled.” One of our top eco-literary journals recently published an essay in which it was said that coyotes frequented a forested area around a New York golf course, a “good habitat in which to den, skulk, and plan.” (Why skulk, with its overlay of nefarious intent? And plan? What are they doing? Laying out little coyote maps, marking the homes of untended cats?) Predator biologist Brian Kertson tells me that in all these ways, the perceived threat from wild predators, relative to the actual risk, becomes tremendously exaggerated in our minds. “Some dad is driving his family around in the SUV at seventy mph while talki
ng on the phone, and he wants to tell me he’s worried a coyote is going to bite his kid? I just don’t know what to say.”
Not that there is no threat. Coyotes do eat cats. They can tussle with dogs and eat small ones. They can (though it is exceedingly rare) menace or even bite children. Coyotes rarely threaten an adult in any circumstance. There have been, in the history of North America, two known human deaths from coyote attacks. One, in Northern California in 1981, was a child who lived in a suburban neighborhood where coyotes were regularly fed. The other, in 2009, was the much publicized and heartbreaking death of the beautiful young Canadian folksinger Taylor Mitchell, who was attacked by a pair of eastern coyotes as she rambled a well-traveled trail in a forested Nova Scotia park. Her debut album had just been released, and the maturity of voice and lyrics belied her age. She was nineteen years old. In a media statement following her death, Taylor’s mother offered this largehearted response: “We take a calculated risk when spending time in nature’s fold—it’s wildlife’s terrain. When the decision had been made to kill the pack of coyotes, I clearly heard Taylor’s voice say, ‘Please don’t. This is their space.’ She wouldn’t have wanted their demise, especially as a result of her own.” The comment is stunningly magnanimous, but in this case, even the strongest wildlife-rights advocates felt that these coyotes could not remain on a public trail without endangering more people and threatening human tolerance for other wild coyotes.*
The Urban Bestiary Page 3