All of this information—the positive, negative, accurate, and distorted—leaves us justifiably confused and wondering. How should we respond to the presence of coyotes in the city? Part of us wants to love the presence of the wild that coyotes represent. We think the animals themselves are beautiful, and they are. Part of us fears them. All of us want to make sure that no one gets hurt. Most people don’t want urban coyotes eradicated, “But…” we say. But.
Some of my contacts in the wildlife biology field are disparaging of the general public. “People are idiots,” one state biologist told me. “Every time they see a coyote they call and say, ‘Well, don’t you want to come out? Aren’t you going to do something?’ And that means, ‘Aren’t you going to trap it or shoot it?’ Lady, get a grip.” It’s true that coyotes are one of the only urban animals whose presence alone is cause for outright alarm, for which being seen is reason enough for wildlife officials to be alerted. But I don’t think people are idiots (for the most part). I think we are well intentioned, underinformed, and honestly unsure about what to do. Appreciation of wild nature is alive and well in our art and literature (sometimes). In our school-books (a little). But in our daily education? In our practical knowledge? Our close-to-home world? There is little to none. And now here we are with coyote scat on the sidewalk, and a neighbor with a missing cat. Most adults cannot accurately identify the song of an American robin, probably the most common garden bird, when they hear one singing in the backyard. Why on earth would we know what to think of a coyote?
Coyote Pre-European distribution
Coyote current distribution
Coyotes didn’t always live in cities, suburbs, or even woodsy rural places. Their historic home range was the western prairie. As humans killed wolves one by one across the country for flock protection, for pelt money, for bounty, or for malice, the coyotes moved easily into the wolves’ ecological niche as top canine predator. They spread north and south, into the woods and canyon lands of the west, and eventually over the mountains, across the divide.
It appears that during their migration eastward, they hybridized with the remaining wolves, and today we are just coming to understand that perhaps this widespread hybridization is the reason the eastern coyote is larger and more aggressive and behaves more wolfishly in general (travels more often in packs, attacks larger prey, sometimes hunts in groups). The coyotes that killed Taylor Mitchell belonged to this group. DNA analysis affirms that pure Canis latrans is uncommon in the east, and biologists are throwing up their hands in the face of such a confusing genetic muddle; eastern coyotes are often called (to rhyme with the wolf’s Latin name, Canis lupus) Canis soupus. Far from being a remote concern for zoogeneticists alone, this is a problem for all of us who want to understand the coyotes in our midst. Which coyote? Eastern coyotes are different from western, rural coyotes behave differently from urban. For everything we say about coyotes, there can be an exception.
We do know that, like their rural counterparts, urban coyotes are gentle, protective parents. And like humans, generally speaking, coyotes are sort of monogamous. That is, a coyote will stay with the same mate as long as it’s working out, perhaps for some years. The outside limits of coyote conjugal commitment are difficult to know, given that individuals in the wild (rural or urban) rarely live more than three or four years. In metropolitan areas, they die because of disease,* predation by domestic dogs and humans, and—more than any of these—cars. The majority of pups do not live through their first year, being subject to all of the above, plus predation by owls, hawks, and sometimes raccoons. Estrus is just two months, and the pups are born furry but blind. Young pups remain in the den with the female, where they nurse, sleep, and grow; the male brings food for his partner and guards the pups from danger (unlike male domestic dogs, male coyotes are active in the raising of the young). When coyotes appear bold, it is often because they are encountered during this time, when most animals, even hummingbirds, are aggressive toward anyone who approaches their nest or den. The female is careful, and she will move the pups readily if she feels the safety of her den has been compromised. It is during this period, April through July, when most conflicts between coyotes and larger dogs occur; off-leash dogs stumble across a den, and the adult coyotes defend their pups. Such conflicts came into the public eye this spring, as some off-leash dog proponents in San Francisco worried over coyote-dog interactions in Golden Gate Park, where coyotes have been denning in recent years. One encounter was captured on video—a Rottweiler mix was shown approaching and harassing two coyotes (much smaller than the dog), who made short lunges toward the interloper, trying to drive it away from their den. Observing the video, coyote behavior expert Marc Bekoff commented that the coyotes remained in defensive, submissive postures; the dog was the aggressor, and the dog’s human guardian was nowhere to be seen.
At about six weeks, the pups start peeking out, full of more wild, playful energy than any domestic puppy, and their mother begins to take them on short, exuberant outings. I’ve heard stories of suburban domestic dogs playing with wild coyote pups, running loose in a makeshift peaceable kingdom. I happen to be writing on San Juan Island, at a University of Washington retreat for writers and scholars, and the novelist in the next study tells me that her two big white Samoyeds befriended a coyote puppy on their property in Port Ludlow, a suburban-woodland interface. For a few nights running, Melissa and her husband noticed that the dogs, Silme and her brother Bear, were coming in more winded than usual, wild and excited. They decided to spy one evening, and they discovered that the dogs had a little coyote-pup friend, all three playing and leaping and mock-fighting with abandon. They let this go on awhile, thoroughly entertained, till they began to wonder if the situation could go wrong in some unforeseen way and decided to keep the dogs in for a few nights to break the pattern, which worked. But there is a sweet little aside to this story. One day Melissa’s neighbor called to ask if her dogs were missing any toys. Melissa walked over to discover her dogs’ orange barbell, their rope toy, and their stuffed hedgehog, all in an out-of-the-way corner. Bear and Silme never ventured into this area because of their invisible fence, but they did offer their toys when they wanted to befriend someone—usually just a human visitor. It appears that Silme and Bear brought their toys for the coyote puppy, and the pup carried them off to its own second play area. Coyotes’ curiosity toward dogs may be mistaken for aggression. Stan Gehrt tells me that even some adult coyotes love to play with domestic dogs, behavior he’s observed in urban parks and cemeteries.
The greatest source of urban coyote-human conflict in the public mind is the threat to small pets. And though coyotes are famous for the spiriting away of outdoor cats, felines are only a tiny fraction of the urban coyote population’s diet, just 1 percent, and many of these are likely feral, rather than someone’s beloved Fluffy. The bulk of their diet by far is small rodents; coyotes eat rats, mice, squirrels, shrews, voles. They eat rabbits—feral domestics and wild. In the east, where white-tailed deer are common in high-density areas, more than 20 percent of an urban coyote’s diet may be fawns. They eat ducks and geese, usually the fat park ones. They eat invertebrates, including many insects, and when chasing a butterfly on the wing, coyotes appear playfully acrobatic, more like a cat than a dog. They eat cat food, dog food, and sometimes birdseed. They eat seeds, nuts, fruit, vegetables, and garbage. Because the coyotes that visit our homes appear to be attracted to garbage cans, and because these are the only coyotes we see and encounter, we overestimate the amount of garbage they actually eat—from studies on scats, researchers know that most coyotes in the urban matrix have less than 2 percent human refuse in their diet. They occasionally eat raccoons but prefer smaller prey. They may fight with domestic dogs, but it is rare for them to kill one that is of medium size or larger. Female coyotes typically weigh twenty to twenty-five pounds, males thirty to thirty-five pounds, which is about as big as a medium-size dog, though they may look a little larger because their coats are so full.
The closer you get to a coyote, the smaller it seems to be.
The Improbability of Coydogs
As we become more aware of coyotes in urban places, there is much speculation about coyotes and domestic dogs hybridizing. I have met two big-eared dogs of dubious parentage in my neighborhood, and the owners of both proudly suspect some coyote mischief. Coyotes and dogs are closely related and can hybridize, but coydogs are less common than we might think. Genetic studies of various urban and rural coyote populations rarely indicate any breeding with domestic dogs, and, while possible, coydogs in urban settings are not likely, in part because coyotes are highly seasonal breeders, while dogs are not. Both male and female coydogs have lower fertility than either coyotes or domestic dogs, and coydog females have a shifted estrus cycle that doesn’t coincide with the limited coyote estrus period. There are behavioral differences too, such as the fact that male coyotes are attentive to the young, while domestic dog and coydog males are not. As exciting a prospect as coydogs might be, when we look at our own animals, it is probably more sensible to think Interesting big ears rather than Coyote hybrid!
Even twenty years ago, ecologists did not suspect that there was a place for a high-level carnivore in the urban landscape. Now many wildlife biologists suggest that as long as humans manage their households to avoid conflict, there can be a positive ecological role for coyotes in the city. Eating and being eaten is how any creature finds its way into ecosystemic processes, and the urban coyote is no exception. That coyotes eat rats is a big fat plus for them as far as humans are concerned (while we rarely see coyotes, we might notice the uptick in rat populations if they were gone). The easy prey coyotes find in Canada geese makes life easier for fish and wildlife departments, which are always looking for publicly palatable ways to manage urban geese. In studies of California canyon lands, areas with a robust coyote population also had far healthier populations of native songbirds, including neotropical migrants, in terms of both species diversity and numbers of individuals. Coyotes do sometimes eat birds and nestlings, but this drawback is far outweighed by the benefit of their control of the feral cat population.* Adult deer are too large for coyotes to hunt, but although coyotes cannot help to reduce the increasingly problematic populations of white-tailed deer outright, they can slow it by preying on fawns.
There is something else coyotes add to the urban landscape. Something intangible, and unquantifiable, and difficult to put into words. They bring something that we modern humans both lack and need, that we both avoid and long for. They bring wildness. Wildness comes naturally to undomesticated animals, but for humans, the concept is more complex. There is something wild and animalish in our shared biology, our ecosystemic connectedness, and our physical vulnerability, to be sure. But wildness can also be a habit of mind, a state of being, of spirit, of imagination that we can choose to access, and to cultivate. This wildness is not chosen instead of our uniquely human rationality, our beautiful capacity for pure logic, our rigorous intellectual pursuits, the honed intricacy of our fine arts. It is a way of seeing and being that brightens, feeds, enhances, and stirs up all of these things.
Wild is a slippery concept. Typically, it has been defined in the negative, by what it is not, by a series of un-s. Something wild is uncivilized, undomesticated, uncultured, unpopulated, unkempt, undisciplined. In his important book The Abstract Wild, environmental philosopher Jack Turner warns that the experience of seeing wild animals in nonwilderness places (which for him includes observing an elk in the “mega zoo” of the national parks as much as seeing a coyote in an urban parking lot) presents a danger—a perilous “blurring” in our minds of the urban with the wild, the wild with the tame, the real with the fake and diminished. Turner is right—the urban landscape is ecologically diminished; the diversity of species is impoverished. But what, then, of the raccoon, the striped skunk, the sharp-shinned hawk on the branch of my backyard cherry tree? What of the coyote? The one who hollows her den at the city’s leafy edge, the one who pads tentatively onto my neighborhood sidewalk in the morning dark? Is she fake? Is she real in a fake place? And what of my own quickening when I glimpse her? My simultaneous stillness, excitement, fear, delight, and recognition? This frisson that makes me want to laugh like a banshee, run like a rabbit, sneak away, celebrate, yelp like Earnhardt the dog?
Deer, Humans, and Coyotes
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the overhunted white-tailed deer had been reduced to just twenty thousand individuals on the continent. With careful management, deer populations recovered, then grew abundant, and they now number more than twenty-five million. Like coyotes, white-tailed deer are a versatile species that has adapted quickly to human presence, and they now roam the edges of highways, parks, and suburban yards, creating millions of dollars’ worth of damage as they browse foliage, eat fruit and vegetables, collide with cars, and cause general upheaval in the minds of regular folk who always thought they loved deer and now find their households overrun. Hunting has been the traditional way of dealing with cycles of deer overpopulation, but in town, hunting is not normally an acceptable option, both for safety reasons and due to public perception. Nonlethal methods of control—fencing, repellents, noise, and immunocontraception—are used, as are lethal methods in which deer are baited or trapped and then shot out of the public eye. But many cities, especially in the Northeast and the South, where hunting culture runs deep, are now offering short urban-deer-hunting seasons to bow hunters that, with an emphasis on population control, encourage the killing of antlerless deer. Reactions on the ground are mixed. People realize that the deer are nuisances, but they are also beautiful; people want the deer gone, not dead. And stories of a wounded deer with an arrow in the shoulder trailing blood through a backyard full of horrified children, or hunters who decide to field-dress a deer à la Sarah Palin right there in town and leave the entrails behind someone’s fence… well, such incidents may be few, but they grow large in the public imagination. In the end, a healthy coyote population may be the best way to naturally keep deer in balance.
Deer sign is easily recognizable—their heart-shaped tracks and pellet-scats are known to almost everyone, and their dropped antlers are a prize, as they have always been. First-year males grow small points, and a point is added every year up to five. Antlers are often conflated with horns, but they are far more fascinating. Antlers are actual organs, with a complex system of nerves and blood vessels, and while regeneration of limbs is well known in many nonmammal species (sea stars, newts), the regrowth of deer antlers is the single instance of organ regeneration in the entire mammalian class. The antlers have recently been found to contain stem cells and are being studied for a possible place in human health (though many people have not waited for scientific sanction—deer antlers and velvet have long been lauded for their supposed benefit for human vitality. Check the interwebs for the variety of potions available!).
It is a persistent untruth that fawns are odorless, though their scent is fainter than that of most newborn mammals; the mother carefully licks off all afterbirth and consumes the fawn’s feces and rune to help prevent detection. She also leaves the fawn completely alone for long hours, visiting only to nurse; she keeps watch and sleeps at a distance so as not to draw attention to her fawn. Fish and wildlife personnel receive thousands of phone calls a year about “orphaned” fawns that are actually being protected in solitude by their careful deer-mothers.
I am always challenged by the work of Jack Turner, but on this topic, Gary Snyder is more helpful, I think. While wholeheartedly defending wilderness, he speaks to civilization’s “permeable” quality. I know from my own life and experience that we can recognize the biological barrenness of an urban place while realizing at the same time that we are connected to wilderness, to the most pristine places left on the earth, by imagination, by activity, and by the wandering presence of the wild creatures that are among us. In a city, these may be few in species number. They may be weedy and scrappy. We may worry, righ
tly, that if we don’t shape up, there will be nothing left other than what we see before us: crows, raccoons, rats, and coyotes. But we can recognize all of this and still affirm with appropriate wonder the beauty and authenticity of the wildness in our midst, in our nearest co-inhabitants. And if we are fortunate, if we are willing, if we open our eyes and our brains and our hearts, we have the capacity to affirm a sense of wildness in ourselves as well. The coyote, on light feet, traverses our urban-wild boundaries, challenging our preconceived ideas of both. The presence of the coyote reminds us that our connection to wildness, within and without, is worth our daily remembering. And that even if we forget, it’s still there.
In mythology and folklore across time and cultures, the coyote has always represented the consummate trickster. He is clever, pugnacious, unscrupulous, playful, plotting, scheming, busy, buffoonish. He is thinking up the most elaborate mischief, which (like Wile E.’s plans to catch the Roadrunner) inevitably backfires. He can have a heart, or not, as suits his whim. This is my telling of one popular myth, believed to be from the California “upriver people,” the Karuk:
The human people had arrived, quite new to the earth. Coyote observed them when they arrived in spring, noting their pathetic hairlessness. But the light of the sun kept the people happy and warm, even the ugly pink babies and the skinny old ones. As autumn came on and began to deepen, Coyote once more passed by the human village, and this time he heard the people whining. They were so cold! What would become of them? They wrapped their blankets tighter and closed their teepees up, wishing for a piece of the warm sun to bring inside. Poor dumb humans, Coyote thought. In full-on winter, Coyote passed again, and this time he heard wailing. The humans were gathered around a grave, where they were burying the same babies and elders he had seen thriving in the spring light. He listened to the cries of the women, the singing of how their dear ones had died in the cold. Serves them right, Coyote thought, closing his ears and trotting on. But, damn it, he couldn’t help himself. Coyote felt sorry for these humans—peltless, stupid, and now also sad and dying. He decided to help them. Being a furry one himself, Coyote had never had a need for fire, and neither had any of the other animal people. But he had heard of the two Fire Spirits—mean, clawed, supernatural beings—who jealously guarded their flaming treasure at the top of the mountain. Coyote crept up and watched them, plotting to steal the fire and bring it to the poor humans. Right away, one of the Fire Spirits heard him. “Who is that? A thief! Brother! A thief after our precious fire!” But then Coyote began to prance among the grasses, where they could see him. “Oh, look, Sister, just an idiot coyote.” Coyote watched how carefully the brother and sister Fire Spirits tended their flame. He watched so long and well that he found the one moment of every day when the fire was left unguarded. Early in the morning, while the earth was still dark, the brother would go into the tent and say, “Hurry out, Sister, it is your turn to guard.” And she would roll over, pull the covers over her groggy head, saying, “I am soooo comfortable. Oh, okay, okay, I am going…” It was in that tiny unguarded moment one day that Coyote leaped forth and claimed the flame! Oh! It was so hot, burning into his beautiful pelt, he’d had no idea, but no matter, he took off running. Well, there were many adventures as Coyote was chased by the angry spirits and helped by various animal people, including Frog and Squirrel. But eventually the flame was delivered to the human people, who were grateful and—alas—ignorant. How to keep the fire going? They danced before the fire, they sang to it, they threw things at it and shouted at it while the fire’s warmth dwindled to a tiny spark. Finally, Coyote stepped in again and showed them what he had learned on the mountain—how to feed the heat with wood, and cones, and breath. This is how Coyote brought fire—and survival—to the people.
The Urban Bestiary Page 4