In the Karuk legend, Coyote was a benevolent, if reluctant, hero-trickster, but that is far from always the case in the stories. Trickster Coyote also has a crazy-seductive sex drive; he’s a “four-legged Falstaff,” as zoo-mythologist Elizabeth Caspari puts it, “a bigger-than-life bad example, ready to take on every available female—human or otherwise.” Coyote can bring, and leave, anything: flood, death, pain, evil, heartbreak, yes, but also secrets—urgent, beautiful secrets about birth and life and survival. He is a cloud of contradiction, a disquieting and richly ambiguous figure. “Scourge and savior both,” writes Caspari.
After wolves were extirpated from the west, coyotes inherited their reputation and were perceived to be the prime threat to livestock, a reputation that they hold even today, though studies show that mismanagement, disease, and poor breeding habits resulting in weakened stock are the primary threats to livestock health. In the mid-twentieth century, after the wolves were pretty much gone, the western states instituted a coyote-eradication program. Many millions of dollars were spent (about eight million dollars a year in the early seventies alone), many thousands of times the dollar value of livestock loss. Today, about a hundred thousand coyotes are killed each year with government approval and assistance (and funding) and many more without.* Coyotes are shot, trapped, or lured to sheep carcasses laced with cyanide or strychnine. Some government officials involved in the program insist they are seeking “relatively humane” execution methods, but ethologist Marc Bekoff, who has studied the social lives of coyotes for decades, wonders what is “relatively humane about having your head blown off or being maimed.” True to trickster style, in spite of all this money, effort, and emotional tension, coyote numbers have only increased across habitats. Ironically, modern grazing practices drive coyote expansion on agricultural land—free-range overgrazing creates dusty open spaces with lots of rodents and gopher holes that coyotes love. And, again ironically, studies show that in areas where coyotes are actively trapped, poisoned, and hunted, the females actually bear more pups than they do in areas where this is not the case, filling the biological carrying capacity of the place and keeping the coyote population nearly constant.
Coyote eradication occurs on a smaller scale in urban settings, where individual or “problem” coyotes are killed because of a threat to public safety, real or perceived. Often such steps are taken quietly, to prevent a public outcry, though at other times it is with full media attention. In the high-end Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park, a sheep that was being kept for a hobby, on a partially fenced backyard lawn that bordered a greenbelt where coyotes were known to live, was killed by a coyote. When the owners of the sheep insisted that the offending coyote be killed, wildlife officials obliged, but neighbors were in a confused uproar, and many protested the killing of a wild animal that was behaving as any sensible coyote would. The blunder was human—sensible husbandry practices would have protected the sheep. Urban coyotes are removed and euthanized by a nuisance-animal trapper or, like this one, killed by a wildlife-official sharpshooter. Like everything involving coyotes, responses to such steps are far from clear-cut. Some people, usually very few, are outright glad that the menace is gone. Some feel, reluctantly, that it was the necessary course and are relieved and saddened, both. Many mourn the loss of a beautiful wild creature and use the moment to regroup and recommit to learning how people and animals can best coexist in safety and tolerance.
The steps asked of us are plain, and practical. We need to keep our small pets indoors, especially at night and in the morning, and we need to keep from feeding wild animals, intentionally or inadvertently. Inconveniences, perhaps, but such small ones. Wildlife officials encourage people who encounter coyotes to shout at them, maybe even throw a stick. Gehrt admits that this is a difficult paradox for those who love wild animals and want to see them flourish in the city. Aren’t we supposed to be kind to animals, to be quiet and peaceful in their presence, to cultivate human-wild harmony? But every human-coyote encounter is what Gehrt calls an “educational moment,” an opportunity for both human and coyote to learn how to live alongside each other, and the more that coyotes avoid us, the better the chances that humans will continue to tolerate their presence and cultivate an enduring coexistence. I told Dr. Gehrt that I hardly ever see a coyote, and when I do, I don’t want to chase it away—all I want to do is watch it for as long as I possibly can. “Yeah,” he said, “me too.”
Coyote is bigger than both our perceptions and, as scientists readily assent, our knowledge. Unwittingly, Coyote has become a cipher, a canvas as big as nature onto which we project our wild hopes, desires, beliefs, ignorance, truth, and fears about wildlife. We all write different words on the cipher of Coyote’s body. I criticize one author for his use of skulk and plan, but are these projections so different, really, from my own prancing? In PrairyErth, William Least Heat-Moon offers his own list of coyote words in a long prose-poem that begins Now, coyote:
Yipping, ululating, singing, freely, freely, night-flute coyote, long leggedness through blackness, (moonless), silent, pausing, yipping, far responding, quick legs, freely, padded feet, coyote feet, pausing, silent padding, pissing, running, swinging head, pausing, back-looking, (tallgrasses frozen, frosted), cold fur erected, coyote singing, sings-long-dog, coyote, coyote, golden-eyes-coyote, canine, climbing, singing, sweetness, song dog, breathing darkness, (hiding darkness), yip-yipping, nose-to-sky-coyote, singing, sweet-throat-beast, coyote jaw, coyote teeth, looking-always-coyote, running, singing the darkness, long-song-dog call, coyote, coyote belly, waiting, watching, wanting, coyote eyes, eye this, that, scenting, sending, sensing, pausing, pissing, breathing, smelling, sniffing, snooping, nosing, silent-feet-coyote, earth-feel-under-foot-coyote.
On and on it goes, this long, lovely, and unusual list. Others would add coyote vermin, coyote pest, coyote menace. I would add just this: Coyote glimpsed. So often this is the view people tell me they have had of a coyote. They glimpsed it, or caught a glimpse. (Somehow it seems fitting that glimpsed is one of just a handful of English-language words that has no true rhyme.) The word glimpse is both a noun and a verb, and in this case, I wonder if I can also stretch it to an adjective. Coyote, perhaps more than any animal in the urban landscape, is a glimpsed animal. Seen only partially. And when we do see them—how do they do it?—they walk into the grass or beyond the fence or straight into a tree, it seems, and are gone. No matter how much we love, hate, tolerate, fear, kill, or even scientifically study coyotes, we will always see them not in full, but in part.
In this new nature, this challenging ecological moment where we seek to find gracious, creative, wise ways of living in a changing landscape, this glimpse of the coyotes that are with us matters. How to live alongside Coyote? In a city, of all places? There is no tidy answer, no pat answer, no right answer. Where humans and coyotes overlap, the coyotes’ presence is determined not just by food and habitat availability, as in wilder places, but also by human tolerance for coexisting closely with a large, carnivorous predator. Wolves? Too big, way too wild, we decided. Gone. Cougars? Um, no. But coyotes? They might be big, but they are big in a smallish, slender sort of way. They just might slip in on the edge of our tolerance. We allow Coyote in literature, in myth, in art, in imagination. Can we also allow her in body?
As we answer this question, the coyotes are looking to us; in this evolving story, they will follow our lead. Perhaps we will manage to protect and welcome the challenging, wonderful, uneasy presence of Coyote by minding ourselves and our homes. Then we will wait, ears pricked, to see what happens. We will join the two old men in the Navajo myth resting on the porch after their long day’s labor. They had finally finished arranging the stars, laying them in neat, orderly rows. As they admired their work, Coyote pranced through, scattering the stars into the night sky, into the wild beautiful disarray we see to this day.
Mole
Squeezing the Earth
One year my dad built the Great Wall of Mole. My parents, Jerry
and Irene, then lived in the middle of ten wooded acres and had created a small garden behind their house. The soft, nicely tilled, and freshly planted soil naturally attracted one of the many moles from the surrounding woodlands, and both the grassy areas and the flower beds were soon dotted with unwelcome mole-ish mounds. These were stamped, cursed, and decried by my father. And though Jerry is on the whole tolerantly loving toward wild creatures, eventually he couldn’t deal with it anymore; the mole had to go. He tried the usual ineffectual methods, spiraling ever downward through the maze of physical effort and psychological torment familiar to would-be mole eradicators (sunflower-shaped plastic windmills, noisemakers, liquid repellents, tromping, fuming, swearing…), until he found himself deploying a metal-toothed mole-killing trap. But Jerry felt so saddened by the velvety heaps of mole the trap periodically brought forth (and simultaneously so annoyed that the molehills kept appearing anyway) that he gave up this bloody tack and, in his sleep, where he does most of his thinking, masterminded the Great Wall of Mole. My dad is a mason, and he doesn’t mess around. The Great Wall of Mole was a full-on, one-hundred-plus-foot perimeter around the entire backyard made of strong metal hardware cloth buried vertically thirty inches into the ground. It took Jerry and his hod carrier, who was paid union wages for his efforts, three days to complete the digging. Finally, the spade-width trench was filled in, and the grass was replanted. Within a day, the mole tunneled under her very own Great Wall, or walked over it during a crepuscular foray, or maybe she had just stayed inside its perimeter and waited out the whole project. She resumed her tunneling and mounding, and my dad walked around for a week hitting himself in the head and muttering, “Jerry, you stupid sonofabitch.”
There is no North American mammal more adapted to a comfortable subterranean existence than the mole. Rats, while excellent burrowers, would have given up before reaching the bottom of the Great Wall of Mole, as would any of the other famous tunnel-underers: raccoons, foxes, weasels. But moles? They are perfectly at home more than nine feet underground, and in nice soft soils like my dad’s yard in the moist spring, they can dig at a rate of over fifteen feet per hour. If possessed by a mole-hurry, they can sprint at one foot per minute for several minutes straight.
In general, I oppose technological metaphors for biological things: the mind a computer, the body a machine, the Earth (alas) a spaceship. Metaphor is powerful, and the comparison of living things to machines represents a failing of both truth and imagination. But for moles, I make an exception. How could I not? Comparing a mole to a machine reflects so well on the mole. Seattle journalist Lynda Mapes compiled these statistics comparing the Emerald Mole tunnel-boring machine to an actual mole: the Emerald Mole weighs 642 tons to the animal mole’s 4 ounces; the Emerald Mole can bore 5 feet an hour compared to the animal mole’s 15 feet an hour; the Emerald Mole excavates 0.17 pounds of soil per pound of machine compared to the animal’s 57.2 pounds of soil per pound of furry mole. No wonder a group of moles is called a labor. The mole is indeed mightier than the machine.
Human-mole relations are made complex by the fact that humans don’t see moles. Or we don’t see them alive. Moles are occasionally killed by coyotes and dogs that dig them out of their mounds, by owls that find moles during their brief terrestrial excursions for water, or by cats. One morning in her backyard, my sister observed a crow pecking a mole to death. Moles are reputed to taste terrible, possibly because of the increased hemoglobin that allows them to maintain oxygen balance in their subterranean haunts. So when a mole is killed by another animal, it is usually left lying. If you are fortunate enough to find a freshly dead, unmaggoty, nicely intact mole, I would encourage you to embolden yourself in the noble role of urban naturalist and take a close look, as such opportunities are relatively rare. (It’s not unsafe—moles are very clean and don’t carry diseases that affect humans; just wash your hands after.) There are seven species of mole in North America, and though they vary in size and, somewhat, in habit, they are in general very similar. Many animals display their biological adaptations overtly but few do it as flamboyantly as moles. Running your hand over your dead mole’s coat, you will discover that mole fur is not just chinchilla-soft but also reversible—it has no nap, so the hair follicles on a mole are not directional, and the individual hairs can move in every direction. When a mole presses forward or back in its tight earthen tunnel, the fur accommodates; it is literally impossible for a mole to be rubbed the wrong way, something most mammals truly do dislike. The pelt is softer than a bunny’s, sweet to touch. In the early 1900s, Queen Alexandra, wife of England’s Edward VII, helped control a mole outbreak in Scotland by parading about in a mole-fur coat, thus establishing a trend. (It took several hundred moles to make one rather thin but very soft coat.) Mole hips are narrow and the femoral attachment is flexible, to allow movement around narrow earthen corners. A thin, translucent layer of skin covers each eye, and unlike the third eyelid, or nictitating membrane, that birds have to protect their eyes in flight or underwater, the skin over the mole’s eyes is a permanent covering. Moles are not blind, but they are almost blind. We know they can distinguish between light and dark, and we think they can also make out the shapes of medium and large objects at close range. The lack of vision is recouped through a keen sense of touch. Humans are most sensitive in our fingertips, but in the mole, the greatest sensitivity is in the nose. The snout is soft, long, and highly innervated, made for finding insects and grubs by feel. The back paws are underdeveloped, but the front paws are large and spade-shaped, turned out for swimmer-like paddling through the soil, and tipped with substantial claws. Moles are weird-looking little things, to be sure. The opossum, so despised for its pointy ugliness, has nothing over the mole.
Mole traps look like medieval torture devices, and death at their hands is particularly gory in comparison to the snap-trap deaths of other animals we kill with legal and social impunity, such as rats. I am convinced that this is in part because mole trapping takes place out of our sight, so we are not confronted in broad daylight by the ramifications of our actions (one of the most popular traps is actually named the Out O’Sight mole trap). Eventually, we will have to retrieve the trap and its impaled-mole contents, but the messy evidence will be pulled from beneath the earth—an alien, decidedly nonhuman world, where we feel somehow less responsible for what goes on. I believe that we humans are on the whole a compassionate species and that, as a general rule, we do not care to engage in the senseless skewering of small velvety creatures unless we can do it with some level of remove. This is not true for everyone, of course—many are perfectly happy to rejoice outright in their mole-killing. But for most, it is thought of as a necessary evil.
Which invites the question—what, exactly, is necessary about it? Moles can cause more than aesthetic damage. Occasionally, mole tunneling becomes so extensive that it makes a plot of land too squishy for safe walking. While moles themselves do not normally eat plants, bulbs, or roots, their tunnels and mounds can uproot plants and seedlings or kill small plants and grasses by burying them in mud. It is said that mole tunnels provide cover and travel opportunities for voles and other small animals who do eat roots and bulbs, and although this is true, it is not particularly common. Most eating of plants and plant parts is accomplished by the good old terrestrial rodents—squirrels and rats. (Moles are not rodents; they are related to shrews and bats.)
The Urban Bestiary Page 5