Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2016 by Dan Flores

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  Basic Books

  Hachette Book Group

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  First Trade Paperback Edition: September 2017

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Print book interior design by Trish Wilkinson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Flores, Dan L. (Dan Louie), 1948–, author.

  Title: Coyote America : a natural and supernatural history / Dan Flores.

  Description: New York : Basic Books, 2016. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043370 (print) | LCCN 2016001156 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465052998 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780465098538 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Coyote—North America—History.

  Classification: LCC QL737.C22 F63 2016 (print) | LCC QL737.C22 (ebook) |DDC 599.77/25—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043370

  ISBN 978-0-465-09372-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-465-09853-8 (ebook)

  E3-20170807-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTIONAmerican Avatar

  CHAPTER 1Old Man America

  CHAPTER 2Prairie Wolf

  CHAPTER 3A War on Wild Things

  CHAPTER 4The Archpredator of Our Time

  CHAPTER 5Morning in America

  CHAPTER 6Bright Lights, Big Cities

  CHAPTER 7Coyote America

  EPILOGUECoyote Consciousness

  About the Author

  Also by Dan Flores

  Praise for Coyote America

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  For Sara

  Few creatures on Earth possess a biography to match the coyote’s. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  INTRODUCTION

  American Avatar

  Here is a vivid memory. I am on winter break from my university duties, and I am home visiting my parents in Louisiana. We are up early, stirring around in the kitchen in a gray, misty dawn in our hometown near the Black Bayou in the north of the state. My dad knows the paper will already be in the mailbox and asks me to walk out to the end of the driveway to fetch it in. I am in the act of pulling the Shreveport Times out of the box in silvery-blue twilight when I hear a rhythmic clatter and the scratching of toenails on the asphalt street. Plastic-wrapped newspaper in hand, I turn toward the commotion and find myself staring into the face of a coyote, which shoots me a quick sidelong glance as it passes by mere feet away, rocking along in that characteristic lope with which coyotes go through the world, close enough to pepper my ankles with dislodged gravel as it digs in to swerve past me. I register hot yellow eyes and something in its mouth. Maybe it’s the neighbor’s cat, although in the dim light it looks more like a trio of tallboys dangling from plastic six-pack rings.

  Open-mouthed, I follow its course down the street, when a second coyote appears, weaving through three cars parked on the road opposite my parents’ home. Pink tongue lolling, this one fixes me with a look that has something of a been-good-to-know-you wave as it passes, and in another couple of seconds it is at the corner intersection at the end of the block. There it pauses for an instant, turns to look back at me, then is gone in a movement I barely discern, like smoke dispersed by a sudden swirl of wind. Coyote number two seems empty-handed, and I register the thought (and tell my dad back in the kitchen), Ah, those looked like pull-tab beers anyway, so no bottle opener needed.

  I tell this story not because it is unusual but for exactly the opposite reason. In twenty-first-century America likely a hundred scenes something like this unfold in towns and cities from coast to coast every morning. Close encounters with coyotes have now become the country’s most common large-wildlife experience. They happen everywhere, in small towns like the one where I was raised and in gigantic cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, and now even New York City, the coyote’s final frontier. A study of print media from 1998 to 2010 found a whopping 1,214 newspaper and magazine articles dedicated to human-coyote encounters in the United States for those years, and of course those included only the newsworthy events. Many thousands more like mine in Louisiana occurred without anyone calling a reporter. According to Stan Gehrt, Chicago’s urban coyote guru ecologist, every major city in America now has a coyote-management study underway.

  Our sense—and this is the way most media and online stories about coyotes have presented the matter—is that this is a brand-new phenomenon and something for which we humans are wholly responsible. Those sentiments reflect urban legend and human hubris. Urban coyotes are in no sense new in American history. And in truth, we are far less responsible than they are for their arrival everywhere among us now. In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic one another, like us coyotes are a cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats. In our case, we have cleverly enhanced our own cosmopolitanism by taking our evolutionary habitat with us around the world: every North American home from Fairbanks to Tucson is heated or cooled to seventy-two degrees, the ambient temperature of the African setting where we evolved. Coyotes haven’t bothered with recreating their desert and plains habitats wherever they’ve gone, but they have sought out prairies, habitat edges, and natural areas as they have colonized the continent, and they have assuredly used cleverness in spreading from their original home in the West across North America.

  Coyotes have been “going along” (as the many Indian stories about them have always put it) for far longer than just the last century. Contemporary media accounts commonly assume that coyotes in eastern settings are an inexplicable phenomenon of the past few decades, that they are “invaders” of the country east of the Mississippi, the result of a sort of reverse-direction coyote manifest destiny. But that relentless coyote trot and sidelong glance has been eating up global space for a very long time. The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old World jackals. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes.

  Five hundred years ago, when Old Worlders first came to America, coyotes largely hewed to a range centered on the deserts and plains of the interior West. The initial European descriptions of coyotes fixed their range in the north as the prairie
s of the modern Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Farther west, fur traders found them in southern British Columbia, but not north of there, and they were nowhere along the Canadian coast. Southward down the Pacific shore, there were no coyotes in coastal Washington or Oregon, but as the country dried farther south, they appeared in coastal California all the way down to Baja. In the interior West, coyotes were not numerous in mountain ranges like the Sierras, Cascades, or Rockies, but apparently a few did roam the high mountains. In all the open country of the interior, though, everywhere there were deserts or plains, as far eastward as Minnesota and the Blackland Prairies of Oklahoma and East Texas, coyotes lived in the millions five hundred years ago.

  At some point in their history, coyotes pushed southward down the continent, spilling out of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts all the way to central Mexico, and human activity may well have drawn them there. Thousands of years of large-scale landscape modification by agricultural societies in that part of Mesoamerica culminated 800 to 1,000 years ago in the Aztec Empire, whose sprawling cities seem to have effected a magnetic pull on coyotes, luring them down from their northern homelands. The lucrative possibilities that life among humans offered coyotes only multiplied when Europeans arrived with herds of clumsy, dim-witted domesticated sheep and goats from the Old World. In the late 1500s the little desert dogs initiated their first recorded range expansion following European arrival when they began to trot southward from the old Aztec capital down through Mexican states like Oaxaca, seeking easy prey among the pastoral flocks. From there they pressed on toward the equator, loping all the way into Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Spanish chroniclers reported the presence of a wolflike animal known to the Indians as coyotl as early as 1600.

  Another European activity in wild North America, the fur trade, probably provoked coyotes’ next famous range expansion. By the 1830s Canadian traders working westward from Hudson’s Bay began to see coyotes north of where they’d ever noticed them before. Decade by decade, hard-bitten trappers in the frozen North wrote to their superiors that the small “prairie wolves” unaccountably seemed to be edging farther north, until by the end of the nineteenth century there were coyotes in the Northwest Territories and even ’round about Whitehorse in the Yukon and Anchorage in Alaska. That amounted to a range expansion of more than six hundred miles across the previous three-quarters of a century. Then, famously, the scavenging possibilities presented by dead horses and mules during Far North mining rushes led coyotes to follow along in the wake of miners plying the Klondike Trail. By 1930 there were coyotes north of the Yukon River, all the way to the Brooks Range. In both the Yukon and Alaska, a few even made it past the Arctic Circle, where Eskimo people, confounded by their presence, speculated among themselves that they were some kind of never-before-seen fox.

  All this is to say that long before America’s desert canines began to show up in Chicago and Manhattan, across the four centuries between the 1520s and the 1930s, coyotes had added about 2,000 miles of territory on the southern and northern edges of their range, which now spanned 7,500 miles of the continent and included every habitat from tropical jungle to frozen tundra. Yet the little western song-dogs were just getting started. By 1950 coyotes had begun to spill across the western mountains into the coastal country of the Pacific, showing up on the outskirts of Seattle and Portland, places where no one had ever seen a coyote before. At the same time, 1,500 miles to the east, they were colonizing almost all of Ontario, as far toward the Atlantic as Toronto and Ottawa. By the mid-twentieth century, the United States and Canada, from the Pacific to east of the Great Lakes, had become coyote country. To the 2,000 north-south miles of new coyote territory since the coming of Europeans, coyotes had now added nearly 1,000 additional miles west and east of where the British, French, and Spanish had first found them. Expansion by only one other large mammal matches this in American history. We humans did it twice: first, when the original Indian hunter-settlers poured out of Siberia all the way to the tip of South America in fewer than 1,000 years; second, during our so-called manifest destiny, a colonization that took Europeans from footholds along the Atlantic Seaboard and in the Southwest across virtually all of North America in about 300 years.

  Across the history of life on Earth, animals and birds of many species have routinely colonized new country. That’s enough a marker of adaptive success that biologists apply the term “cosmopolitan” to species that are especially flexible regarding the habitats where they can live. Evolving in America, the ancestors of horses spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa, where they became zebras and quaggas. Bovine evolution in Southeast Asia eventually brought bison to North America, where they became an icon of the continent. But the range expansion of a wild animal for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal’s eradication, is truly remarkable. A suite of factors must be involved.

  The intelligence and flexibility that evolution bequeathed this small wolf was undoubtedly most important of all. Southwestern Hispanos have a rich folk tradition about coyotes and have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God. It is a certainty that only humans and a handful of other species are capable of the variety of lifestyles coyotes can lead, from living with a pack and cooperating cleverly to attain group goals to slipping into the cracks of the world to fend for themselves as lone individuals. But other factors were at play. An obvious one from their history is that coyotes—at least some coyotes—not only survive among humans but have long quested after opportunities among us as a part of their evolving way of life. Unlike so many other wild animals, coyotes have been seeking humans out from the time we arrived in America, almost “testing” how closely they and we can function in the world. This striking trait has created an unusual history.

  We also aided them in ways we little understood at the time. One of the “pull” factors in drawing coyotes out of the West seems to have been our almost complete extirpation of eastern and southern wolves. Since colonial times Americans had waged war against Canis lycaon, the wolf of the Northeast, and Canis rufus, the red wolf of the South and Atlantic Seaboard. By the early 1900s we had pushed these wolf species to the edge of extinction almost everywhere east of the Mississippi River. Western coyotes venturing into these landscapes, where all sign and scent of their ancient relatives was absent or fading, found whole new possibilities available to a midsize canid predator. East of the Mississippi they found wet, humid, forested landscapes drastically unlike their natal deserts and plains, with different prey and food sources. But by the twentieth century, eastern landscapes like those in New England were recovering from intensive farming and clearing, once again reforesting and rewilding. Adirondack Park in upstate New York, new national forests in New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Appalachians, and new national parks like Great Smoky Mountains gave the East some essential wildlands in the twentieth century. East of the big river were far more people, roads, towns, and cities. But a species that had survived the Pleistocene Extinctions, consorted with humans before, and escaped a scorched-earth campaign against them in the West evidently found none of that intimidating.

  Because naturally there was also a “push” factor in coyotes’ takeover of America. For a century before lone animals and pairs of coyotes began to show up in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, coyotes had been the special targets and victims of a crusade against their kind that surpassed any other in recorded history in terms of the range of killing techniques and cruelty. It was a war of extermination, publicly proclaimed, and its weapons had progressed from guns and traps and dogs to saturation poisoning with a range of predacides invented specifically for the purpose. Wolves fell quickly before this onslaught, but, amazingly, decades of intensive persecution, culminating in a western landscape littered with millions of poison baits, did not eradicate coyotes. Yet the unrelenting pressure on them did invoke an ancient coyote biological imperative: it t
riggered larger litters of pups and colonization behavior that pushed them into new settings everywhere on the outer margins of their core range.

  So starting in the 1920s, coyotes began suddenly and mysteriously showing up in places east of the Mississippi River where Americans had never seen them before. With coyotes rapidly colonizing Ontario, it took only a moment—the specific year was 1919—before they appeared just to the south, in upstate New York. Between then and the 1970s, coyotes followed two migration paths east. One version of a coyote Overland Trail was in the north. Coyotes that got to upstate New York then moved southward down the mountain chains all the way to Virginia and North Carolina. Meanwhile, a southern migration route took coyotes through Louisiana and across the lower South. Reflecting a sense of confusion, American books on mammal distribution in the 1950s began to note coyote appearances not just in the Midwest but in New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and both the upper and the Deep South. Some biologists convinced themselves the only possible explanation was that tourists returning from the West on Route 66 had bought coyote pups at Navajo roadside jewelry stands, then released them into the wilds of the East. Maybe it happened, but that wasn’t the cause of the coyote’s takeover of America. Coyote resolve was the cause, and by the late 1970s it had led them to colonize all of North America—they even swam cold Atlantic waters to Cape Cod. Unless they stowaway to Hawai’i, they colonized their final US state, Delaware, in 2010.

  The modern coyote story has not just been about coyotes in states where no one would have imagined them a century ago. As we all realize now, coyotes were coming to live with us. They found the rewilding rural East and South appealing, to be sure, but it quickly became apparent that individuals, pairs, and even packs were also setting themselves up in towns and cities across the country. The urban coyote phenomenon happened first in places like California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, where we had founded major cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, and Denver atop existing coyote habitats. Their colonization of our cities, from small burgs like my hometown in Louisiana to the biggest, loudest, most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife story of our time. It deserves some explanation.