The men who graduated from their rabid pursuit of wolves to become trappers and poisoners of coyotes in the 1930s and 1940s were also detached, stoic killers, but they were grown men drawing a salary for their efforts, not teenage boys romantic about the American West. Interestingly, though, they did romanticize the animals they executed. Federal wolf hunters and the stockmen in whose interests they worked were known in those years for anthropomorphizing their targets, giving them names and personalities. The Bureau of Biological Survey’s celebration of the craftiness and worthiness of their canine opponents seemed almost to echo the Indian Wars.
As obvious as the psychology of that was, it nonetheless bequeathed to us stories of a last few individual wolves—Rags, Whitey, Lefty, the Greenhorn wolf, the Custer wolf, and female wolves the hunters named Bigfoot and Unaweap. Then there was the famous female Three-Toes, so desperate to find a mate in a now wolfless Great Plains that she eventually seduced and mated with a collie. Having betrayed humans by going feral, Three-Toes’s domesticated paramour soon enough followed her (along with their wolf-dog hybrid pups) to his death at the hands of bureau hunters.
By 1923 the possibilities for pursuing heroic, last-stand wolves in the Lower 48 were virtually over. It was at this point—in moves just as psychologically transparent as before—that the Biological Survey first feigned shock at, then resignation to, just how frightful and destructive a predator the coyote actually was. The truth was that, with wolves gone, the bureau badly needed coyotes to serve as uber-predators for the purpose of keeping the agency alive. But it was also true that no one at the bureau ever made the connection that wholesale eradication of gray wolves was removing the coyote’s sworn enemy of the past 20,000 years. In modern Yellowstone National Park in our own time, we have had ringside seats to this process working in reverse, as gray wolves have rejoined coyotes in places like Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. But back in the 1920s, as wolf after wolf disappeared, the coyote nation found itself in a new world where it had become target number one, slated for official extinction at the hands of the American state.
So the lead-in to the shocking Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 was a wolfless 1920s America. American policymakers have always needed enemies, and with wolves gone, the coyote stepped unsuspectingly into the glare of a very intense predator-hatred spotlight. Suddenly (or so the bureau asserted), cattlemen who had paid little attention to coyotes before realized that “heavy losses of calves, heretofore attributed to wolves have evidently been due to coyotes”—which were now, shockingly, more visible in America than anyone could remember. Whether coyotes really were filling the niche of wolves, or whether many of those stock losses (as scientists who studied the matter in the 1930s believed) were exaggerated or actually caused by feral dogs was not really a matter of science, since a bureau that had once been a vehicle for pure science now only devoted 3 percent of its budget to scientific study.
In this vacuum of reliable information, the coyote assumed the mantle, in a phrase the bureau would use soon and often, of “the arch-predator of our time.” Even some of the romance got transferred. To increase coyote worthiness as a bureau opponent, distinctive coyotes began to acquire names, such as the “Rick Creek coyote” in Colorado or “Old Crip,” a female in Texas that, finally trapped in 1944, supposedly drowned herself rather than be taken. Among themselves, in their own packs and even among other animals inhabiting their world, coyotes were always individuals, as distinctive from one another as we are. Now the humans who pursued them began to distinguish individual coyotes, but in a move that cannot have made any sense to wild coyotes at all, their human enemies began to bestow on them both personalities and motives that oddly resembled those of fascist figures with designs on the American way.
In our twenty-first-century world, the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. “Species cleansing,” on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis, to flightless birds, clubbed and battered to extinction across the islands of the Pacific when Polynesians and later Europeans arrived there, to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers and Carolina parakeets in twentieth-century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, the act of pushing fellow animals into black hole oblivion.
When Henry David Thoreau, lamenting the phenomenon in 1856, wrote that he did not like to think that some “demigod” had come before him to pluck from the heavens the best of the stars, that he “wished to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” he was mourning a deep time human activity that likely extends back as far as the epoch of Lascaux and Chauvet caves. Even so, few if any organized states have ever been so coldly calculating about species cleansing as to set into law a statute largely conceived as a strategy to exterminate a singular mammal native to its continent. If residents of Queens or the Upper West Side want to know why coyotes are sleeping in their flowerbeds or peering down from the rooftops of bars, the interrogation can begin here, with twentieth-century America’s Dr. Strangelove designs to eradicate the animals wholesale.
It is also the primary reason why, two decades after American ecologists first organized to begin mapping out the study of Darwinian relationships, the ten-year plan for coyote eradication in the form of the Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 became a line in the sand for many of the scientists of the period. What ensued from 1931 to 1950 between science and federal policy amounted almost to a predator-prey dialectic. On one side was a scientific community becoming convinced that a federal species-cleansing program for coyotes (and predators in general) was a stunning, myopic mistake, without scientific basis, carrying with it profound collateral damage to nature. On the other was a government bureau, with almost frenzied support from livestock associations, the Farm Bureau, and legislators from the rural West, determined to seize its main chance with a witches’ brew of poisons stimulated by World War II. This forgotten war in American history was epic. And unlike other wars of the era, it was one we lost.
From the perspective of the coyote going about its usual rounds, finding mates, establishing territories, and forming packs to enable alphas to raise up new generations of pups, its status as archpredator presented both danger and opportunity. Shot at on sight, run down with cars, trucks, and dogs, and endlessly tempted with easy treats that disguised mortal danger in the form of traps or poison, coyotes in the early twentieth century found themselves pushed hard to explore new chances in a modernizing world.
Acquiring human champions meant nothing to coyotes, but they were materially affected by the fact that since Europeans had arrived, scarcely any humans spoke well of them (save traditional Indians who still credited Coyote with the creation of North America). Along with Ernest Thompson Seton, a usual suspect in such matters was John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and of a kind of philosophy of American nature worship that endures in activist environmentalism today. But like everyone else at the time, Muir knew little of predator ecology and nothing of the indigenous Coyote lore of his adopted state of California. His Colorado compatriot as a nature writer was Enos Mills, like Muir not a sportsman but a strong advocate of a new idea: the virtue of being in nature without a gun. Gun in hand, Mills had found coyote howls “menacing.” But weaponless in the wild, not thinking of coyotes as targets, he realized that howling coyotes were actually playful, full of merriment. Eventually he concluded that as the scourge of mice and gophers, a coyote “does man more good than harm.” Living with them high up in his mountain valley below Long’s Peak, Mills came to believe that “wise coyote” knew more than we newly minted Americans ever suspected.
It shouldn’t surprise us now that the first group of Americans after Indians finally to “get” coyotes were scientists. Elliott Coues, a frontier scientist who spent considerable time in coyote country, expressed an initial lukewarm admiration in 1873, the year after Mark Twain’s description in Roughing It. America’s unique wild canid, Coues wrote, “theoretically compels a certain degree of admiration, viewing his irrepressible positivity of character and his versatile nature. If his genius has nothing noble or lofty about it, it is undeniable that few animals possess so many and so various attributes, or act them out with such dogged perseverance.”
Understanding of the role predators like coyotes played had its beginnings when scientific naturalists formed the Ecological Society of America, which met for the first time in 1914. America’s founding ecologists, Frederick Clements, Charles C. Adams, and Victor Shelford, agreed at that gathering on several basic strategies for their field, among them the study of adaptation that had been so critical to Charles Darwin’s insights, an investigation of the flow of energy through nature, an analysis of “climax conditions” (which fascinated Nebraskan Clements), and development of better insights into how humans disturbed the natural world. Shelford, who had published the landmark Animal Communities in Temperate America just the year before, pushed his fellows to recognize and work on biotic communities too.
But the most old-fashioned research topic of all—an idea Western culture had known since the time of Aristotle as “the balance of nature,” the presence of a dynamic equilibrium in the natural world—began to push ecological science in the direction of understanding the role of predators. The Biological Survey’s policies assumed the European folk position: predators were entirely disposable, and the banishment of wolves and cougars and coyotes from America would create a civilized paradise for deer and elk and ranchers and sheepmen. This thinking ultimately became the rapier point of scientific inquiry.
The man who would become the most famous ecologist of this era, Aldo Leopold, would admit that all the way up until the early 1920s, he had thought in Elysian Fields terms himself. But years later, reviewing the book The Wolves of North America by bureau stars Stanley Young and Edward Goldman, Leopold wrote that he had come to realize that a predator-free “paradise” contained a fatal non sequitur. How had it happened that the wolf and coyote population had failed “to wipe out its own mammalian food supply” millennia before Europeans had ever come to North America? Between 1914 and 1945, Leopold’s colleagues had studied their way to an understanding of the balances that had kept American ecologies healthy for century after century without human intervention. But somehow, Leopold wrote, the bureau and men like Young and Goldman had obstinately refused to hear this rather self-evident message.
One of the most prominent names in conservation in the decades on either side of the turn of the twentieth century was Grinnell, largely because of the radiant halo cast by George Bird Grinnell, a first-rank conservationist in an age that produced Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and the public-lands system that was their legacy. Grinnell had an illustrious career, founding the Audubon Society and becoming (along with TR) a charter member of the Boone and Crockett Club and later of the American Bison Society, which helped bring bison back from the brink of extinction. He was best known in his day for editing the prototype outdoor magazine, Forest and Stream, and for almost single-handedly promoting the Continental Divide region of northern Montana as a new national park, 1910’s Glacier National Park.
The glow of Grinnell’s fame inspired other members of his large family, and among them was a younger cousin, Joseph Grinnell, who in 1916 would advance the “big idea” that provided ecologists their wedge issue as emerging critics of the bureau’s predator policies. Raised on western Indian reservations by his physician father, Joseph Grinnell grew up to become one of the West Coast’s most celebrated naturalists. In 1908, after a stint at Caltech, he got the University of California’s appointment as the first director of its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley, where he pioneered field techniques for the most careful and thorough collection of mammals and birds ever assembled for a state. As an original thinker, though, Grinnell made his major contribution to ecology with his proposal, in 1924, of the ecological niche, a fundamental insight into nature.
The ecological niche breakthrough was critical for understanding wild coyotes and appreciating predators generally. In nature a “niche” is analogous to an occupation in human culture. As with doctors and dentists in rural regions of the human world, niches in nature sometimes go unfilled or can become vacant. In the case of wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions, an understanding of niches caused ecologists to worry about the result of vacancies. As Grinnell and his students were able to demonstrate, niches for predators had existed across time as part of the balance of nature that ancient societies had marveled at.
In scientese, the coyote trotting across America and going about its ancient business occupied the niche of a midsize predator. It helped keep the populations of everything from mice to some ungulates in balance. The niche of the coyote-sized predator is almost universal across the world. It is filled by wild dogs in Africa, jackals in southern Europe and the Middle East, and marsupial carnivores on the great island continents of the Southern Hemisphere. The Tasmanian tiger was the equivalent of the gray wolf on that island, while the Tasmanian devil—surviving now only on Tasmania—was Australia’s coyote-sized carnivorous marsupial and occupied the same niche as a coyote. Humans introduced wild dingos to Australia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, and with the extirpation of the marsupial carnivores, these true canids then occupied that ancient niche.
The famous Kaibab Plateau deer episode in the 1920s furnished ecologists with a dramatic and helpful story for illustrating how predators create a balance in nature. By then bureau and bounty hunters had managed to erase wolves and mountain lions from the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and for good measure they had poisoned nearly 8,000 coyotes there. The evident consequence in the mid-1920s—exactly when scientists were first challenging the bureau’s predator policies—was a population explosion of mule deer on the Kaibab Plateau from roughly 4,000 to 100,000 animals that destroyed their browse and then suffered a catastrophic 60 percent die-off. In a much publicized (and ridiculed) move, Arizona novelist Zane Grey organized a nature-loving group, which included Hollywood actors, that attempted to drive the surviving animals to a new range. The main result was that Kaibab became a national story.
While modern ecologists have questioned the simple conclusions contemporary scientists drew about Kaibab, at the time few ecologists looked for more nuanced explanations. That was especially true when after Kaibab, in 1927, a rodent population explosion in Kern County, California, left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice. That event also came on the heels of mass coyote poisonings. The lessons of Kaibab and Kern seemed so clear at the time that they served as evidence for the so-called Lotka-Volterra equations of that decade, algorithmic ecological models of how prey and predator populations follow an oscillating rise and fall of first the hunted, then their hunters.
His niche insight gave Grinnell enormous gravitas in ecology, but it was only the opening to the proposal that led his fellows to begin their break with the bureau. Grinnell was also an ardent proponent of the new federally held public lands of America. Although by World War I America had established sixteen national parks since 1872, there was as yet no managing federal agency in charge of setting policy for America’s parks. But when the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 resulted in the damming of Hetch Hetchy Canyon, a large and scenic portion of Yosemite National Park, as a water source for the city, the anguished outcry from preservationists finally produced the creation of a National Park Service. The year was 1916.
So there was now a National Park Service and an organic act that empowered it to preserve nature in the parks for future generations. In terms of policies to preserve nature, though, exactly how would the new Park Service manage these crown jewel American landscapes? Joseph Grinnell and one of his zoologists, Tracy Storer, laid out a suggestion in “Animal Life as an Asset of the National Parks,” an article they cowrote for the journal Science that same year.
What Grinnell and Storer suggested was radical given what was already happening to predators in Yellowstone and Glacier. “As a rule,” they wrote, in the parks “predaceous animals should be left unmolested and allowed to retain their primitive relation to the rest of the fauna.” Presumably national park superintendents would be reading Science, and the two had a message. They were “naturalists,” they wrote, and as such were convinced there was a longstanding balance of nature relationship between predators and the local game animals. No worries, in other words, about sacrificing game to predators. Besides (they went on), “many of the predatory animals” were themselves “exceedingly interesting” to observe.
The idea of offering wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes permanent refuge inside America’s national parks, where scientists could do “research in natural history” on them, was shocking at the time. In 1916 the bureau was still a decade away from reducing wolf numbers to single remaining animals like Three-Toes, and the Animal Damage Control Act was still fifteen years in the future. But Grinnell and Storer could see the direction bureau predator policies were taking. At least, they said, let’s do what we managed to do for iconic native animals like bison and make the parks refuges for both game animals and predators, places where the grand cycles of primitive America could remain forever intact.
This “big idea” would be debated at meetings of the brand-new American Society of Mammalogists, founded in 1919, and in the pages of its publication, the Journal of Mammalogy. After a decade of success and widespread praise for their efforts, bureau leaders were gobsmacked to find that the scientific community was having doubts about what seemed to them nothing less than a mission of civilization. Some of the early stars of the bureau from the days when it had been a purely scientific agency, like founder C. Hart Merriam and Vernon Bailey, who had overseen its transition to predator control, attended these meetings and commanded great respect from their fellows. Merriam, legendary as the mind behind the idea of altitude-based life zones around the world, was the mammalogy society’s first president.
Suggestions for reform centering on Grinnell’s idea began at the society’s annual conference in 1924. At first the scientists were polite to the point of deference in their questioning of the bureau. By this stage everyone knew the bureau had reduced wolves, even in the national parks, to a shadowy handful of animals and that its hunters had put out more than 3 million poison bait stations for coyotes, killing untold thousands of nontarget birds and animals in the process. Scientists began their attempt to rein in the runaway program with papers emphasizing what a permanent step extinction was and the benefits predators conferred on “more valuable” ungulates by “removing weak and sickly animals” infected with diseases like septicemia or lumpy jaw.
Charles C. Adams, a founder of the Ecological Society of America, took the argument gently to the next step with a talk titled “The Conservation of Predatory Mammals.” It directly supported Grinnell’s national park idea. In the national parks surely “there will be less need of predatory control,” Adams thought. After all, midsize predators like coyotes, he argued, “materially aid in rodent control.” Then he continued, “Without question our National Parks should be one of our main sanctuaries for predacious mammals.” But if the parks were expected “to make the predacious fauna safe,” they were going to have to be larger, and there were going to have to be more of them.
The bureau’s Major Edward (or E. A.) Goldman—whose family had migrated from Pennsylvania to California in the nineteenth century and along the way had changed their name from Goltman to Goldman—responded to these first expressions of discontent from the scientific community. A highly accomplished field naturalist who had helped do foundational work in the natural history of Mexico, Goldman was becoming a wolf specialist, and he was now on his way to becoming a major figure in the coyote’s story. Goldman doubled down in his denial of a role for predators in America. Although he was “loath to contemplate the destruction of any species,” Goldman told the audience, surely as biologists they must know that the bureau had no choice but to “decide against such predatory animals as mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes.” Stepping away from current bureau policies would alienate both hunters and the livestock industry. The criticism he was hearing clearly rankled Goldman. He felt himself grow warm as he thundered at the assembly, “Large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.” And that was that.
As far as some of the scientists were concerned, the bureau had thrown down the gauntlet. The society managed before its 1924 conference ended to create a committee to draw up a plan “for the preservation of predatory mammals” and for public-lands preserves to provide them a refuge. Obviously some in the scientific community were not going to back down. But at the Bureau of Biological Survey, those in the higher echelons realized that a line of sorts had been crossed. As it pondered the meeting of 1924, its public relations statements seemed to pull back ever so slightly. In 1925 the bureau’s annual report even appeared to embrace the Grinnell idea, concluding, “Little objection can be raised to the continuance of a limited number of predatory animals in national parks and in wilderness areas remote from civilization,” although the newfound tolerance the report implied conflicted seriously with the bureau’s simultaneous assistance in wiping out predators as fast as possible in those very parks.
Goldman himself drew a different lesson from the 1924 conference, and in his fuming he penned an article the following year that in his mind settled the issue once and for all. In “The Predatory Mammal Problem and the Balance of Nature,” Goldman minced no words. Ecologists who prattled on about predators and the balance of nature were conveniently forgetting that the arrival of people from Europe had changed everything about North America. The balance of nature might have been fine for Indians, but with white people on the scene, the balance of nature on the continent had been, as he put it, “violently overturned, never to be reestablished.”
As a result, leading ecologists remained wary and unconvinced that the bureau was going to be reasonable. The growing rift between scientists and the bureau festered throughout the late 1920s, and it got worse when the mammalogists learned from the bureau’s own figures that since 1924 government hunters had put out another 2,174,886 poisoned bait stations across the West. Now under the leadership of Stanley Young (who in public appearances began to imply, fraudulently, that he had a PhD), in 1929 the coyote-hunting division of the bureau gained a new name, Predatory Animal and Rodent Control (PARC). During its first full year, PARC hunters set out 181,887 bait stations in Colorado alone. True enough, in the wake of the scientific mutiny, the bureau’s director in the late 1920s, Paul Redington, tried to downplay the word “extermination” in his public pronouncements. In another stab at political correctness, he got the Denver Eradication Methods Lab’s name changed to the Control Methods Lab. But even he demonstrated telltale disbelief: “We face the opposition,” he announced incredulously in a talk to the faithful, “of those who want to see the mountain lion, the wolf, the coyote, and the bobcat perpetuated as part of the wildlife of the country.”
At a planning conference in Ogden, Utah, in 1929, the bureau finally decided to take a stand against the Grinnell idea of allowing predators a refuge in the national parks: “We cannot favor sanctuaries for the breeding of mountain lions, wolves, bobcat, and coyotes,” the conference resolved. That same year, at the American Game Conference in December, chairman Aldo Leopold set out the evolving counterposition of the scientists with respect to predators. “No public agency” (guess which one) should control predators without substantial research first. Poisons should be an “emergency” control only. And “no predatory species should be exterminated over large areas.”
At their 1930 annual meeting at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the mammalogists organized a panel specifically on predator policy and invited Edward Goldman and Vernon Bailey of the bureau to express their views. By 1930 the bureau had for all purposes extirpated wolves from the Lower 48 and advised and assisted in erasing gray wolves from the crown jewel national parks, Yellowstone and Glacier. If the scientists expected rueful regret about this, they were in for a rude awakening. In New York Goldman let the audience know in no uncertain terms that extermination was still the game, and now it was the coyote’s turn. His only qualification had to do with the science behind the policy, but secretly he thought studies then underway that would all but convict coyotes. So he put the matter to the panel this way: “It seems a reasonable forecast that additional studies will confirm the conclusion that the coyote is the archpredator of our time.”
Yellowstone National Park was one of the laboratories where the bureau’s E. A. Goldman believed science would convict coyotes of high crimes against nature. It was also one of the prime locales where 1920s biologists thought we ought to protect and finally study predators. The world’s oldest national park has served as a setting to untangle natural relationships in America in almost every way imaginable for the past 150 years. So it’s no surprise that if you yearn to understand the role coyotes played in the changing ecology of the Biological Survey’s America, Yellowstone is one of the places to be. Coyotes and wolves, family cousins in a very old dog-eat-dog relationship, are encountering one another in several locations around North America now. But nowhere else provides quite the lessons as here for grasping coyotes as predators versus wolves as predators or how the gray wolf’s presence and absence have influenced the coyote biography. That was true in the 1930s, and it still is.
The Yellowstone Wolf Project people, Doug Smith and Rick McIntyre in particular, are amenable to a visit to watch this ancient canine relationship renewed and revisited. So Yellowstone, the scene of so many bureau/biologist debates three-quarters of a century ago, is where you go.
You can drive the road that traverses the marvelous Lamar Valley, in the once ignored northeastern quadrant of the park, just about any time of year and expect to see wolves and coyotes. But my fiancé Sara and I pick September, the weekend of the autumn equinox, for one last stretch of perfect Indian summer days up on the 7,000-foot Yellowstone Plateau. Doug, a major player in the 1995 release of the first Canadian gray wolves in the park, sets us up with Rick to go into the field, but first he offers me some thoughts. You could say, and you would be right, that on the topic of wolves and their effects on the Yellowstone ecosystem, Doug Smith’s thoughts are some of the savviest around.
Smith looks exactly as you’d imagine a Yellowstone Park wolf biologist to look. Tall, fit, and handsome, with a Sam Elliott mustache, Doug is a little gray and grizzled at fifty-two. He got his PhD from the University of Nevada, then worked with some of the most famous wolf people in the world, including David Mech, in the few remaining wild wolf outposts in the Lower 48, Isle Royale National Park in Michigan among them. He was part of the crew when the park and the US Fish and Wildlife Service formed the Yellowstone Gray Wolf Restoration Project in 1994. Now, twenty years later, he is its head biologist and project leader. Generous with his time and knowledge, he lays out for me the basic elements of a fascinating story.
“In general,” he tells me, “across North America, where you have wolves, you don’t have many coyotes.” A westerner, Doug pronounces the word KI-ohts, emphasis on the first syllable. “And where there are wolves, coyotes hunker down close to people, they get in close to towns, settlements, farms where they can use people as cover. They prefer people, who are more benign, to a wolf who’s stalking you all the time.” But Yellowstone is one of the places where wolves and coyotes hunt the same landscapes now. For the past two decades the park has given us a rare opportunity to observe how nature, disassembled with wolf extirpation in the 1920s, is stitching itself back together with the species’ restoration.
Gray wolf tracks, Montana, 2009.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
The experience of the Yellowstone coyotes when the wolves returned after an absence of seventy years is now a famous park story. “Before wolves the coyotes were the big dogs on the block. Then we introduced gray wolves out of Canada to the park, and they went swaggering through places like the Lamar Valley, putting the fear of God in those coyotes. I forget exactly how many dead coyotes we documented over the first few years.” Doug pauses. “But there was, you know, a real big spike in dead coyotes two, three years after wolf recovery, and 90 percent of them were at the elk carcasses that wolves killed. . . . I recall over one hundred dead coyotes the first two years.” In that initial set of encounters, the elk carcass banquet wolves provided in places like the Lamar Valley was simply irresistible to local coyotes. They’d had the run of the valley for decades, so at first they’d darted boldly in to snatch a meal when the wolves were sated and meat drunk. On occasions it worked; most of the time, the coyote ended up dead.
Yet unlike at Isle Royale, where wolves entirely wiped out the small resident coyote population, the Yellowstone coyotes survived. “Now we hardly ever pick up a dead coyote killed by wolves,” Doug adds. “I can tell you from walking around Yellowstone all the time, there are good coyote numbers out there and that suggests some type of coexistence now.”
This brand-new wolf-coyote interaction is important to track, it seems to me, for what it tells us about the deep evolutionary history of both species. In the dimness of continental history, coyotes evolved to occupy a niche adjacent to and in conjunction with the one wolves occupied. The current scientific argument holds that coyotes acquired many of their behavioral traits—including their nervous wariness and the stunning intelligence that allows them to survive so well in our midst—by living in close association with their dangerous larger relative, the gray wolf. The return of the gray wolf, in particular, to Coyote America has come as a bit of future shock, and not just for those used to an America without wolves. It is future shock for the coyotes, too, which must have thought a world without gray wolves was coyote nirvana.
If the coyote is what it is not because of a comparatively recent relationship with humans but because of its ancient and evolutionary relationship with wolves, then understanding coyotes within the context of an intact wolf community seems crucial to knowing coyotes. If we want to understand why coyotes have been such a success in modern history, why they’re hunting geese along the lakeside in Chicago and learning to wait for traffic to pass on interstate highways, we have to look directly at how they came by adaptations that made one of the most persecuted animals in America also its most wildly successful one.
Observation of wolves and coyotes interacting with one another and with prey in Yellowstone National Park has become critical to biologists’ and the public’s understanding of how predation worked in ancient America.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
A pair of coyotes joins a wolf, a grizzly, and ravens over a carcass in Yellowstone Park.
Jim Peaco photo, 2013. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Watching wolves and coyotes in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley is a bit like going to the premiere of a major new film in Los Angeles. Several dozen nattily dressed people, attired in the most recent offerings from Eddie Bauer and REI, their late-model Jeep and BMW and Mercedes SUVs parked nearby, are in a kind of receiving line, peering through their Swarovski spotting scopes at the celebrities, who consist primarily of the park’s new wolf population. Fall in among this group and unless host Rick McIntyre points someone out—or you run into folks you know—you can end up unaware that you’re rubbing shoulders with any manner of famous people from around the globe. Writers and journalists, well-known academics from far-flung universities, superintendents of other national parks, they’re all among the throngs of people assembled at the valley turnouts for these events. So are a large number of people from small communities near Yellowstone who are obviously passionate about predators.
With amiable and well-connected park public coordinator Rick McIntyre as our guide, Sara and I are quickly immersed in a predator observation culture that has come to thrive in Yellowstone over the past two decades. Red-haired baby boomer Rick is a native New Englander, educated at the University of Massachusetts by old-school natural resource professors who never could have appreciated something like deliberately restoring gray wolves to a national park long lacking them. Rick introduces us to a congenial and generous group, all fans of charismatic predators, all with a fanaticism for meticulous observation, who clearly know individual animals by name or number and follow them through all seasons across the sprawling geography of the park.
In late September 2013, the sought-after movie stars are the members of the Junction Butte wolf pack. The Gray Wolf Restoration team released seven wolf packs from Canada into the park in 1995 and 1996, with the Crystal Creek pack of 1995 and the Druid pack of 1996 eventually battling it out for control of the Lamar Valley. The Junction Butte pack consists this September of eleven wolves, three sisters and two brothers among them. Nine are gray; two are black. To avoid humanizing them, park personnel don’t give either wolves or coyotes names, but the volunteer wolf watchers call the gray alpha female of this pack “Ragged Tail.” The alpha male is a tall, thin gray wolf known affectionately as “Puff,” a name bestowed on him in younger days when sarcoptic mange left him with mere patches of fur.
This first morning Rick has located the Junction Butte wolves using radiotelemetry equipment, and as we watch them string out across a sagebrush slope four miles from our overlook, Rick points out Puff, now fully recovered and “probably the fastest wolf” in the pack. “Even though he doesn’t give the appearance of being a really strong wolf, he is. He’s become maybe the best hunter in Yellowstone,” Rick adds.
That comment becomes a prophecy. Later that day Puff almost single-handedly pulls down a young cow elk in the Lamar Valley, and for the rest of the afternoon the admiring roadside crowds train their Swarovskis on the scene and exclaim as if Paul Prudhomme were preparing a tableside meal on Jackson Square. We do the same, but as the pack devours the elk, I can’t help noticing that there is not a coyote in sight.
Twenty-fours hours later, after members of the Junction Butte pack have eaten their fill, then trotted some six to eight miles west to rest and digest, we set up our spotting scope to glass the kill site from the day before. And now, with the wolves a safe distance away, we at once see coyotes where there had been none. Two of them, animals that appear, through our scopes, to be fully grown adults, are on the kill site, scavenging what remains. In the midst of an entourage of ravens and magpies, one of them is bracing itself and pulling up what seems, even at this distance, to be fairly large chunks of bone and flesh. The two coyotes work the carcass by turns for about fifteen minutes before a third coyote, what some biologists refer to as a young transient, or “floater,” not attached to a pack, approaches from the river. At that point one of the original tandem dashes out to deflect this newcomer, and after a short pursuit, coyote number three retreats.
These coyotes are in the right geography to be descendants of a prewolf coyote pack here known as the Bison Peak Pack, one of eleven contiguous coyote packs once stacked neatly side by side, like eggs in a carton, up and down the Lamar Valley. We are looking at these coyotes across three-quarters of a mile of distance, and even through a 50X spotting scope, they appear much smaller than the wolves on this kill the day before. Otherwise their actions are similar, and indeed some of the tourists watching this morning seem to think they’re observing gray wolves. Through atmospheric heat-wriggles magnified by the spotting scope, we can see one of the coyotes scent-rolling in what remains of the carcass, while the other—bracing all four of its feet, its tail curled under in an arc—manages to pull the carcass entirely off the ground and drags it backward and uphill toward the trees, sending ravens and magpies into spiraling, flapping, protesting flight. We are too far away to hear the cacophony of bird insults, but watching, it isn’t too difficult to imagine the din.
“It’s a pretty good bet those coyotes were there all the time, probably lurking back in the aspen groves yesterday,” Rick offered. “It’s taken till this morning for them to feel confident enough to approach that kill.”
A Lamar Valley coyote’s simple act of pulling the remains of a wolf kill uphill and into a forest rests on 20,000 years or more of competition between coyotes and gray wolves. As predators of pursuit, coyotes became one of the fastest animals in the world, slower than cheetahs or pronghorns, to be sure, but capable of speeds up to forty-three miles per hour. Only seven or eight animals in the world are faster. Nonetheless, on an open plain, wolves can run down a coyote. Among the morphological changes and learned behaviors coyotes bring to bear on their relationship with their wolf cousins, one is to engage with them, when possible, in either forested or hilly settings, where the smaller, quicker coyote can dodge and weave and outmaneuver a wolf or can lead a pursuing wolf downhill, then quickly swap directions and escape uphill while the heavier wolf spins out on the turn.
One scientist associated with the study of Yellowstone coyotes is Bob Crabtree, who in 1989 landed a National Park Service grant to examine the park’s coyotes on the eve of wolf recovery. Crabtree’s PhD is from the University of Idaho, where he studied a similarly protected coyote population on the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State. He’s also an activist on the board of the San Francisco–based Project Coyote and has sparred in print with the Division of Wildlife Services, the successor to the Bureau of Biological Survey’s PARC. One interviewer described him as a scientist who couldn’t string together seven words without including an expletive. I liked the guy already.
Crabtree has used his work on those rare coyotes protected from both wolves and humans as a kind of baseline, and he argues that when coyote populations are unmolested—the situation at Hanford, and Yellowstone from the late 1930s until wolf reintroduction in the mid-1990s—their numbers stabilize at the carrying capacity of the local landscape. Crabtree’s work indicates that before wolves returned, the Lamar Valley had a coyote population of eighty animals, most of them members of one of the eleven packs there. In this situation, even in a game-rich national park, coyote litters were slightly small, averaging 5.4 pups, with only 1.5 pups per litter surviving into autumn. Coyote populations thus were stable across decades. It’s what could have happened in 1920s and 1930s America once the bureau wiped out wolves. But because of bureau and ag community intransigence about coyotes, of course it didn’t.
And what happened when wolves returned and at once began to harass and kill coyotes? According to Crabtree, within three years the Lamar Valley coyote population dropped from eighty to thirty-six. Most of those coyotes were killed outright by the wolves, the overwhelming majority in the battles around carcasses that Doug Smith had mentioned. Sometimes, as at the Lamar site still known to the biologists as “Dead Puppy Hill,” wolves even excavated coyote dens and killed the pups inside. No wonder the coyotes we watched in the valley waited until the Junction Butte wolf pack was eight miles away before visiting that kill site.
Ultimately, whether it’s persecution by gray wolves or by humans, harassment and killing of coyotes triggers the same set of responses, adaptations hardwired by evolution into coyote genes. As the coyote sees the world, allow it to live out its life without its neck on a guillotine, and it will rear a sufficient number of pups to reach the carrying capacity of its territory and no more. But it’s had to survive less benign circumstances for many thousands of years. Hound it and mark it for extermination, and not only will its biology defeat you every time, but it will colonize into new settings where you never in your wildest dreams expected to confront yellow eyes peering out of the twilight.
If anyone in the scientific community doubted Major E. A. Goldman’s sincerity about the coyote being the “archpredator” of 1930s America, the Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 disabused him or her of any illusion that the bureau would renounce extermination. The act originated in 1928 in a Texas congressman’s plan to wipe out coyotes once and for all. Once proposed the idea gained momentum and precision: Congress would appropriate $1 million a year for ten years “to promulgate the best methods of eradicat[ing], suppress[ing], or bringing under control” primarily coyotes but also a suite of other “varmints” the United States regarded as unworthy wild citizens of the republic.
Almost 150 scientists from some of the most distinguished universities and research facilities in the country at once signed a petition protesting the Animal Damage Control Bill, arguing among other things that wholesale attempts to eradicate coyotes would produce enormous collateral damage among innocent animals. Even the bureau’s now elderly founder, C. Hart Merriam, came out publicly against doubled-down poisoning. But extermination advocate Scott Leavitt of Montana agreed to serve as the chief sponsor of the bill in Congress, and Edward Taylor of Colorado—soon to become famous as the architect of the Taylor Grazing Act, which ended homesteading in the United States—was his wingman in the effort to “clean out this scourge.”
Despite a heroic battle waged by the mammalogists in testimony, newspapers, and magazines like Outdoor Life, Congress passed the bill, and President Herbert Hoover signed the Animal Damage Control Act into law on March 2, 1931. In its claimed goals of protecting livestock, saving valuable game animals, and suppressing diseases like rabies, the act specifically designated the “national forests and other areas of the public domain,” along with state lands and private holdings, as staging grounds for the eradication or “control” of predators. Notably, the bill did not mention the national parks. Indeed, Joseph Grinnell’s proposal that predators remain unmolested in the parks would become the single victory the scientists realized from taking on the bureau’s policy of extermination. And even that concession would wait until 1935.
As Major Goldman had promised the year before, this time the bureau pinned the species-cleansing bull’s-eye directly on America’s junior wolf. Gray wolves were gone; Mexican, red, and eastern wolves had dwindled to a few straggling, shadowy remnants. Now, with $1 million a year to spend on the prospect, the bureau deemed it señor coyote’s turn for shock and awe.
But it turned out that the bureau still faced hurdles. Goldman’s reference during the 1930 panel in New York to “additional studies” pointed directly at the work of two mammal ecologists who would become legendary figures in twentieth-century American conservation. At the time, however, they were, in effect, working for the man, with the stated goal of buttressing the case against the scientific critics who were fighting the bureau’s predator policies. The Minnesota brothers, Olaus and Adolph Murie, were born ten years apart in the late 1800s. Both had taken advanced degrees in the new field of wildlife management at the University of Michigan, and both began their careers as government biologists. The older brother, Olaus, in an odd quirk of fate, had gone to work for the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1920 and quickly impressed his superiors with a landmark study on elk in Jackson Hole, which he completed in 1927.
The Murie brothers would become famous for a shared conviction: that scientists must above all be ethical. When Olaus’s superior, E. A. Goldman, approached him with the proposal that he study Jackson Hole’s elk predators, coyotes, Goldman expected Murie’s research to show that coyotes were archpredators whose depredations on stock and game animals had grown so egregious that the species deserved a death sentence. Remarkably, younger brother, Adolph, working for the Wildlife Division of the National Park Service, was taking on a similar project in Yellowstone at almost the same time. Olaus Murie’s Food Habits of the Coyote in Jackson Hole, Wyoming appeared in print in 1935, followed five years later by Adolph’s Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone. The bureau would coldly ignore both volumes. Yet they turned out to be extremely important studies in the scientific firestorm that never stopped singeing people around the Animal Damage Control Act from the 1930s on.
The problem all along for both camps was that no one from either side had good, untainted evidence about coyote natural history or food habits. The bureau had accounts from ranchers and sheepmen about coyote predation on calves and sheep, and its hunters turned in reports on coyote stomach contents from animals they poisoned and trapped. But the former were hardly unbiased; they attributed kills to coyotes whenever they saw them on carcasses, even though the original cause of death was often unclear. As for the bureau’s field men, they were entirely untrained in scientific techniques of analysis. Yet, while Kaibab and Kern County seemed to support intuitions about the balance of nature, in truth the scientists had no good studies on the diets of coyotes either.
The two Murie brothers aimed to correct that. Olaus, for his part, conducted a classic “stomach contents/scat study” in a straightforward effort to determine what his coyote subjects in Jackson Hole ate. Younger brother Adolph, trained a decade later, was more up-to-date and more thorough. His Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone was an actual ecological study, analyzing both predator and its various prey animals, along with the influences of weather, disease, and even history. Not appearing in print until 1940, five years after the national parks were excluded from the bureau’s extermination campaign, Adolph’s study would even take on some of the bureau’s and its supporters’ most treasured (but untested) myths about coyotes.
Reading these two studies today, it is clear why Olaus’s Jackson Hole study infuriated his bureau superiors, who without any evidence whatsoever had succeeded in painting coyotes as a bane of nature and civilization. For four years, from 1931 until 1935, Olaus collected data, much of it from the Teton Game Reserve, with its large elk population. Yet by the end of his work, he had to conclude that mice, gophers, and hares were the chief prey of Jackson Hole’s coyotes. Rather than archpredators of game animals, coyotes turned out to be omnivorous generalists. Murie found that the 1,629 dietary items he analyzed represented twenty-eight different mammals, ten birds (including their eggs), and, in a sampling he admitted was probably weak, nine items that were either fish, insects, or plant matter. An archpredator in the vicinity of an elk preserve ought to have been meat-drunk with elk, and Murie did find elk in coyote scat and stomach contents. But he concluded from observation that virtually all of it was scavenged carrion. Ethically, he had to report that coyotes appeared to be “unimportant” in elk predation.
Nor could Murie tell his bureau superiors that coyotes were major predators of mule deer, mountain sheep, or antelope. From the coyote’s point of view, everything it ate was beneficial, of course. But Murie’s analysis indicated that, all things considered, 70.3 percent of a coyote’s food sources produced a net benefit for humans as well. Another 18 percent of the junior wolf’s wide-ranging diet had a neutral effect on human endeavors. So much for Goldman’s “arch-predator of our time.”
Adolph’s Yellowstone work was far more sophisticated, but it yielded similar conclusions unwelcome by government bureaus that had dedicated themselves to wiping out a coyote “scourge.” The two years of fieldwork that went into Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone took place in a distinctive context. Twenty years after Joseph Grinnell had proposed the idea in Science, predators now had refuges—even from PARC hunters—in America’s national parks. As the Journal of Mammalogy had announced, “Predatory animals are to be considered an integral part of the wild life protected within national parks, and no widespread campaigns of destruction are to be countenanced.” But many were the dire predictions of doom that produced. Retired Park Service director Horace Albright had done all he could to squash any sympathy for coyotes. In fact, sentiment in favor of restoring coyote control in the parks had gotten Murie’s work in Yellowstone approved in the first place. His superiors had thought his study would result in a return to poisoning and trapping.
Biologist Adolph Murie’s breakthrough study exonerating coyotes as stock-and-game predators appeared soon after Congress authorized a program to exterminate them.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
So Adolph Murie knew he had a keenly interested and suspicious audience no matter what he found. Like a twenty-first-century climate scientist, he knew he was conducting critical research in a highly politicized atmosphere. He responded in much the same way as today’s climatologists. He was exceedingly careful.
Murie began not in the field but in the Yellowstone archives, trying to develop an understanding of the history of coyotes on the Yellowstone Plateau. Aldo Leopold said in 1936 that he had found no coyotes in the mountains in Mexico, and there was a general sense all along the Rockies that coyotes had arrived recently in the high country. So, were coyotes in the mountains originally? The historical record seemed clear that coyotes had always been more numerous on the Great Plains, but Murie found ample indications of them high in the Yellowstone country too, at least as far back as the writings of trapper Osborne Russell in the 1830s. Indeed, contrary to Major Goldman’s insistence that the arrival of white Americans had destroyed the balance of nature, Murie concluded from his research that the coyote’s relationship “to the rest of the fauna is today similar to what it was formerly.”
Murie also discovered that as early as the 1890s, tourists in the park had become interested in and favorably disposed toward the coyotes they saw. But as he wrote in his foreword, park superintendents had always insisted that Yellowstone was supposed to showcase game animals and that controlling coyotes was essential to preserve deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep for those same tourists. That opinion had continued even after control efforts ended in 1935, accompanied by dire warnings that in the absence of human control, the coyote population would certainly skyrocket with disastrous results. Yet, Murie found that four years after the park had ended coyote control, the coyote population in Yellowstone remained at about the 1935 level. Contrary to predictions, there simply had been no explosion of coyotes.
Since the park’s resident coyotes had not swelled in numbers, it followed that they had also not spilled across park boundaries to wreak havoc outside the park, as so many had warned. In the adjacent Absaroka National Forest, rangers had estimated the coyote population in 1935 at nine hundred animals. After coyote control ended in Yellowstone, the national forest population actually fell, to 781 animals. So much for yet another hand-wringing prediction. Why, in any case, would an animal as smart as a coyote want to leave protection and plentiful food in a national park for the dangers of trappers and poison bait outside its boundaries? As Murie argued, the vast majority of coyotes born in Yellowstone would very likely die right there.
In the wake of the Animal Damage Control Act, Murie knew the crux of his investigation was to discover whether coyotes were truly archpredators of valuable game animals. Like his older brother, Olaus, he did this primarily by examining stomach contents and scat, in which his analysis ultimately identified nearly 9,000 food items. And like his brother, Adolph carefully enumerated the mammals, birds, invertebrates, and vegetables these represented. Some of the items that had passed through his coyote subjects definitely fell outside those categories. A piece of window curtain, a strip of rubber, a paint-covered rag, a gunny sack, a piece of towel, part of a shirt, and eight inches of rope made Mark Twain’s Roughing It description from seventy years before sound like a masterpiece prophecy of coyote natural history.
But—and this, after all, was the whole point of the study—did coyotes prey harmfully on prized game animals? In case after case, Murie had to conclude that the answer was no. Primarily coyotes ate mice and gophers (55 percent of their diet) and carrion from large mammals (in Yellowstone about 17 percent of their diet). Grasshoppers and crickets accounted for nearly 10 percent of what they ate. Otherwise their menu was a wild smorgasbord, including the odd length of rope. Did they prey on elk? No, not even—except in anomalous circumstances—on elk calves. “All available data indicate that the coyote is a minor factor in the status of elk.” What about mule deer, whose very survival, some had argued, depended on vigorous coyote control? In bad winters of crusted snow, coyotes sometimes took the weakest fawns, running them down slopes and catching them at the bottom. Otherwise, “there was no evidence that the coyotes molested any deer except fawns.” Antelope, those beautiful, striped survivors from ancient America? Coyotes had been thought a threat to their very existence by people who blamed every antelope death on coyotes. Murie found some fawn predation but not at any problematic level and concluded, “The coyote is not at the present time adversely affecting the antelope.” Bighorn sheep? “Coyote predation is at most an unimportant mortality factor.”
Adolph Murie no doubt went to press in 1940 with the kind of expectations that wary climate scientists anticipate in our own time. For nearly a decade a powerful government agency, seconded by the Park Service he worked for, had moved heaven and earth for the extinction of coyotes in part because they were supposedly “archpredators” of valuable game animals. Now, in the first comprehensive study of the matter, a government-employed scientist said flatly, without any equivocation, “The facts show that in the case of elk [coyote predation] is negligible, and that no appreciable inroads on the populations of deer, antelope, and bighorn are taking place.”
The Murie brothers did many other things across their illustrious careers, but neither ever lost a fascination with coyotes. Through the 1930s and 1940s Olaus continued to assemble data on coyote diets in places like Montana and British Columbia. He illustrated articles for J. Frank Dobie while Dobie was working on his folkloric book The Voice of the Coyote, and he collected newspaper articles on anticoyote sentiment among stockmen and hunters. He and brother Adolph even raised a female coyote pup as a pet.
While still working for the bureau, Olaus Murie went so far as to evaluate “the factions interested in [the] coyote question” for his superiors. He concluded that there was an emerging group he called the “Nature Lovers,” and to the evident disgust of his superiors he argued that this group might actually represent the future and a state of enlightenment with respect to predators. “I firmly believe that it is working against the best interests of humanity to . . . ridicule those who see beauty in a coyote’s howl.”
Eventually Murie came to think that he and other scientists of the period had misunderstood their own motivations during the 1930s. Before a public they knew the bureau had brainwashed into hating predators, the scientists had opposed poisoning because of collateral damage, because of all the innocent animals that ended up dying along with coyotes in the bureau’s war of extermination. But in a famous letter he would write in 1952, Murie asserted that, in truth, “concern for the coyote itself” had turned so many scientists against the bureau and its coyote policy.
Concern for the coyote itself. Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the bureau, without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.
The several score American mammalogists who were by now heavily invested in the coyote question felt vindicated by the fieldwork of the Murie brothers, but they knew that exonerating coyotes as major predators of game animals was only part of the task. With wolves all but gone in the Lower 48 and mountain lions rapidly dwindling, hunters would never have to be arm-wrestled into believing coyotes were rivals to filling their elk and deer tags. They would ignore the Murie brothers’ research. It was the livestock industry, especially sheepmen but even some cattlemen, that kept the pressure on Congress and the bureau’s PARC hunters to continue the coyote campaign. And as they had long done, stockmen’s associations and state legislatures contributed external money when New Deal contingencies left the bureau a little short of those promised million-dollar-a-year appropriations.
Some incredulous coyote from hundreds of years before had been the first of its kind to marvel at what a lob across the plate the domestic sheep was. By the 1930s generations of western coyotes had never gotten over marveling, so sheepmen, in particular, were shrill with some justification. The country’s coyote population was likely growing in the 1930s for two reasons: carpet-bombing lethal control, which kept coyotes constantly colonizing and rebuilding their populations, and what ecologists today call “mesopredator release,” which resulted when wolves faded away. The mouflon variety the sheep industry had imported to America descended from a wild sheep hunted in the Old World by the coyote’s distant cousin, the golden jackal. Rendered incapable of resisting shepherds—and therefore predators—through 8,000 years of domestication, sheep in that helpless condition had then been plopped into the heart of coyote habitat in the West. With millions of normal prey—rodents and prairie dogs—vanishing before the bureau’s poisoning onslaught, coyotes in sheep country did exactly what a coyote had evolved to do: they laid into such easy sitting ducks. And with the number of domestic sheep in the United States reaching 56 million during World War II, coyotes must have been drunk with their good fortune.
But the bureau’s all-out war against coyotes repeatedly disrupted their normal social behavior, and for sheepmen the results were not good. The poisoning of older alpha males and females, gassing and strangling of pups, and harassing and winnowing of coyote social groups resulted in inexperienced beta animals assuming alpha status and breeding. That had the potential to send coyote social life into a loop of fractured, abnormal behavior not unlike what history has recorded for the Indian populations of the Americas in the wake of contact with Europeans. Waves of virgin-soil epidemics caused by Old World pathogens killed millions, among them elders and priests responsible for conveying cultural lore to younger generations. Hardwon knowledge of how to exist in the world vanished overnight.
Something like that seems to have happened with some coyotes. Young coyotes were surviving without proper cultural training, and with the pressure of raising litters, they attacked livestock, especially marks as easy as sheep. Coyotes may not have been archpredators of the natural world, but domestic sheep were low-hanging fruit. Killing them required little training in the hunt.
Whether because they are retiring introverts or for some other reason, scientists have never been particularly good at public relations. Judging from the climate debate, they still aren’t. In the 1930s and 1940s, they were getting their hats handed to them by the bureau, which was clearly winning the war for the hearts and minds of the public. In the mid-1930s, newspapers around the country, among them even the Washington Post, ran an illustrated, canned bureau article that, in the age of John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, offered up coyotes and other predators as the “gangsters of the animal kingdom” and characterized bureau hunters as the heroic G-men who would protect society, “man and beast, against the animal underworld.” It was a clever set piece, and it worked. Despite the Murie brothers’ findings, in the public mind coyotes deserved the same fate as Bonnie and Clyde.
In 1935 Ira Gabrielson replaced Ding Darling as director of the bureau. Gabrielson (who conservationist Rosalie Edge said could make poisoning a coyote sound like a beautiful experience for poisoner and coyote alike) was still in charge in 1940 when the bureau, transferred from Agriculture to the Department of Interior, became the Fish and Wildlife Service, the name it still carries. PARC made the transition with its name unchanged. Gabrielson would hold his position for eleven years, during a time when rumors of war, then real war on a scale never before seen in human history, absorbed the country’s attention. All the same, the coyote war at home continued, and one of Gabrielson’s field men saw all of this as part of a whole: “I hope I have three celebrations coming—when we whip Hitler and Hirohito and when we kill that damn coyote.”
So throughout World War II, and partially in response to the huge shot in the arm the war effort gave to widespread technological innovation, the smaller, less heralded campaign against coyotes went on. And on and on. In 1946, the year Gabrielson retired, two events of significance in the effort to exterminate coyotes from North America occurred almost back-to-back. In September, E. A. Goldman, architect of the phrase “archpredator of our time,” passed away from a stroke, dying only a few months after retiring and while serving as president of the American Society of Mammalogists. Then, in a kind of tangible epitaph to Goldman, in December the Fish and Wildlife Service approved the use of sodium fluoroacetate and thallium sulfate against coyotes.
That final decade for wild coyotes in America, promised by the bureau back in 1931 if only Congress would pass the Animal Damage Control Act, had stretched to fifteen years. And coyotes were still on the scene. More than that, coyotes had reached the Yukon and Alaska and were showing up in one state after another in the Midwest, the South, and the East. Despite a focused and single-minded campaign against them unlike anything in American history, coyotes were still out there, now loping casually along boulevards, glancing back defiantly, for some inexplicable reason impossible to eradicate.
Hence the two new poisons. Strychnine had killed hundreds of thousands of coyotes in its century of use, but obviously it had fallen short of the task. Coyotes were especially bright and observant, and strychnine acted so quickly that other coyotes in the vicinity of a poisoning victim learned to be wary of the baits and their associated smell. Thallium sulfate had been around since the 1920s, mostly used against rats, but tests on coyotes at Denver’s Wildlife Research Laboratory—another new name for the old Eradication Methods Lab—showed it had real advantages. It not only was odorless but, happily enough, killed coyotes slowly. Rather than producing the thrashing, struck-by-lightning reaction caused by strychnine, the new poison took days to kill. Coyotes that fed on a carcass baited with thallium sulfate went blind. They lost the pads on their feet. Their pelage dropped off in tufts. Naked coyotes poisoned by thallium sulfate were sometimes found huddled together, freezing and blind but not yet dead. But with the relationship between cause and result obscured, coyotes did not become bait-shy.
The second poison was even more effective. Sodium fluoroacetate occurs naturally in the Australian “poison pea” plant family but was synthesized into a commercial poison during World War II. The poison acquired the name Compound 1080 because it took the Wildlife Research Lab that many tries to perfect it. It was cheap, easy to handle, and simple to use. Injected into a bait animal like horse—a lethal coyote dose was 1.6 grams per one hundred pounds of horse—it would poison every molecule of flesh. Coyotes feeding on such a bait animal showed no symptoms for up to an hour, again long enough to confuse other coyotes about the cause of death. But there was no surviving 1080. Within an hour or two, a poisoned coyote would be seized by grotesque convulsions. It would utter piteous howls and bizarre vocalizations. Then it would run uncontrollably until it dropped.
The World War II era had produced an explosion of knowledge about chemicals and poisons, and along with these two, the Denver lab promoted yet a third, administered by a device the Fish and Wildlife Service, to its eternal discredit, called the “humane coyote-getter.” Originally the device was a brass .38-caliber casing inserted into the earth and capped by the kind of scented cloths that Adolph Murie had found in the stomachs of coyotes in Yellowstone. If unable to resist these cloth offerings, which were suddenly springing up like mushrooms, the coyote ingested a tablet that exploded into a sodium cyanide mist in its mouth. What was “humane” about this? Cyanide didn’t cause blindness or hair or pad loss. It left pretty corpses.
Everyone, from PARC hunters to outside observers, believed the trio of new poisons would finally accomplish what the old bureau had promised back in 1931. World War II had killed millions. Now, at least, the offspring of the science it had engendered promised to erase coyotes from the continent of their origin. No American animal had ever been the target of this kind of viciousness. In 1952 Olaus Murie, writing a review of the old bureau stalwart Stanley Young’s The Clever Coyote for the Wilderness Society’s magazine, adopted the position that the bureau’s hatred had finally won, that species cleansing was already a fait accompli for the coyote. “Many who had formerly taken for granted the presence of Señor Coyote and his song, without much thought,” he wrote, “now miss him, now that he is gone.”
Despite the bureau’s obsessively tabulated official kill of 1,884,897 coyotes from 1915 to 1947, rumors of the coyote’s final song were exaggerated. But how and why? The poison trifecta of the postwar years does seem to have extirpated coyotes, at least locally, in many regions of the country beginning in the late 1940s. By 1957 PARC’s budget from Congress had almost doubled, to $1.76 million. Added revenue from states and livestock associations brought the figure up to an astonishing $4.5 million. From 1945 to 1971 the federal coyote killing program would collect the carcasses of a staggering 3.6 million dead coyotes, although because of the way the new poisons killed, many in PARC believed they destroyed another 3 million coyotes in those years that were never found. And still coyotes persisted, although backed by this kind of money, the new poisons roughhoused them.
One place that experienced a regional near-collapse of coyotes may provide us with an answer about what factors were critical in keeping coyotes from going under when faced with chemical warfare on this scale. The Texas Hill Country, low juniper-covered hills west of Austin and San Antonio devoted to sheep and goats since Spain owned the territory, experienced the most intensive poison and trapping carpet-bombing campaign against wolves and coyotes of any locale in America. One researcher called the relentless forty-year program there “a massive human effort using all the tools and techniques which could be brought to bear.” First wolves, then coyotes practically ceased to exist in the Hill Country. Why? The answer may lie in the land ownership history of Texas, which had entered the Union in the 1800s with so many debts that the government allowed the new state to retain title to its lands to pay them off. This it did by selling off its landscape wholesale. The result was a giant state with no public lands and only one national park (Big Bend), located hundreds of miles from the Hill Country, that could serve as a refuge. Yet the struggle for survival of Texas Hill Country’s wolves and coyotes would become one of the amazing wildlife stories of the 1960s.
So Joseph Grinnell and the scientists had managed a win that helped coyotes after all. That one concession, protection of predators inside the national parks, was certainly key in helping to save coyotes at mid-century. In Yellowstone, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Zion, Bryce, Canyonlands, and the Grand Canyon, coyotes survived unmolested.
But national parks and scientist saviors alone do not explain the coyote’s persistence. In the next two decades a pair of new studies would demonstrate a fuller truth: all along, coyotes had been saving themselves. Biologist Fred Knowlton would finally untangle the behavior of coyotes under assault, and a computer simulation by biologist Guy Connolly using Knowlton’s insights—Connolly titled the resulting article “The Effects of Control on Coyote Populations”—would produce an almost mind-bending revelation.
With the species under siege from efforts to wipe it out, Knowlton and Connolly had discovered, the coyote’s evolutionary colonizing mechanisms kicked in. With beta females breeding, fission-fusion in high gear, larger litters, and more surviving pups, even reducing the total population of coyotes in a given area by 70 percent—not just once but year after year after year—produced no appreciable effect on coyote population density! Even at a 75 percent annual reduction, it would take half a century to eliminate a population. And once killing stopped, within three to five years in-migration and coyote cues about carrying capacity would return population numbers to where they’d been when 75 percent control began!
Sisyphus kept pushing his rock up the hill, and Coyote kept rolling it right back down again. Short of carpeting the continent with our new nuclear weapons, nothing was going to get rid of coyotes. Were we really willing continue this level of cruelty in the face of unending failure?
As with coyotes, as with most mammals, as with us. Epigenetics determine who we are; that mysterious interplay between our hardwired genetic selves and the experiences we have, which turn off some genes and dial up the gain on others, shapes the beings we become. The age of ecology looming in front of us in the 1960s was one of those mass epigenetic experiences that would change America. Like so many millions of others, I became someone different then, transformed by my experiences, and I suppose open to transformation. And through what seemed yet another inexplicable turn in the coyote story, the period provided many of us with a new, very twentieth-century experience with the animal—that ambiguous yet endlessly intriguing canine—that stood as such an emblem of wild America.
Those ever-trotting, golden-eyed creatures of vertical red canyons and sere deserts were about to become far more visible in the culture and in our living rooms. I, for one, would be enthralled.