It is a brilliantly sunny June day in 2013 in Eldorado, New Mexico, a subdivision southeast of Santa Fe that has long been a second-home and retirement destination for East and West Coast academics and movers and shakers from around the United States. About forty-five well-heeled residents have shown up for a 10 a.m. presentation on urban coyotes by Project Coyote, Camilla Fox’s San Francisco–based organization, which has a local chapter in northern New Mexico. The centerpiece of the meeting is a documentary film, Still Wild at Heart, about how coyotes, after an absence of decades, in 2001 began to recolonize San Francisco. Urban coyote expert Stan Gehrt appears in the film to discuss how coyotes similarly moved into Chicago and tells the camera that he began his studies thinking there were maybe a few dozen coyotes in that city, only to conclude after a few years that the population was more than 2,000, with almost everyone in Chicago going to bed at night with a coyote no more than a mile away. (A year later, when I asked Stan about that figure, he equivocated on a precise number, but said, “It’s a lot more than that now. A lot more. Chicago has become a source population for the surrounding hinterland.”)
This is liberal northern New Mexico, so everyone, with the exception of Justin, the local boy who is the state coyote-mitigation officer, pronounces our canid’s common name ki-YOH-tee. The theme of the gathering is coexistence. For those encountering coyotes in the backyard or along the trails in the local park, that means following some simple rules, a message that has acquired some urgency as more cities find themselves dealing with coyotes and as town coyotes have steadily become more comfortable around us.
The prime directive is straightforward and delivered with an exclamation mark: For chrissake, do not feed coyotes and accustom them to associating food with humans! To avoid the most common human conflict with coyotes, don’t let your cats or small dogs outside at night. Don’t leave infants or small children unwatched outside. And “haze” urban coyotes, who after a few generations of city life lose whatever fear of us they ever had, which probably wasn’t much to start with. Whatever you do, don’t let a streetwise coyote bluff you. If your dog or your jogging or biking excites an unusual and bold reaction from a coyote, establish your dominance. If a coyote doesn’t retreat from you or acts in any way aggressive, stand tall, raise your hands over your head to underscore the fact that you’re a hell of a lot bigger than it is, and shout. If you’ve got a good arm, pick up a couple of rocks and prepare to deliver a Nolan Ryan dust-off fastball. Give the coyote every indication that you’re fully prepared to kick its little ass halfway to Sunday. In other words, keep town-wise coyotes thinking that people can still be dangerous. Or at least that we’re way too weird to trust.
Those enlightened sentiments in 2013 were not necessarily where we started out when coyotes first came to town. Not by a long shot.
For a good reason, US towns and cities were hard for coyotes to enter until fairly recently. But their instincts about associating with humans were visible in other contexts. Nineteenth-century traveler accounts brim with references to coyotes as a constant presence around the camps of emigrants, trappers, traders, and explorers, where “prairie wolves” often dashed through camp to snatch something and run with it. The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are full of accounts of both coyotes and wolves almost underfoot. Clark once bayoneted a wolf strolling past him, not because it presented a danger but apparently just because he could. A writer for Salt Lake City’s Weekly Tribune in 1887 felt the need to warn his readers about the coziness of coyotes on the trail: “Have you ever seen a coyote? He is the most impudent animal that exists. . . . [A]s a kleptomaniac he is an expert, for he can steal the boots from under a camper’s head and the meat out of his camp kettle.”
Simple canine competition alone kept coyotes from establishing territories and scavenging and hunting among us in places like Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Denver, and Calgary a century ago. Except in cities, dogs, not wolves, were the obstacle. The past can be a foreign country, and this may be one of those times, for few modern city dwellers can conjure in their minds an image of cities overrun with loose and feral dogs. But that was the case for most American cities and towns into the beginning of the twentieth century.
If we still lived in the loosely regulated cities that characterized American urban life 125 years ago, urban coyotes might be a rare phenomenon. Dogs and packs of dogs, a high percentage of them unowned or only casually linked to owners, once roamed at will through the streets of cities and towns, and as canine competitors of similar size, they kept coyotes at bay. According to historian Jon Hall, when word began to spread that ten Americans in the first few months of 1848 had died horribly from rabies contracted through dog bites, the so-called Great Dog War marked the beginning of the end for that older urban world. Led by New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, cities across the country proceeded to launch a violent, clumsy offensive against stray and feral dogs. Bounties, urban sharpshooters, dog clubbers, and even lidded cisterns designed to drown hundreds of captured dogs at a time became the order of the day, always to a certain middle-class distaste leavened by resignation at the inevitable. Eventually dogcatchers and pounds became the ultimate answers to the Great Dog War. The urban middle class may have ended up feeling safer, but the excesses of the cure were sufficiently egregious to help produce the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In the end, the Great Dog War didn’t just turn the remaining dogs into pampered, yard- and house-kept animal companions, ushering in a new and modern relationship between owners and their dogs. In one of those entirely unexpected ecological consequences, a dog regulation in the urban landscape opened up American cities to a new town canine of a far wilder and more exciting sort. America’s junior wolf was about to become a denizen of big cities.
New York City may represent the newest frontier of Coyote America, but coyotes probably first became city slickers 3,000 miles in a desert direction, in the Los Angeles of the immediate post–World War II era. The City of Angels had, after all, been wrested from wild coyotes and their fellow travelers back when the Spanish padres had founded it in the late eighteenth century. There is some evidence that town building along the Los Angeles River never did entirely exclude wild coyotes from the city.
In the heart of southwestern coyote country, the same was probably true of San Diego, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas. The progression was likely similar in all of them, beginning with the founding of a city in prime coyote habitat, which likely drove the wild canids to the margins of town. Several decades or a century of few or no dog regulations would have prevented coyotes from fully colonizing these cities, but then passage of laws against free-roaming dogs and the advent of dog pounds and dogcatchers unintentionally allowed coyotes to establish territories inside the city limits. Train rights-of-way that preserved corridors of habitat augmented colonization, allowing coyotes access to inner cores. The city parks movement preserved a few natural areas where coyotes could escape the human din of urban life, find prey, and raise litters. From the perspective of modern city dwellers, seeing small wolves trotting around town was at first lights-out shocking. From the point of view of the coyotes, adapted to the presence of human encampments for 15,000 years and human cities for 1,000 years or more, it must have all seemed entirely normal, effortless, and natural.
For contemporary biologists studying the urban coyote phenomenon, like Stan Gehrt, Seth Riley, and Stewart Breck, what began as far back as a century ago in the cities of the desert Southwest has now assumed a shape and direction, and the patterns are repeating in Seattle, Denver, Chicago, and now New York. Los Angeles—where a population of some five hundred town coyotes had become famous enough that as early as 1965 Walt Disney would make A Country Coyote Goes Hollywood about them—saw modern Coyote America first. But with only a few variations, coyotes and the human city dwellers among whom they now live are replicating those patterns from coast to coast.
One of the most common twentieth-century conceits in the Western world was that we humans, more urban by the decade and as a consequence seemingly divorced from the wild, were somehow “outside nature,” separate, by virtue of our specialness, from the natural world. Put aside the folly of such an idea for a species arising out of Earth’s evolutionary stream—whose very bodies are microbiomes of thousands of other species and who will never be separate from nature unless they figure out how not to die—and focus on the urban component of that idea. No human settings have struck us as more polar opposite to nature than cities. Cities were human conceived, we said, human designed and built. If modern city dwellers take anything for granted, it’s that cities are surely the one place they don’t have to engage with wild predators. Yet cities are ecosystems. They sustain what biologists call synanthropic species, or creatures that thrive in the ecosystems created by urban development. We are one of those obviously. Rodents are another. And so are coyotes.
To a coyote slipping along a rail line to enter a city for the first time, urban ecosystems probably only exaggerate the experience of living with humans in the rural countryside. Places useful to a coyote would be more scattered and broken up because of the prevalence of asphalt, concrete, and structures. As a coyote moved from suburbs to edge cities to inner cores, the din of noise we humans make would gradually crescendo. The world would become more lit, and the effect of lighting would extend through the nighttime. A coyote confronting big-city life would find a massive increase in the number of roads it had to deal with, and the number of cars on those roads would go up by several orders of magnitude. This would be especially true during the daytime, since as a species we are most active then.
A newly urban coyote would find mice of various varieties, a coyote’s most dependable prey, to be extremely numerous, but there would be strange new prey, too, like Norway rats, urban-adapted flocks of geese and ducks, and exotic plants and fruits of wide diversity. While dogs would mostly be contained in modern cities, the occasional small dog let out on its own might arouse a coyote’s ire as a potential predatory competitor, or a coyote with pups to feed might find it tempting. Cats don’t suffer the restrictions that dogs do in most cities, and they would be numerous and sometimes look like prey to a coyote. They would also evidently strike an urban coyote as what biologists refer to as a guild competitor that it should eliminate from its territory.
Modern city coyotes must have first figured out how to insinuate themselves into this much human density in Los Angeles, but the strategies for accomplishing it and the trajectory of how coyotes are adapting to life even in developed downtowns are now unreeling in towns and cities all over North America. New York City is just the most recent.
Stan Gehrt, America’s go-to biologist for urban coyotes, who has been studying them in Chicago for fifteen years, characterized the urban coyote story to me this way: “It’s an ongoing, unplanned experiment.” As of 2015, understanding coyote individuality is a key part of his work on urban coyotes: “Right now we are really interested in coyote personalities more than we’ve ever been,” he told me. Like people, some coyotes can take a lot more humanity and novelty than others. Coyotes calm enough to tolerate noise, traffic, lights, the Amazon-like torrent of human scents, and the frequent sight of humans are the most successful in cities, although they can develop that behavior through “habituation.” With only a couple centuries of evolutionary pressure in their past pushing them to avoid humans, urban coyotes living in the present don’t find it so tough to lose their fear of us, it turns out. We think it normal for animals to flee from us in a wild panic, so the “habituated” coyote also gets into trouble in town. At least that’s the case now. The goal, though, is for coyotes and modern city dwellers to learn how to “cohabitate”—in effect to create the sort of relationship that prevailed among coyotes and people, among coyotes and urban Aztecs—across North American history.
Coyotes with a tolerance for being around us are finding new riddles to solve in urban life, and coyote intelligence seems fully up to the challenge. Indeed, city life may well be selecting for novelty-seeking, “supergenius” coyotes. Among the most dangerous aspects of urban life for canid predators are the teeming highways they must learn to navigate. Coyotes can do this by moving mostly at night, when people are less evident and traffic ebbs; a nighttime routine has become one of their adaptations to city life. But Ohio State’s Gehrt has seen them out in Chicago during rush hour, crossing half a multilane interstate highway brimming with traffic, then sitting in the median until it thins enough to cross the other half.
Coyotes are still getting hit by cars, but in another few generations we may discover that city life has fashioned urban coyotes and an urban coyote culture that deals with highway traffic with the skill of pedestrians in modern Rome. Los Angeles coyotes already seem to demonstrate this trend. In Chicago more than 60 percent of coyotes die under the wheels of cars. But with several more generations of city experience in carmageddon California, LA coyotes have gotten that figure down to about 40 percent. Angeleno coyote culture apparently has even recognized one highway as a barrier to travel: only the most intrepid California coyotes ever attempt to cross US Highway 101, which runs north-south through the state.
Tasked with establishing territories in the fragmented patchwork of parks, green spaces, campuses, golf courses, rail lines, and deserted lots that make up citified natural habitats, urban coyote packs generally create smaller home ranges than they would in rural areas. In Los Angeles, fifty-three radio-collared resident coyotes had an average home territory of about five square kilometers. The figure for 118 resident coyotes in Chicago was the same: five kilometers, or about three square miles. Coyotes in rural areas require larger territories, averaging about seventeen kilometers. (Solitary, transient coyotes in both urban and rural locales use far larger ranges of twenty-five to fifty kilometers for city coyotes and up to one hundred kilometers—sixty miles!—for rural nomads.) Biologists have concluded from this that urban coyote territories are far more resource-rich compared to those in the rural countryside. And smaller home ranges indicate a denser coyote population, meaning many more coyotes can live in a city of a given footprint than would be the case for a similar-sized territory in the country.
Coyote that survived high-speed car hit, then hitchhiked to California in the grill in 2012.
Courtesy David Lovere/Rex Shutterstock.
If it seems counterintuitive that a predator like a coyote would find life in town to be fat-city, consider this additional evidence: in rural Illinois, where residents shoot, trap, and harass coyotes, only 13 percent of coyote pups survive to maturity. In the Chicago metropolitan area, a whopping 61 percent of coyote pups survive to adulthood. Like human adolescents, male coyote pups are always the most at-risk pack members, the easiest to trap or poison or shoot. But in town young male coyotes tend to survive at the same rate as females. In fact, only in preserved wildlands like national parks does coyote survivability compare to what coyotes experience in cities. For a twenty-first-century coyote, town life is pretty obviously the good life, especially compared to the dangers of rural America. We’re going to have to start imagining cities as twenty-first-century coyote preserves in much the way national parks were in the twentieth century.
Any version of a good life means eating well, one reason for being in a city in the first place. The emerging urban legend, propagated by a media clearly out of its depth when it comes to city predators, is that town coyotes eat very well indeed because they’re dining regularly on small pets, pet food, and trash. That pearl of wisdom may be an urban memory preserved from the Great Dog War of the nineteenth century, when loose and feral city dogs survived by doing pretty much just that. The biologists have shown repeatedly that this is not how town coyotes survive. Individual coyotes or specific packs may develop a taste for human foods or pets, as has happened a few times when coyotes in Tucson, San Diego, and on the outskirts of Seattle developed a yen for cats (which in Seattle actually made up 13 percent of a particular pack’s diet). The coyote-cat story, though, is much more nuanced than the proliferation of cat-attack accounts suggests.
Despite the cat-killer urban legend, in city after city the science indicates that pets provide only about 1 to 2 percent of the average coyote’s diet. Stan Gehrt grew up as a rural Kansan who’d never seen a city the likes of Chicago in his life, but coyotes had attracted so much notice there by the late 1990s that he finally got funding to study them. Unless new isotope analysis of coyote diets shows something his original scat studies didn’t, he told me, then “despite the stories, I can say flat out that urban coyotes don’t depend on pets for food. If coyotes were relying on pets as a source of food, we quickly wouldn’t have any pets left.”
That may not translate, as Gehrt was quick to add, to a peaceable kingdom between urban coyotes and domestic cats and dogs. Coyotes may kill more cats than they ever eat. That may have to do with an ancient animosity; recall that naturalist Thomas Say finally collected the type specimen of the American coyote by baiting his traps with a bobcat. Coyotes may also attack cats for the same reason they attack small dogs: they perceive domestic cats and dogs as “intraguild” predators operating in their territories. When coyotes attack dogs or cats, they most often don’t intend to eat them; they’re simply ridding their territories of roaming predators. The vast majority of coyote encounters that unnerve urbanites almost always feature a dog. It’s not true in every case, but in a large majority of instances of coyotes biting people, the bite happens while a dog owner is attempting to protect a pet.
What urban coyotes eat depends a good deal on the city where they live. In Chicago, the large lakeshore population of Canadian geese has become a major food source for Cook County coyotes, not so much the adult geese themselves as the contents of their nests, nearly half of which get raided in most years. Where there are populations of deer in American cities, coyotes can quickly become major predators of fawns. Coyotes acting as a control for urban populations of deer and geese, it turns out, is one of those “beneficial” outcomes Olaus Murie wrote about in the 1930s. Although not many cat owners will want to hear it, increasing numbers of studies indicate that when coyotes come to town and pilfer the odd cat, the survivability of local songbirds goes up markedly.
Compliments of the Los Angeles of thirty years ago, coyote dumpster diving is an urban legend with legs. Some biologists believe that as much as 25 percent of the diet of some coyote packs in LA in the naive 1980s was human food. More recent studies of urban coyote scat indicate that in most cities the percentage of trash, pet food, and other human food actually comes in at only about 2 percent. A recent study in modern Denver pegged that figure at less than one-half of 1 percent, and today it has dropped to 6 percent even in LA. Despite all the anecdotes from the 1980s, except in rare cases of localized coyote culture, the vast majority of town coyotes are not scavenging behind Sonic and Burger King. They’re not really much of a threat to the six-pack of tallboys you left on the porch.
Sometimes, especially in summers when a coyote pair is stressed trying to raise pups, the parents might become serial killers of cats (one British Columbia coyote den yielded fifty-five cat collars). If you are halfway intelligent with your animals, though, coyotes are not remotely as great a threat to your cat or dog as traffic is. Coexisting with coyotes just requires paying attention, the way we’ve done around predators for a couple hundred thousand years, after all.
Still, coyotes are a kind of wolf. Living in our midst, are they a danger to us?
Los Angeles is famous among ecologists for having the most extensive wildlands-urban interface of any city in America, a zone at least seven hundred miles long where subdivisions abut chaparral and sharply incised canyons cut deeply back into mountain ranges like the San Gabriels, the San Bernardinos, and the Santa Monicas. Those canyons provide thousands of patches of natural habitat that interpenetrate the edges of greater Los Angeles. From the Coyote Hills to the Hollywood Bowl, from urban parks to university campuses, coyotes are everywhere in the six counties of greater LA. They probably always have been, but in the 1980s they began to attract attention for some of the same reasons Central Park’s “Otis” would freak out New Yorkers in 1999.
As Mike Davis wrote in The Ecology of Fear, published a year before Otis showed up in Manhattan, in 1980s LA coyotes became “symbols of urban disorder,” of a breakdown in our own conceits about what city life meant. We’ve thought of cities for 5,500 years of recorded history as the one spot where, at long last, humans could escape predators. But in modern America, it turned out, not so fast.
The Los Angeles of the 1980s became the place that wildlife managers in Denver, Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and New York are today doing their best not to emulate. Coyotes had been in LA for decades, only attracting passing notice; as far back as 1938 the city government paid bounties on 650 coyotes the first year bounties were offered. A population of at least five hundred coyotes was residing in LA by the 1960s. But the lure of the Southern Californian good life and the success of the sprawling late-twentieth-century city gave LA a population of people from across America and the globe, many of them recent arrivals who knew little or nothing about coyotes other than that one endlessly fell off cliffs in Saturday morning cartoons. In the 1980s, scientific studies of urban coyotes were still in the future. The majority of the LA population did know one thing about coyotes though: As wild predators they sure as hell weren’t supposed to be inside the city limits of a giant metropolis. Yet there they were, trotting through the tombstones of local cemeteries, loping across the runways of Los Angeles International Airport, and, most disconcertingly, hunting along suburban streets where people lived.
The unease about coyotes in LA spilled over into panic on August 26, 1981. That morning, in a new suburb of Glendale, three-year-old Kelly Keen wandered, unattended, out of her house and into the driveway. A single coyote attacked, killing her. It was the first human death attributed to a coyote in recorded American history. Glendale officials responded by killing every coyote they could find and astonished Los Angeles when their efforts produced fifty-three dead coyotes in the square mile around the Keen home.
Los Angelenos’ immediate, emotional response was to describe areas like Glendale as “teeming coyote ghettos” and to compare coyote packs to “gang bangers.” Any coyote spotted in the daytime became a “brazen criminal,” bold enough to show itself “in broad daylight.” To writer Mike Davis, assessing LA’s reaction fifteen years later, coyotes were “the textbook example of a protean, ‘unfinished’ species” that engaged in “continuous behavioral improvisation.” Coyotes survived city life, he wrote, by eating garbage, pets, even zoo animals. The title of his chapter on the story of coyotes and cougars in LA: “Maneaters of the Sierra Madre.”
Today biologists believe that more than 5,000 coyotes inhabit greater Los Angeles. Their territories so blanket the city, and they do so well there—living significantly longer on average than rural coyotes—that biologists suspect LA, like Chicago, has most likely reached its carrying capacity for coyotes and is actually producing a surplus number of animals that leave the city to find territories outside it. Plenty of LA residents still hate them, but in a pattern that urban coyote researchers are finding increasingly common, residents have slowly recovered from the initial shock of realizing they share their city with a small, wolflike predator. Over time, urban people get used to coyotes. They go Aztec and learn how to live with them, which essentially entails keeping coyotes wild and a little nervous even in the city. By now plenty of people with urban coyote experiences under their belt have come to relish the presence of coyotes in the city for ecological reasons or just because they’re so beautiful and it’s such a cool thing to get to see a small wolf among us as we go about our daily routines.
Wildlife managers respond to the winds of politics, and one bit of evidence that attitudes toward coyotes are beginning to evolve is that in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver, officials charged with managing the relationship between urban coyotes and city residents have developed progressive plans of coexistence to replace the early kneejerk attempts to eradicate every coyote anyone sighted. Managers certainly still take out problem coyotes, the ones that are aggressive toward people or become dependent on pets as a food source, but in most cities these are still a tiny percentage of the total coyote population. No city wants to replicate the Los Angeles experience, where between 1960 and 2006 nearly seventy people were bitten by coyotes, accounting for fully half of all the coyote-bite incidents in North America. Too many Angelenos, often unintentionally or due to ignorance, had fed coyotes. Smart as ever, the animals came to suburban yards for food, with disastrous consequences.
With LA’s history in mind and a rapidly growing coyote population approaching 2,000, Chicago by 1999 was witnessing annual removal of three to four hundred “nuisance” coyotes, which seems like a lot until you realize that in the first decade of coyote presence in any city, simply being seen and recognized made a coyote a “nuisance.” By 2001 coyotes were so much in the news in the Windy City that in that year Chicago homeowners listed them—not street gangs, not burglars, but coyotes—as the single greatest threat to their safety. At the time there had not been a single aggressive coyote incident in Chicago. With an even larger coyote population now, the figures for nuisance animals have dropped as residents have become more familiar with Chicago as a coyote town.
And the vast majority of the Chicago coyote population consists of upstanding citizen animals. In a recent study there, only 5 coyotes out of 175 tracked became actual nuisance animals, stalking pets or refusing to back away from people. In fact, of 260 animals radio-tracked in Chicago and Los Angeles two decades after the biteathon of the 1980s, not one showed any aggression toward people. In the same years, between 2,000 and 3,000 people were bitten by dogs in Chicago alone.
“If anything,” Stan Gehrt told me, “some people and some communities in greater Chicago have by now become too accepting of coyotes, tolerating behavior I wish they wouldn’t.” Biologists like Stan and Denver’s Stewart Breck want to make sure coyotes in town are like coyotes in Yellowstone, still wild, still a little nervous about us.
Stewart Breck, a dark-haired, bespectacled, genial PhD who works for the National Wildlife Research Center (a research arm of Wildlife Services), and I talked right after he and colleagues had put on a
Denver urban coyote symposium in December 2014. Breck gave me the impression that Denver’s story is somewhat distinct from that of either Los Angeles or Chicago. “Coyotes weren’t really a presence in Denver until the 1980s,” he told me, but at present the estimate (“conservative by maybe 20 percent”) puts 112 coyote packs in the Denver Metro Area, with a summer population of 1,004 animals. A remarkable 90 percent of Denver residents in one recent survey indicated having seen a coyote near their home. That, together with the media stories, makes the Denver public “highly attentive” to coyotes.
Human encounters with coyotes, says Breck, ultimately are both “emotional and political.” The broad, lethal removal approach that characterized LA in the 1980s is today favored only by about 12 percent of Denver residents. That same recent survey found that fully 45 percent of Denverites—most of them in liberal, well-to-do suburbs—are actually coyote advocates who want them left unmolested in the city. Even attempts to get Coloradans to haze urban coyotes to keep them uneasy around humans have met with resistance in these suburbs and in places like the university town of Boulder. In liberal twenty-first-century America, identification with predators, with reintroduced wolves in the rural West, and now with coyotes in town is a potent political force in a way never seen before in American history.
Coyote on Portland MAX light-rail train.
Courtesy Google Images.
But Breck hypothesizes that an urban coyote culture is developing in Denver, one reflective of the brashness and boldness of urban human culture, and that such an urban canine culture is likely to emerge over time in other cities as well. The inevitable outcome at this moment, he believes, is more human-coyote conflicts. While the shyer individual coyotes may survive the gauntlet of rural life or be able to coexist with gray wolves in a park like Yellowstone, Breck argues that in urban settings, avoiding humans or gray wolves has become a nonissue for coyotes. In another mirror (or maybe it’s a stereotype) of human urban life, bolder, more novelty-seeking individuals among wild coyotes may be most attracted to cities in the first place. They’re the first to become accustomed to thronging humans and sensory overload, the first to take risks and try new things, and, Breck reasons, they’re transferring both their genes and urban cultural norms to their offspring.
This urban coyote culture, Breck believes, explains a sharp uptick between 2005 and 2010 of “a lot more aggression toward pets and people” in Denver. Now that the Mile-High City is a coyote town, its human residents may need to be a little less tolerant and laid-back about their junior wolves. Or so Stewart Breck and his associates argue.
Maybe tolerance in the form of an appreciative attitude toward urban coyotes actually means accepting, most of all, a new and different definition of what city life is supposed to be. The notion of cities as outside nature is an old fantasy of ours, but in North America coyotes have entirely undermined it, a fact modern journalists and bloggers in particular need to get real about. In 2011 two Canadian researchers, analyzing 453 articles portraying interactions between people and urban coyotes in Canada between 1998 and 2010, found a stunningly uninformed media coloring what the public thought about those interactions. The stories consistently portrayed coyotes as invaders, a plague, an infestation, as unnatural in cities. Most recently the descriptions have tended toward language depicting criminal behavior, describing coyotes as assailants, brazen bandits, suspects, fugitives, kidnappers, robbers, and lurkers, as depraved and (my favorite) “without souls.” Almost half the articles discussed “attacks” on people, even though only three people a year were bitten by coyotes in Canada between 1995 and 2010, during which time that country averaged 300,000 dog bites annually.
The arrival of coyotes in a metropolis initially frightens residents. People tend to react to wild coyotes among them as if they are encountering escaped exotic animals from local zoos, often the only explanation that comes to mind. Once they discover that coyotes are not escapees but an urban-adapted population of wild predators, initial fear translates into specific concerns, disease often central among them. To be sure, coyotes historically have suffered from a variety of ordinary canid pathogens, including canine parvovirus, heartworms, distemper (a viral relative of measles in humans), herpesvirus (again, similar to the primate version), and adenovirus. Sarcoptic mange is another affliction among them, although coyotes suffer from a version of the malady introduced among them by veterinarians in the early twentieth century. The disease that city dwellers new to coyotes most commonly fear is rabies. But unlike foxes, coyotes, except for a small population in South Texas, are not carriers of rabies, although (like us) an individual coyote can be infected if bitten by a rabid skunk, fox, or raccoon.
If coyote colonization in other American cities can teach Boston or New York or Washington, DC, anything, it’s to learn everything possible about living with the animals, then kick back, be cool, and enjoy them. Their arrival among us is not momentary. Coyotes were here long before we were, and they’re not going away.
After two hundred miles and two weeks by rubber raft through the Grand Canyon, in the fall of 2014 my friend Marcus Buck, a Navajo boatman from the town of Bluff, in southeastern Utah, told me this coyote story.
Among the Indian and white homes in and around Bluff, a particular coyote had been causing trouble, killing sheep, chasing pets, and attracting attention to itself. Bluff is no Chicago, with a population of about 350 people rather than 9 million, but like so many big cities across America nowadays, small towns—like the one where my parents lived in Louisiana—have also acquired resident coyotes. An occasional one becomes a problem. So the Navajo chapter leadership asked Marcus if he couldn’t hunt down this coyote and take it out.
A few mornings later Marcus was in his truck on the edge of town, bouncing slowly along a dirt road, his rifle in the gun rack behind his head, when out of the waist-high sagebrush a coyote stepped into the road no more than twenty-five feet away. Marcus braked to a stop. The dust from the truck tires rose into the air, briefly obscured the coyote, then settled. The coyote was still there, standing broadside to the truck. Marcus reached behind him and grasped his rifle.
As Marcus told me this story, we were floating through a calm but gorgeous stretch of the Colorado River below Lava Falls Rapid. Crenulated black lava flows and irregular dikes and blobs of lava decorated both banks of the river. Marcus and I were alone on his raft, the rest of our group bobbing along in five more yellow craft some distance downstream. I was sitting behind him and couldn’t see his face as he told me what happened then.
“This coyote walks nonchalantly right in front of me in the road. Looks at me. Sees the rifle. Then you know what he does? He yawns, right in my face! Kind of stretches! Then he turns to look back where he’d come from, and I hear coyotes howl a ways back. So he raises his nose, throws back his head, and howls back at them. I’ve got my hand on the stock of the rifle, but I still haven’t pulled it down. Now he stops howling, turns back to me, looks straight as can be right at me for probably half a minute. Then he strolls casually across the road, in no hurry at all, as if he knew something about me.”
“So you never shot.” I’d known how this was going to go.
“No, I never even got the gun down. He was just too damned nonchalant, too confident. Something. And I didn’t know for sure if it was the coyote everybody was looking for. But you know something? Even if it was, I wouldn’t have shot. That coyote was so . . . cool looking. So perfect. He was way too pretty to shoot.”
I nodded. Marcus had experienced one of those moments of sympathy with the world, much the way Adolphe Murie had in Yellowstone so many decades before when he’d watched a coyote trotting along a trail, tossing a sprig of sagebrush into the air and catching it in its mouth again and again. These are moments of identification, animal to animal. They are rare. Sometimes a moment like that becomes unforgettable, because the dialogue of body language isn’t getting filtered by the cultural thoughts in our heads, by loaded language like “depraved” or “gang banger” or “archpredator of our time.” Each sees the other for who he is.
Although rare, these are the kinds of moments millions of us need to have so we can coexist with coyotes, urban and otherwise.