In the contemporary Western world, you do not grow up imagining death by predation. A dark-haired, soulful girl from Toronto would have outgrown fears like that by the time she was five. Just turned nineteen, Taylor Mitchell had entirely different things on her mind in late October 2009. A songwriter and performer since age sixteen, she had just released her debut album, For Your Consideration, which had landed her a gig at the Winnipeg Folk Festival that summer. On a promotional tour that fall, she decided to take a break with a quick hike in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia. It was the unluckiest decision of her life, the unluckiest decision anyone anywhere in North America made on October 28, 2009. The next morning she lay dead in the Halifax Hospital from massive blood loss as a result of an attack by two coyotes. Rescuers had found the forty-two-pound male standing over her prostrate form, growling, unwilling to leave the scene. She had been bitten all over her body.
Half a decade later we are still trying to figure out exactly how an alluring young woman with a promising career became the first adult in recorded North American history to die from a coyote attack. Coyotes are fully capable of bringing down animals of one hundred pounds or more, certainly deer, and rarely even larger ungulates. But a human being? As with wolves, coyote cultural training does not include humans as part of the species’ prey template. Predator biologists have puzzled ever since over what might have gone wrong that October morning along the Atlantic shore. Did the coyotes confuse a young woman for a deer? Did she yield ground or attempt to run, exciting their pursuit instincts? With so many people in North America and so many coyotes—more of both now than at any previous time in history—did the extremely remote mathematical possibilities of a predatory attack by coyotes on an adult human finally produce that one-in-a-million outcome?
Or was something else going on? In November 2014, in an incident actually several orders of magnitude more common than a wolf or coyote attacking a human, a pack of dogs attacked and killed a forty-year-old woman on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. That might seem of only glancing relevance to the Nova Scotia attack, except that some biologists have wondered if Taylor Mitchell’s fate in some way was tied to a phenomenon researchers had been aware of for at least two decades, as coyotes appeared in state after state in the East and South. Was hybridization between coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs, in other words, producing a new canid east of the Mississippi, an animal larger than a western coyote, smarter and more clever than a wolf, with a feral dog’s aggressive potential?
That’s how the larger story is playing out in popular culture. Two years after Taylor Mitchell died, in 2011, a National Geographic Wild television documentary, Killed by Coyotes, told her story on national TV. This was followed in 2014 by “Meet the Coywolf,” a PBS Nature episode that left its international audience with the impression that the bulk of the eastern coyote population consists of “coywolves,” a hybrid wolf-coyote created by human actions. Cape Breton Park in Nova Scotia and Taylor Mitchell’s death served as the lead to this show. Even reality TV is weighing in on the larger point. Late in 2014 the Discovery Channel aired a program titled Beasts of the Bayou wherein its Venice, Louisiana, protagonists searched for what they referred to as a rougarou, a “mutant canine,” which the show’s narration repeatedly called “an aggressive hybrid mutant wolf” that was “more wild and more aggressive than anything seen before.” It took a few minutes before my Louisiana upbringing finally untangled rougarou as a garbled loup-garou, French for “werewolf.” The animals this breathless tabloid TV show found in the swamps? A pack of coyotes that may have included a wolf-coyote hybrid.
This “new” hybridization story is older than we think. Its origins, and causes, very likely go back hundreds and probably hundreds of thousands of years. The remote tangle of canid evolution is the most likely sourcebook for our answers, but the popular media are also right: the history of the human-canid relationship is also a driver of the hybrid phenomenon, just as it drives our continuing warfare against coyotes today. And yet—this is the part I like best—the fact that we too are hybrids, that once again the coyote story is echoing the evolutionary trajectory that made us such a wildly successful species ourselves, is the most delicious irony of all.
Another memory, vivid like I’m looking back into time through polished glass, this one destined to color me for life.
I am fourteen, just a couple of years along from having watched that first Walt Disney Presents episode on western coyotes, which aired in 1961. In the woods and among the bayous of Louisiana, the West and coyotes seem very far away, or at least they do when I leave home on this summer morning of 1963 and ride my bicycle a couple of miles down a dirt road to a clearing in the woods I know about. This open glade in the grown-up Louisiana forest is my destination because here I can climb a tree and see fifty or seventy-five yards through the trees and prepare to try out an item I’d found in a hardware store a couple of days earlier.
“It’s a predator call,” the clerk had told me. “We just got them in. Blow on it, and it sounds like a rabbit in distress. You could call up a gray fox with it!” A gray fox? I’d seen one hit by a car along Louisiana Highway 1, a beautiful little animal. Not a coyote, but as close as 1960s Louisiana was going to get to a wild predator, I’d figured. So, at mid-morning on this sweltering southern summer day, I crawl into somebody’s half-collapsed deer stand on the edge of my clearing, wait for silence to envelop the surrounding woodlands, then try an experimental bleat on a wooden call that had cost three bucks.
The interval between the dying out of the rabbit wail and the appearance of an animal on the edge of the clearing opposite me could not have been more than ten seconds. Later, feverishly replaying every detail in my head, I would realize that I had somehow managed to climb a tree with a rabbit call while a very large wild predator was either hunting or reclining for the day only seventy-five yards away. It was a stunning stroke of luck. But in the moment, with this unexpectedly large creature emerging from the woods at a very interested and purposeful trot, heading directly for me, my head was entirely empty of thought. I was a vessel shot from head to toe with adrenalin.
Pointed ears up, gaze fixed, the animal was coming straight as an arrow’s flight for the base of the tree I was in. About thirty yards away, where mid-morning sunlight dappled the clearing in light and shadow, it stopped, peered intently in my direction for a few seconds, then resumed its approach, now in a slow, more cautious walk. I had gotten out of the car and examined that highway-kill gray fox; this was no gray fox. Even through the veil of excitement, I registered clear visual impressions. Sharply pointed ears. A long snout. Yellowish and reddish fur that rippled in the sunlight as it approached. Eyes that appeared almost orange. Most of all—the impression I never forgot—it was coming toward me on remarkably long legs, like it was walking on stilts. I had a dog at home, a shepherd mix that I knew weighed fifty pounds. This creature was easily that heavy, I guessed, but it seemed much taller. And now it was only twenty-five feet away.
Every second from the moment I’d put the wooden call to my lips had seemed to transpire in slow motion, as if we were underwater. But in an instant something broke the spell. Probably a downdraft swirl of air sent it a whiff of me, but curiosity on that canine face changed to alarm faster than I could track it. Next I knew it was loping back the way it had come, its head turned backward toward me the whole time, scanning the forest for the source of the danger. In about the same ten seconds it had taken to appear, it disappeared, leaving me sitting in a tree, shaking like a leaf. The whole episode had unfolded across less than two minutes.
What had I seen? It was no fox, but what other than a fox could it have been? When I sat down in my room that night and wrote the Louisiana Department of Wildlife Fisheries in Baton Rouge, I could imagine only one answer: from twenty-five feet away, I had seen a wolf in the northwest of the state, I told them. Two weeks later I got a reply. It is possible you saw a wolf, someone from the office wrote. We think there are still a few red wolves in the state. But (my official letterhead reply stated) it’s far more likely that you saw a coyote, since coyotes are now colonizing Louisiana.
A coyote? Wait, what? A coyote like in the Walt Disney films, an animal of the deserts and of the West? I may as well have rounded a corner and run into a moose in downtown New Orleans. I knew about coyotes, but how could there be a coyote anywhere within two hundred miles of Louisiana? Yet in the early 1960s, they were there, and it would not be too long before I saw one, then another and another. That first wild canid I ever laid eyes on, though, stalking my tree on stilt-like legs while I watched with wide eyes, was a harbinger of a different kind of canine future for eastern America.
In Yellowstone National Park in September 2013, I first began to realize how political the debates about wild American canids have become in the modern era. As it turns out, some of our most iconic twenty-first-century battles about charismatic endangered species surge and ebb very specifically around the coyote.
On our second day in the Lamar Valley that September in 2013, Sara and I had met a pair of California scientists, watching the wolves alongside us, who turned out to be Blaire Van Valkenburgh, of the University of California at Los Angeles’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Robert Wayne, the UCLA molecular biologist and Canidae specialist who has done some of the preeminent genetic work on dogs, wolves, and coyotes. A slight, dark-haired scientist who looked to be in his fifties, Wayne was at the Zoological Institute in London when he started researching the molecular evolution of the canids. The work took him head-on into a very big political controversy. So he hadn’t missed a beat when I casually mentioned the obvious resemblance between coyotes and the red wolves of the South where I grew up. “There’s a good reason for that,” he’d frowned. “Red wolves aren’t a true species. They’re a hybrid, and more coyote than anything else.”
“And he should know,” Blaire Van Valkenburgh had added brightly. “He did the genetic work demonstrating that the red wolf is really a coyote hybrid.”
The genetic markers Wayne found indicated, as he read the evidence, that coyotes are a kind of wolf that shared a common ancestor with gray wolves down to about 3.2 million years ago, when coyote and gray wolf ancestors began to separate, first physically, then, as distance increased, genetically. The question of that evolutionary relationship has animated US endangered species programs going back to the 1960s and has come to spin prominently around a very specific and unusual animal, which since the time of John James Audubon we have called Canis rufus.
Since it entered written history (with William Bartram’s Travels in 1791), the red wolf has been associated with the Deep South. Its range extended as far west as the Hill Country of Central Texas, however—where coyotes also ranged. In true wolf fashion there were black variations (Bartram named the red wolves he saw Canis niger), but more commonly the animal was a cinnamon-buff color. Like coyotes. Although it lived in swamps and deep woods, its remarkably long and spindly legs struck many observers as belonging to an animal designed to course after running prey in open country. Its curiosity aroused, it could stand upright on those long legs. Like coyotes, it could live among people, yet it was quite easy to trap or poison. At forty to seventy pounds, it was bigger than a coyote but smaller than a gray wolf. Naturalist Vernon Bailey, on hearing red wolves howl, wrote in 1904, “Their voice is a compromise between that of the lobo . . . and the howl of the coyote. It suggests the coyote much more than the lobo.”
John Woodhouse Audubon, Red Texas Wolf (Canis rufus).
Courtesy Google Art Project.
In truth, so much about the red wolf seemed coyote-like that as early as 1962—the year before that fourteen-year-old version of me saw a large coyote-like canid from a deer stand in Louisiana—biologists began to question whether the red wolf was a legitimate species or a hybrid resulting from mating between wolves and coyotes. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, however, designated the red wolf an endangered species in 1967 and later followed the lead of a young biologist named Ronald Nowak, who wrote his dissertation on red wolves. Nowak would go on to become the service’s endangered species coordinator and to write a major work on canid evolution, North American Quaternary Canines, in 1979 (he’s also author of the most recent edition of the Bible-like Walker’s Mammals of the World, the go-to reference for mammals). For decades Nowak deflected all challenges to the red wolf’s legitimacy as a distinctive species with full protection under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Since then the red wolf story has produced endless controversy, and for one primary reason: coyotes. Coyotes, in fact, seemed to be garbling everything we thought we knew about wolves from the Great Lakes to the Deep South.
Partly in an effort to quell the mounting debate about its wolf-management policies—essentially whether, with the red wolf, it had spent millions recovering an animal that may only have come into being in recent history—in 2012 the Fish and Wildlife Service published a peer-reviewed seventy-five-page monograph that offered up an entire rethinking of American wolves. An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves concluded that North America’s gray wolves were indeed Asian in origin and had arrived here in at least three different waves only 20,000 or so years ago. Using both classic morphology and the host of new genetic studies, the study’s authors shrank the number of gray wolf subspecies from the twenty-three Stanley Young and E. A. Goldman had designated in the 1940s down to only four. They extended the former range of the red wolf up the Eastern Seaboard to Canada. And they reclassified the wolf of the eastern Great Lakes—long a gray wolf subspecies—as its own species, Canis lycaon.
Most importantly of all, the study claimed that the wolves of eastern America were ancient continental wolves that had come from the same evolutionary line that produced coyotes: “Coyotes, C. rufus, and C. lycaon are modern representatives of a major and diverse clade that evolved within North America.” While An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves conceded that both eastern and red wolves may have “anciently” hybridized with coyotes, it posited that “pure” red wolves had still existed in the twentieth century.
Outside the hallways of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, with its commitment to red wolf recovery that predates modern genetics research, the role of the coyote in the red wolf story has struck some scientists as far more problematic than federal policies have acknowledged. The American Museum of Natural History warily skirts the issue, its 2009 monograph on canid fossils leaving off any investigation of red wolves. I asked Xiaoming Wang, of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of this study, about that. He responded that the red wolf’s omission was deliberate: “As an animal with a mixed morphology, including its fossil relatives, it is not always easy to place with certainty. Works on ancient DNA may have a better chance of resolving the mystery.”
Robert Wayne and his colleagues have been approaching the debate by looking not at fossil DNA but at the comparative genetics of existing animals. In 2011 Wayne and no fewer than eighteen coauthors published the results of their most recent work on the topic, an article titled “A Genome-Wide Perspective on the Evolutionary History of Enigmatic Wolf-Like Canids.” It directly challenges the conclusions and policy of the Fish and Wildlife Service. In the most thorough genetic study so far, the researchers tested genetic markers from 208 gray wolves, 12 red wolves, and 57 coyotes. In contrast to Fish and Wildlife’s conclusions, Wayne found no evidence that eastern and red wolves share a common lineage. Great Lakes wolves, he insists, are essentially a population of gray wolves with about 20 percent coyote admixture, and that admixture goes up to as much as 40 percent coyote in the wolf population of Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. The hybridization events this study pinpoints are decidedly not the result of today’s coyote manifest destiny. Using molecular clock dating strategies, the researchers determined that coyote hybridization with gray wolves in the Great Lakes region initially began between 550 and 950 years ago.
As for the red wolves the federal government has lavished so much effort on recovering? “Structure analysis consistently assigned 80 percent of the red wolf genome to coyotes,” the geneticists argued. Large blocks of coyote DNA in red wolf populations imply to Wayne and his colleagues that the creature we now call the “red wolf” is not an ancient American wolf surviving into our time but a hybrid that originated when coyotes began to interbreed with southern gray wolves at some point between 290 and 430 years ago. “We find a coyote-wolf admixture zone that stretched from southern Texas to the Great Lakes and the northeastern U.S. This admixture zone is the largest in area ever described for a terrestrial vertebrate.”
Wayne links the dates for these hybridization events to humans, specifically the arrival of Europeans and the changes that followed them. But it doesn’t take much of a historian to realize that virtually none of the geneticists’ molecular clock dates could possibly reference European history in the Americas. No Europeans were altering landscapes or killing wolves in the Great Lakes area in the 1460s, let alone in 1060. As for the South, only Wayne’s event date of 290 years in the past (i.e., 1721) allows for any European influence at all. The southern colonies with red wolves closest to a potential coyote invasion would have been Louisiana and Texas. Louisiana was not settled by the French until 1714 (in Natchitoches) and 1718 (New Orleans), and Texas did not acquire a permanent settlement until Spain founded San Antonio in 1718. Any appreciable European effect on predators in those areas wouldn’t have occurred until decades after 1721 from humble beginnings like these.
However, one series of events in the South could provide a historical story to support the time frame in Wayne’s molecular clock. The actors were not Europeans, though, except indirectly. Indians had invented agriculture long before Europeans arrived. Native crop growing reached its heyday in the South in the form of the so-called mound-building Mississippian Culture 1,000 years ago. A large agricultural Indian population that also regularly burned the woods subsequently transformed the South, creating a more open setting that featured bluestem-grass prairies in many areas.
Then around 1500, two additional transformations took place. The first European explorers traveled through dense Indian settlements, and in their wake Old World diseases unknown in the Americas swept through the Indian villages, killing millions. That occurred simultaneously with another change, the onset of the three-century weather anomaly known as the Little Ice Age. It produced cooler, wetter conditions that grew such bumper crops of grasses on the Great Plains that swollen bison herds began colonizing in all directions, including into the South. Although not a single early European had seen buffalo in the South earlier, beginning around 1650 and lasting until at least 1725, European travelers reported significant numbers of bison along the woodland trails and in the bluestem prairies of the Deep South.
Early in the 1700s the Indian population began to build up again, European settlers arrived, and the bison herds began falling back westward.
I suspect Wayne’s coyote–red wolf hybridization in the South 290 to 430 years ago refers to this bison event. Coyotes must have followed bison from the plains into the Southeast 350 years ago, and over their seventy-five-year stay, a good number of stilt-legged red wolves and sharp-nosed coyotes formed pair-bonds and had litters. By the time coyotes retreated west with buffalo, they’d left a genetic imprint on the canids of the Southeast. The red wolf had became the coyote-like wolf the naturalists would describe a hundred years later. Perhaps some different but corresponding Indian-bison event of 550 to 950 years ago took coyotes into the Great Lakes country and eastward, with similar results.
I did not know until many decades later that as an adolescent growing up in Louisiana in the early 1960s, I had been downstream of a biological tsunami sweeping on padded feet in the direction of the Mississippi River. I had gotten a confusing glimpse of a once-in-several-hundred-years phenomenon. It was sort of like being there to witness the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa but not grasping the bigger picture of plate tectonics. What some canid biologists now describe as one of the most extensive “hybrid swarms” of animals in the North American historical record began moving eastward from the edge of the Great Plains in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I got to witness it.
The “hybrid swarm” in question consisted of wild canids that were partly coyote and partly wolf. The wolf was of course the red wolf. As for the geographic source of the hybridization act, it appears to have been the very Edwards Plateau where proud Texans had all but eradicated predators in the decades from the 1920s through the 1940s. This Texas Hill Country had long been famous for preserving an interesting and unusual intermixed ecology. The hilltops there were grassy and studded with cactus and junipers typical of the edge of the Great Plains. But the river valleys presented a relict southern woodlands setting that even included bald cypress trees.
No one knows just how long western coyotes and southeastern red wolves had ranged through this intermingled West-South setting. But in the 1920s the Biological Survey, with typical fervor for the job, killed 2,209 red wolves in the Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas region. When Texas’s version of Animal Damage Control then subjected the Hill Country to a predator scorched-earth campaign, the pressures led the remaining wolves to hybridize with coyotes. Then, in a move straight out of the main plotline of the coyote’s twentieth-century story, unceasing human harassment in one place led this “swarm” to colonize another. The direction of least resistance was eastward, where the disappearance of the southern wolf population was creating a vacuum that hybrids and coyotes rushed to fill.
Coyote–red wolf hybrid, Louisiana, 1960s.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
By the time I was sitting in my tree, open-mouthed at the leggy canid below me, biologists were daily becoming more aware of the eastward advance of hordes of hybrids and coyotes across the mid-South. Ron Nowak, growing up in New Orleans, was still a decade from writing his dissertation and becoming the Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species guru. But he was already interested in red wolves and became alarmed enough at stories of the coyote invasion that—moved in part by letters like mine—he actually visited my home parish, Caddo, and other northwestern Louisiana sites in 1965 and 1966, looking for remnant populations of red wolves. In the two years before red wolves were first listed as an endangered species, he found only hybrids and coyotes. As a doctoral student, in 1970 Nowak figured there were no more than three hundred true red wolves left wild anywhere on the continent, with genetic swamping as a result of advancing coyotes and hybrids now the primary threat to their existence.
In the lead-up to passing the Endangered Species Act of 1973, biologists trying to protect red wolves as a species dreamed up some wildly impractical schemes to “save” them from coyotes. One that ought to resonate in our age was a canid-proof fence they hoped to build north-south through East Texas and Oklahoma! When that seemed too daft to implement, the Fish and Wildlife Service brain-stormed a canid-free “buffer zone” reminiscent of the infamous “fur desert” the Hudson’s Bay Company had attempted to create 150 years earlier to keep American trappers out of the Rockies. Biologists actually planned to kill every coyote and hybrid entering the buffer zone in order to protect the purity of red wolves beyond the line.
In truth, without a sound grasp of canid evolution or any good genetic science to back up their hunches, 1970s biologists working on the coyote-wolf hybridization phenomenon in the South (and, in the same decades, far to the north in Algonquin Provincial Park in eastern Canada) were mostly shooting from the hip. When the Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, Fish and Wildlife appointed Curtis Carley the first field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Program. Working primarily in southeastern Texas and heroically trying to untangle, among the canids he trapped, which was a wolf, which was a hybrid, and which was a coyote, Carley developed a technique using morphology measurements and recorded howl profiles. It wasn’t quite Crania Americana, Samuel Morton’s mid-nineteenth-century treatise on his human-skull studies using buckshot to determine cranial capacity for the various “races,” but it was close enough.
Carley decided early in the project that there was only one possible way of saving red wolves from genetic swamping by coyotes. Biologists were going to have to capture every red wolf remaining in the wild for placement in a captive breeding program. In effect, preserving the red wolf’s purity required first bringing about its extinction in the wild and turning its former range over to coyotes and hybrids until biologists could produce enough “pure” animals, then finding a suitable protected preserve for releasing a captive-bred population into the wild again.
How difficult was that? After establishing a certified captive breeding program for red wolves at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, in 1974 and 1975, the Red Wolf Recovery team decided to examine as breeding candidates some fifty red wolves held in almost twenty zoos across the country. Using the morphology-howl criteria they had established, out of those fifty they identified but a single red wolf, a female in the Oklahoma City Zoo. They were convinced all the rest, plus their pups, were actually either coyotes or hybrids, and in the latter case the team insisted they be destroyed. When some of the shocked zoo personnel refused such a draconian order, in the name of purity Curtis Carley carried out the death sentences himself.
In 1980 the Fish and Wildlife Service proclaimed the red wolf to be extinct in the wild. Out of some four-hundred-plus canids its trappers had captured in Louisiana and East Texas, the program had recognized only forty-three as real red wolves and designated just seventeen as breeding candidates, three of which were unable to have pups. So with just 14 animals selected out of at least 450, the United States’ federal wildlife agency began to breed red wolves in captivity. All those other captured canids deemed to have been betrayed by the sin of contaminating coyote blood? The team destroyed them, every one.
A Louisiana anticoyote program resulted in scenes like this in the 1970s.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
In the full light of day half a century later, this sounds like a wild canid version of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, designed to keep the American population untainted by genetic undesirables, with Curtis Carley recalling Madison Grant, the early-twentieth-century conservationist and eugenicist who urged genetic purity in the name of a larger good. Now the task for this increasingly Dr. Strangelove–like program became finding suitable locations for releasing red wolves—locations where, of course, horny coyotes could not get at them.
In Canada, New England, and the northern states, the battle for canid purity hasn’t been fought at the same level of intensity as in the South, although the new “canis soup” did pretty much squash plans to launch recovery of endangered wolves in the Northeast. Both in ancient times and in the last century, coyotes certainly interbred with the Great Lakes’ wolves, whose genome now seems about 20 percent coyote. They’ve contributed considerably more genetics to the eastern wolves of Algonquin Provincial Park, where mingled packs of wolves, hybrids, and coyotes are more common every day as members of a newly formed “coywolf” population. Farther south, as coyotes have spread across states like North Carolina, it has taken heroic efforts of every kind to beat coyotes back from the jealously guarded, endangered red wolves finally released into the wild in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in 1987.
The Red Wolf Recovery Program, to its dismay, has gotten little help from the red wolves themselves in what it has called “hand-to-hand combat against the invading coyotes.” Because red wolves so readily mate and create pair-bonds with coyotes, the program had to abandon the national park site in 1998 and pull back its recovery efforts from the Alligator River refuge to the more defendable Albemarle Peninsula of the Atlantic shore. It also—obsessively—had to find and destroy hybrids. According to David Rabon, the current coordinator of Red Wolf Recovery, in the mid-1990s biologists realized to their horror that they had missed by two generations a single hybrid pair-bond between a male coyote and a female red wolf. Following existing protocols would have compelled them to destroy the entire wild red wolf population of nearly one hundred animals. Sanity finally prevailed, but this story puts to the test our own conceits about species “purity” and even what we thought we knew about why hybridization happens at all.
For example, why is it that coyotes have made time with wolves in the Northeast and South, yet we preserve no record, from either history or the present, of coyotes and gray wolves hybridizing in the West? The size difference is the answer, some biologists have told me. Yet Mexican gray wolves are also small, the size of red wolves or Algonquin wolves, but scant or no record of hybridizing between coyotes and Mexican wolves exists. Some suggest that hybridization occurs when humans have driven one of the species to rarity. Yet didn’t we extirpate gray wolves in the West a century ago, affording all kinds of last opportunities for wolf-coyote hybridizing? We have records of the last gray wolves mating with dogs but not coyotes.
And if rarity of potential mates really is the sole explanation, why do today’s red wolves, which the Red Wolf Recovery team has with much effort maniacally winnowed of coyote genetics, have to be pried loose from coyote mates so often? The North Carolina program has actually had to resort to capture and sterilization of the coyote population bordering the refuge in hopes that sterile “space holder” coyotes will create buffer territories against fertile newcomers that might prove irresistible to red wolves. With something like desperation, biologists have looked for natural “behavioral reproductive barriers” between coyotes and red wolves. They’re still looking. Something strange is going on here, and it looks very much as if the answer leads us back to the evolutionary lineage of America’s canids. What we are seeing happen before our eyes in the eastern United States appears to be something very much like canid behavioral recognition of evolutionary kinship.
The geneticists are offering us two different explanations of what’s happening. In their 2011 paper on enigmatic wolflike canids, my Yellowstone wolf-watching companion Robert Wayne and his coauthors argue that genetics show neither a distinctive red wolf genome nor any proof that wolves from Canada and the South were originally related to one another. Further, they argue, Canadian and southern wolves were all originally gray wolves, not distinctive American wolves related through deep evolution to coyotes. Eastern and southern wolves, they insist, are related to coyotes now because of hybridization events, in the deep past and recently.
The other argument, also based in genetics, offers up a different scenario. Its advocates, a group of Canadian researchers led by Paul Wilson, contend they can find no gray wolf mitochondrial DNA in either eastern wolves or red wolves and that those animals have coyote-like genetics not due to ancient hybridization but because they have come out of a purely North American lineage of canids that split from coyotes only some 300,000 years ago. Wolf guru David Mech, who argues that the Great Lakes wolves he’s studied are actually gray and eastern wolf hybrids, seconds their ideas.
Mech also points out that killing coyotes, not mating with them, is intrinsic to gray wolf behavior. Julie Young of the Predator Research Facility even told me that in experiments there, coyotes inseminated with gray wolf sperm actually killed the puppies they bore. The Canadian argument thus offers up an evolutionary explanation for why coyotes and eastern-southern wolves are so readily hybridizing in our time. Canis lycaon and Canis rufus breed and form packs with coyotes because they “recognize” one another. Coyotes and gray wolves do not.
Robert Wayne, however, continues to insist that his own study has settled the debate with its different scenario. After the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2012 followed the outlines of the Canadian argument with its monograph An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves, in 2014 Wayne persuaded the agency to halt its wolf programs to take account of the “unresolved science.”
Regardless of who ultimately wins this scientific debate, there is a natural and logical solution to the penchant eastern and southern wolves and coyotes have for one another. The animals certainly know what that is. I respect the heroic efforts of so many to preserve the red wolf, but if a single coyote getting lucky with a red wolf—in a North America now blanketed with coyotes—threatens the whole show, the work of red wolf recovery simply seems too intrusive and heavy-handed to be lasting.
Besides, as has happened so often and with so many species in the past, genetic purity may be just a momentary accident of time and geography anyway. Both evolution and logic seem to point to a different solution. Why don’t we just let coyotes and red wolves do what coyotes and Algonquin wolves are doing already, what comes naturally to them as bequeathed by the Coyote god of North American canid evolution? Let them form pair-bonds, raise litters, and take joy in their creation of a new (or maybe not so new) American animal better adapted to modern conditions. They’ll return wild canids to continental ecology, and we’ll take joy in having them among us. We’ll eventually sort out what to call them, and with their coyote genes, we won’t need to continue protecting them so religiously. Then we can just value them as the remarkable new outcome of North America’s long, unique canid history.
In the eastern half of North America, where having coyotes—let alone “coywolves”—loping down city streets still appears to some like a scene from a sci-fi movie, life with a midsize predator was on a lot of minds with the death of Taylor Mitchell in 2009. That brought big-time media attention to coyotes, hybridization, and urban predators. For that matter, so have brand-new terms like “coywolf” and “canis soup,” the latter coined by Scientific American when it noted that across the past century, the last 75 to 140 generations of coyotes have thoroughly mixed with the East’s remnant wolves, plus a few dogs along the way.
One result is that the creation of what some are now calling the “eastern coyote” and others the “coywolf” bears an uncanny resemblance to the legendary melting-pot process that continues to birth Americans out of our multicultural immigrant population. In his famous book The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant lamented and feared the melting pot. Are we being hypocritical to find sentiments like Grant’s about multiculturalism to be old-fashioned and very distasteful now, while at the same time we fear the results of similar mixing among the wild canids around us?
Americans are not even merely a wild mélange of ethnicities. What we are witnessing with wild canids in the eastern United States looks very similar to what took place in Europe 40,000 years ago when two or three kinds of humans encountered one another and saw commonality rather than difference. Those of us from a European background, we’ve recently discovered, are hybrids of another, far more ancient sort. When our species, Homo sapiens, left Africa and finally made it through the Middle East and into Europe some 43,000 years ago, we found the country to the north already inhabited by two distinctive human species, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Especially in the first 5,000 years of initial encounters, it seems, we seduced one another a sufficient number of times that, for us out of European lines, 2 to 3 percent of our genetic heritage today comes from these now extinct hominin types.
Just as coyote genes are lending canid hybrids the ability to thrive amid human density, while their wolf genes are helping them live in forests, hunt deer, and (according to eastern coyote biologist Roland Kays) expand their range in the East five times faster than pure coyotes could have, we’ve preserved a hybrid genetic legacy ourselves. There is a good chance that the genes for light eyes and the mutations that produced fairer skin tones originated with ancient Neanderthal adaptations to life in cold, gray places. Those genes and others acquired from Neanderthals had a selective advantage in northern latitudes, where vitamin D from sunshine was in short supply, because they helped us survive without succumbing to diseases like rickets.
So hybridization is not so bad a thing, especially for species migrating to new places or dealing with rapidly evolving conditions like climate change. It speeds up adaptations dramatically, producing new creatures well fitted to their environments. Just as coyote-wolf hybrids are preserving the genetics of nearly vanished wolves, we have ourselves preserved 20 percent of the genome of the extinct Neanderthals, dispersed in small snippets throughout global humanity.
In modern Coyote America, coexistence with coyotes is an essential lesson, something we need to make second nature as quickly as we can. Coyotes have been in North America far longer than we, they are not going anywhere, and history demonstrates all too graphically that eradicating them is an impossibility. This is truly an instance in which any desire on our part to control nature is perfectly countered by a profound inability to do so. It’s a misunderstanding that is a short road to madness in the classic fashion of Moby-Dick. Because with coyotes, as with the great whale, resistance is futile.
I’ve lived in the urban-wildlands zone—in West Texas, Montana, and now New Mexico—for much of my adult life, surrounded by coyotes in each location. Living among them, I have never felt them a threat of any kind. They’ve functioned for me more as part of the occasional magic show of life, like whales breaching an ocean surface or the Galilean moons, glimpsed through a telescope, swinging around Jupiter over the course of a starry winter night. The coyote’s remarkable resilience doesn’t just put me in mind of us; it operates as shorthand for the greatest story ever told, the miracle of ongoing evolutionary adaptation to an endlessly changing world. Coyotes are the perfect expression of how life finds a way. They are also one of the iconic life-forms birthed in our part of the globe, an American original that makes us more American the more we know them. We and they are similar success stories in our shared moment on Earth. That’s how I, at least, see the coyotes around me. How they see me, I can’t know. But I do know this: when I make eye contact with a coyote, I can see the wheels turning inside her head. If I have a theory of mind, so does she.
It is the high summer of 2014 in the High Desert of the American Southwest, the area that spawned coyotes a half million or more years ago, and like tens of thousands of other Americans in our present age, I’m having a coyote experience. My two-year-old malamute, Kodi, and I have set out on this summer morning on a ramble into the canyon below our house in the urban-wildlands countryside where we live, seventeen miles outside Santa Fe. Half a mile from the back patio, on our way to a spot where the streambed long ago sliced a narrow defile through a soaring lava-flow dike, the quiet July morning has suddenly turned tumultuous.
It begins with excited, alarmed yelps and barks, then unmistakable coyote howls from very close by and from both sides of the canyon. To our right, perhaps twenty-five yards away, a skinny year-old coyote emerges from the junipers, barking and howling her head off. It only takes me seconds to spot her companion on our left, a sleek young male probably from the same litter, who’s taken up a sentry position about the same distance from us. In another minute, I spot a fully grown adult, from the looks of her a female. She hasn’t joined the yapping and howling but is standing still and silent, thirty-five yards away. Her unblinking yellow eyes are locked on Kodi.
Kodi is not leashed, but he is trained to my voice. I bring him to my side, noticing in the cacophony of sound how calmly he obeys. At twenty-two months he weighs nearly 130 pounds, and as malamutes do, he resembles a wolf. The coyotes never take their eyes off him and scarcely even glance my way as I unlimber the camera and snap a few shots. After a few minutes of everyone watching everyone else, Kodi and I decide to forego our further progress down-canyon and turn and start for home. We are escorted for a couple of minutes by the little female, who walks along perhaps twenty-five to thirty feet away, incessantly yapping the whole time.
So here’s the thing. Coyotes are a fresh enough presence across much of America that someone new to coyotes or who hasn’t yet made an effort to understand them could find this scene alarming. The coyotes did not run away! They were close! They followed! Someone might have gone for a rifle or called a local wildlife officer to report “aggressive, problem animals.” Coyotes are feared—and removed—all the time for reasons like these.
Yearling coyote guardian at its pack’s den.
Courtesy Dan Flores.
But these coyotes, which we saw many more times through the summer, were neither dangerous nor problematic. They were reacting entirely properly. They had established a territory in my canyon, and we—especially Kodi, a competitor canine—had violated their boundaries. At another time of year, they would have loped away over the rimrock, but in high summer the female probably had pups a few months old hidden away in the canyon’s crevices, with her yearlings from a prior litter serving as sentries. I never saw the pups or the alpha male. But we enjoyed hearing this pack sing and occasionally spotting them hunting mice all the rest of the summer.
They were not a threat, some unmanageable wildness near home to fear and destroy in a battle for civilization. They were, rather, an addition to modern life and a beautiful benefit to living in today’s Coyote America.