by Dan Flores
The Progressive Era was the age of the bureaucratic professional, and professionalism prevailed at the Biological Survey. The quickest, most “efficient” way to mass-kill wolves and coyotes was not shooting individual animals but poisoning entire populations. So with the goal of blanketing river valleys and mountain ranges with poison bait stations that aimed to kill every predator of every species in a region, with its new funding the bureau now proceeded to build a plant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to produce strychnine tablets in volume. Chillingly and unsentimentally dubbed the Eradication Methods Laboratory, this federal killing facility moved to Denver in 1921, where it would go on to perfect an amazing witch’s brew of ever more efficient, ever deadlier predacides. Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory, with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America’s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.
For the hunters employed by the Biological Survey, the approach in the field was simple. The bureau’s professional hunters’ first step was “prebaiting,” strewing cubes of fat and meat across the countryside to get wolves and coyotes habituated to them. That accomplished, the actual “poison bait stations”—in the age of the automobile, each bait station was commonly one of America’s surplus horses, which could be led to the selected spot and shot and whose carcass was then laced with strychnine tablets and surrounded by poisoned fat and meat cubes—went in next.
Stanley Young, one of the bureau’s initial hunters who rose to subsequent prominence in the agency, became something of a coyote specialist in this new game. Young had grown up in Oregon idealizing Lewis and Clark. Now, in places like the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico and along the rims of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, he discovered that with strychnine it was possible to kill 350 of Lewis and Clark’s “prairie wolves” in less than ten days. Approaching his bait stations, he later wrote, he found that he could tally a quick total of his victims even from a distance because of the way they died. Every single dead coyote was frozen into that signature strychnine convulsion—a wrenched, alien shape easily visible against the landscape, its tail sticking straight out and frizzed as if the animal had been struck by lightning.
Young’s visual imagery of the US government’s coyote extermination campaign was soon writ large across the West. With wolf populations rapidly collapsing in the face of the bureau’s war on the wild, señor coyote’s turn was coming fast. But there remained one very large and visible public-lands arena in which wolves were still the main target and coyotes still mostly collateral damage in the wolf war. That was the national parks.
Yellowstone, set aside as the world’s first national park in 1872, and Glacier, created along the Continental Divide in Montana in 1912, became symbolic national scenes of America’s wolf and coyote jihad in the 1920s. The United States created national parks in order to allow the public to experience wild nature in its pristine state, so you would assume that when Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller banned all hunting in Yellowstone, even predators would have found refuge. But naturally, park managers saw things differently. Despite having been on the “pristine” Yellowstone Plateau for 1 million years before the park ever existed, wolves, lions, bears, and coyotes somehow were unwelcome enough to produce extermination campaigns even in America’s grand nature preserves. Sport hunters, hoping the parks would breed game animals, and ranchers, hoping they wouldn’t become asylums for predators, pushed for this, but they didn’t have to push hard.
Yellowstone aimed its first predator-extermination campaign directly at the park’s “numerous and bold” coyote population. At first the army rangers who patrolled the park randomly shot every coyote they saw. But as early as 1898, park personnel actually began to poison coyotes, mountain lions, and wolves inside park boundaries. When Congress signed the Biological Survey’s predator death sentence appropriation in 1914, Yellowstone went so far as to invite Vernon Bailey to show park personnel the proper mass-extermination techniques. Following Bailey’s approach, which focused heavily on dens and pups, between 1914 and 1916 Yellowstone rangers destroyed eighty-three coyotes and twelve wolves inside park boundaries. Stephen Mather, the charismatic New Englander who became the National Park Service’s first director in 1916, is a conservationist hero to many, but Mather thought that if a Yellowstone ranger “didn’t kill off his 200 to 300 coyotes a year,” the park’s coyotes would spread across the West and wreak havoc. Yellowstone’s tally until the death of the last wolves in the park, in 1926, was 136 gray wolves, 80 of them puppies. Coyote deaths, of course, did not end in 1926. With bureau assistance, the number of coyotes that died in Yellowstone from 1918 until 1935 reached nearly 3,000: 2,968, to be precise.
Glacier National Park, 250 miles north of Yellowstone, played a tail-to-a-kite role to the older park, primarily because its clusters of rounded mountains and glacial valleys did not provide as rich a habitat for herbivores or predators as Yellowstone. Yet James Galen, Glacier’s superintendent in 1913, thrilled by the state of Montana’s experiment with biological warfare against predators, wrote the state veterinarian, “I am desirous of inoculating, with mange, some coyotes to turn loose here in the park, with the idea that I may eventually kill off all the coyotes in the park in this manner.” Montana dutifully supplied a pair of mange-ridden coyotes to Glacier in late 1913, and Galen turned them loose with best wishes for success. But Department of Agriculture bureaucrats in Washington eventually scotched his bigger plan to spread mange to wild canids. Poison, they thought, would be far more effective, especially if the baits were placed on the border between Glacier and the Blackfeet Reservation, a “breeding ground for coyotes.” As for wolves, Glacier killed only fourteen between 1910 and 1920, although the park’s proximity to a healthy Canadian wolf population made it a sporadic wolf colonization destination throughout the twentieth century.
All the government’s hunters, whether on private ranches, in the national forests, or in the parks, initially concentrated their greatest efforts on wolves because, frankly, the war was all about the interests of the livestock industry, and ranchers particularly hated wolves. But within a decade after the Biological Survey’s mandate, its hunters had so thoroughly reduced the gray wolf population that after about 1926 the bureau’s hunters rarely killed more than a single wolf a year in any state. Nonetheless, in 1923 in the single state of Colorado, the bureau had set out 31,255 poison bait stations. This was the start of a new phase. With almost no wolves left alive in America, coyotes had now become public enemy number one.
In fairness, bureau explanations for an increasing focus on coyotes were not entirely matters of expediency to preserve funding after the poisoning campaign against wolves turned out to be a little too successful. With the country’s keystone predator now gone, an ecological chain reaction set in across much of America. Their 20,000-year competitor canines now almost erased, coyotes began to exercise their ancient fission-fusion capabilities. Some coyotes began to form packs and hunt larger prey, including sheep and occasionally (although very rarely) calves. Either as pack members or in singles and pairs, coyotes proved far more elusive to federal hunters than wolves, whose social bonds were so strong that pack members tended to fall one after another into traps baited with the scent of their pack mates and puppies.
Coyotes were also on the move. With wolves disappearing, coyotes of the 1920s and 1930s found themselves in a world where humans seemed their only threat, but whose forest clearing, cities, and built environments also offered coyotes brand-new opportunities. Harassed and endlessly pursued, but now by people rather than wolves, coyotes in the 1920s ratcheted themselves into survival high gear. Not only did they employ several then unsuspected evolutionary stratagems for maintaining their populations in the West, but they began
another historic expansion of their range—first westward toward the Pacific and northward in the direction of the Yukon and Alaska, then eastward across the Mississippi River into the East and South, where they would gradually begin to fill a niche left almost entirely vacant by eradication campaigns against wolves.
The federal coyote killing program exists as a subsidy for a fading US sheep industry. Courtesy Dan Flores.
With the wolf cleansed and the bureau’s Denver plant cranking out the strychnine, by the mid-1920s bureau hunters reached the rather phenomenal milestone of having set out 3.567 million poison bait stations across the West. This scorched-earth policy against coyotes yielded some 35,000 dead coyote bodies a year, although the bureau publicly estimated that its hunters never found another 100,000 poisoned annually. But soon enough it began to dawn on the bureau’s overconfident operatives that even after they had saturated the landscape with poison, coyote numbers somehow weren’t diminishing. Like Old Man Coyote in the native traditions, the real coyote simply refused to die. First surprised, then increasingly angry, bureau personnel began to confess privately to one another that for a reason no one could figure out, a bureau with wolf notches on its gun was struggling to win the war of civilization against the slinking, lowlife junior wolf.
The bureau’s success against wolves combined with hubris to blind its functionaries, at first, to an observation that had actually been around for a while. The truth was, people who had experience with coyotes had been puzzling since the late 1800s over their extraordinary resilience. Unlike so many of the West’s animals—bison, bighorn sheep, antelope, elk, grizzly bears, and ultimately wolves—all of which had turned up their toes in capitulation to American western expansion, coyotes seemed an anomaly. And as early as 1900, one of America’s leading national magazines had published a short story by a famous nature writer that directly addressed the coyote’s singular situation in America’s war on wild things.
Ernest Thompson Seton was a Canadian who ended his long and productive career as a writer (and founder of the Boy Scouts) living in New Mexico. Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the “Nature Faker” writers of the early twentieth century, the group famous for anthropomorphizing the animal characters in their books. In some of the nature writing of that time, the animals reasoned and had morals, societies, and advanced cultures with laws. One critic of Seton’s book Animals I Have Known even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been Animals I Alone Have Known.
Nonetheless, Seton’s most famous coyote story, “Tito: The Story of the Coyote That Learned How,” which was the lead piece in the August 1900 issue of Scribner’s, had taken up coyote resilience back at the turn of the century and tried to explain it allegorically. Like the Indian stories featuring Coyote, Seton’s “Tito” took on an observable truth and offered an explanation. Species after species was disappearing in twentieth-century America. Yet, despite a “fierce war” that “had for a long time been waged against the coyote kind,” coyotes somehow had not done the proper and expected thing. For some reason, they had refused to disappear.
To offer an explanation, Seton invented “Tito,” a little bobtailed female coyote captured as a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity. But she was observant and coyote-smart, and this close association with humans taught her not just about the range of dangers from humans but how to avoid lassos, metal traps, gunfire, and poison bait. From experience as an “insider,” she learned to hoodwink hounds and finally grasped the ultimate trajectory of man’s designs against “the coyote kind.” Tito had made a lousy dog, so was never a pet, and ultimately she escaped, found a mate, had a litter of her own, and then proceeded to teach her pups and “their children’s children” all the wisdom she had learned.
In the story’s formulation, through transmission down the generations from a Hero Coyote, all coyotes after her would be “wise in the later wisdom that the ranchers’ war has forced upon them.” Seton’s human analog to Tito? Moses, of course, who by growing up among the Egyptians learned their ways, which enabled him to save the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and persecution.
So just how were coyotes able to survive a nineteenth-century fur trade followed by a twentieth-century war of extermination without going under? As Seton’s story implied, intelligence and the sharing of learned behavior certainly enabled such coyote resilience. But in truth, the coyote’s evolutionary biology played as large a role. The fission-fusion flexibility that went so far back in their evolution made coyotes—very much like us—opportunists able to thrive in wholly new circumstances. In our own case, fission-fusion abilities early in our evolution allowed us to survive bottleneck die-offs, probably from disease epidemics that threatened to exterminate us. In the case of coyotes, fission-fusion helped position the species to survive twentieth-century America’s war on predators when wolves could not. A primary reason coyotes are in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City this morning has to do with an evolutionary adaptation they share with us.
Coyote evolution also produced a litany of other traits that help explain the species’ resilience, some of which should appear familiar to us as well. Like us, coyote young have lengthy childhoods during which they learn from their parents cultural skills and critical information about the world. Juvenile coyotes, like human children, have to be taught through their adolescence the cultural wisdom of their species. So Seton was right about Tito, to a certain extent. Our intuitive grasp of this aspect of the social life of canids is one reason wolves were our first and oldest domesticate. We can also relate to the inclination of wild canids like coyotes to pair up as long-term mates and for both parents to assist in rearing young. These are not especially common mating strategies in nature, but they seem normal to us.
Decades after Seton’s story appeared, though, biologists discovered another highly important coyote adaptation that helps explain their resilience, and it amazed even the scientists. The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large litters. The coyote’s yipping howl, known around the world as the iconic music of wild North America, has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population. In the face of persecution that thins their numbers, they respond with whopping litters with high pup survivability.
Other evolved traits also enable coyotes under stress to maintain or even grow their populations. Coyote packs commonly consist of a breeding alpha pair along with one- and two-year-old pups, often females, from previous litters. If something kills the alpha female, lower-ranking beta females, which can breed as early as ten months, will come into estrus during the normal late-winter mating season and have litters of pups as, in effect, adolescent mothers.
Coyotes are remarkable in other ways too. Fission-fusion flexibility makes them omnivorous, and they may scavenge, but nature designed them to succeed as predators. We often express horror at animals that pursue and kill other animals, but such a response demonstrates a misunderstanding of our own evolutionary history. We have been a wildly successful species in part because of our predatory skills. We ought to look with clear eyes and admiration at the coyote’s skill set. Darwinian evolution gave its species something like 1,000 times the number of scent receptors we have. Its ability to hear extends into extremely high frequencies in the range of 80 kHz, about 25 percent higher than dogs. As is the case with many other species, a coyote’s eyes lack cones to separate wavelengths into color. Bureau hunters trying to eradicate them got scant advantage from those yellow-orange coyote eyes perceiving the enemy in black and white thoug
h. Coyote vision is at least as good as ours, and their peripheral vision is much better.
Along with cultural transmission that instructs pups about how to be predators, stalk a deer mouse or vole and pounce on it with stiffened front legs, or suffocate larger prey with a bulldogging neck grab and a bite hold that collapse the windpipe, coyotes bring to bear on the world great observational learning intelligence. Occurring for 20,000 years alongside wolf evolution, coyote evolution selected for animals that were naturally wary, even nervous, traits usually associated with a species that is itself sometimes prey (again, behavior we ought to recognize in ourselves). In fact, coyotes are not “cowardly” but instead are circumspect to the point of extreme wariness. Lacking a fearsome predator until we arrived, gray wolves possessed a comparative boldness that rendered them relatively easy to extirpate in the twentieth century, whereas coyotes were not. Yellowstone wolf biologist Doug Smith once put it to me this way: “When you’re top dog in evolutionary history, you get bold and cocky… but when, like the coyote, you’ve been persecuted your entire existence, you learn how to be clever.”
A coyote’s nervousness makes it highly suspicious of new developments, new objects, and new smells in its habitat, and it learns extremely quickly from experience. Here is one way I know that. Coyote packs establish fixed ranges that in rural areas may be as large as ten to twelve miles around a den site, territories they defend against other coyotes, scent-mark with urine, and navigate via routinely traveled trails. In the 1980s I was building a house in a canyon called Yellow House out in West Texas, and over coffee in the mornings I began to notice an alpha female coyote and two yearling pups traversing the same trail, day after day, along the edge of a mesa about a hundred yards from my construction. Every morning, at a particular clump of yuccas, the adult female would pause, hump her back, extend a rear leg toward her nose, and scent-mark.
