Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  One day, curious about what would happen and maybe feeling a little perverse, I walked over to the same yuccas and relieved myself in her spot. Early the next morning, as usual, there she was, trotting with lolling tongue along her footpath, pups fifteen feet behind. This time, though, at her yucca scent-mark she stopped cold, extended a pointed nose, sniffed, and sniffed again. Then she walked stiff-legged around the clump, a series of steps the pups mimicked exactly. I worked on my house for several more months, and once or twice the pups came and sat on their haunches in the yard fifty feet away and watched in fascinated wonderment. But I never saw the alpha female on that mesa trail again. I’d introduced something new into her routine, and she was too wary to tolerate it even once.

  So the coyote’s innate wariness, the kind of nervous brainpower that emerges in an animal that is both predator and prey, made it a far more formidable target than Biological Survey bureaucrats ever realized. Coyotes could call on the perfect suite of traits to survive a war against them when wolves, bears, and almost no other North American animal could turn that trick. Many of the coyote’s resilience traits were actually adaptations to thousands of years of living alongside wolves. But ultimately human harassment triggered the same set of hardwired responses persecution by wolves had. Pressuring coyote populations by killing large numbers of them kept the species in a constant state of “colonization,” employing fission-fusion strategies to enlarge their prey base, attempting to grow their population with larger litters, and raising a higher percentage of pups to adulthood because there was more food in a landscape where coyote numbers were suppressed.

  Tito made a lovely analogy to Moses, but considered all together, these factors explain why coyotes evaded the slaughterhouse we had prepared for them. Try as we might to destroy them—and in this we were stubbornly, obsessively, blindly happy to indulge—they responded with maddening nonchalance.

  By the late 1920s, when the bureau finally designated the Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control to specialize in its professional killing program, the total eradication of coyotes had come to seem the only reasonable policy in America. Ernest Thompson Seton’s fellow nature writer John Burroughs had argued as early as 1906 that predators “certainly needed killing.” The “fewer of these there are, the better for the useful and beautiful game.” William T. Hornaday, a conservation hero who saved the last of the bison and led the charge to replace commercial hunting with sport hunting, insisted that where predators like coyotes were concerned, “firearms, dogs, traps, and strychnine [are] thoroughly legitimate weapons of destruction. For such animals, no half-way measures suffice.” Not even John Muir, who found coyotes “beautiful” and “graceful,” mounted a campaign against the destruction of predators, although he worried in print that slaughtering coyotes would induce a “penalty for interfering with the balance of Nature.”

  But in the 1920s, almost out of the blue, coyotes began to acquire champions. At their annual meetings beginning in 1924, the American Society of Mammalogists began to debate whether predators might actually serve some essential functions in nature and whether American poisoning policies were drastically wrongheaded. A cadre of famous scientific luminaries soon spoke out against the bureau, to the shock of many of its employees, biologists themselves and their critics’ colleagues.

  In reaction to this new reflection from the scientific community, the bureau would double down on its denials of a role for predators and propose a shocking final solution. In the late 1920s it had a predator war budget of nearly $2 million from its various sources, yet repeatedly conveyed to Congress that it was underfunded in so herculean a task. Those repeated pleas led Texas representative James Buchanan to wonder aloud if a significant increase in the bureau’s budget might not enable it, finally, to “wipe out” coyotes entirely as it had done with wolves.

  Ignoring signs of growing restlessness within the scientific community, in 1928 the bureau’s Major E. A. Goldman, its point man on all things canid, offered up the agency’s predator endgame. If Congress would fund the bureau at $10 million for a decade, it would wipe out coyotes completely, once and for all. The bill the bureau drew up and sought out Congressman Scott Leavitt of Montana to sponsor was not to be called the Coyote Extermination Act, however. Even in the 1920s that sounded tin eared. Internally, the bureau called it the Ten-Year Bill. If enacted into American law, it would be called the Animal Damage Control Act, a fantasy law for the agricultural industry and for the bureau too. The figures involved were certainly fantasy: the sum of $1 million a year for ten years to effect the outright “eradication” of coyotes appears to have been drawn out of thin air, designed more for effect in Congress than anything else. But even with coyote numbers still high and science beginning to turn against it, with the Ten-Year Bill the bureau did actually seem to believe that a civilized kingdom in America was at hand.

  It had been only 125 years since Lewis and Clark first encountered “prairie wolves” and wondered what to think of them. Now bureaucratic coyote killers were salivating at the chance to wipe 5 million years of North American canine genetics from the face of the Earth. What could have been more American?

  Standing on my patio in the ancient coyote range outside Santa Fe, with coyote howls enlivening almost every night in the High Desert of New Mexico, I wonder now at the mind-set of it all, the mode of thinking that makes us such stoic killers, able to extinguish with such ease the very qualities that lend the world beauty, grace, romance. And, to my personal regret, I wonder not just how it played out a century ago or in other minds. I wonder about it in all of us, certainly in myself, who as a teenager, when coyotes were colonizing Louisiana, tried so hard to possess wild nature and bring it to hand.

  This is an uncomfortable memory for me, but here it is. It is an early daybreak, with the sun a flattened red ball through the mists of the Red River Valley. I am seventeen years old. A coyote pauses in yellow prairie grass, her muzzle wondrously sharp and refined, her ears working. Dew droplets cascade into silvery pearls in the air above her as her tail switches the grass. Her intense eyes bore straight into mine: she is posing an ancient question, one I will not be capable of answering correctly until another decade of living has passed. So a rifle blast shatters the humid morning air, and she yelps, spins, disappears.

  The next moment is one of the most vivid mind’s-eye pictures of my life, as perfect in my memory as a circle. The sun suddenly breaks through the mist, and all that only an instant before had seemed wild, romantic, beautiful, dissolves in stop-frame motion as I look on. The “prairie” becomes a scraggly pasture littered with cow dung and discarded plastic soft drink bottles and broken farm machinery. The “wilderness” is now encircled with a half-collapsed barbed wire fence decorated with rusted, bullet-riddled no-trespassing signs. And somewhere beyond the cottonwoods along the river, the gears of a propane delivery truck are grinding like chalk on slate.

  In an instant I had personally recapitulated the last two hundred years of coyote history. I had destroyed what I loved, drained beauty and perfection from the world with a syringe as I looked on. Detached, stoic. A killer.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Archpredator of Our Time

  The men who graduated from their rabid pursuit of wolves to become trappers and poisoners of coyotes in the 1930s and 1940s were also detached, stoic killers, but they were grown men drawing a salary for their efforts, not teenage boys romantic about the American West. Interestingly, though, they did romanticize the animals they executed. Federal wolf hunters and the stockmen in whose interests they worked were known in those years for anthropomorphizing their targets, giving them names and personalities. The Bureau of Biological Survey’s celebration of the craftiness and worthiness of their canine opponents seemed almost to echo the Indian Wars.

  As obvious as the psychology of that was, it nonetheless bequeathed to us stories of a last few individual wolves—Rags, Whitey, Lefty, the Greenhorn wolf, the Custer wolf, and female wolves the hunters name
d Bigfoot and Unaweap. Then there was the famous female Three-Toes, so desperate to find a mate in a now wolfless Great Plains that she eventually seduced and mated with a collie. Having betrayed humans by going feral, Three-Toes’s domesticated paramour soon enough followed her (along with their wolf-dog hybrid pups) to his death at the hands of bureau hunters.

  By 1923 the possibilities for pursuing heroic, last-stand wolves in the Lower 48 were virtually over. It was at this point—in moves just as psychologically transparent as before—that the Biological Survey first feigned shock at, then resignation to, just how frightful and destructive a predator the coyote actually was. The truth was that, with wolves gone, the bureau badly needed coyotes to serve as uber-predators for the purpose of keeping the agency alive. But it was also true that no one at the bureau ever made the connection that wholesale eradication of gray wolves was removing the coyote’s sworn enemy of the past 20,000 years. In modern Yellowstone National Park in our own time, we have had ringside seats to this process working in reverse, as gray wolves have rejoined coyotes in places like Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. But back in the 1920s, as wolf after wolf disappeared, the coyote nation found itself in a new world where it had become target number one, slated for official extinction at the hands of the American state.

  So the lead-in to the shocking Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 was a wolfless 1920s America. American policymakers have always needed enemies, and with wolves gone, the coyote stepped unsuspectingly into the glare of a very intense predator-hatred spotlight. Suddenly (or so the bureau asserted), cattlemen who had paid little attention to coyotes before realized that “heavy losses of calves, heretofore attributed to wolves have evidently been due to coyotes”—which were now, shockingly, more visible in America than anyone could remember. Whether coyotes really were filling the niche of wolves, or whether many of those stock losses (as scientists who studied the matter in the 1930s believed) were exaggerated or actually caused by feral dogs was not really a matter of science, since a bureau that had once been a vehicle for pure science now only devoted 3 percent of its budget to scientific study.

  In this vacuum of reliable information, the coyote assumed the mantle, in a phrase the bureau would use soon and often, of “the archpredator of our time.” Even some of the romance got transferred. To increase coyote worthiness as a bureau opponent, distinctive coyotes began to acquire names, such as the “Rick Creek coyote” in Colorado or “Old Crip,” a female in Texas that, finally trapped in 1944, supposedly drowned herself rather than be taken. Among themselves, in their own packs and even among other animals inhabiting their world, coyotes were always individuals, as distinctive from one another as we are. Now the humans who pursued them began to distinguish individual coyotes, but in a move that cannot have made any sense to wild coyotes at all, their human enemies began to bestow on them both personalities and motives that oddly resembled those of fascist figures with designs on the American way.

  In our twenty-first-century world, the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. “Species cleansing,” on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis, to flightless birds, clubbed and battered to extinction across the islands of the Pacific when Polynesians and later Europeans arrived there, to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers and Carolina parakeets in twentieth-century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, the act of pushing fellow animals into black hole oblivion.

  When Henry David Thoreau, lamenting the phenomenon in 1856, wrote that he did not like to think that some “demigod” had come before him to pluck from the heavens the best of the stars, that he “wished to know an entire heaven and an entire earth,” he was mourning a deep time human activity that likely extends back as far as the epoch of Lascaux and Chauvet caves. Even so, few if any organized states have ever been so coldly calculating about species cleansing as to set into law a statute largely conceived as a strategy to exterminate a singular mammal native to its continent. If residents of Queens or the Upper West Side want to know why coyotes are sleeping in their flowerbeds or peering down from the rooftops of bars, the interrogation can begin here, with twentieth-century America’s Dr. Strangelove designs to eradicate the animals wholesale.

  It is also the primary reason why, two decades after American ecologists first organized to begin mapping out the study of Darwinian relationships, the ten-year plan for coyote eradication in the form of the Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 became a line in the sand for many of the scientists of the period. What ensued from 1931 to 1950 between science and federal policy amounted almost to a predator-prey dialectic. On one side was a scientific community becoming convinced that a federal species-cleansing program for coyotes (and predators in general) was a stunning, myopic mistake, without scientific basis, carrying with it profound collateral damage to nature. On the other was a government bureau, with almost frenzied support from livestock associations, the Farm Bureau, and legislators from the rural West, determined to seize its main chance with a witches’ brew of poisons stimulated by World War II. This forgotten war in American history was epic. And unlike other wars of the era, it was one we lost.

  From the perspective of the coyote going about its usual rounds, finding mates, establishing territories, and forming packs to enable alphas to raise up new generations of pups, its status as archpredator presented both danger and opportunity. Shot at on sight, run down with cars, trucks, and dogs, and endlessly tempted with easy treats that disguised mortal danger in the form of traps or poison, coyotes in the early twentieth century found themselves pushed hard to explore new chances in a modernizing world.

  Acquiring human champions meant nothing to coyotes, but they were materially affected by the fact that since Europeans had arrived, scarcely any humans spoke well of them (save traditional Indians who still credited Coyote with the creation of North America). Along with Ernest Thompson Seton, a usual suspect in such matters was John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and of a kind of philosophy of American nature worship that endures in activist environmentalism today. But like everyone else at the time, Muir knew little of predator ecology and nothing of the indigenous Coyote lore of his adopted state of California. His Colorado compatriot as a nature writer was Enos Mills, like Muir not a sportsman but a strong advocate of a new idea: the virtue of being in nature without a gun. Gun in hand, Mills had found coyote howls “menacing.” But weaponless in the wild, not thinking of coyotes as targets, he realized that howling coyotes were actually playful, full of merriment. Eventually he concluded that as the scourge of mice and gophers, a coyote “does man more good than harm.” Living with them high up in his mountain valley below Long’s Peak, Mills came to believe that “wise coyote” knew more than we newly minted Americans ever suspected.

  It shouldn’t surprise us now that the first group of Americans after Indians finally to “get” coyotes were scientists. Elliott Coues, a frontier scientist who spent considerable time in coyote country, expressed an initial lukewarm admiration in 1873, the year after Mark Twain’s description in Roughing It. America’s unique wild canid, Coues wrote, “theoretically compels a certain degree of admiration, viewing his irrepressible positivity of character and his versatile nature. If his genius has nothing noble or lofty about it, it is undeniable that few animals possess so many and so various attributes, or act them out with such dogged perseverance.”

  Understanding of the role predators like coyotes played had its beginnings when scientific naturalists formed the Ecological Society of America, which met for the first time in
1914. America’s founding ecologists, Frederick Clements, Charles C. Adams, and Victor Shelford, agreed at that gathering on several basic strategies for their field, among them the study of adaptation that had been so critical to Charles Darwin’s insights, an investigation of the flow of energy through nature, an analysis of “climax conditions” (which fascinated Nebraskan Clements), and development of better insights into how humans disturbed the natural world. Shelford, who had published the landmark Animal Communities in Temperate America just the year before, pushed his fellows to recognize and work on biotic communities too.

  But the most old-fashioned research topic of all—an idea Western culture had known since the time of Aristotle as “the balance of nature,” the presence of a dynamic equilibrium in the natural world—began to push ecological science in the direction of understanding the role of predators. The Biological Survey’s policies assumed the European folk position: predators were entirely disposable, and the banishment of wolves and cougars and coyotes from America would create a civilized paradise for deer and elk and ranchers and sheepmen. This thinking ultimately became the rapier point of scientific inquiry.

  The man who would become the most famous ecologist of this era, Aldo Leopold, would admit that all the way up until the early 1920s, he had thought in Elysian Fields terms himself. But years later, reviewing the book The Wolves of North America by bureau stars Stanley Young and Edward Goldman, Leopold wrote that he had come to realize that a predator-free “paradise” contained a fatal non sequitur. How had it happened that the wolf and coyote population had failed “to wipe out its own mammalian food supply” millennia before Europeans had ever come to North America? Between 1914 and 1945, Leopold’s colleagues had studied their way to an understanding of the balances that had kept American ecologies healthy for century after century without human intervention. But somehow, Leopold wrote, the bureau and men like Young and Goldman had obstinately refused to hear this rather self-evident message.