Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  One of the most prominent names in conservation in the decades on either side of the turn of the twentieth century was Grinnell, largely because of the radiant halo cast by George Bird Grinnell, a first-rank conservationist in an age that produced Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and the public-lands system that was their legacy. Grinnell had an illustrious career, founding the Audubon Society and becoming (along with TR) a charter member of the Boone and Crockett Club and later of the American Bison Society, which helped bring bison back from the brink of extinction. He was best known in his day for editing the prototype outdoor magazine, Forest and Stream, and for almost single-handedly promoting the Continental Divide region of northern Montana as a new national park, 1910’s Glacier National Park.

  The glow of Grinnell’s fame inspired other members of his large family, and among them was a younger cousin, Joseph Grinnell, who in 1916 would advance the “big idea” that provided ecologists their wedge issue as emerging critics of the bureau’s predator policies. Raised on western Indian reservations by his physician father, Joseph Grinnell grew up to become one of the West Coast’s most celebrated naturalists. In 1908, after a stint at Caltech, he got the University of California’s appointment as the first director of its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley, where he pioneered field techniques for the most careful and thorough collection of mammals and birds ever assembled for a state. As an original thinker, though, Grinnell made his major contribution to ecology with his proposal, in 1924, of the ecological niche, a fundamental insight into nature.

  The ecological niche breakthrough was critical for understanding wild coyotes and appreciating predators generally. In nature a “niche” is analogous to an occupation in human culture. As with doctors and dentists in rural regions of the human world, niches in nature sometimes go unfilled or can become vacant. In the case of wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions, an understanding of niches caused ecologists to worry about the result of vacancies. As Grinnell and his students were able to demonstrate, niches for predators had existed across time as part of the balance of nature that ancient societies had marveled at.

  In scientese, the coyote trotting across America and going about its ancient business occupied the niche of a midsize predator. It helped keep the populations of everything from mice to some ungulates in balance. The niche of the coyote-sized predator is almost universal across the world. It is filled by wild dogs in Africa, jackals in southern Europe and the Middle East, and marsupial carnivores on the great island continents of the Southern Hemisphere. The Tasmanian tiger was the equivalent of the gray wolf on that island, while the Tasmanian devil—surviving now only on Tasmania—was Australia’s coyote-sized carnivorous marsupial and occupied the same niche as a coyote. Humans introduced wild dingos to Australia 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, and with the extirpation of the marsupial carnivores, these true canids then occupied that ancient niche.

  The famous Kaibab Plateau deer episode in the 1920s furnished ecologists with a dramatic and helpful story for illustrating how predators create a balance in nature. By then bureau and bounty hunters had managed to erase wolves and mountain lions from the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and for good measure they had poisoned nearly 8,000 coyotes there. The evident consequence in the mid-1920s—exactly when scientists were first challenging the bureau’s predator policies—was a population explosion of mule deer on the Kaibab Plateau from roughly 4,000 to 100,000 animals that destroyed their browse and then suffered a catastrophic 60 percent die-off. In a much publicized (and ridiculed) move, Arizona novelist Zane Grey organized a nature-loving group, which included Hollywood actors, that attempted to drive the surviving animals to a new range. The main result was that Kaibab became a national story.

  While modern ecologists have questioned the simple conclusions contemporary scientists drew about Kaibab, at the time few ecologists looked for more nuanced explanations. That was especially true when after Kaibab, in 1927, a rodent population explosion in Kern County, California, left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice. That event also came on the heels of mass coyote poisonings. The lessons of Kaibab and Kern seemed so clear at the time that they served as evidence for the so-called Lotka-Volterra equations of that decade, algorithmic ecological models of how prey and predator populations follow an oscillating rise and fall of first the hunted, then their hunters.

  His niche insight gave Grinnell enormous gravitas in ecology, but it was only the opening to the proposal that led his fellows to begin their break with the bureau. Grinnell was also an ardent proponent of the new federally held public lands of America. Although by World War I America had established sixteen national parks since 1872, there was as yet no managing federal agency in charge of setting policy for America’s parks. But when the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 resulted in the damming of Hetch Hetchy Canyon, a large and scenic portion of Yosemite National Park, as a water source for the city, the anguished outcry from preservationists finally produced the creation of a National Park Service. The year was 1916.

  So there was now a National Park Service and an organic act that empowered it to preserve nature in the parks for future generations. In terms of policies to preserve nature, though, exactly how would the new Park Service manage these crown jewel American landscapes? Joseph Grinnell and one of his zoologists, Tracy Storer, laid out a suggestion in “Animal Life as an Asset of the National Parks,” an article they cowrote for the journal Science that same year.

  What Grinnell and Storer suggested was radical given what was already happening to predators in Yellowstone and Glacier. “As a rule,” they wrote, in the parks “predaceous animals should be left unmolested and allowed to retain their primitive relation to the rest of the fauna.” Presumably national park superintendents would be reading Science, and the two had a message. They were “naturalists,” they wrote, and as such were convinced there was a longstanding balance of nature relationship between predators and the local game animals. No worries, in other words, about sacrificing game to predators. Besides (they went on), “many of the predatory animals” were themselves “exceedingly interesting” to observe.

  The idea of offering wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes permanent refuge inside America’s national parks, where scientists could do “research in natural history” on them, was shocking at the time. In 1916 the bureau was still a decade away from reducing wolf numbers to single remaining animals like Three-Toes, and the Animal Damage Control Act was still fifteen years in the future. But Grinnell and Storer could see the direction bureau predator policies were taking. At least, they said, let’s do what we managed to do for iconic native animals like bison and make the parks refuges for both game animals and predators, places where the grand cycles of primitive America could remain forever intact.

  This “big idea” would be debated at meetings of the brand-new American Society of Mammalogists, founded in 1919, and in the pages of its publication, the Journal of Mammalogy. After a decade of success and widespread praise for their efforts, bureau leaders were gobsmacked to find that the scientific community was having doubts about what seemed to them nothing less than a mission of civilization. Some of the early stars of the bureau from the days when it had been a purely scientific agency, like founder C. Hart Merriam and Vernon Bailey, who had overseen its transition to predator control, attended these meetings and commanded great respect from their fellows. Merriam, legendary as the mind behind the idea of altitude-based life zones around the world, was the mammalogy society’s first president.

  Suggestions for reform centering on Grinnell’s idea began at the society’s annual conference in 1924. At first the scientists were polite to the point of deference in their questioning of the bureau. By this stage everyone knew the bureau had reduced wolves, even in the national parks, to a shadowy handful of animals and that its hunters had put out more than 3 million poison bait stations for coyotes, killing untold thousands of nontarget birds and
animals in the process. Scientists began their attempt to rein in the runaway program with papers emphasizing what a permanent step extinction was and the benefits predators conferred on “more valuable” ungulates by “removing weak and sickly animals” infected with diseases like septicemia or lumpy jaw.

  Charles C. Adams, a founder of the Ecological Society of America, took the argument gently to the next step with a talk titled “The Conservation of Predatory Mammals.” It directly supported Grinnell’s national park idea. In the national parks surely “there will be less need of predatory control,” Adams thought. After all, midsize predators like coyotes, he argued, “materially aid in rodent control.” Then he continued, “Without question our National Parks should be one of our main sanctuaries for predacious mammals.” But if the parks were expected “to make the predacious fauna safe,” they were going to have to be larger, and there were going to have to be more of them.

  The bureau’s Major Edward (or E. A.) Goldman—whose family had migrated from Pennsylvania to California in the nineteenth century and along the way had changed their name from Goltman to Goldman—responded to these first expressions of discontent from the scientific community. A highly accomplished field naturalist who had helped do foundational work in the natural history of Mexico, Goldman was becoming a wolf specialist, and he was now on his way to becoming a major figure in the coyote’s story. Goldman doubled down in his denial of a role for predators in America. Although he was “loath to contemplate the destruction of any species,” Goldman told the audience, surely as biologists they must know that the bureau had no choice but to “decide against such predatory animals as mountain lions, wolves, and coyotes.” Stepping away from current bureau policies would alienate both hunters and the livestock industry. The criticism he was hearing clearly rankled Goldman. He felt himself grow warm as he thundered at the assembly, “Large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.” And that was that.

  As far as some of the scientists were concerned, the bureau had thrown down the gauntlet. The society managed before its 1924 conference ended to create a committee to draw up a plan “for the preservation of predatory mammals” and for public-lands preserves to provide them a refuge. Obviously some in the scientific community were not going to back down. But at the Bureau of Biological Survey, those in the higher echelons realized that a line of sorts had been crossed. As it pondered the meeting of 1924, its public relations statements seemed to pull back ever so slightly. In 1925 the bureau’s annual report even appeared to embrace the Grinnell idea, concluding, “Little objection can be raised to the continuance of a limited number of predatory animals in national parks and in wilderness areas remote from civilization,” although the newfound tolerance the report implied conflicted seriously with the bureau’s simultaneous assistance in wiping out predators as fast as possible in those very parks.

  Goldman himself drew a different lesson from the 1924 conference, and in his fuming he penned an article the following year that in his mind settled the issue once and for all. In “The Predatory Mammal Problem and the Balance of Nature,” Goldman minced no words. Ecologists who prattled on about predators and the balance of nature were conveniently forgetting that the arrival of people from Europe had changed everything about North America. The balance of nature might have been fine for Indians, but with white people on the scene, the balance of nature on the continent had been, as he put it, “violently overturned, never to be reestablished.”

  As a result, leading ecologists remained wary and unconvinced that the bureau was going to be reasonable. The growing rift between scientists and the bureau festered throughout the late 1920s, and it got worse when the mammalogists learned from the bureau’s own figures that since 1924 government hunters had put out another 2,174,886 poisoned bait stations across the West. Now under the leadership of Stanley Young (who in public appearances began to imply, fraudulently, that he had a PhD), in 1929 the coyote-hunting division of the bureau gained a new name, Predatory Animal and Rodent Control (PARC). During its first full year, PARC hunters set out 181,887 bait stations in Colorado alone. True enough, in the wake of the scientific mutiny, the bureau’s director in the late 1920s, Paul Redington, tried to downplay the word “extermination” in his public pronouncements. In another stab at political correctness, he got the Denver Eradication Methods Lab’s name changed to the Control Methods Lab. But even he demonstrated telltale disbelief: “We face the opposition,” he announced incredulously in a talk to the faithful, “of those who want to see the mountain lion, the wolf, the coyote, and the bobcat perpetuated as part of the wildlife of the country.”

  At a planning conference in Ogden, Utah, in 1929, the bureau finally decided to take a stand against the Grinnell idea of allowing predators a refuge in the national parks: “We cannot favor sanctuaries for the breeding of mountain lions, wolves, bobcat, and coyotes,” the conference resolved. That same year, at the American Game Conference in December, chairman Aldo Leopold set out the evolving counterposition of the scientists with respect to predators. “No public agency” (guess which one) should control predators without substantial research first. Poisons should be an “emergency” control only. And “no predatory species should be exterminated over large areas.”

  At their 1930 annual meeting at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the mammalogists organized a panel specifically on predator policy and invited Edward Goldman and Vernon Bailey of the bureau to express their views. By 1930 the bureau had for all purposes extirpated wolves from the Lower 48 and advised and assisted in erasing gray wolves from the crown jewel national parks, Yellowstone and Glacier. If the scientists expected rueful regret about this, they were in for a rude awakening. In New York Goldman let the audience know in no uncertain terms that extermination was still the game, and now it was the coyote’s turn. His only qualification had to do with the science behind the policy, but secretly he thought studies then underway that would all but convict coyotes. So he put the matter to the panel this way: “It seems a reasonable forecast that additional studies will confirm the conclusion that the coyote is the archpredator of our time.”

  Yellowstone National Park was one of the laboratories where the bureau’s E. A. Goldman believed science would convict coyotes of high crimes against nature. It was also one of the prime locales where 1920s biologists thought we ought to protect and finally study predators. The world’s oldest national park has served as a setting to untangle natural relationships in America in almost every way imaginable for the past 150 years. So it’s no surprise that if you yearn to understand the role coyotes played in the changing ecology of the Biological Survey’s America, Yellowstone is one of the places to be. Coyotes and wolves, family cousins in a very old dog-eat-dog relationship, are encountering one another in several locations around North America now. But nowhere else provides quite the lessons as here for grasping coyotes as predators versus wolves as predators or how the gray wolf’s presence and absence have influenced the coyote biography. That was true in the 1930s, and it still is.

  The Yellowstone Wolf Project people, Doug Smith and Rick McIntyre in particular, are amenable to a visit to watch this ancient canine relationship renewed and revisited. So Yellowstone, the scene of so many bureau/biologist debates three-quarters of a century ago, is where you go.

  You can drive the road that traverses the marvelous Lamar Valley, in the once ignored northeastern quadrant of the park, just about any time of year and expect to see wolves and coyotes. But my fiancé Sara and I pick September, the weekend of the autumn equinox, for one last stretch of perfect Indian summer days up on the 7,000-foot Yellowstone Plateau. Doug, a major player in the 1995 release of the first Canadian gray wolves in the park, sets us up with Rick to go into the field, but first he offers me some thoughts. You could say, and you would be right, that on the topic of wolves and their effects on the Yellowstone ecosystem, Doug Smith’s thoughts are some of the savv
iest around.

  Smith looks exactly as you’d imagine a Yellowstone Park wolf biologist to look. Tall, fit, and handsome, with a Sam Elliott mustache, Doug is a little gray and grizzled at fifty-two. He got his PhD from the University of Nevada, then worked with some of the most famous wolf people in the world, including David Mech, in the few remaining wild wolf outposts in the Lower 48, Isle Royale National Park in Michigan among them. He was part of the crew when the park and the US Fish and Wildlife Service formed the Yellowstone Gray Wolf Restoration Project in 1994. Now, twenty years later, he is its head biologist and project leader. Generous with his time and knowledge, he lays out for me the basic elements of a fascinating story.

  “In general,” he tells me, “across North America, where you have wolves, you don’t have many coyotes.” A westerner, Doug pronounces the word KI-ohts, emphasis on the first syllable. “And where there are wolves, coyotes hunker down close to people, they get in close to towns, settlements, farms where they can use people as cover. They prefer people, who are more benign, to a wolf who’s stalking you all the time.” But Yellowstone is one of the places where wolves and coyotes hunt the same landscapes now. For the past two decades the park has given us a rare opportunity to observe how nature, disassembled with wolf extirpation in the 1920s, is stitching itself back together with the species’ restoration.