by Dan Flores
Gray wolf tracks, Montana, 2009. Courtesy Dan Flores.
The experience of the Yellowstone coyotes when the wolves returned after an absence of seventy years is now a famous park story. “Before wolves the coyotes were the big dogs on the block. Then we introduced gray wolves out of Canada to the park, and they went swaggering through places like the Lamar Valley, putting the fear of God in those coyotes. I forget exactly how many dead coyotes we documented over the first few years.” Doug pauses. “But there was, you know, a real big spike in dead coyotes two, three years after wolf recovery, and 90 percent of them were at the elk carcasses that wolves killed.… I recall over one hundred dead coyotes the first two years.” In that initial set of encounters, the elk carcass banquet wolves provided in places like the Lamar Valley was simply irresistible to local coyotes. They’d had the run of the valley for decades, so at first they’d darted boldly in to snatch a meal when the wolves were sated and meat drunk. On occasions it worked; most of the time, the coyote ended up dead.
Yet unlike at Isle Royale, where wolves entirely wiped out the small resident coyote population, the Yellowstone coyotes survived. “Now we hardly ever pick up a dead coyote killed by wolves,” Doug adds. “I can tell you from walking around Yellowstone all the time, there are good coyote numbers out there and that suggests some type of coexistence now.”
This brand-new wolf-coyote interaction is important to track, it seems to me, for what it tells us about the deep evolutionary history of both species. In the dimness of continental history, coyotes evolved to occupy a niche adjacent to and in conjunction with the one wolves occupied. The current scientific argument holds that coyotes acquired many of their behavioral traits—including their nervous wariness and the stunning intelligence that allows them to survive so well in our midst—by living in close association with their dangerous larger relative, the gray wolf. The return of the gray wolf, in particular, to Coyote America has come as a bit of future shock, and not just for those used to an America without wolves. It is future shock for the coyotes, too, which must have thought a world without gray wolves was coyote nirvana.
If the coyote is what it is not because of a comparatively recent relationship with humans but because of its ancient and evolutionary relationship with wolves, then understanding coyotes within the context of an intact wolf community seems crucial to knowing coyotes. If we want to understand why coyotes have been such a success in modern history, why they’re hunting geese along the lakeside in Chicago and learning to wait for traffic to pass on interstate highways, we have to look directly at how they came by adaptations that made one of the most persecuted animals in America also its most wildly successful one.
Observation of wolves and coyotes interacting with one another and with prey in Yellowstone National Park has become critical to biologists’ and the public’s understanding of how predation worked in ancient America. Courtesy Dan Flores.
A pair of coyotes joins a wolf, a grizzly, and ravens over a carcass in Yellowstone Park. Jim Peaco photo, 2013. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Watching wolves and coyotes in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley is a bit like going to the premiere of a major new film in Los Angeles. Several dozen nattily dressed people, attired in the most recent offerings from Eddie Bauer and REI, their late-model Jeep and BMW and Mercedes SUVs parked nearby, are in a kind of receiving line, peering through their Swarovski spotting scopes at the celebrities, who consist primarily of the park’s new wolf population. Fall in among this group and unless host Rick McIntyre points someone out—or you run into folks you know—you can end up unaware that you’re rubbing shoulders with any manner of famous people from around the globe. Writers and journalists, well-known academics from far-flung universities, superintendents of other national parks, they’re all among the throngs of people assembled at the valley turnouts for these events. So are a large number of people from small communities near Yellowstone who are obviously passionate about predators.
With amiable and well-connected park public coordinator Rick McIntyre as our guide, Sara and I are quickly immersed in a predator observation culture that has come to thrive in Yellowstone over the past two decades. Red-haired baby boomer Rick is a native New Englander, educated at the University of Massachusetts by old-school natural resource professors who never could have appreciated something like deliberately restoring gray wolves to a national park long lacking them. Rick introduces us to a congenial and generous group, all fans of charismatic predators, all with a fanaticism for meticulous observation, who clearly know individual animals by name or number and follow them through all seasons across the sprawling geography of the park.
In late September 2013, the sought-after movie stars are the members of the Junction Butte wolf pack. The Gray Wolf Restoration team released seven wolf packs from Canada into the park in 1995 and 1996, with the Crystal Creek pack of 1995 and the Druid pack of 1996 eventually battling it out for control of the Lamar Valley. The Junction Butte pack consists this September of eleven wolves, three sisters and two brothers among them. Nine are gray; two are black. To avoid humanizing them, park personnel don’t give either wolves or coyotes names, but the volunteer wolf watchers call the gray alpha female of this pack “Ragged Tail.” The alpha male is a tall, thin gray wolf known affectionately as “Puff,” a name bestowed on him in younger days when sarcoptic mange left him with mere patches of fur.
This first morning Rick has located the Junction Butte wolves using radiotelemetry equipment, and as we watch them string out across a sagebrush slope four miles from our overlook, Rick points out Puff, now fully recovered and “probably the fastest wolf” in the pack. “Even though he doesn’t give the appearance of being a really strong wolf, he is. He’s become maybe the best hunter in Yellowstone,” Rick adds.
That comment becomes a prophecy. Later that day Puff almost single-handedly pulls down a young cow elk in the Lamar Valley, and for the rest of the afternoon the admiring roadside crowds train their Swarovskis on the scene and exclaim as if Paul Prudhomme were preparing a tableside meal on Jackson Square. We do the same, but as the pack devours the elk, I can’t help noticing that there is not a coyote in sight.
Twenty-fours hours later, after members of the Junction Butte pack have eaten their fill, then trotted some six to eight miles west to rest and digest, we set up our spotting scope to glass the kill site from the day before. And now, with the wolves a safe distance away, we at once see coyotes where there had been none. Two of them, animals that appear, through our scopes, to be fully grown adults, are on the kill site, scavenging what remains. In the midst of an entourage of ravens and magpies, one of them is bracing itself and pulling up what seems, even at this distance, to be fairly large chunks of bone and flesh. The two coyotes work the carcass by turns for about fifteen minutes before a third coyote, what some biologists refer to as a young transient, or “floater,” not attached to a pack, approaches from the river. At that point one of the original tandem dashes out to deflect this newcomer, and after a short pursuit, coyote number three retreats.
These coyotes are in the right geography to be descendants of a prewolf coyote pack here known as the Bison Peak Pack, one of eleven contiguous coyote packs once stacked neatly side by side, like eggs in a carton, up and down the Lamar Valley. We are looking at these coyotes across three-quarters of a mile of distance, and even through a 50X spotting scope, they appear much smaller than the wolves on this kill the day before. Otherwise their actions are similar, and indeed some of the tourists watching this morning seem to think they’re observing gray wolves. Through atmospheric heat-wriggles magnified by the spotting scope, we can see one of the coyotes scent-rolling in what remains of the carcass, while the other—bracing all four of its feet, its tail curled under in an arc—manages to pull the carcass entirely off the ground and drags it backward and uphill toward the trees, sending ravens and magpies into spiraling, flapping, protesting flight. We are too far away to hear the cacophony of bird insults, but watching
, it isn’t too difficult to imagine the din.
“It’s a pretty good bet those coyotes were there all the time, probably lurking back in the aspen groves yesterday,” Rick offered. “It’s taken till this morning for them to feel confident enough to approach that kill.”
A Lamar Valley coyote’s simple act of pulling the remains of a wolf kill uphill and into a forest rests on 20,000 years or more of competition between coyotes and gray wolves. As predators of pursuit, coyotes became one of the fastest animals in the world, slower than cheetahs or pronghorns, to be sure, but capable of speeds up to forty-three miles per hour. Only seven or eight animals in the world are faster. Nonetheless, on an open plain, wolves can run down a coyote. Among the morphological changes and learned behaviors coyotes bring to bear on their relationship with their wolf cousins, one is to engage with them, when possible, in either forested or hilly settings, where the smaller, quicker coyote can dodge and weave and outmaneuver a wolf or can lead a pursuing wolf downhill, then quickly swap directions and escape uphill while the heavier wolf spins out on the turn.
One scientist associated with the study of Yellowstone coyotes is Bob Crabtree, who in 1989 landed a National Park Service grant to examine the park’s coyotes on the eve of wolf recovery. Crabtree’s PhD is from the University of Idaho, where he studied a similarly protected coyote population on the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State. He’s also an activist on the board of the San Francisco–based Project Coyote and has sparred in print with the Division of Wildlife Services, the successor to the Bureau of Biological Survey’s PARC. One interviewer described him as a scientist who couldn’t string together seven words without including an expletive. I liked the guy already.
Crabtree has used his work on those rare coyotes protected from both wolves and humans as a kind of baseline, and he argues that when coyote populations are unmolested—the situation at Hanford, and Yellowstone from the late 1930s until wolf reintroduction in the mid-1990s—their numbers stabilize at the carrying capacity of the local landscape. Crabtree’s work indicates that before wolves returned, the Lamar Valley had a coyote population of eighty animals, most of them members of one of the eleven packs there. In this situation, even in a game-rich national park, coyote litters were slightly small, averaging 5.4 pups, with only 1.5 pups per litter surviving into autumn. Coyote populations thus were stable across decades. It’s what could have happened in 1920s and 1930s America once the bureau wiped out wolves. But because of bureau and ag community intransigence about coyotes, of course it didn’t.
And what happened when wolves returned and at once began to harass and kill coyotes? According to Crabtree, within three years the Lamar Valley coyote population dropped from eighty to thirty-six. Most of those coyotes were killed outright by the wolves, the overwhelming majority in the battles around carcasses that Doug Smith had mentioned. Sometimes, as at the Lamar site still known to the biologists as “Dead Puppy Hill,” wolves even excavated coyote dens and killed the pups inside. No wonder the coyotes we watched in the valley waited until the Junction Butte wolf pack was eight miles away before visiting that kill site.
Ultimately, whether it’s persecution by gray wolves or by humans, harassment and killing of coyotes triggers the same set of responses, adaptations hardwired by evolution into coyote genes. As the coyote sees the world, allow it to live out its life without its neck on a guillotine, and it will rear a sufficient number of pups to reach the carrying capacity of its territory and no more. But it’s had to survive less benign circumstances for many thousands of years. Hound it and mark it for extermination, and not only will its biology defeat you every time, but it will colonize into new settings where you never in your wildest dreams expected to confront yellow eyes peering out of the twilight.
If anyone in the scientific community doubted Major E. A. Goldman’s sincerity about the coyote being the “archpredator” of 1930s America, the Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 disabused him or her of any illusion that the bureau would renounce extermination. The act originated in 1928 in a Texas congressman’s plan to wipe out coyotes once and for all. Once proposed the idea gained momentum and precision: Congress would appropriate $1 million a year for ten years “to promulgate the best methods of eradicat[ing], suppress[ing], or bringing under control” primarily coyotes but also a suite of other “varmints” the United States regarded as unworthy wild citizens of the republic.
Almost 150 scientists from some of the most distinguished universities and research facilities in the country at once signed a petition protesting the Animal Damage Control Bill, arguing among other things that wholesale attempts to eradicate coyotes would produce enormous collateral damage among innocent animals. Even the bureau’s now elderly founder, C. Hart Merriam, came out publicly against doubled-down poisoning. But extermination advocate Scott Leavitt of Montana agreed to serve as the chief sponsor of the bill in Congress, and Edward Taylor of Colorado—soon to become famous as the architect of the Taylor Grazing Act, which ended homesteading in the United States—was his wingman in the effort to “clean out this scourge.”
Despite a heroic battle waged by the mammalogists in testimony, newspapers, and magazines like Outdoor Life, Congress passed the bill, and President Herbert Hoover signed the Animal Damage Control Act into law on March 2, 1931. In its claimed goals of protecting livestock, saving valuable game animals, and suppressing diseases like rabies, the act specifically designated the “national forests and other areas of the public domain,” along with state lands and private holdings, as staging grounds for the eradication or “control” of predators. Notably, the bill did not mention the national parks. Indeed, Joseph Grinnell’s proposal that predators remain unmolested in the parks would become the single victory the scientists realized from taking on the bureau’s policy of extermination. And even that concession would wait until 1935.
As Major Goldman had promised the year before, this time the bureau pinned the species-cleansing bull’s-eye directly on America’s junior wolf. Gray wolves were gone; Mexican, red, and eastern wolves had dwindled to a few straggling, shadowy remnants. Now, with $1 million a year to spend on the prospect, the bureau deemed it señor coyote’s turn for shock and awe.
But it turned out that the bureau still faced hurdles. Goldman’s reference during the 1930 panel in New York to “additional studies” pointed directly at the work of two mammal ecologists who would become legendary figures in twentieth-century American conservation. At the time, however, they were, in effect, working for the man, with the stated goal of buttressing the case against the scientific critics who were fighting the bureau’s predator policies. The Minnesota brothers, Olaus and Adolph Murie, were born ten years apart in the late 1800s. Both had taken advanced degrees in the new field of wildlife management at the University of Michigan, and both began their careers as government biologists. The older brother, Olaus, in an odd quirk of fate, had gone to work for the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1920 and quickly impressed his superiors with a landmark study on elk in Jackson Hole, which he completed in 1927.
The Murie brothers would become famous for a shared conviction: that scientists must above all be ethical. When Olaus’s superior, E. A. Goldman, approached him with the proposal that he study Jackson Hole’s elk predators, coyotes, Goldman expected Murie’s research to show that coyotes were archpredators whose depredations on stock and game animals had grown so egregious that the species deserved a death sentence. Remarkably, younger brother, Adolph, working for the Wildlife Division of the National Park Service, was taking on a similar project in Yellowstone at almost the same time. Olaus Murie’s Food Habits of the Coyote in Jackson Hole, Wyoming appeared in print in 1935, followed five years later by Adolph’s Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone. The bureau would coldly ignore both volumes. Yet they turned out to be extremely important studies in the scientific firestorm that never stopped singeing people around the Animal Damage Control Act from the 1930s on.
The problem all along for both
camps was that no one from either side had good, untainted evidence about coyote natural history or food habits. The bureau had accounts from ranchers and sheepmen about coyote predation on calves and sheep, and its hunters turned in reports on coyote stomach contents from animals they poisoned and trapped. But the former were hardly unbiased; they attributed kills to coyotes whenever they saw them on carcasses, even though the original cause of death was often unclear. As for the bureau’s field men, they were entirely untrained in scientific techniques of analysis. Yet, while Kaibab and Kern County seemed to support intuitions about the balance of nature, in truth the scientists had no good studies on the diets of coyotes either.
The two Murie brothers aimed to correct that. Olaus, for his part, conducted a classic “stomach contents/scat study” in a straightforward effort to determine what his coyote subjects in Jackson Hole ate. Younger brother Adolph, trained a decade later, was more up-to-date and more thorough. His Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone was an actual ecological study, analyzing both predator and its various prey animals, along with the influences of weather, disease, and even history. Not appearing in print until 1940, five years after the national parks were excluded from the bureau’s extermination campaign, Adolph’s study would even take on some of the bureau’s and its supporters’ most treasured (but untested) myths about coyotes.
Reading these two studies today, it is clear why Olaus’s Jackson Hole study infuriated his bureau superiors, who without any evidence whatsoever had succeeded in painting coyotes as a bane of nature and civilization. For four years, from 1931 until 1935, Olaus collected data, much of it from the Teton Game Reserve, with its large elk population. Yet by the end of his work, he had to conclude that mice, gophers, and hares were the chief prey of Jackson Hole’s coyotes. Rather than archpredators of game animals, coyotes turned out to be omnivorous generalists. Murie found that the 1,629 dietary items he analyzed represented twenty-eight different mammals, ten birds (including their eggs), and, in a sampling he admitted was probably weak, nine items that were either fish, insects, or plant matter. An archpredator in the vicinity of an elk preserve ought to have been meat-drunk with elk, and Murie did find elk in coyote scat and stomach contents. But he concluded from observation that virtually all of it was scavenged carrion. Ethically, he had to report that coyotes appeared to be “unimportant” in elk predation.
