Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  “The next step was, Can we implement this? Can we find ranchers who will work with us? But we just couldn’t get anybody to bite. They felt like they already have the solution—we can aerial-gun, we can trap, we can use M-44s, so this is cute, but there’s no need for it.”

  I’m mulling this information. I’m pretty certain the relentless pressure agency hunters put on them is one goad to coyotes taking lambs. They have larger litters to compensate and need more calories to rear them. But I ask, “So how expensive is it to sterilize? And how do you maintain a population of the coyotes themselves if you’re sterilizing them?”

  “We thought of that,” Eric says. “But our idea is to make it surgical, just aim it at problem coyote packs. It’s pretty expensive, $400 to $500 per coyote to catch them, do vasectomies on the males, and tie the tubes of the females. But over three years you’d come out even or ahead because of the lambs you’d save. We never even saw pair-bond changes among the coyotes; sometimes they still excavated dens together. Just getting the ranchers to try it has been the main problem. They’re used to getting our help nearly free, so there’s no way you could ask them to pay for it.”

  I was remembering a story I’d heard about a Wildlife Services public hearing in Idaho to explain sterilization. A rancher at the back of the room had raised his hand: “Son, I don’t think you understand our problem. Them coyotes ain’t fucking our sheep, they’re eatin’ ’em.”

  Julie brings me back to the present. “So we looked at cheaper, chemical methods. Last year we tested eighteen pairs using a drug that works extremely well on dogs. The male coyotes got ten times the dog dose, which, as long as they were alone, pretty much killed their sperm production. But as soon as they were reunited with their mates, fifteen of the eighteen pairs still got pregnant!” Julie still found this incredible. Sara and I do too. “That’s just not supposed to happen, but somehow they’re overcoming the drugs as a result of their social bonds. They even had normal-sized litters. Coyotes will make a liar out of you every time!”

  “Anyway, right now, even if we had a viable chemical, the delivery system could be problematic,” Eric says. “If it went out as bait, it would be hard to target the problem pack; plus there are endangered animals out there like swift foxes that could ingest a bait. We’ll be testing this for a long time before we’ll ever get EPA approval.”

  I nod that I understand that nonlethal controls apparently aren’t on the docket for Wildlife Services anytime soon. “So in the meantime it’s aerial gunning, M-44s, and trapping.” They’d not said anything about 1080 sheep collars, the only way the infamous predacide can be used anymore, although—in another classic of coyote deduction—the more poison collars have gotten used, the more coyotes have figured them out. The hip new way for a coyote to attack a sheep is to hamstring it from behind rather than, as instinct would dictate, to grab the neck and crush the windpipe—and perchance puncture a 1080 collar.

  “Yep, that’s pretty much it.” Then Eric adds, “With the toxins gone, the field guys are just trying to solve problems for our cooperating ranchers and counties. They’re trying to be surgical.”

  “Problem solvers,” Julie echoes. “We can’t require our cooperators do nonlethal techniques anyway.”

  “Well, OK then, what’s the annual surgical coyote kill for the agency these days?”

  There’s a bit of a pause.

  Eric answered, “Well, I think the last couple of years, about 70,000 a year.”

  I actually already knew the ballpark figure, but 70,000 to 80,000 coyotes a year that are problematic enough to fly a goddamn plane off after them? “Given their replacement biology, what’s the logic of that? This seems like it’s never going to end.”

  “The way the ranchers see it, as long as you’re taking some of them, you’re reducing the risk,” Julie insists. “And there’s just the social thing of believing something is being done, a psychological thing.”

  “It has to be something they can see,” Eric says. “Sterilization seems like hocus-pocus—you can’t see anything—but shooting… and even nonlethal stuff like guard dogs, guard llamas, burros also work, and those are things ranchers can see, a visible effect.”

  I decide to direct one more question at Julie before we go out and drive the grounds of the facility. I’ve talked to enough coyote biologists by this point to know that studying coyote personalities is cutting-edge and that some of the boldness/shyness studies have been done here. “So, Wildlife Services seems to base much of its reason for existence on the proposition that there are always going to be problem coyotes because of the individual variation among them.” The question comes out as more of a statement, but Julie confirms it.

  “That is what I believe. They’re individuals. Like people, some get into trouble.”

  We spend the next half hour navigating a pickup around and through the Predator Research grounds, sometimes stopping and watching the coyotes pace the perimeters of their pens. The facility has wire-mesh pens housing a population of one hundred adult coyotes divvied up into mated pairs, fed to keep them around twenty-five pounds, vaccinated, and treated for heartworms. They look healthy, if somewhat small, to me. On the couple of stops we make—the mountain valley setting of this facility is absolutely stunning on this late fall day—coyotes glide by, their golden eyes fixed on us; they move like water flowing in every direction and seemingly at every possible distance. And all of them are watching.

  Sara asks what turns out to be our final question. “Do you guys have a relationship with any of the environmental groups, like Project Coyote for instance, or just grazing associations?”

  I am in the front seat and can’t see Eric, but I see Julie roll her eyes.

  One of a hundred resident coyote inmates at Wildlife Services Predator Research Facility. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  “Our greatest advocate is the American sheep industry. That’s who we work with. As for Camilla Fox and Project Coyote, they and a bunch of others have filed a lawsuit against us, about forty pages long. I just deleted it. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not going to waste my time.”

  Among the vocal defenders of coyotes across American history, the naturalists and the scientists are easy to pick out, people like Elliott Coues, Joseph Grinnell, and Olaus and Adolph Murie. There was the filmmaker Walt Disney. Then there were the writers: Ernest Thompson Seton, Enos Mills, J. Frank Dobie, and Edward Abbey, although the latter’s shout-out to coyotes in Desert Solitaire about whether coyotes are eating enough sheep—“I mean, enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy, and well fed”—was more a trademark Abbey thumb in the eye of western ranching than anything else. With the poison controversy of the 1960s and 1970s, though, modern nonprofit environmental organizations and their presidents or directors became the ones pushing hard to relieve the unrelenting pressure on predators like coyotes. The Fund for Animals was such a group. Rodger Schlickeisen, longtime president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife and a man the western environmental newspaper High Country News once called “the most influential conservationist you’ve never heard of,” was prominently another. Founded in 1947, Defenders of Wildlife has been among the most ardent advocates for coyotes since the 1960s.

  So at times have more mainstream groups, like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Audubon Society. But more recently, niche environmental groups like the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have been advocating for the rights of coyotes. In particular, a San Francisco–based organization called Project Coyote, founded in 2008 by Camilla Fox, has adopted a novel approach to taking on Wildlife Services, as well as demonstrating opposition to a highly controversial kind of coyote “event” that has become increasingly common across the country.

  The latter would be the sponsored public coyote-hunting contest, with prizes (and often gambling pots) based on body counts for the most coyotes the contestants can, basically, murder over a week or a weekend. Coy
ote contests are often held by gun stores or local sportsmen’s groups whose patrons are all in on the premise that failing to kill an elk or deer last fall has everything to do with coyotes (and in the West, now wolves) on the landscape. In 2000 the Fund for Animals financed a documentary on the practice, Killing Coyote, made by two filmmaker friends of mine from Missoula. It’s not for the faint of heart. Coyote prize contests are advertised as family and youth events across the West, and despite national and international outrage, they are showing up in places like Pennsylvania. In Camilla Fox, though, coyote contests have a formidable opponent.

  In 2013 I was in Northern California to do a talk on coyotes at the elegantly preserved nineteenth-century Nevada Theater in Nevada City. After a drive across the Central Valley, the visit gave me a chance to sit down with Camilla Fox at an outdoor restaurant in Larkspur, her home on the north end of San Francisco Bay, and find out why she had become such a passionate advocate in the modern incarnation of the coyote war.

  Camilla Fox is striking. She is attractive, also charismatic, also tiny. She delivers information calmly and with the care of someone raised in an academic family, or so I think as I listen, and I turn out to be right. Her father, Dr. Michael W. Fox, long a leading researcher in the field of canid ecology, had a canid research station connected to his position at Washington University in St. Louis. “As a little girl I grew up with a wolf in the house and lived with her for fifteen years,” she told me. “My father was never closer to any being than to that wolf. I was just inculcated into all things canid at an early age.”

  When her parents split, she’d lived with her mother in Maine and ended up attending Boston University, majoring in women’s studies rather than biology. Then in 2006, after several years of work with environmental nonprofits, she went to graduate school at Prescott College in Arizona to write a very specific thesis about what she’d managed to make happen in Marin County, California, around Wildlife Services and coyotes.

  “This was the project where you persuaded Marin to drop its relationship with Wildlife Services, right?”

  “Exactly. I had learned back in 1996 about this agency and its use of 1080 in sheep collars. The way it works all over the West is that county ag commissioners actually contract for Wildlife Services to come in. The county puts up 30 to 70 percent of the cost of bringing in agency hunters, and the federal government pays the rest. In Marin the whole county was completely clueless about this arrangement. It functions with this aura of secrecy because once taxpayers realize what they’re funding, they won’t stand for it; they’re outraged. This was at a time when a California ballot measure banned the use of M-44s and 1080 collars. Our board of supervisors in Marin was shocked to find out what they were signing off on every year.

  “So we met with our ranching community. Marin is a place where wildlife is important, and we sought common ground with them. It led to developing an all-nonlethal coyote program for the county using shepherds and guard animals and fencing, and often bringing the sheep inside enclosures at night, and to Marin breaking off its old arrangement with Wildlife Services. In five years we were able to show that lamb losses went from 5.5 percent under lethal control to 2.2 percent under our system.”

  At this point, I’m recalling Wildlife Services scientists’ assertion to me that paid snipers still had to go after problem coyotes in the Marin system. Camilla had also mentioned that she’d not yet had time to publish her thesis on the Marin plan versus Wildlife Services in a peer-reviewed journal, a piece of information the people at the Predator Research Facility had wanted to make sure I knew.

  But I ask, “So have other counties around the country followed Marin’s lead?”

  “There’s been a lot of interest, and some have asked for our data, but so far only Sonoma County has implemented something similar.”

  “Have you interacted much with the people at Wildlife Services? It struck me visiting with their scientists that, unlike the Forest Service with its multiple constituencies, this is an agency with only one interest group, the agricultural community, which blinkers them to bigger realities. Their scientists may be myopic. They don’t seem irrational though.”

  “Wildlife Services does all this great research at their centers,” Camilla agreed, “but there’s this disconnect in translating it into the field, to the guys who are most used to traps and airplanes. There’s some grudging acknowledgment of that. I think there are a few people there who are younger, smart, well intentioned, but they get burned out from the inertia of the old killing system. There’s concern, too, that if Wildlife Services shifts to something different, somehow their funding’s going to dry up. I think they have a great opportunity to shift their whole paradigm. But it would be a big cultural shift.”

  It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon on the bay. Bright sun, drifting cotton-ball clouds, light traffic tending toward BMWs and sports cars idling a few feet away. I had just one more question for her.

  “Why coyotes, Camilla? Why spend your life fighting to protect them? The gods know they don’t need much help from us, do you think?”

  I’d spent twenty years among nonprofit environmentalists in the university town of Missoula, Montana, and I knew this was going to be a fat fastball down the middle for her, right at her group’s mission.

  “In a way, I’m doing this for us, for the sake of our moral compass. We’ve made coyotes the most persecuted native carnivore in North America. My board—lots of illustrious scientists and ethicists—estimates that considering all the ways we do it, we’re killing half a million coyotes a year, which averages one every minute! But here is our iconic song-dog, so prominent in our history, so unique compared to wolves or foxes that occur on other continents. If we can change the way we view and treat coyotes, we can change the way we treat nature itself.”

  Within a few months of my meeting with her, Project Coyote had managed, among other things, to get public coyote-hunting contests for prizes and gambling pots banned in California. This was going to be harder to do elsewhere, I knew, where “sport hunting for coyote control” strikes many as sanctioned by God. The real goal is to have convenient live targets, of course, but the argument often advanced is that gunshot coyotes make for more “game.”

  Poster for prize-based public coyote hunt, 2013. Courtesy Dan Flores.

  Of course, sport hunters don’t read peer-reviewed ecological articles. Since the time of the Murie brothers’ research, biologists have done some very fine-grained studies of coyote predation on the animals hunters like to shoot. The strongest case for coyote predation has long been the pronghorn antelope, as in some instances coyotes account for half the mortality of pronghorn fawns. Coyote predation on pronghorns, though, is complicated by livestock grazing, which impacts forage enough that antelope fawns end up weak and easy prey. Even so, antelope populations remain stable with that level of predation, in good part because female pronghorns long ago adapted to coyote pressure by birthing twins. This is a more ancient equation, for the coyote and the pronghorn alike, than we ever think to acknowledge.

  True enough, in the East and South coyotes are now the primary predators of whitetail fawns, although their effect is actually to create healthier deer herds more in balance with the setting than before. In the West, where mule deer are an important game animal, an intensive, long-term study of coyotes and mule deer in 2011 concluded flatly that “benefits of predator removal… will not appreciably change long-term dynamics of mule deer populations in the intermountain west.” In obstinate defiance of that science, in 2012 Utah passed a controversial Mule Deer Protection Act creating a predator bounty program that pays state hunters a $50 head-price for coyotes. In 2014, 7,041 coyotes paid with their lives for being in a state where neither hunters nor legislators bother to read science.

  Meanwhile, in states like Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and New Mexico, hunter-sponsored public coyote contests continue to go on, ostensibly “to protect game,” often for prizes. Sometimes the body counts reach as many as
two hundred animals over a weekend.

  Along with other groups, Project Coyote continues to battle hunts like these, now with a documentary film narrated by Peter Coyote that may finally blow open the disgrace of these coyote contests, which will struggle to survive in the glare of national and international attention. There’s no vantage from which they’re not despicable. Project Coyote also brings lawsuits. In November 2014, a coalition it assembled, which included the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Animal Welfare Institute, sued Mendocino County and Wildlife Services on the grounds that Mendocino had failed to submit its $142,356-a-year contract with Wildlife Services to environmental review as required by the California Environmental Quality Act. In February 2015 Project Coyote filed a second suit against the US Department of Agriculture, this time seconded by four additional environmental groups, over the department’s failure to conduct an environmental-impact assessment, as required by federal law, of Wildlife Services’ extensive predator-killing program in Idaho, financed entirely by taxpayer dollars.

  Coyotes discarded in the desert, the aftermath of a coyote-hunting contest in New Mexico, in 2015. Courtesy Kevin Bixby.

  In 2015 Camilla Fox was named the John Muir Conservation Awards’ Conservationist of the Year.

  My first-grade class picture shows me decked out in Davy Crockett gear straight out of the 1955 Disney series starring Fess Parker as the great American frontiersman. By the time of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, I looked more like one of the Indians the Crocketts of the world had displaced. Big History had unreeled in the years since I had matriculated from first grade, and pop culture was right there in the mix.