Coyote America

by Dan Flores

  When it came to changing opinions about coyotes, Walt Disney was sure in the mix. A Chicago native, Disney had spent his early professional career in Kansas City, but in 1924 he and his brother Roy had transferred their operations and fortunes to Hollywood, where they quickly became commercial successes with cartoons and shorts in the motion picture industry. Disney may have fought to keep the Cartoonists Guild out of Disney Studios, and he may have been a red-baiting Republican in 1950s Hollywood and a Goldwater Republican in the 1960s, but he had always been interested in animals. His studio effectively invented the nature documentary, and he inserted conservationist values into many of his films. The house he built at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs in 1957 gave him more chances to be in the country and to interact with desert coyotes, and he soon began to hear from friends about the coyotes hanging out in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. These coyote experiences brought Disney around to defending the little song-dogs of the western deserts and cities.

  The Coyote’s Lament of 1961 was just the beginning of Disney’s attempt to shape American attitudes about coyotes. He followed it later that fall with a theatrical release, Chico, the Misunderstood Coyote. For some moviegoers the star coyote’s name probably sounded vaguely familiar, and for a reason. “Chico” was none other than “Tito,” the heroine coyote in Ernest Thompson Seton’s story from sixty years before. Perhaps the Bambi-like storyline appealed to Disney. Chico is the story of an orphan pup whose family has been killed by ranchers. Captured, he is put in a rundown roadside zoo, a classic highway snake pit in the West, where his captors display him to gawking tourists as a “wild desert dog.” Disney’s film even invokes the poisoning debate by having Chico nearly killed by poison. But as in the Seton story, Chico escapes with a newfound craftiness about what the human world holds for his kind.

  Now Disney was rolling, and Chico was about to have new adventures. In 1965’s A Country Coyote Goes Hollywood, a theatrical featurette narrated by and starring country music star Rex Allen, Chico gets chased inside a moving van by dune buggy toughs and their dogs and finds himself in Hollywood, learning how to be an urban coyote. The surprise plot twist is actually an indication of how hip Disney was to coyotes in modern America, for Chico finds that Los Angeles is already inhabited by a population of slick, big-city coyotes. The film includes outstanding footage of coyotes in the Hollywood Hills. Disney even released a 45-rpm record from the film, “When Coyotes Howl in Hollywood You Hear a Mournful Tune.”

  Throughout all those pivotal Age of Ecology events in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Disney’s Wonderful World of Color kept at it. Concho, the Coyote Who Wasn’t, about a young Navajo shepherd who trains an orphan coyote to work as a sheepdog, appeared in 1966. The Nashville Coyote, about a coyote with a voice for the stage, came out in 1972; and Carlo, the Sierra Coyote, based on the novel Sierra Outpost and with John Muir as a character, debuted in 1974.

  Unlikely as it might have seemed, then, Uncle Walt deserves some share of the credit for helping the country begin to cast aside the disrespect for coyotes that started with Roughing It, then morphed into outright hatred via the public relations arms of the Bureau of Biological Survey and its descendants. The gray wolf’s emergence as environmental star helped give coyotes a fresh chance too, but that never could have happened without the American public’s own maturation beginning in the 1960s.

  And it seemed, somehow, as if the coyotes mysteriously understood that maturation, for at this same moment they discovered a new refuge for themselves in America, one chock-full of food and cover where, blessedly, no one ever shot at you.

  Hello bright lights, big cities.

  CHAPTER 6

  Bright Lights, Big Cities

  It is a brilliantly sunny June day in 2013 in Eldorado, New Mexico, a subdivision southeast of Santa Fe that has long been a second-home and retirement destination for East and West Coast academics and movers and shakers from around the United States. About forty-five well-heeled residents have shown up for a 10 a.m. presentation on urban coyotes by Project Coyote, Camilla Fox’s San Francisco–based organization, which has a local chapter in northern New Mexico. The centerpiece of the meeting is a documentary film, Still Wild at Heart, about how coyotes, after an absence of decades, in 2001 began to recolonize San Francisco. Urban coyote expert Stan Gehrt appears in the film to discuss how coyotes similarly moved into Chicago and tells the camera that he began his studies thinking there were maybe a few dozen coyotes in that city, only to conclude after a few years that the population was more than 2,000, with almost everyone in Chicago going to bed at night with a coyote no more than a mile away. (A year later, when I asked Stan about that figure, he equivocated on a precise number, but said, “It’s a lot more than that now. A lot more. Chicago has become a source population for the surrounding hinterland.”)

  This is liberal northern New Mexico, so everyone, with the exception of Justin, the local boy who is the state coyote-mitigation officer, pronounces our canid’s common name ki-YOH-tee. The theme of the gathering is coexistence. For those encountering coyotes in the backyard or along the trails in the local park, that means following some simple rules, a message that has acquired some urgency as more cities find themselves dealing with coyotes and as town coyotes have steadily become more comfortable around us.

  The prime directive is straightforward and delivered with an exclamation mark: For chrissake, do not feed coyotes and accustom them to associating food with humans! To avoid the most common human conflict with coyotes, don’t let your cats or small dogs outside at night. Don’t leave infants or small children unwatched outside. And “haze” urban coyotes, who after a few generations of city life lose whatever fear of us they ever had, which probably wasn’t much to start with. Whatever you do, don’t let a streetwise coyote bluff you. If your dog or your jogging or biking excites an unusual and bold reaction from a coyote, establish your dominance. If a coyote doesn’t retreat from you or acts in any way aggressive, stand tall, raise your hands over your head to underscore the fact that you’re a hell of a lot bigger than it is, and shout. If you’ve got a good arm, pick up a couple of rocks and prepare to deliver a Nolan Ryan dust-off fastball. Give the coyote every indication that you’re fully prepared to kick its little ass halfway to Sunday. In other words, keep town-wise coyotes thinking that people can still be dangerous. Or at least that we’re way too weird to trust.

  Those enlightened sentiments in 2013 were not necessarily where we started out when coyotes first came to town. Not by a long shot.

  For a good reason, US towns and cities were hard for coyotes to enter until fairly recently. But their instincts about associating with humans were visible in other contexts. Nineteenth-century traveler accounts brim with references to coyotes as a constant presence around the camps of emigrants, trappers, traders, and explorers, where “prairie wolves” often dashed through camp to snatch something and run with it. The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are full of accounts of both coyotes and wolves almost underfoot. Clark once bayoneted a wolf strolling past him, not because it presented a danger but apparently just because he could. A writer for Salt Lake City’s Weekly Tribune in 1887 felt the need to warn his readers about the coziness of coyotes on the trail: “Have you ever seen a coyote? He is the most impudent animal that exists.… [A]s a kleptomaniac he is an expert, for he can steal the boots from under a camper’s head and the meat out of his camp kettle.”

  Simple canine competition alone kept coyotes from establishing territories and scavenging and hunting among us in places like Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Denver, and Calgary a century ago. Except in cities, dogs, not wolves, were the obstacle. The past can be a foreign country, and this may be one of those times, for few modern city dwellers can conjure in their minds an image of cities overrun with loose and feral dogs. But that was the case for most American cities and towns into the beginning of the twentieth century.

  If we still lived in the loosely regulated cities that charac
terized American urban life 125 years ago, urban coyotes might be a rare phenomenon. Dogs and packs of dogs, a high percentage of them unowned or only casually linked to owners, once roamed at will through the streets of cities and towns, and as canine competitors of similar size, they kept coyotes at bay. According to historian Jon Hall, when word began to spread that ten Americans in the first few months of 1848 had died horribly from rabies contracted through dog bites, the so-called Great Dog War marked the beginning of the end for that older urban world. Led by New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, cities across the country proceeded to launch a violent, clumsy offensive against stray and feral dogs. Bounties, urban sharpshooters, dog clubbers, and even lidded cisterns designed to drown hundreds of captured dogs at a time became the order of the day, always to a certain middle-class distaste leavened by resignation at the inevitable. Eventually dogcatchers and pounds became the ultimate answers to the Great Dog War. The urban middle class may have ended up feeling safer, but the excesses of the cure were sufficiently egregious to help produce the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

  In the end, the Great Dog War didn’t just turn the remaining dogs into pampered, yard- and house-kept animal companions, ushering in a new and modern relationship between owners and their dogs. In one of those entirely unexpected ecological consequences, a dog regulation in the urban landscape opened up American cities to a new town canine of a far wilder and more exciting sort. America’s junior wolf was about to become a denizen of big cities.

  New York City may represent the newest frontier of Coyote America, but coyotes probably first became city slickers 3,000 miles in a desert direction, in the Los Angeles of the immediate post–World War II era. The City of Angels had, after all, been wrested from wild coyotes and their fellow travelers back when the Spanish padres had founded it in the late eighteenth century. There is some evidence that town building along the Los Angeles River never did entirely exclude wild coyotes from the city.

  In the heart of southwestern coyote country, the same was probably true of San Diego, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas. The progression was likely similar in all of them, beginning with the founding of a city in prime coyote habitat, which likely drove the wild canids to the margins of town. Several decades or a century of few or no dog regulations would have prevented coyotes from fully colonizing these cities, but then passage of laws against free-roaming dogs and the advent of dog pounds and dogcatchers unintentionally allowed coyotes to establish territories inside the city limits. Train rights-of-way that preserved corridors of habitat augmented colonization, allowing coyotes access to inner cores. The city parks movement preserved a few natural areas where coyotes could escape the human din of urban life, find prey, and raise litters. From the perspective of modern city dwellers, seeing small wolves trotting around town was at first lights-out shocking. From the point of view of the coyotes, adapted to the presence of human encampments for 15,000 years and human cities for 1,000 years or more, it must have all seemed entirely normal, effortless, and natural.

  For contemporary biologists studying the urban coyote phenomenon, like Stan Gehrt, Seth Riley, and Stewart Breck, what began as far back as a century ago in the cities of the desert Southwest has now assumed a shape and direction, and the patterns are repeating in Seattle, Denver, Chicago, and now New York. Los Angeles—where a population of some five hundred town coyotes had become famous enough that as early as 1965 Walt Disney would make A Country Coyote Goes Hollywood about them—saw modern Coyote America first. But with only a few variations, coyotes and the human city dwellers among whom they now live are replicating those patterns from coast to coast.

  One of the most common twentieth-century conceits in the Western world was that we humans, more urban by the decade and as a consequence seemingly divorced from the wild, were somehow “outside nature,” separate, by virtue of our specialness, from the natural world. Put aside the folly of such an idea for a species arising out of Earth’s evolutionary stream—whose very bodies are microbiomes of thousands of other species and who will never be separate from nature unless they figure out how not to die—and focus on the urban component of that idea. No human settings have struck us as more polar opposite to nature than cities. Cities were human conceived, we said, human designed and built. If modern city dwellers take anything for granted, it’s that cities are surely the one place they don’t have to engage with wild predators. Yet cities are ecosystems. They sustain what biologists call synanthropic species, or creatures that thrive in the ecosystems created by urban development. We are one of those obviously. Rodents are another. And so are coyotes.

  To a coyote slipping along a rail line to enter a city for the first time, urban ecosystems probably only exaggerate the experience of living with humans in the rural countryside. Places useful to a coyote would be more scattered and broken up because of the prevalence of asphalt, concrete, and structures. As a coyote moved from suburbs to edge cities to inner cores, the din of noise we humans make would gradually crescendo. The world would become more lit, and the effect of lighting would extend through the nighttime. A coyote confronting big-city life would find a massive increase in the number of roads it had to deal with, and the number of cars on those roads would go up by several orders of magnitude. This would be especially true during the daytime, since as a species we are most active then.

  A newly urban coyote would find mice of various varieties, a coyote’s most dependable prey, to be extremely numerous, but there would be strange new prey, too, like Norway rats, urban-adapted flocks of geese and ducks, and exotic plants and fruits of wide diversity. While dogs would mostly be contained in modern cities, the occasional small dog let out on its own might arouse a coyote’s ire as a potential predatory competitor, or a coyote with pups to feed might find it tempting. Cats don’t suffer the restrictions that dogs do in most cities, and they would be numerous and sometimes look like prey to a coyote. They would also evidently strike an urban coyote as what biologists refer to as an “intraguild predator” that it should eliminate from its territory.

  Modern city coyotes must have first figured out how to insinuate themselves into this much human density in Los Angeles, but the strategies for accomplishing it and the trajectory of how coyotes are adapting to life even in developed downtowns are now unreeling in towns and cities all over North America. New York City is just the most recent.

  Stan Gehrt, America’s go-to biologist for urban coyotes, who has been studying them in Chicago for fifteen years, characterized the urban coyote story to me this way: “It’s an ongoing, unplanned experiment.” As of 2015, understanding coyote individuality is a key part of his work on urban coyotes: “Right now we are really interested in coyote personalities more than we’ve ever been,” he told me. Like people, some coyotes can take a lot more humanity and novelty than others. Coyotes calm enough to tolerate noise, traffic, lights, the Amazon-like torrent of human scents, and the frequent sight of humans are the most successful in cities, although they can develop that behavior through “habituation.” With only a couple centuries of evolutionary pressure in their past pushing them to avoid humans, urban coyotes living in the present don’t find it so tough to lose their fear of us, it turns out. We think it normal for animals to flee from us in a wild panic, so the “habituated” coyote also gets into trouble in town. At least that’s the case now. The goal, though, is for coyotes and modern city dwellers to learn how to “cohabitate”—in effect to create the sort of relationship that prevailed among coyotes and people, among coyotes and urban Aztecs—across North American history.

  Coyotes with a tolerance for being around us are finding new riddles to solve in urban life, and coyote intelligence seems fully up to the challenge. Indeed, city life may well be selecting for novelty-seeking, “supergenius” coyotes. Among the most dangerous aspects of urban life for canid predators are the teeming highways they must learn to navigate. Coyotes can do this by moving mostly at night, when people are less evident a
nd traffic ebbs; a nighttime routine has become one of their adaptations to city life. But Ohio State’s Gehrt has seen them out in Chicago during rush hour, crossing half a multilane interstate highway brimming with traffic, then sitting in the median until it thins enough to cross the other half.

  Coyotes are still getting hit by cars, but in another few generations we may discover that city life has fashioned urban coyotes and an urban coyote culture that deals with highway traffic with the skill of pedestrians in modern Rome. Los Angeles coyotes already seem to demonstrate this trend. In Chicago more than 60 percent of coyotes die under the wheels of cars. But with several more generations of city experience in carmageddon California, LA coyotes have gotten that figure down to about 40 percent. Angeleno coyote culture apparently has even recognized one highway as a barrier to travel: only the most intrepid California coyotes ever attempt to cross US Highway 101, which runs north-south through the state.

  Tasked with establishing territories in the fragmented patchwork of parks, green spaces, campuses, golf courses, rail lines, and deserted lots that make up citified natural habitats, urban coyote packs generally create smaller home ranges than they would in rural areas. In Los Angeles, fifty-three radio-collared resident coyotes had an average home territory of about five square kilometers. The figure for 118 resident coyotes in Chicago was the same: five kilometers, or about three square miles. Coyotes in rural areas require larger territories, averaging about seventeen kilometers. (Solitary, transient coyotes in both urban and rural locales use far larger ranges of twenty-five to fifty kilometers for city coyotes and up to one hundred kilometers—sixty miles!—for rural nomads.) Biologists have concluded from this that urban coyote territories are far more resource-rich compared to those in the rural countryside. And smaller home ranges indicate a denser coyote population, meaning many more coyotes can live in a city of a given footprint than would be the case for a similar-sized territory in the country.