Coyote America
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Coyote that survived high-speed car hit, then hitchhiked to California in the grill in 2012. Courtesy David Lovere/Rex Shutterstock.
If it seems counterintuitive that a predator like a coyote would find life in town to be fat-city, consider this additional evidence: in rural Illinois, where residents shoot, trap, and harass coyotes, only 13 percent of coyote pups survive to maturity. In the Chicago metropolitan area, a whopping 61 percent of coyote pups survive to adulthood. Like human adolescents, male coyote pups are always the most at-risk pack members, the easiest to trap or poison or shoot. But in town young male coyotes tend to survive at the same rate as females. In fact, only in preserved wildlands like national parks does coyote survivability compare to what coyotes experience in cities. For a twenty-first-century coyote, town life is pretty obviously the good life, especially compared to the dangers of rural America. We’re going to have to start imagining cities as twenty-first-century coyote preserves in much the way national parks were in the twentieth century.
Any version of a good life means eating well, one reason for being in a city in the first place. The emerging urban legend, propagated by a media clearly out of its depth when it comes to city predators, is that town coyotes eat very well indeed because they’re dining regularly on small pets, pet food, and trash. That pearl of wisdom may be an urban memory preserved from the Great Dog War of the nineteenth century, when loose and feral city dogs survived by doing pretty much just that. The biologists have shown repeatedly that this is not how town coyotes survive. Individual coyotes or specific packs may develop a taste for human foods or pets, as has happened a few times when coyotes in Tucson, San Diego, and on the outskirts of Seattle developed a yen for cats (which in Seattle actually made up 13 percent of a particular pack’s diet). The coyote-cat story, though, is much more nuanced than the proliferation of cat-attack accounts suggests.
Despite the cat-killer urban legend, in city after city the science indicates that pets provide only about 1 to 2 percent of the average coyote’s diet. Stan Gehrt grew up as a rural Kansan who’d never seen a city the likes of Chicago in his life, but coyotes had attracted so much notice there by the late 1990s that he finally got funding to study them. Unless new isotope analysis of coyote diets shows something his original scat studies didn’t, he told me, then “despite the stories, I can say flat out that urban coyotes don’t depend on pets for food. If coyotes were relying on pets as a source of food, we quickly wouldn’t have any pets left.”
That may not translate, as Gehrt was quick to add, to a peaceable kingdom between urban coyotes and domestic cats and dogs. Coyotes may kill more cats than they ever eat. That may have to do with an ancient animosity; recall that naturalist Thomas Say finally collected the type specimen of the American coyote by baiting his traps with a bobcat. Coyotes may also attack cats for the same reason they attack small dogs: they perceive domestic cats and dogs as intraguild predators operating in their territories. When coyotes attack dogs or cats, they most often don’t intend to eat them; they’re simply ridding their territories of roaming predators. The vast majority of coyote encounters that unnerve urbanites almost always feature a dog. It’s not true in every case, but in a large majority of instances of coyotes biting people, the bite happens while a dog owner is attempting to protect a pet.
What urban coyotes eat depends a good deal on the city where they live. In Chicago, the large lakeshore population of Canadian geese has become a major food source for Cook County coyotes, not so much the adult geese themselves as the contents of their nests, nearly half of which get raided in most years. Where there are populations of deer in American cities, coyotes can quickly become major predators of fawns. Coyotes acting as a control for urban populations of deer and geese, it turns out, is one of those “beneficial” outcomes Olaus Murie wrote about in the 1930s. Although not many cat owners will want to hear it, increasing numbers of studies indicate that when coyotes come to town and pilfer the odd cat, the survivability of local songbirds goes up markedly.
Compliments of the Los Angeles of thirty years ago, coyote dumpster diving is an urban legend with legs. Some biologists believe that as much as 25 percent of the diet of some coyote packs in LA in the naive 1980s was human food. More recent studies of urban coyote scat indicate that in most cities the percentage of trash, pet food, and other human food actually comes in at only about 2 percent. A recent study in modern Denver pegged that figure at less than one-half of 1 percent, and today it has dropped to 6 percent even in LA. Despite all the anecdotes from the 1980s, except in rare cases of localized coyote culture, the vast majority of town coyotes are not scavenging behind Sonic and Burger King. They’re not really much of a threat to the six-pack of tallboys you left on the porch.
Sometimes, especially in summers when a coyote pair is stressed trying to raise pups, the parents might become serial killers of cats (one British Columbia coyote den yielded fifty-five cat collars). If you are halfway intelligent with your animals, though, coyotes are not remotely as great a threat to your cat or dog as traffic is. Coexisting with coyotes just requires paying attention, the way we’ve done around predators for a couple hundred thousand years, after all.
Still, coyotes are a kind of wolf. Living in our midst, are they a danger to us?
Los Angeles is famous among ecologists for having the most extensive wildlands-urban interface of any city in America, a zone at least seven hundred miles long where subdivisions abut chaparral and sharply incised canyons cut deeply back into mountain ranges like the San Gabriels, the San Bernardinos, and the Santa Monicas. Those canyons provide thousands of patches of natural habitat that interpenetrate the edges of greater Los Angeles. From the Coyote Hills to the Hollywood Bowl, from urban parks to university campuses, coyotes are everywhere in the six counties of greater LA. They probably always have been, but in the 1980s they began to attract attention for some of the same reasons Central Park’s “Otis” would freak out New Yorkers in 1999.
As Mike Davis wrote in The Ecology of Fear, published a year before Otis showed up in Manhattan, in 1980s LA coyotes became “symbols of urban disorder,” of a breakdown in our own conceits about what city life meant. We’ve thought of cities for 5,500 years of recorded history as the one spot where, at long last, humans could escape predators. But in modern America, it turned out, not so fast.
The Los Angeles of the 1980s became the place that wildlife managers in Denver, Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and New York are today doing their best not to emulate. Coyotes had been in LA for decades, only attracting passing notice; as far back as 1938 the city government paid bounties on 650 coyotes the first year bounties were offered. A population of at least five hundred coyotes was residing in LA by the 1960s. But the lure of the Southern Californian good life and the success of the sprawling late-twentieth-century city gave LA a population of people from across America and the globe, many of them recent arrivals who knew little or nothing about coyotes other than that one endlessly fell off cliffs in Saturday morning cartoons. In the 1980s, scientific studies of urban coyotes were still in the future. The majority of the LA population did know one thing about coyotes though: As wild predators they sure as hell weren’t supposed to be inside the city limits of a giant metropolis. Yet there they were, trotting through the tombstones of local cemeteries, loping across the runways of Los Angeles International Airport, and, most disconcertingly, hunting along suburban streets where people lived.
The unease about coyotes in LA spilled over into panic on August 26, 1981. That morning, in a new suburb of Glendale, three-year-old Kelly Keen wandered, unattended, out of her house and into the driveway. A single coyote attacked, killing her. It was the first human death attributed to a coyote in recorded American history. Glendale officials responded by killing every coyote they could find and astonished Los Angeles when their efforts produced fifty-three dead coyotes in the square mile around the Keen home.
Los Angelenos’ immediate, emotional response was to describe a
reas like Glendale as “teeming coyote ghettos” and to compare coyote packs to “gang bangers.” Any coyote spotted in the daytime became a “brazen criminal,” bold enough to show itself “in broad daylight.” To writer Mike Davis, assessing LA’s reaction fifteen years later, coyotes were “the textbook example of a protean, ‘unfinished’ species” that engaged in “continuous behavioral improvisation.” Coyotes survived city life, he wrote, by eating garbage, pets, even zoo animals. The title of his chapter on the story of coyotes and cougars in LA: “Maneaters of the Sierra Madre.”
Today biologists believe that more than 5,000 coyotes inhabit greater Los Angeles. Their territories so blanket the city, and they do so well there—living significantly longer on average than rural coyotes—that biologists suspect LA, like Chicago, has most likely reached its carrying capacity for coyotes and is actually producing a surplus number of animals that leave the city to find territories outside it. Plenty of LA residents still hate them, but in a pattern that urban coyote researchers are finding increasingly common, residents have slowly recovered from the initial shock of realizing they share their city with a small, wolflike predator. Over time, urban people get used to coyotes. They go Aztec and learn how to live with them, which essentially entails keeping coyotes wild and a little nervous even in the city. By now plenty of people with urban coyote experiences under their belt have come to relish the presence of coyotes in the city for ecological reasons or just because they’re so beautiful and it’s such a cool thing to get to see a small wolf among us as we go about our daily routines.
Wildlife managers respond to the winds of politics, and one bit of evidence that attitudes toward coyotes are beginning to evolve is that in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver, officials charged with managing the relationship between urban coyotes and city residents have developed progressive plans of coexistence to replace the early kneejerk attempts to eradicate every coyote anyone sighted. Managers certainly still take out problem coyotes, the ones that are aggressive toward people or become dependent on pets as a food source, but in most cities these are still a tiny percentage of the total coyote population. No city wants to replicate the Los Angeles experience, where between 1960 and 2006 nearly seventy people were bitten by coyotes, accounting for fully half of all the coyote-bite incidents in North America. Too many Angelenos, often unintentionally or due to ignorance, had fed coyotes. Smart as ever, the animals came to suburban yards for food, with disastrous consequences.
With LA’s history in mind and a rapidly growing coyote population approaching 2,000, Chicago by 1999 was witnessing annual removal of three to four hundred “nuisance” coyotes, which seems like a lot until you realize that in the first decade of coyote presence in any city, simply being seen and recognized made a coyote a “nuisance.” By 2001 coyotes were so much in the news in the Windy City that in that year Chicago homeowners listed them—not street gangs, not burglars, but coyotes—as the single greatest threat to their safety. At the time there had not been a single aggressive coyote incident in Chicago. With an even larger coyote population now, the figures for nuisance animals have dropped as residents have become more familiar with Chicago as a coyote town.
And the vast majority of the Chicago coyote population consists of upstanding citizen animals. In a recent study there, only 5 coyotes out of 175 tracked became actual nuisance animals, stalking pets or refusing to back away from people. In fact, of 260 animals radio-tracked in Chicago and Los Angeles two decades after the bite-athon of the 1980s, not one showed any aggression toward people. In the same years, between 2,000 and 3,000 people were bitten by dogs in Chicago alone.
“If anything,” Stan Gehrt told me, “some people and some communities in greater Chicago have by now become too accepting of coyotes, tolerating behavior I wish they wouldn’t.” Biologists like Stan and Denver’s Stewart Breck want to make sure coyotes in town are like coyotes in Yellowstone, still wild, still a little nervous about us.
Stewart Breck, a dark-haired, bespectacled, genial PhD who works for the National Wildlife Research Center (a research arm of Wildlife Services), and I talked right after he and colleagues had put on a Denver urban coyote symposium in December 2014. Breck gave me the impression that Denver’s story is somewhat distinct from that of either Los Angeles or Chicago. “Coyotes weren’t really a presence in Denver until the 1980s,” he told me, but at present the estimate (“conservative by maybe 20 percent”) puts 112 coyote packs in the Denver Metro Area, with a summer population of 1,004 animals. A remarkable 90 percent of Denver residents in one recent survey indicated having seen a coyote near their home. That, together with the media stories, makes the Denver public “highly attentive” to coyotes.
Human encounters with coyotes, says Breck, ultimately are both “emotional and political.” The broad, lethal removal approach that characterized LA in the 1980s is today favored only by about 12 percent of Denver residents. That same recent survey found that fully 45 percent of Denverites—most of them in liberal, well-to-do suburbs—are actually coyote advocates who want them left unmolested in the city. Even attempts to get Coloradans to haze urban coyotes to keep them uneasy around humans have met with resistance in these suburbs and in places like the university town of Boulder. In liberal twenty-first-century America, identification with predators, with reintroduced wolves in the rural West, and now with coyotes in town is a potent political force in a way never seen before in American history.
Coyote on Portland MAX light-rail train. Courtesy Google Images.
But Breck hypothesizes that an urban coyote culture is developing in Denver, one reflective of the brashness and boldness of urban human culture, and that such an urban canine culture is likely to emerge over time in other cities as well. The inevitable outcome at this moment, he believes, is more human-coyote conflicts. While the shyer individual coyotes may survive the gauntlet of rural life or be able to coexist with gray wolves in a park like Yellowstone, Breck argues that in urban settings, avoiding humans or gray wolves has become a nonissue for coyotes. In another mirror (or maybe it’s a stereotype) of human urban life, bolder, more novelty-seeking individuals among wild coyotes may be most attracted to cities in the first place. They’re the first to become accustomed to thronging humans and sensory overload, the first to take risks and try new things, and, Breck reasons, they’re transferring both their genes and urban cultural norms to their offspring.
This urban coyote culture, Breck believes, explains a sharp uptick between 2005 and 2010 of “a lot more aggression toward pets and people” in Denver. Now that the Mile-High City is a coyote town, its human residents may need to be a little less tolerant and laid-back about their junior wolves. Or so Stewart Breck and his associates argue.
Maybe tolerance in the form of an appreciative attitude toward urban coyotes actually means accepting, most of all, a new and different definition of what city life is supposed to be. The notion of cities as outside nature is an old fantasy of ours, but in North America coyotes have entirely undermined it, a fact modern journalists and bloggers in particular need to get real about. In 2011 two Canadian researchers, analyzing 453 articles portraying interactions between people and urban coyotes in Canada between 1998 and 2010, found a stunningly uninformed media coloring what the public thought about those interactions. The stories consistently portrayed coyotes as invaders, a plague, an infestation, as unnatural in cities. Most recently the descriptions have tended toward language depicting criminal behavior, describing coyotes as assailants, brazen bandits, suspects, fugitives, kidnappers, robbers, and lurkers, as depraved and (my favorite) “without souls.” Almost half the articles discussed “attacks” on people, even though only three people a year were bitten by coyotes in Canada between 1995 and 2010, during which time that country averaged 300,000 dog bites annually.
The arrival of coyotes in a metropolis initially frightens residents. People tend to react to wild coyotes among them as if they are encountering escaped exotic animals from local zoos,
often the only explanation that comes to mind. Once they discover that coyotes are not escapees but an urban-adapted population of wild predators, initial fear translates into specific concerns, disease often central among them. To be sure, coyotes historically have suffered from a variety of ordinary canid pathogens, including canine parvovirus, heartworms, distemper (a viral relative of measles in humans), herpesvirus (again, similar to the primate version), and adenovirus. Sarcoptic mange is another affliction among them, although coyotes suffer from a version of the malady introduced among them by veterinarians in the early twentieth century. The disease that city dwellers new to coyotes most commonly fear is rabies. But unlike foxes, coyotes, except for a small population in South Texas, are not carriers of rabies, although (like us) an individual coyote can be infected if bitten by a rabid skunk, fox, or raccoon.
If coyote colonization in other American cities can teach Boston or New York or Washington, DC, anything, it’s to learn everything possible about living with the animals, then kick back, be cool, and enjoy them. Their arrival among us is not momentary. Coyotes were here long before we were, and they’re not going away.
After two hundred miles and two weeks by rubber raft through the Grand Canyon, in the fall of 2014 my friend Marcus Buck, a Navajo boatman from the town of Bluff, in southeastern Utah, told me this coyote story.