by Dan Flores
Among the Indian and white homes in and around Bluff, a particular coyote had been causing trouble, killing sheep, chasing pets, and attracting attention to itself. Bluff is no Chicago, with a population of about 350 people rather than 9 million, but like so many big cities across America nowadays, small towns—like the one where my parents lived in Louisiana—have also acquired resident coyotes. An occasional one becomes a problem. So the Navajo chapter leadership asked Marcus if he couldn’t hunt down this coyote and take it out.
A few mornings later Marcus was in his truck on the edge of town, bouncing slowly along a dirt road, his rifle in the gun rack behind his head, when out of the waist-high sagebrush a coyote stepped into the road no more than twenty-five feet away. Marcus braked to a stop. The dust from the truck tires rose into the air, briefly obscured the coyote, then settled. The coyote was still there, standing broadside to the truck. Marcus reached behind him and grasped his rifle.
As Marcus told me this story, we were floating through a calm but gorgeous stretch of the Colorado River below Lava Falls Rapid. Crenulated black lava flows and irregular dikes and blobs of lava decorated both banks of the river. Marcus and I were alone on his raft, the rest of our group bobbing along in five more yellow craft some distance downstream. I was sitting behind him and couldn’t see his face as he told me what happened then.
“This coyote walks nonchalantly right in front of me in the road. Looks at me. Sees the rifle. Then you know what he does? He yawns, right in my face! Kind of stretches! Then he turns to look back where he’d come from, and I hear coyotes howl a ways back. So he raises his nose, throws back his head, and howls back at them. I’ve got my hand on the stock of the rifle, but I still haven’t pulled it down. Now he stops howling, turns back to me, looks straight as can be right at me for probably half a minute. Then he strolls casually across the road, in no hurry at all, as if he knew something about me.”
“So you never shot.” I’d known how this was going to go.
“No, I never even got the gun down. He was just too damned nonchalant, too confident. Something. And I didn’t know for sure if it was the coyote everybody was looking for. But you know something? Even if it was, I wouldn’t have shot. That coyote was so… cool looking. So perfect. He was way too pretty to shoot.”
I nodded. Marcus had experienced one of those moments of sympathy with the world, much the way Adolph Murie had in Yellowstone so many decades before when he’d watched a coyote trotting along a trail, tossing a sprig of sagebrush into the air and catching it in its mouth again and again. These are moments of identification, animal to animal. They are rare. Sometimes a moment like that becomes unforgettable, because the dialogue of body language isn’t getting filtered by the cultural thoughts in our heads, by loaded language like “depraved” or “gang banger” or “archpredator of our time.” Each sees the other for who he is.
Although rare, these are the kinds of moments millions of us need to have so we can coexist with coyotes, urban and otherwise.
CHAPTER 7
Coyote America
In the contemporary Western world, you do not grow up imagining death by predation. A dark-haired, soulful girl from Toronto would have outgrown fears like that by the time she was five. Just turned nineteen, Taylor Mitchell had entirely different things on her mind in late October 2009. A songwriter and performer since age sixteen, she had just released her debut album, For Your Consideration, which had landed her a gig at the Winnipeg Folk Festival that summer. On a promotional tour that fall, she decided to take a break with a quick hike in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia. It was the unluckiest decision of her life, the unluckiest decision anyone anywhere in North America made on October 28, 2009. The next morning she lay dead in the Halifax Hospital from massive blood loss as a result of an attack by two coyotes. Rescuers had found the forty-two-pound male standing over her prostrate form, growling, unwilling to leave the scene. She had been bitten all over her body.
Half a decade later we are still trying to figure out exactly how an alluring young woman with a promising career became the first adult in recorded North American history to die from a coyote attack. Coyotes are fully capable of bringing down animals of one hundred pounds or more, certainly deer, and rarely even larger ungulates. But a human being? As with wolves, coyote cultural training does not include humans as part of the species’ prey template. Predator biologists have puzzled ever since over what might have gone wrong that October morning along the Atlantic shore. Did the coyotes confuse a young woman for a deer? Did she yield ground or attempt to run, exciting their pursuit instincts? With so many people in North America and so many coyotes—more of both now than at any previous time in history—did the extremely remote mathematical possibilities of a predatory attack by coyotes on an adult human finally produce that one-in-a-million outcome?
Or was something else going on? In November 2014, in an incident actually several orders of magnitude more common than a wolf or coyote attacking a human, a pack of dogs attacked and killed a forty-year-old woman on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. That might seem of only glancing relevance to the Nova Scotia attack, except that some biologists have wondered if Taylor Mitchell’s fate in some way was tied to a phenomenon researchers had been aware of for at least two decades, as coyotes appeared in state after state in the East and South. Was hybridization between coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs, in other words, producing a new canid east of the Mississippi, an animal larger than a western coyote, smarter and more clever than a wolf, with a feral dog’s aggressive potential?
That’s how the larger story is playing out in popular culture. Two years after Taylor Mitchell died, in 2011, a National Geographic Wild television documentary, Killed by Coyotes, told her story on national TV. This was followed in 2014 by “Meet the Coywolf,” a PBS Nature episode that left its international audience with the impression that the bulk of the eastern coyote population consists of “coywolves,” a hybrid wolf-coyote created by human actions. Cape Breton Park in Nova Scotia and Taylor Mitchell’s death served as the lead to this show. Even reality TV is weighing in on the larger point. Late in 2014 the Discovery Channel aired a program titled Beasts of the Bayou wherein its Venice, Louisiana, protagonists searched for what they referred to as a rougarou, a “mutant canine,” which the show’s narration repeatedly called “an aggressive hybrid mutant wolf” that was “more wild and more aggressive than anything seen before.” It took a few minutes before my Louisiana upbringing finally untangled rougarou as a garbled loup-garou, French for “werewolf.” The animals this breathless tabloid TV show found in the swamps? A pack of coyotes that may have included a wolf-coyote hybrid.
This “new” hybridization story is older than we think. Its origins, and causes, very likely go back hundreds and probably hundreds of thousands of years. The remote tangle of canid evolution is the most likely sourcebook for our answers, but the popular media are also right: the history of the human-canid relationship is also a driver of the hybrid phenomenon, just as it drives our continuing warfare against coyotes today. And yet—this is the part I like best—the fact that we too are hybrids, that once again the coyote story is echoing the evolutionary trajectory that made us such a wildly successful species ourselves, is the most delicious irony of all.
Another memory, vivid like I’m looking back into time through polished glass, this one destined to color me for life.
I am fourteen, just a couple of years along from having watched that first Walt Disney Presents episode on western coyotes, which aired in 1961. In the woods and among the bayous of Louisiana, the West and coyotes seem very far away, or at least they do when I leave home on this summer morning of 1963 and ride my bicycle a couple of miles down a dirt road to a clearing in the woods I know about. This open glade in the grown-up Louisiana forest is my destination because here I can climb a tree and see fifty or seventy-five yards through the trees and prepare to try out an item I’d found in a hardware store a coup
le of days earlier.
“It’s a predator call,” the clerk had told me. “We just got them in. Blow on it, and it sounds like a rabbit in distress. You could call up a gray fox with it!” A gray fox? I’d seen one hit by a car along Louisiana Highway 1, a beautiful little animal. Not a coyote, but as close as 1960s Louisiana was going to get to a wild predator, I’d figured. So, at mid-morning on this sweltering southern summer day, I crawl into somebody’s half-collapsed deer stand on the edge of my clearing, wait for silence to envelop the surrounding woodlands, then try an experimental bleat on a wooden call that had cost three bucks.
The interval between the dying out of the rabbit wail and the appearance of an animal on the edge of the clearing opposite me could not have been more than ten seconds. Later, feverishly replaying every detail in my head, I would realize that I had somehow managed to climb a tree with a rabbit call while a very large wild predator was either hunting or reclining for the day only seventy-five yards away. It was a stunning stroke of luck. But in the moment, with this unexpectedly large creature emerging from the woods at a very interested and purposeful trot, heading directly for me, my head was entirely empty of thought. I was a vessel shot from head to toe with adrenalin.
Pointed ears up, gaze fixed, the animal was coming straight as an arrow’s flight for the base of the tree I was in. About thirty yards away, where mid-morning sunlight dappled the clearing in light and shadow, it stopped, peered intently in my direction for a few seconds, then resumed its approach, now in a slow, more cautious walk. I had gotten out of the car and examined that highway-kill gray fox; this was no gray fox. Even through the veil of excitement, I registered clear visual impressions. Sharply pointed ears. A long snout. Yellowish and reddish fur that rippled in the sunlight as it approached. Eyes that appeared almost orange. Most of all—the impression I never forgot—it was coming toward me on remarkably long legs, like it was walking on stilts. I had a dog at home, a shepherd mix that I knew weighed fifty pounds. This creature was easily that heavy, I guessed, but it seemed much taller. And now it was only twenty-five feet away.
Every second from the moment I’d put the wooden call to my lips had seemed to transpire in slow motion, as if we were underwater. But in an instant something broke the spell. Probably a downdraft swirl of air sent it a whiff of me, but curiosity on that canine face changed to alarm faster than I could track it. Next I knew it was loping back the way it had come, its head turned backward toward me the whole time, scanning the forest for the source of the danger. In about the same ten seconds it had taken to appear, it disappeared, leaving me sitting in a tree, shaking like a leaf. The whole episode had unfolded across less than two minutes.
What had I seen? It was no fox, but what other than a fox could it have been? When I sat down in my room that night and wrote the Louisiana Department of Wildlife Fisheries in Baton Rouge, I could imagine only one answer: from twenty-five feet away, I had seen a wolf in the northwest of the state, I told them. Two weeks later I got a reply. It is possible you saw a wolf, someone from the office wrote. We think there are still a few red wolves in the state. But (my official letterhead reply stated) it’s far more likely that you saw a coyote, since coyotes are now colonizing Louisiana.
A coyote? Wait, what? A coyote like in the Walt Disney films, an animal of the deserts and of the West? I may as well have rounded a corner and run into a moose in downtown New Orleans. I knew about coyotes, but how could there be a coyote anywhere within two hundred miles of Louisiana? Yet in the early 1960s, they were there, and it would not be too long before I saw one, then another and another. That first wild canid I ever laid eyes on, though, stalking my tree on stilt-like legs while I watched with wide eyes, was a harbinger of a different kind of canine future for eastern America.
In Yellowstone National Park in September 2013, I first began to realize how political the debates about wild American canids have become in the modern era. As it turns out, some of our most iconic twenty-first-century battles about charismatic endangered species surge and ebb very specifically around the coyote.
On our second day in the Lamar Valley that September in 2013, Sara and I had met a pair of California scientists, watching the wolves alongside us, who turned out to be Blaire Van Valkenburgh, of the University of California at Los Angeles’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Robert Wayne, the UCLA molecular biologist and Canidae specialist who has done some of the preeminent genetic work on dogs, wolves, and coyotes. A slight, dark-haired scientist who looked to be in his fifties, Wayne was at the Zoological Institute in London when he started researching the molecular evolution of the canids. The work took him head-on into a very big political controversy. So he hadn’t missed a beat when I casually mentioned the obvious resemblance between coyotes and the red wolves of the South where I grew up. “There’s a good reason for that,” he’d frowned. “Red wolves aren’t a true species. They’re a hybrid, and more coyote than anything else.”
“And he should know,” Blaire Van Valkenburgh had added brightly. “He did the genetic work demonstrating that the red wolf is really a coyote hybrid.”
The genetic markers Wayne found indicated, as he read the evidence, that coyotes are a kind of wolf that shared a common ancestor with gray wolves down to about 3.2 million years ago, when coyote and gray wolf ancestors began to separate, first physically, then, as distance increased, genetically. The question of that evolutionary relationship has animated US endangered species programs going back to the 1960s and has come to spin prominently around a very specific and unusual animal, which since the time of John James Audubon we have called Canis rufus.
Since it entered written history (with William Bartram’s Travels in 1791), the red wolf has been associated with the Deep South. Its range extended as far west as the Hill Country of Central Texas, however—where coyotes also ranged. In true wolf fashion there were black variations (Bartram named the red wolves he saw Canis niger), but more commonly the animal was a cinnamon-buff color. Like coyotes. Although it lived in swamps and deep woods, its remarkably long and spindly legs struck many observers as belonging to an animal designed to course after running prey in open country. Its curiosity aroused, it could stand upright on those long legs. Like coyotes, it could live among people, yet it was quite easy to trap or poison. At forty to seventy pounds, it was bigger than a coyote but smaller than a gray wolf. Naturalist Vernon Bailey, on hearing red wolves howl, wrote in 1904, “Their voice is a compromise between that of the lobo… and the howl of the coyote. It suggests the coyote much more than the lobo.”
John Woodhouse Audubon, Red Texas Wolf (Canis rufus). Courtesy Google Art Project.
In truth, so much about the red wolf seemed coyote-like that as early as 1962—the year before that fourteen-year-old version of me saw a large coyote-like canid from a deer stand in Louisiana—biologists began to question whether the red wolf was a legitimate species or a hybrid resulting from mating between wolves and coyotes. The US Fish and Wildlife Service, however, designated the red wolf an endangered species in 1967 and later followed the lead of a young biologist named Ronald Nowak, who wrote his dissertation on red wolves. Nowak would go on to become the service’s endangered species coordinator and to write a major work on canid evolution, North American Quaternary Canines, in 1979 (he’s also author of the most recent edition of the Bible-like Walker’s Mammals of the World, the go-to reference for mammals). For decades Nowak deflected all challenges to the red wolf’s legitimacy as a distinctive species with full protection under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Since then the red wolf story has produced endless controversy, and for one primary reason: coyotes. Coyotes, in fact, seemed to be garbling everything we thought we knew about wolves from the Great Lakes to the Deep South.
Partly in an effort to quell the mounting debate about its wolf-management policies—essentially whether, with the red wolf, it had spent millions recovering an animal that may only have come into being in recent history—in 2012 the Fish and
Wildlife Service published a peer-reviewed seventy-five-page monograph that offered up an entire rethinking of American wolves. An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves concluded that North America’s gray wolves were indeed Asian in origin and had arrived here in at least three different waves only 20,000 or so years ago. Using both classic morphology and the host of new genetic studies, the study’s authors shrank the number of gray wolf subspecies from the twenty-three Stanley Young and E. A. Goldman had designated in the 1940s down to only four. They extended the former range of the red wolf up the Eastern Seaboard to Canada. And they reclassified the wolf of the eastern Great Lakes—long a gray wolf subspecies—as its own species, Canis lycaon.
Most importantly of all, the study claimed that the wolves of eastern America were ancient continental wolves that had come from the same evolutionary line that produced coyotes: “Coyotes, C. rufus, and C. lycaon are modern representatives of a major and diverse clade that evolved within North America.” While An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves conceded that both eastern and red wolves may have “anciently” hybridized with coyotes, it posited that “pure” red wolves had still existed in the twentieth century.
Outside the hallways of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, with its commitment to red wolf recovery that predates modern genetics research, the role of the coyote in the red wolf story has struck some scientists as far more problematic than federal policies have acknowledged. The American Museum of Natural History warily skirts the issue, its 2009 monograph on canid fossils leaving off any investigation of red wolves. I asked Xiaoming Wang, of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of this study, about that. He responded that the red wolf’s omission was deliberate: “As an animal with a mixed morphology, including its fossil relatives, it is not always easy to place with certainty. Works on ancient DNA may have a better chance of resolving the mystery.”
