No Regrets Coyote
Coyotes are a sort of goldilocks animal. They can be active during the day, and at night. They can hunt in groups, or survive solo. They’re wolfish enough to survive in the wild, dog-like enough to blossom in the big city.
That adaptability has arguably made coyotes one of the most successful mammalian predators on the planet. It’s also given them a reputation as opportunistic villains that prey on neighborhood garbage, livestock, and (occasionally) household pets.
So what makes these animals so special? And if coyotes are so good at living amongst us, how do we get better at living amongst them?
Featuring: Daniel Proux, Dan Flores, Christine Wilkinson, Stan Gehrt, and Kieon Halona
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
If you enjoyed learning about coyote vocalizations, check out Janet Kessler’s blog about San Francisco coyotes, or her YouTube page, where you can find dozens of videos showing the diversity of coyote yips, yowls, barks, grows, and more .
Read about coyotes in the Massachusetts town of Nahant, where municipal officials asked the federal government to help kill them in 2022. (New York Times)
SUPPORT
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Kate Dario
Mixed by Kate Dario and Taylor Quimby
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Marina Henke
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Kate. Dario. First ever episode for us, right?
Kate Dario: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: I am so excited. What do you got?
Kate Dario: Okay, Nate .So a few weeks ago, I was on the hunt for an apex predator in a pretty unlikely place…
Dan Proulx: If you're here in the middle of the night, you'll see a coyote here and there. Um You're usually just looking for opportunistic things, like the – [MUX IN] – you see the overflowing trash there that's going to track small wildlife, and that's going to track the coyotes.
Kate Dario: That's Dan Proulx. He's a wildlife rehabilitator, animal control officer and General Coyote Guru based in the North Shore of Massachusetts. This area has been having what some people might call a coyote problem. And when we met up, I'm thinking we're going to get in his car and drive to the edge of town or something, but instead we drive over to the dumpsters behind a strip mall.
Dan Proulx: So there was an incident where a woman was leaving Bertucci's with her takeout, and she was nipped on the lower leg when she was getting into her car, and then the coyote ran off. And then there was an individual just standing in front of Santander that was nipped by the – we believe, the same coyote. We can't say it was the same coyote, but it was within, you know, a week or two.
[MUX SWELL & FADE]
Nate Hegyi: So Bertucci’s must be absolutely delicious for a coyote to come and nip a lady as she's walking out, just trying to get. What is it, like, subs or something?
Kate Dario: No. Oh my God, no. It's an amazing Massachusetts classic pizza place. It's really, really good.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah. Dude. Teenage Mutant Ninja Coyotes.
Kate Dario: [Laugh] Exactly, exactly. Um, and there's actually another story where a whole pack of coyotes surrounded a woman in this area walking her dog.
NEWS CLIP: Arriving officers counted at least 9 coyotes, police say the flashing lights from their cruisers appeared to scare off the animals… [fade out]
Nate Hegyi: Okay, this is wild to me. I just moved out east from the Mountain West and out there like we never have coyote attacks. Is this happening like, all the time here?
Kate Dario: Yeah... And this is an area right on the coast. It's like a 25 minute drive from downtown Boston.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
NEWS CLIP: But people who live out here say it’s happening more often… and that coyotes are becoming a little too friendly.
NEWS CLIP: Holly Jaeger showed me where a coyote bit her dog Barley, and worries about the stealthy predators next target. “God forbid my child comes out the front door, and the coyote is sitting right here, and… hmm.”
Nate Hegyi: Okay, like nipping people, no good. But hot dang. Like good on you coyotes moving all the way out to the East Coast from the West. I feel a kindred spirit with them.
Kate Dario: Totally. In fact, one expert I spoke to told me the two most successful mammals in the evolutionary history of this continent. Humans and coyotes.
[MUX]
Nate Hegyi: That is so awesome. I love coyotes.
Kate Dario: Oh yeah. And despite efforts to get rid of them, history shows us one thing. Whatever doesn't kill a coyote just makes them stronger.
[HOWLING TAPE]
Dan Flores: The original national anthem of North America was coyote song and it has been sung here in tribute to the continent for more than a million years.
[COYOTE SOUNDS]
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside In. I'm Nate Hegyi here with producer Kate Dario.
Kate Dario: And on this edition of our series Holy Scat, we are going to dive deep on coyotes. What makes these animals such good survivors?
Nate Hegyi: And if coyotes are so good at living amongst us, how do we get better at living amongst them?
Christine Wilkinson: Rather than us try to ignore the problem or shoot a bunch of coyotes pretending its working, we just need to accept that there are coyotes and they will continue to persist.
[COYOTE SOUNDS FADE OUT]
AD BREAK
Kate Dario: Nate, let me ask you a question. Do you say coyote [Ki-ote] or coyote [ki-oy-tee]?
Nate Hegyi: I unfortunately say coyote [ki-oy-tee], but I think coyote is cooler.
Kate Dario: Definitely. I've heard different people say different things. I say coyote, that's I think I guess we'll both be saying coyote throughout this episode. But you might hear coyote, same animal. I did embarrassingly ask someone once if they were different animals. They are the same animal. A little humbling experience as a young reporter.
[MUX]
Kate Dario: So you know the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Kate Dario: So, one way to think about coyotes is that they are the ultimate Goldilocks animal.
Nate Hegyi: How so?
Kate Dario: You may think being bigger always means better when it comes to predators, but in reality, coyotes’ size is an evolutionary advantage. So, many thousands of years ago, there were all of these big grazers in North America - AND there were a lot of BIG carnivores that preyed on them.
Nate Hegyi: Really?
Kate Dario: But then the Pleistocene extinction wiped out a lot of those animals. So, instead of competing with wolves for what was left of the big prey, coyotes adapted. They learned to go for smaller prey like rabbits and rodents.
[MUX]
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so, so for them, smaller was better.
Kate Dario: Yeah, exactly. Because, look, there's no fight between a wolf and a coyote that a coyote is winning. Their jaws are smaller and not as strong as wolves, and they can't hold on to large prey in a way a wolf can. But again, this smaller form is actually an evolutionary advantage. You know, they're compact, they're sleek, and they're actually faster than wolves.
Nate Hegyi: Really? How fast do they run?
Kate Dario: 40mph.
Nate Hegyi: Whoa!
Kate Dario: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Holy crap. I've clocked my dog at, like, 20 miles an hour and been impressed. But 40 miles an hour? Sorry, Wally, you're just not as good.
Kate Dario: Yeah, and their teeth are different. They have more chewing space on their molars. Sharp teeth are good for shredding through flesh. So when they have less sharp teeth, that means that they have an easier time eating foods that aren't meat. So they're less picky eaters than wolves and other carnivores.
Nate Hegyi: Are they sometimes like eating veggies or like eating… like plants and stuff?
Kate Dario: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Christine Wilkinson: Coyotes are generalists. They're very flexible in their diets. They're omnivorous.
Kate Dario: This is Christine Wilkinson. She's a wildlife ecologist based in the Bay area.
Christine Wilkinson: They can take prey as large as deer and as small as insects, right? And they can eat fruit and all sorts of other things like, you know, human trash and so on and so forth. And so they are able to kind of make it work with whatever is there.
Nate Hegyi: They're kind of like people, you know, sometimes you find yourself at a food court and you gotta eat at a Sbarro.
[MUX]
Kate Dario: And it's not just food where coyotes have this go with the flow attitude. It also extends to their social structure.
Christine Wilkinson: They are behaviorally flexible so they are able to hunt in groups or alone or kind of, you know, they're very flexible in how they choose to hunt or forage.
Kate Dario: Scientists describe this behavioral flexibility as a fission fusion society. Coyotes can band together or fuse when environmental pressures make that the best way to survive. Or if things aren't going great, these groups can separate. That's the fission part and ‘go out on their own.’
Kate Dario: This trait is pretty rare across the animal kingdom. Most carnivores are either social or solitary, not both. And Nate to your point, earlier, one of the few other animals that display this trait? Humans.
Nate Hegyi: Yep, definitely been in situations where you're just like, ah, I'm just gonna go it alone.
[MUX PEAKS & FADES]
Kate Dario: Coyotes have even been known to make friends with other species. There are studies and videos that show them teaming up with badgers to hunt prairie dogs and squirrels.
Nate Hegyi: [Laugh] It's like a fantastic Mr. Coyote.
Christine Wilkinson: They are also typically… a lot of people don't realize this. They are active day and night. So that's called being cathemeral. Um, so they if they have to shift into being nocturnal because there's more human activity, that's not something that's going to be difficult for them.
Nate Hegyi: So they're just like taking naps whenever they can.
Kate Dario: Totally.They can do what they want. They're like they're like teenagers, you know, just falling asleep in the afternoon. And they have a slate of other cool evolutionary tricks up their sleeves, too. You've heard coyotes howl, right?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Kate Dario: Yeah, they make a lot of different sounds. Barks, yips, you name it. But they can also manipulate these vocalizations in a really cool way. I'm going to have you listen to some tape. Okay. And I want you to tell me how many coyotes you think this is.
[COYOTE BEAU GESTE TAPE BEGINS]
Nate Hegyi: Okay. I'm gonna say that was like six coyotes.
Kate Dario: You would be wrong. It's actually just two.
Nate Hegyi: Geez, they are really throwing around a lot of yips and yaps.
Kate Dario: Yeah, so that's called the Beau Geste effect.
Nate Hegyi: The Beau Geste effect. Why is it called the Beau Geste effect?
Kate Dario: Well, I can tell you it's from a movie in the 1960s.
[ARCHIVAL CLIP: Beau Geste! The spectacular adventure classic!]
Kate Dario: Okay, we have our hero, Beau Geste. And there's a war scene. Okay? And he props up a bunch of dead soldiers to make the opposing army think there are a lot more troops in the area than they’re really are. You get it? You see how it connects?
[MUX]
Nate Hegyi: Yes. So the coyotes are trying to make it sound like there's a whole bunch of coyotes. You got to get out. It's going to be really scary, but it's really just like two little coyotes.
Kate Dario: So the theory is that it can make a territory sound a lot more populated than it really is to discourage new coyotes from moving in.
Nate Hegyi: Gotcha.
[COYOTE YAPS FADES INTO MUX]
Nate Hegyi: You think that they would eventually figure that out? Like if they're all doing it.
[MUX SWELL AND FADE]
Kate Dario: Okay, so another way coyotes can adapt is through reproduction. So if their population is kind of thinned out and the social structure is destabilized, there is evidence that female coyotes will have bigger litters and young coyotes will mate at younger ages. But if the space is crowded and resources are scarce, they'll have fewer babies.
Nate Hegyi: Wow, so they're essentially adjusting their population levels based on whether there's a lot of, let's say, hunting pressure or not, that kind of thing.
Kate Dario: Exactly. So this is a pretty rare trait, especially in predators. And like, talk about flexibility, right? Coyotes will even opportunistically mate outside their own species with closely related animals like dogs or wolves.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, that's why you'll get like Coy-dogs and things like that.
Kate Dario: Fun fact if a male coyote breeds with a female dog, that's a coy-dog. But if it's the other way around, it's a dog-ote. Or perhaps dog-otie
Nate Hegyi: Hello, I am dog-otie
Kate Dario: Dog-otie So this is actually really interesting when you start looking at the genetics of coyotes. So coyote genetics vary based on what coyote population you're looking at, like where they are in the country.
So here in the Northeast, coyotes have a lot of like not coyote in them basically. So a recent study of northeastern coyotes showed that 14% of their DNA was from western wolves, 13% was from the eastern wolf, and 11% was from domestic dogs.
Nate Hegyi: That’s so fascinating because I had noticed when I moved out east that the coyotes here, they seem bigger than the ones out in the Great Plains.
Kate Dario: Yeah, it's almost like coyotes are the ultimate mutt, you know. And I think that makes a lot of sense, because when we often talk about mutts, we talk about how their genetic diversity helps them be more resilient. And as you'll hear a lot throughout this episode, coyotes are super resilient.
[MUX]
Dan Flores: So this is an animal that's very deep into the evolutionary history of the continent.
Kate Dario:So this is Dan Flores, an environmental historian and author of Coyote America.
Dan Flores: So coyotes are initially, uh, evolved to the Great Plains and the deserts of the American West. And that's their original home. They're really kind of open country, savanna like animals.
Kate Dario: By the 1500s, though, Spanish colonists started reporting coyote sightings in Mexico…
Dan Flores:Then, in the 1700s and early 1800s…
Kate Dario: Those coyotes start to spread even further…into places like modern day Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Kate Dario: Now they can be found just about everywhere, from Alaska to LA to the most densely populated parts of the Eastern seaboard, like Manhattan.
Dan Flores: The major threat in cities to coyotes is being run over by cars, but they're smart enough that they began to figure out how to navigate, uh, six and eight lane highways. You get across the first set of lanes, and you stop in the median and wait for traffic to clear on the other side. And so we've got all kinds of studies that indicate that not only do they learn how to do this, but they transmit that knowledge culturally to their pups down the generations. Coyotes, like most animals, have a very strong culture. And of course, like us, they teach their young how to survive.
[MUX]
Nate Hegyi: So they can just like, adapt to almost any ecosystem from like huge skyscrapers, cities to, you know, essentially like boreal forest, northern Alberta.
Kate Dario: Totally.
Nate Hegyi: That's so cool.
[COYOTE HOWL]
Kate Dario: But where Nate, where you may ask, are these urban coyotes actually staying? Let me take you back to my reporting trip with Dan Proulx, on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
Kate Dario: So is this like, are we abutting like another part of the golf course, or is this a different golf course?
Dan Proulx: It's the… this is a different golf course.
Kate Dario: A lot of golf courses in this area.
Dan Proulx: Yeah
Nate Hegyi: It's Massachusetts, Kate. Of course there's lots of golf courses.
Kate Dario: We went to more golf courses than I think I've ever been to in my 24 years on this earth. And the reason… is that Dan told me golf courses are notorious places for coyotes to den.
Dan Proulx: You're definitely going to have at least one pack living on a golf course. Again, there's a water source, the open fields, there's bunnies. It's easy to capture stuff. You know, tons of squirrels. The only problem is when the coyotes are young. I mean.
Nate Hegyi: I guess that's kind of surprising, but this also totally makes sense because, you know, these are essentially like manicured, wild areas. Manicured natural areas. They've got everything a coyote wants.
Kate Dario: Right - which is why another place that coyotes love is cemeteries. On top of all those reasons you just said, there are also folks who leave food for cultural reasons. And non picky coyotes, they're happy to get this really easy snack.
Dan Proulx: So they have multiple dens because they are smart and they understand that, you know, sometimes you can't just dig a hole, stay in there. Something might happen. Where are you going to go?
Kate Dario: So one pack will have multiple dens, is what you're saying? Like a vacation house?
Dan Proulx: Yes. They'll have multiple things. Yeah. Yeah. Like these. These two specific coyotes in Salem. Um, they had a den in an abandoned house in the backyard. also up here. So we know that two dens and I suspect at least one out in the the woods in the wooded area. So, so.
[MUX]
Nate Hegyi: So they're like they're like Mark Zuckerberg. They've got their nice, you know, Malibu mansion. But then they've also got their survivalist compound in Hawaii.
Kate Dario: No, exactly. They're not here just to survive. They're here to thrive. You got it. You got it.
[MUX HIT]
Kate Dario: And you might get the impression from these examples that urban coyotes are just on the periphery of cities. But that isn’t the case. I talked to a guy named Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist who has been running one of the longest urban coyote studies based around the greater Chicago area.
Stan Gehrt: But we assumed that the downtown area like the loop, the loop is the part of Chicago that got the skyscrapers, the Sears Tower, all of that stuff. We thought, that's off limits. I mean, there's no way. Um, and sure enough, within the eighth or ninth year of the study, we were moving downtown along with the coyotes and attempting to radio collar them and track them right on Lake Shore Drive all the way up to Navy Pier.
[MUX SWELL AND FADE]
Nate Hegyi: Where are they living?
Kate Dario: There are stories of coyotes, okay, having litters of babies on roofs of parking garages in downtown Chicago.
Nate Hegyi: Wow, that's so cool.
Stan Gehrt: There is no place in the Chicago landscape that coyotes aren't exploiting or using
Kate Dario: These experts, they told me that urban coyotes actually live, on average, longer than rural coyotes.
Nate Hegyi: You know, that actually tracks, I mean, they've got, you know, Big Macs to eat. They've got deep dish pizza.
Kate Dario: Portillo's hot dogs.
Nate Hegyi: [laugh] Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of good snacks in Chicago.
Kate Dario: We may think this is cool but most people don't. So coming up, how the coyote went from respected predator to cartoon villain… insert Wile E coyote sounds
Nate Hegyi: Kate, I don't think I don't think he actually makes any sounds.
Kate Dario: Oh, oh, is it just like. Isn't it like I'm picturing? Isn't it like, like like, am I like like. Isn't he like when he's chasing. Like, isn't there like… [FADES OUT]
[MUX FADE]
AD BREAK
Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside In. I'm Nate Hegyi here with Kate Dario. And today we are talking all about coyotes.
Kate Dario: And for the rest of the episode we're going to be talking about our relationship with coyotes, which goes way, way, way back.
Dan Flores: Starting with native stories about them 10,000 years ago down to Roadrunner Coyote cartoons in our present time, they've served as avatars of humans as sort of stand ins for humans in the natural world.
Kate Dario: This again is author Dan Flores. He sees a lot of overlap between the story of humans and the story of coyotes (which you Nate have already been picking up on) Like I said earlier, we are both members of these fission fusion species
Dan Flores: So coyotes have not only sort of mimicked our own behavior. But their colonization of America, starting in the West and going east is sort of a reversal of American manifest destiny.
[MUX]
Kate Dario: Coyotes have been living among human civilization for thousands of years. They show up in ancient Aztec mythology, and they were denning in and around the Hopi and Pueblo cities of modern day New Mexico. And the stories about coyotes have been passed down through pictures and oral traditions for thousands of years.
Kieon Halona: Right. So for Navajo belief, Navajo culture, uh, pertaining to the coyote, which we call mąʼii" [pronounced "ma'ii"]. in the Navajo language, um, it's going to vary.
Kate Dario: So this is Kieon Halona, a member of the Navajo Historic Preservation Committee. He says coyotes are still very much present on the Navajo Nation today, which is about the size of Rhode Island.
Kieon Halona: You have them here in the, uh, the high mountain areas. You have them in the low deserts.
Kate Dario: Kieon told me, listen, there are so many stories about coyote, and they're different for different regions of Navajo Nation and different Indigenous tribes across the American West. But no matter where you are, coyote has a role.
Kieon Halona: He is a part of our whole tradition. He helped create the stars by accident. He discovered the first changing lady.
[MUX]
Kate Dario: In the Navajo Nation. Some of these stories are only told during the winter time, and in a lot of them, Coyote’s meeting and interacting with other animals on the landscape.
Kieon Halona: There’s gonna be coyote with the beavers. There’s coyote with the skunks. There's coyote and horned toad. There are so many coyote stories within Navajo nation.
Nate Hegyi: Coyote's got a lot of friends.
Kate Dario: Well, a lot of acquaintances. He's talking to a lot of people. I don't know if they're always friends. I don't know if they'd call each other friends.
Nate Hegyi: Okay
Kate Dario: Because you'll see this again and again. Coyote is really smart, and he's clever, but he's a flawed character.
Kieon Halona: And he's always referred to as a jokester, a trickster.
Kate Dario: But one thing that really sets all of these different stories and traditions apart from Western views of coyotes, is a sense of respect. Many European colonizers saw this creature very differently… like other predators on the landscapes, coyotes are competition… and one of the most famous American writers really helped set this tone for how a lot of people think about this American animal today. Nate, I want you to read this passage, okay? It's from Mark Twain's 1872 travelog Roughing It.
Nate Hegyi: “The coyote is a long, slim, sick, and sorry looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and miseryHe has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry.”Dang, Mark Twain. It's kind of mean.I think they look sleek and cool.
Nate Hegyi: Anyways, he is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. What's a velocipede?
Kate Dario: It’s an old-timey bicycle. I had to look it up, too. I had to look it up. No shame.
Dan Flores: Virtually every magazine writer after Mark Twain characterized coyotes this way. And it reached a point where there was actually an article in Scientific American in 1920 that argued that the coyote was the original Bolshevik. The original communist, in other words, and that all Americans should shoot a coyote on sight, even though a coyote was not worth the value of the ammunition that you would use to shoot one. It was your patriotic duty to wipe out these original communist animals in North America.
[MUX SWELL AND FADE]
Nate Hegyi: Again, it's like we see a reflection of ourselves, and then we otherize that reflection. they act like us, but they aren't us. And they need to go away. We don't like it.
Kate Dario: Around this time, killing coyotes became formal policy of the United States. Flores told me how the U.S. Biological Survey was founded around the turn of the century, in order to catalog the wildlife that had survived decades of unregulated colonization.
But they were also the ones tasked with essentially wiping out wolves. Which they did very successfully.
Nate Hegyi: Right.
Kate Dario: But this is you know, this created a problem in and of itself because this actually helped coyote populations who were like, okay, wow, now we don't have to compete with wolves anymore. Look at this nice, beautiful patch of beautiful northeastern land that we can move into. So the Biological Survey pivots.
Dan Flores: And that's when they come up with the idea that the coyote is the arch predator of the 20th century. They began to argue that really, it was the coyote that was the threat all along. It wasn't the wolf now that the wolf is gone. To the point where in 1931, the Biological Survey gets Congress to pass a law called the Animal Damage Control Act, which gives them $10 million to wipe coyotes off the face of the continent.
[ARCHIVAL TAPE: The snowmobiles leave to hunt coyotes or prairie wolves. Which are killing poultry and sheep in vast numbers. Fitted with skis in front and tracks behind, the motor slays can reach high speeds over the snow. Poison or traps are the more typical way of killing coyotes. There’s one now (fades out)...]
Kate Dario: And we know that this, uh, project to wipe coyotes off the face of the country was not successful, right?
Nate Hegyi: No
Dan Flores: When we began to persecute them and try to destroy them, they basically became fission animals and broke up their packs and scattered in singles and pairs across the landscape.
[MUX]
Dan Flores: And one of the things they do when they go into fission mode is they tend to colonize widely. And so, intriguingly enough, our attempts in the American West, which was the Coyotes original range to try to control their populations, resulted in spreading them across the continent as they went into fission mode.
Nate Hegyi: Kate, do you have Elon Musk's phone number? Because I think we just found an example of wasteful government spending. This obviously did not work.
Kate Dario: No, it did not work even a little bit. This is when you start seeing the rise of a truly urban coyote. Because coyotes, right, they're getting pushed out of their traditional homes. And American cities are also experiencing these rapid transformations that are making them more habitable for coyotes. There, you know, there were a lot of us moving there. And when we're somewhere, we have a lot of trash, which means a lot of rodents, which means a lot of food for coyotes. And then you also start seeing the advent of stray dog laws in cities like Boston and New York. So this took dogs who may have been eating similar animals and trash off the street, and then opening up that niche for coyotes. So now they're the sole predator of this size on an urban landscape.
[MUX SWELL AND FADE]
Kate Dario: So this brings us to today. Cities are definitely trying to figure out how to best handle having predators in urban landscapes. And outside of cities, killing coyotes en masse is still really common. The federal government killed more than 60,000 coyotes in 2022 alone. In rural America… many farmers and herders argue that killing predators keeps their livestock safer. But again, scientific research overwhelmingly shows that coyote numbers can actually increase in an area after killing. Plus, they can also become more aggressive, leading to even more predation, and causing more problems with people.
Christine Wilkinson: I mean even today we have, uh, coyote killing contests in many areas of this country, uh, that people get these bounties for killing the most coyotes, despite the science. Not supporting that, even being helpful for reducing coyote populations.
Christine Wilkinson: And so rather than us trying to ignore the problem or shoot a bunch of coyotes pretending that it's working or, um, you know, argue with one another about whether there should be coyotes, like, we need to just accept the fact that there are coyotes and they they will continue to persist.
Kate Dario: So Christine talks about needing to foster a “culture of coexistence.” And this is personal, because she works in a city with one of the highest coyote densities in the country.
Christine Wilkinson: San Francisco Animal Care and Control estimates around 100 coyotes in the city.
Kate Dario: And yes – there are dogs that have been nipped, and other incidents there too. But she points out that coyotes also have benefits in an urban landscape.
Christine Wilkinson: They are essentially regulating prey populations. And so in the case of coyotes, they are regulating the rodent populations and the populations of animals that, um, a lot of people think of as pests.
Kate Dario: In other words, coyotes are eating rats. They’re eating bunnies. They’re discouraging populations of feral cats. And at least on the East Coast, they may even be helping control deer populations. And did you know, you're actually way more likely to get hurt by crashing your car into a deer than you are by getting bit by a coyote?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, yeah that's not surprising at all. Like, people hit deer all the time.
Kate Dario: But it’s definitely hard for people to feel those benefits. Christine actually led a study that surveyed attitudes about urban coyotes in San Francisco.
Christine Wilkinson: We heard everything from coyotes don't pay taxes. Why should they live here? I kid you not, To I appreciate that coyotes are here. I recognize that we are in their space. And I just want to note for people that were experiencing conflict, they weren't, um, ubiquitously feeling negatively toward coyotes. This is even if, like, someone's dog got chased by a coyote or something very frightening that was, you know, tactile. Some of those comments would even say like, hey, I recognize that. Like, I did the wrong thing by having my dog off leash in this area. That's not an off leash area. Um, because there are coyotes.
[MUX]
Christine Wilkinson: And so that led me to thinking, okay, what does coexistence really mean?
Kate Dario: Okay, Nate, I want to finish this story back in Massachusetts.
Dan Proulx: Look at that little dog.
Kate: Perfect target.
Dan Proulx: Perfect. Perfect target. A coyote vest would be on top of that one.
Kate Dario: That's me with Dan Proulx again. And he was telling me that after all these coyote incidents in the North Shore, people were getting really worried about their pets. So when we were driving around, one thing he kept talking about were coyote vests.
Dan Proux: And plus there's spikes to where it looks like a little like porcupines and stuff like that. So they're scared of it.
Kate Dario: Can you picture this? Do you want me to explain this a little bit better?
Nate Hegyi: No. I can, you know those leather jackets that, like punks would wear in the 1980s with, like, spikes on the shoulders? That's what I'm imagining a Chihuahua wearing.
Kate Dario: Exactly, exactly. You can give your Yorkshire terrier a little bit of, like, a goth makeover and protect it.
Nate Hegyi: [Laugh] I dig.
Dan Proulx: I love the coyote vest because it's, I would say 90% of the the attacks on small dogs are always on the back, and a coyote would cover it. And it helps with birds of prey too, especially if you have a little tiny dog. Um, I'm actually driving around in circles because I was talking.
[MUX SWELL AND FADE]
Kate Dario: So Dan Proulx, Massachusetts Dan, he says for communities that are just learning to live with coyotes - is education, you gotta educate people. Okay, First of all, Do not feed coyotes. That just habituates them, makes them more comfortable around people, means they’re gonna keep bothering you. Second - You got to make them scared of people.
Nate Hegyi: How do you do that?
Kate Dario: You know, you just hit him with a little. AH, if you see them on the street, that's all. That's all it is. Just AH.
Nate Hegyi: All you gotta do is just roar at them. If they want your pizza, you just give them a roar, okay?
Kate Dario: Exactly, exactly. And again, if you have a little dog, do not let it off its leash at night, okay? Because we can't blame coyotes for doing what they're going to do.
Dan Proulx: Actually I lost a cat to a coyote several years back. I was angry at the coyote for a long time, but my cat was out in the backyard and sometimes she sneaks out into the back, sits on the back porch, and I heard a rustling, and I went back there and a coyote grabbed my cat and left. I was really angry at coyotes. I wanted them all dead. This and that. But after about a week, two weeks, I realized that's what they do. That's, they’re predators. And something like that helped me grow into to realize that, you know, maybe I can help prevent future things like that from happening.
[MUX]
Nate Hegyi: It just seems like in the East Coast, we wiped out all these predators, right? There's like no wolves here. There are some black bears, sure, but like, now we have these big coyotes coming in, and they're kind of taking that place of the apex predator, which is something that almost every ecosystem needs.
Kate Dario: Exactly. No, I think predator is like a four letter word to a lot of people. But we need them. We need them. I don't like rats in the city, I really don't. I if that means that I have to be a little bit more okay with coyotes, that that is something I can do.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. I mean I think predator is more like a eight letter word, but I get I get.
Kate Dario: Well congrats on being good math, Nate
Nate Hegyi: I probably didn’t get it right either.
[Coyote sounds]
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: This episode was reported, produced and mixed by Kate Dario. It was edited and also mixed by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I’m your host, Nate Hegyi. Our team also includes Felix Poon, Justine Paradis, and Marina Henke. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio. And if you’re interested in listening to some more super cool coyote vocalizations… check out Janet Kessler’s page on YouTube. We’ll put a link in our shownotes.
And have you seen coyotes in your neighborhood? Maybe you’ve already bought your coyote vest for Fido… or maybe you’re realizing you should stop feeding your local pack. Either way… we wanna hear from you! You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Outside/In is a production of NHPR.