Though Human Incursion Has Decimated Many Wild Species, One Wily Animal Has Benefited : Trail of the Urban Coyote

Jeff Franklin is a wildlife biologist. That’s biologist, not apologist. He’s not the guy on the wildlife show praising the finer qualities of the Gila monster or moray eel.

So when it comes to the urban coyote, the Canoga Park resident has no illusions.

Yes, he says, the coyote would happily devour your pet. Over the last two years, he has pulled enough cat fur and bones from coyote droppings to know.

Franklin, 25, who offers an informal workshop on the wiles of the urban coyote, recently found himself before residents of a canyon neighborhood who knew from bitter experience about the coyote’s appetite for pets. As one woman put it: “We’re just raising hors d’oeuvres.”

‘A Success Story’

Franklin, nonetheless, admires the staying power of the coyote, which he calls “a success story unparalleled to this day in terms of a wild animal.”

“As time is running out for many species in this rapidly urbanizing world, the time for the urban coyote is now and in the future,” he wrote in an abstract of his unpublished research.

During a century of diminished expectations for wildlife--in which top-ranked predators like the grizzly bear, cougar and wolf have been decimated or isolated in preserves--the coyote has expanded its range from a few states to every state but Hawaii, and has spread as far as northern Canada and south to Costa Rica, wildlife experts say.

In the Verdugo and Santa Monica mountains, where housing tracts pushing deep into hillsides and canyons have sent wildlife in retreat, the coyote has stood his ground--at times displaying his awe of man by padding nonchalantly down the street or cooling off under a sprinkler.

For many people, these lean, wolf-like creatures serve as a romantic vestige of the Old West, or a link to natural forces that seem to have been banished from suburban life. Coyotes, which typically grow to weigh 25 to 40 pounds, also provide the practical benefit of rodent control.

But house pets in many canyon and hillside neighborhoods have paid the price. And, in a few cases, coyotes have been bold enough to treat people--usually small children--as prey.

Attacks on Humans

Since 1975, there have been 14 reported coyote attacks on humans in Los Angeles County, according to the county agricultural commissioner’s office. A fatal 1981 attack on a 3-year-old Glendale girl is the only documented case in this country of a coyote killing a person.

Some of the attacks occurred in areas where people made the mistake of putting out food for coyotes. For the omnivorous animal, food is so abundant on the urban fringe that no desperate steps are needed to obtain it.

A supreme opportunist, the coyote has prospered because it is willing to “take a meal wherever it can get it,” Franklin said.

“And the beauty of it is, it recognizes what a meal is.” Unlike predators that are rigid carnivores, the coyote “doesn’t say, ‘This is fruit, and I can’t eat it.’ ”

In fact, in dissecting more than 100 samples of coyote scat found near housing tracts in the Westlake Village-Thousand Oaks-Agoura Hills area, Franklin has found an abundance of apricot and peach pits as well as garbage and signs of dog food, vegetables, insects, lizards, birds, house pets and rodents.

Humans May Have Helped

Yet, if adapting means coping with adverse conditions, coyotes may be given too much credit for surviving human incursions. In the view of some experts, the urban coyote is prospering as much because of man as in spite of him.

“By manipulating the environment to suit his own requirements and preferences, man has substantially increased the quantity and quality of prey” available to the coyote, Franklin said.

As a result, he said, “given a choice of habitats in which to forage, the coyote would actively choose the more urban environment over the more rural.”

In developing the hillsides, man has “taken arid soils, and he’s irrigated the hell out of them, and he’s brought in lush vegetation, lots of it fruit-bearing,” Franklin said. The fruit also attracts rodents, the coyote’s dietary staple.

Golf courses also are a big draw for coyotes, Franklin said. “They go crazy in golf courses because there’s lots of rodents running around” and “the grass is always short.”

In short, compared to their rural counterparts, urban coyotes “are in a position where they can expend less energy” and “less time actively foraging” and “travel shorter distances to acquire their food,” Franklin said.

This, he said, allows them to concentrate on other biological imperatives, such as “mating, weaning offspring and territorial defense.”

According to Franklin, the urban coyote even manages to penetrate the seemingly formidable barrier of the freeways.

“They use the L.A. River as a freeway of their own to get around without getting under the cars,” Franklin said.

Franklin, a Pennsylvania native who is working toward a master’s degree in environmental ecology, majored in biology at Gettysburg College and moved to Westlake Village after his graduation in 1983.

But his job at a medical laboratory was far from his career goal of wildlife research, prompting him to look for a study to pursue in his spare time.

Intriguing Audacity

He became intrigued by the audacity of the coyotes he saw while driving to work in the early morning or jogging at night. He thought learning more about the coyote’s adaptive success might help save other creatures. Besides, the study of threatened species has a funereal quality--how much more encouraging to be involved with an ecological winner.

Under the sponsorship of the Mountains Restoration Trust, a Malibu-based conservation group, Franklin began offering a coyote workshop to neighborhood groups.

Recently, he was invited to a Brentwood neighborhood where coyotes had begun to wear out their welcome.

Of the 10 people who gathered in a living room in Mandeville Canyon--just over the ridge from Encino and east of Topanga State Park--seemingly each had lost a pet goose, or Siamese, or Pekinese, or some combination thereof. One woman said she had lost 12 cats in 25 years.

“I hate being woken up in the middle of the night . . . by the animals screaming as they’re getting torn apart,” said Ethel Schonberger, who was host at the gathering. It is almost equally unsettling, she said, to see piles of “cat fur and bones and things like that” while out walking her dog.

Humorous Outlook

But such grim complaints also gave rise to humor. When Franklin explained that local coyotes tend to be chunkier and glossier than their scruffy desert cousins, someone deadpanned: “Of course, it’s the Westside.”

Franklin offered a few modest suggestions, telling the neighbors above all to keep their pets in at night.

He said to avoid putting pet food and water dishes outside and to never leave food and water for coyotes. He said to keep trash containers tightly capped; to pick up fruit that has fallen on the ground; to keep bushes and shrubs trimmed so coyotes can’t hide in them, and not to leave small children unattended.

“I guess, basically, what it boils down to is that you’re trying to make the habitat less appealing for the coyote,” he said.

Beyond that, “you just have to learn to live with them, because you can’t get rid of them. . . . That’s the bottom line,” he said.

Futile Extermination Attempts

As has became apparent to many Western ranchers, Franklin said, attempts to exterminate coyotes through methods such as trapping have proven futile. He said coyotes are smart enough to learn how to avoid traps, which also are not species specific, and can snare dogs and children and lawsuits.

Area wildlife-control officials generally agree that wiping out coyotes would not be possible, much less desirable.

After the death of 3-year-old Kelly Keen from an attack five years ago, county wildlife officers trapped and killed 55 coyotes within half a mile of her home in less than three months.

Wildlife officers for the City of Los Angeles trap and kill about 100 coyotes a year, but only in situations where the safety of people, pets or livestock seems threatened, according to Tom Walsh, West Valley district supervisor with the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation.

Los Angeles County trappers take between 125 and 200 coyotes a year in the county and in several cities that contract for coyote control, including Agoura Hills, Glendale, Hidden Hills and Beverly Hills.

Population Unaffected

The trapping programs, although possibly alleviating risky situations, appear to make little dent in coyote numbers, animal-control officials say.

One reason is that coyotes somehow are able to respond to depletion of their numbers by bearing larger litters.

Robert G. Howell, former deputy agricultural commissioner for Los Angeles County, compared the trapping to “a policing action” that seems to signify to coyotes that it is time to lay low.

“You take a few,” Howell said, “and the word gets around.”

No one in Franklin’s audience seemed to favor Draconian measures, anyway, with several saying they knew the coyotes got there first.

Besides, said Lauren Mulford, it’s “the coyotes and the hawks and the owls” that make a canyon a lovely place to live.

Audrey Denberg-Geffs, who said she once lost a cat to a coyote, said the animals “are cute, and they do have a right to be here.”

She told of living years ago in a place in Malibu where her little boy fell asleep each night to a howling serenade.

Later, in a different house, where there was little coyote activity, the boy had trouble falling asleep, Denberg-Geffs said. “That was his lullaby.”