Coping With Coyotes : Foragers are sighted more often in Conejo Valley neighborhoods. A public meeting will focus on learning to live with them.

Looking out her window, Gerri Conlan sometimes sees three or four coyotes nibbling the fruit off the apple trees in her back yard in Thousand Oaks.

Last Christmas, Conlan saw one large coyote attempting to scale a neighbor’s fence to get at a pair of brown hens inside. Shooed away, the coyote snarled and showed its teeth. Another time, she watched as a coyote sprawled out in her front yard to calmly devour a neighbor’s cat.

Mysteriously vanished pets are a frequent problem in the Conejo Valley. Over the years, Sylvia Bente has lost three small dogs to coyotes. The first, a French poodle, was boldly snatched during a game of fetch.

“I was playing ball with him,” Bente said. “He went around the corner and I never saw him again.”

Althou,s Conlan has lived in her quiet suburban neighborhood for nearly 19 years, she said coyotes only recently started paying visits to her home.

“For the first 16 years we never saw a coyote, ever,” Conlan said. “Oh, the occasional squirrel, a possum or a raccoon. That never disturbed me.”

But as the coyotes have grown bolder in their foraging ventures, Conlan has grown more concerned. She sought help from city officials and local wildlife experts, prompting a public meeting on coping with coyotes in an urban environment to be held Wednesday night.

The program will feature representatives from the California Department of Fish and Game and Los Angeles Animal Care and Control in Agoura Hills, a Los Angeles County shelter that provides animal control services to Thousand Oaks.

The city staffer organizing Wednesday’s meeting, Brenda Young, said the session is not designed to scare people, just to educate them on living with coyotes.

“It’s something that we have been talking about doing for a long time,” Young said. “Coyotes are part of our environment. It’s just a matter of people needing to learn how to coexist with them.”

Councilwoman Judy Lazar said Conlan’s situation caught her attention because of where she lives. Conlan’s home is centrally located in the Conejo Oaks neighborhood and closed in by other homes.

“She doesn’t back up to open space,” Lazar said. “I do, and I see coyotes having their breakfasts in the morning. I expect that, but she doesn’t. This is an indicator that coyotes are integrating more into our neighborhoods.”

Conlan said her greatest fear is that hungry coyotes will attack playing children. She brought flyers to local elementary schools and preschools to notify parents of Wednesday’s meeting, as well as calling the presidents of homeowner associations around the city.

“I hate the thought of seeing children harmed,” said Conlan, a grandmother of four. “It’s just a concern and a feeling in my tummy that something is going to happen eventually. The more prepared we are, the better.”

Her worries are not unfounded, said Bruce Richard, manager of the Agoura Hills shelter. While coyote attacks on humans are rare, he said they have been known to attack small children.

Officials have recorded only one fatality from a coyote attack: a 3-year-old in Glendale in 1981. In 1991, an Orange County toddler was attacked and bitten by a coyote, and in 1992, a 5-year-old girl in San Clemente was scratched and bitten while playing on a swing set in her back yard.

“Coyotes don’t really distinguish between species so much as size,” said Suzanne Goode, associate resource ecologist with the California Department of Parks and Recreation. “It’s never a good idea to leave a toddler or small child unattended outside.”

Richards said coyotes have become more aggressive in recent years as they have adjusted to the presence of human beings in their natural habitat.

“Fifteen years ago, if they saw you they would be out of sight in a second,” he said. “Today, they stand there and watch you.”

The Agoura Hills shelter used to provide humane traps for residents to catch and remove coyotes. But Richards said there are simply too many coyotes in the Conejo Valley to bother trying to trap them anymore. Not to mention the fact that coyotes are too smart to fall for that trick.

“More often you catch someone’s cat,” Richards said. “Coyotes are too smart to go in a box.”

Coyotes are territorial creatures, he said, and it takes a lot of development to push them out of a region. As long as they can find a sheltered hillside to dig a den to sleep in during the day, they aren’t likely to leave.

Garrie Mar, who tracks wildlife sightings for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy Foundation, said residents of Southern California report seeing more coyotes than any other creatures.

“We’ve found them all over,” Mar said. “We even had a sighting of coyotes on Sunset Boulevard in front of the UCLA campus. They really are all over the place because they are so adaptable.”

Nocturnal hunters, coyotes tend to appear at dusk and forage until dawn. The reed-thin animals weigh about 40 pounds at most, largely because they are on the move so much they never have time to gain weight.

Richards said coyotes provide a natural cleanup service for humans because they eat mostly rodents and snakes. But a plump house cat is just as attractive to them as a rat, he said.

“Coyotes look at cats and even small dogs as being like rabbits,” Richards said. “They don’t make the distinction that it is someone’s pet.”

Small dogs such as Bente’s poodle are no match for coyotes. She has barricaded her yard with chain fencing and floodlights, but even with those protective measures fears that the two small dogs she has now will go the way of the other three.

“I worry about it, but I don’t want to destroy the coyotes,” Bente said. “If they could be kept up in the mountains, I think it would be all right. After all, we are intruding on their territory.”

With mating season just finished and litters of coyote pups on the way, Richards said sightings are likely to go up. The mother coyote will keep her pups close to her for about eight months, training them to hunt and passing on clues about how to tip over garbage cans and leap fences.

He cautions residents to bring small pets in at night and not to leave them unattended in the morning.

“A six-foot block wall is nothing for a coyote,” he said. “They’ll pick up someone’s cat and clear the wall with it. It’s very common here for people to just matter-of-factly dismiss the fact that their cat is missing and assume that a coyote or hawk took it.”

Residents should keep their garbage cans inside a garage or other shelter until collection time. Pet food should never be left outside; it beckons coyotes for an easy and tasty meal.

“If people don’t take preventive measures, they set out a banquet for coyotes every night,” Richards said.

After floods and fires, some residents feel sorry for the coyotes, and put food out for them. Richards said feeding them is a bad idea.

“I know their intentions are good,” he said. “But they are actually creating a problem.”

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FYI

Coping With Coyotes in an Urban Environment is scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday in the board room at Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. Because there is a performance at the plaza that evening, people attending the meeting will have to pay a $4 fee to park in the City Hall lots, but can receive a voucher for parking at a future event.