In Defense of an Urban Survivor

I know, I know. The coyote killed your cat, attacked your dog, ate your daughter’s homework, your wife’s Palm Pilot and your Greg Norman signature golf tees, ripped your pet bunny to shreds, devoured your chickens, wiped out your sheep farmer brother-in-law’s spring lamb population and gorged for days on hundreds of priceless black Angus cattle, thereby reducing the country’s livestock supply by a third and simultaneously quadrupling the price of a good steak, before a holiday weekend no less.

OK, maybe I’m exaggerating. But to listen to a lot of people tell it, the coyote is the four-legged, cloven-hooved antichrist, ranging around our cities and plains for the sole purpose of destroying the American economy, and having a few laughs along the way. Now, I admit that the coyote probably did eat your cat, and maybe he knocked off a couple of sheep, give or take a hundred, out in the hills somewhere. But so what? The coyote is just doing what he or she has to do to survive.

I would also like to suggest that instead of simply chuckling patronizingly when someone tells a story about a coyote rummaging through an urban garbage can and spitting out a tennis shoe in favor of an approaching rodent, we reconsider this Los Angeles totem, this atavistic representative from long ago, eons before the first humans entered the stadium and evolved into a species that could tolerate the survival of no other.

First, a few biological stats: coyotes, Canis latrans, are often mistaken for domestic dogs, as they typically weigh 25 to 40 pounds and look like a relative of the German shepherd--perhaps a third cousin from the fun and irresponsible side of the family. They can be distinguished from dogs by their black-tipped tail, which is carried down (at or below the level of the back) while running, whereas dogs run with their tails higher. One evening, Robert Wayne, a biology professor at UCLA, saw a coyote making a beeline down Sunset Boulevard. The animal was acting very much like a stray dog, which, he pointed out, he would be more likely to fear than a loose coyote. “Coyotes are afraid of people, they’ll run away,” says Wayne. “I’d be more frightened of a dog off leash than a coyote.” His point is well-taken: Dogs kill several people every year while coyotes reportedly have never been responsible for a human death in L.A. County.

Although they have long lived on the fringes of the metropolis, particularly dry years such as this one drive them out of hiding. As rabbits and other prey look for more water sources, cruising backyard gardens, golf courses and other suburban attractions, in their footsteps come the coyotes.

Classified as carnivores, coyotes are really omnivores; in addition to eating small rodents, rabbits and insects, they feed on fruit, nuts and vegetables. This makes the common suburban garden, despite the coyotes’ mistrust of people, a rather attractive proposition. Where coyotes do live in suburbia, their numbers are denser than they would be in the wild, says Seth Riley, a wildlife ecologist with the National Park Service. This seems to correlate with human populations: Compare the populations of Montana, a comparatively vast wilderness area, with Southern California, which is the national template for suburban sprawl.

Coyotes are found in every contiguous state in the union, showing up in a slightly larger form in the Great Lakes and maritime states, probably as a result of hybridizing with Algonquin wolves. In the Eastern United States, where they can live on deer, they hunt in packs. In Southern California, when not caring for their young, they are usually found in pairs, although sometimes they pal up in groups of three or four. Typically there will be resident coyotes crossing paths with commuters, usually young males looking for somewhere to settle down. Coyotes do not generally carry rabies, although they can. Adults have relatively long reproductive lives of three to 10 years, and they have been known to compensate for adverse conditions, such as heavy hunting and trapping, with larger litter sizes, with the average litter numbering about four.

A trait that they share with humans is that they punish group members for breaking rules. There have been incidents in which a pack attacked and ostracized a beta male after he attempted to mount the group’s alpha female. They also indulge in a sort of play not unlike a milder version of frat boys on spring break. That wild yipping that city slickers assume is a pack of coyotes tearing up a cat is actually the rambunctious outbursts of frolicking coyotes, says Wayne.

The ease with which coyotes have learned to live on the fringes of civilization is what sets them apart from the bobcat and mountain lion, both of whose numbers have declined with the expansion of suburbia. The coyote has no natural predators except the wolf and mountain lion, and where wolves have been reintroduced, as in Yellowstone National Park, coyote populations have dropped. With no move afoot to repopulate California with wolves, human activities, such as poisoning and vehicle collisions, will have to do. In other words, we are largely responsible for coyote mortality in Southern California.

Riley, who has been working for the last three years on a coyote study in the Santa Monica Mountains, says that while individuals will generally stay within a five-square-mile area, there have been intriguing exceptions. One female originally tagged in the Agoura-Calabasas area was found hunting as far away as Pierce College in Woodland Hills: Biologists figured out that she was using the L.A. River basin to move freely through the Valley.

But the perpetually clogged 101 Freeway “is a huge barrier to them,” says Ray Sauvajot, senior Park Service biologist in charge of the study. “They don’t attempt to cross it at all. Those that do, get hit.” On the other major roadway in the study, the 23 Freeway that connects the 101 to the 118, “there have been a lot of road kills,” 20 in one nine-month period alone, says Sauvajot. “In our study, road kill is the No. 1 cause of death.”

The finding echoes what was discovered in seven months at the 241, a toll road in Orange County. Although five underground crossings for animals were built and fences erected, at least 30 animals (including coyotes, deer, bobcats and other wildlife) were hit and killed while attempting to cross the road, which bisects a wildlife preserve.

But while car-versus-coyote incidents are lethal, poison has an equally sweeping effect on the coyote population. The anti-coagulants used to kill mice and rats not only affect coyotes dining on rodents deep in suburbia, but also those farther away. Riley’s study found that as the poisoned pests make their way afield, they eventually spell death for their far-flung predators.

As it happens, spiking the coyotes’ food may one day protect them. For the past 27 years, behavioral psychologist Stuart Ellins has been studying coyotes and food-aversion conditioning at Cal State San Bernardino. “I try to get coyotes to stay away from livestock and pets with lithium chloride,” he explains. “It is nontoxic, similar to table salt. It makes coyotes nauseous.” The image conjured is of the roadrunner playing a trick on Wile E. Coyote by making his food taste funny, and then dashing off with a smug “beep-beep” as the coyote heaves his lunch. Reality is not far from image, as the food-aversion method works like this: Doses of lithium chloride are placed inside dead bait, such as turkeys or sheep. When the coyotes approach and start to eat the bait, they are repelled.

The method has been so successful that Ellins has been consulted by ranchers in Orange County and wilderness stewards at Joshua Tree National Park about humane coyote control. “Suddenly, a lot of people are calling me,” he says. Currently he is trying to find out if coyotes transfer their aversion to other coyotes. “Rats don’t communicate food aversions,” he says, “but they do with their preferences. So far, even though coyotes don’t share food, I have found that if a rabbit has lithium in it, coyotes won’t eat it and they will keep others from eating it too.

“There are a lot of two- and three-legged coyotes out there,” Ellins says, referring to the consequences of non-humane methods of control such as trapping, “and hopefully this will reduce it.”

To investigate exactly how the urban coyote fares, I decided to spend an evening with Sauvajot and Riley’s carnivore study team in the central Santa Monica Mountains. The mission--to learn about coyotes, bobcats and gray foxes and how they ply their living on the edge of a giant metropolis--could one day be crucial to saving other species. If we can’t protect these carnivores, they speculated, how can we protect anything? The mountain area they covered runs from the 23 Freeway on the west to Topanga Canyon Boulevard on the east, and here they examined such issues as how development patterns affect animals and how these three species interact within human-impacted areas.

The study, the largest of its kind involving urban California coyotes (smaller studies had been done with significantly fewer animals) captured 120 coyotes (50 females and 70 males) and tagged 104 with radio collars. On a winter evening, I joined a team heading out from Park Service headquarters in Thousand Oaks in a van with a rooftop antenna. We drove into a middle-class suburban neighborhood--lots of cul-de-sacs and large ranch homes with SUVs in the driveways. At 5:21 p.m. we stopped at the corner of Valley Spring just off Westlake Boulevard. We were tracking a female coyote known as C84. Lorraine Tigas, a graduate student at UC Davis, hopped out of the van with a walkie-talkie and a radio monitor and sent her assistant about 20 yards down the street, on a parallel track with a stretch of undeveloped terrain owned by the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency. Five minutes away are a freeway and a mall, complete with a Starbucks and Macy’s.

Tigas and her assistant, who carried a portable antenna and a radio monitor, turned on their listening devices. “She’s inactive,” Tigas said. We cruised around the Westlake patch to another location a few blocks away. Tigas and her assistant assumed their positions and the routine was repeated; the object was to see if the coyote was moving. “Still inactive,” Tigas said. She explained that C84 is a mate of C29, who died at the age of about 5 of “rodenticide.” In other words, C29 ate a rodent that had been poisoned. As we waited, so did C84 remain motionless; was she tracking our movement with her keen senses?

While there is much folklore about coyotes, both in Native American narratives (which present the animal as a trickster, creator, wise man, wise guy, thief) and the journals of explorers and trappers (which present the animal as a social nuisance or as sneaky vermin with somewhat valuable pelts), there is not much accounting for Canis latrans in mainstream literature (unlike the bear or wolf, for example, which are enduring icons of prose wonderment). This dearth of scrutiny works to the coyote’s advantage; he remains a puzzlement to his greatest threat, daring the world for triangulation.

A human resident of the neighborhood approached the team and the Park Service van, a curious-looking arrangement that an outsider could have taken for a Home Depot attempt at extraterrestrial contact, or a high school surveillance project. “What’s up?” he said. Tigas explained. “My dog ran off for a few days,” he elaborated. “He’s an Akita-Lab mix. Where did he go?” They had a brief conversation, in which Tigas told him that his dog might have mated with a coyote, among myriad possibilities, most of which did not involve coyotes. We continued to listen for signs of movement from C84. Had she hooked up with the man’s dog? I wondered. Had the dog heeded the call of the wild and joined a pack of urban coyotes? “Last month,” Tigas recounted, “a woman stopped me and said, ‘I saw a coyote cross the road. I didn’t know whether to slow down or speed up.’ ”

It was time to take a break and we headed down the hill, away from this wilderness patch, to the local mall. We never did find C84; perhaps she was waiting for us to leave so she could begin her evening rounds, helping us two-legged critters in ways we should note: eating rodents and, yes, the occasional cat, which may well be preying on local birds. A San Diego study published in the Journal of Science found that an increase in the coyote population had brought a subsequent increase in the songbird population, as the coyotes eradicated the feral cat population.

The fact that we were monitoring coyotes at night is significant: In the wild, coyotes are more likely to have some daytime activity, while in suburban areas they are mostly nocturnal, a direct response to the presence of people--and the times when they are least likely to run into them.

It is at night that I feel most connected to the coyote: I fall asleep while listening to tapes of their songs. If I don’t listen to the tapes, I like to think that they are around, watching and listening and playing. Although I have never heard of any sightings in my beach-adjacent area, I have heard of coyotes boldly walking down the streets of Santa Monica, as if to window shop along Montana Avenue. There is, however, an injured possum living at my apartment complex. Sometimes at night it crawls from underneath a building, and a bloody patch on its back is illumined as it dashes before a pair of headlights in the parking lot. I’ve seen it enough times that I think I can make out bite marks around the wound. Was it waylaid by a coyote? I think as it scurries off to hunt before it is hunted again. Is brother coyote lurking in Marina del Rey? If so, he is clever indeed. I have heard that to avoid being detected in areas where they are heavily hunted, the coyote stops singing. So I resort to my tapes.

A couple of months later, I joined a group of campers in Malibu Creek State Park. We had gathered for a twilight talk on coyotes. We sat on wooden benches in an amphitheater staring at a blank movie screen. As sunlight faded and the stars came up, a ranger arrived and began a slide show. The slides comprised a generic nature show--coyote pups, coyote tracks, coyotes on the hunt, coyotes at play. After the visual presentation, it was time for questions and answers. Most questions had to do with coyote control; evidently, those who had gathered under the stars to talk of wilderness had come not out of curiosity but fear. “Why aren’t they moved away when they’re caught?” one camper asked. “How can I keep coyotes away from my cat?” said another. “Will coyotes eat my toddler?” a third wondered. The ranger advised them that it’s best to keep cats away from coyotes, and that it is not likely a coyote would consume human toddlers.

The evening reminded me of traffic school. “If I have an unopened six-pack in my trunk,” someone inevitably asks, “can I get busted?” “What if my wine bottle is uncorked but it’s in my back seat?” “Exactly how many feet from the driver’s seat can I leave the booze?” The conversation is always a perversion of the concept of individual rights, the pursuit of happiness, the national mantra, “It’s a free country, Your Honor. It says right here I can do what I want.”

So, too, with the coyote: “I’m camping and I brought my Chihuahua . . . . So what if my housing development displaces a coyote settlement? It’s easy for them to move. Isn’t that what they do?” Yes, they do move. They wander. They are rootless. They survive. Kind of like Americans. In particular, the kind of people who live in Los Angeles. And so they move into our neighborhoods, fleeing other less-desirable regions, dragging a trap perhaps, singing a silent song, searching for a room and a meal.