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People I meet in Santa Fe ask, "have you seen a coyote here yet? Have you heard them at night? Yes, one or two, but the truth is that I saw more coyotes much closer up in my yard in Connecticut.
In Santa Fe we are at the edge of a dense city, with fences and sidewalks and close buildings. In Connecticut we lived surrounded by forest, in "edge habitat" that coyotes, black bears, bobcats, turkeys, and deer called home. They wandered in and out of our yards all the time.
But the southwest is the original home of the ancestor coyote, and the small wild song-dog is emblematic of this part of the country, reaching back to the origin stories of Pueblo natives who lived here millennia ago. Old Man Coyote, wise, tricky, full of human-like foibles and hubris, the creator of the earth and teller of morality tales, was the first deity of the Americas. Coyotl in Aztec.
Over the past century the adaptable, wily, smart, cunning, flexible coyote has spread from the west all over North America and into our cities, even Central Park in New York City. Close encounters with coyotes have now become the country's most common large-wildlife experience, writes Dan Flores.
He is the author of Coyote America, which I am reading now. Flores lives in the Galisteo Valley, just south of Santa Fe. His history of the large scale coyote eradication programs of the 1920s and 30s is mind blowing. First, wolves were virtually eradicated in America before environmental awareness changed our perceptions of other species and of predator niches.
And when the wolves went, it was the turn of the coyotes to be poisoned and trapped by the millions and millions with funding from the government in the millions of dollars over decades.
And yet coyotes persisted. Unlike wolves, who are rigidly social and dramatically affected if any part of the group collapses, coyotes are cooperative sometimes, but perfectly fine hunting alone and being solitary. They adapt to the conditions they find. Like humans do.
Coyotes have a biological ability to produce larger litters (ten or more pups) when populations are low, and fewer pups (two at a time) when coyote packs are stable. Much of their yipping and singing at night is a way to determine how many coyotes are in the area, and they adjust hunting behaviors and breeding fertility based on what they hear. The government found it was impossible to eradicate them, they just produced more pups when more coyotes were killed off.
They are smart, adapting easily to humans, and when vast acreage in the west was being carpet poisoned in an effort to eliminate them, coyote packs simply moved north to Canada, east to cities and south to bayous and swamps. They moved to Chicago, to Quebec, to Miami and New York and to Boston, and made new homes spreading out very quickly into strange new environments. Just like us.
When leash laws started going into effect in cities to control what had been the urban scourge of feral dogs in the last century, coyotes moved into the vacated niche. But they are so much more secretive and elusive than dog packs, and we hardly noticed at first.
They have never approached being an endangered species like gray wolves, even though both were targeted for elimination. Just a hated one by Europeans and sheepmen, a revered one by native Americans. The author does a great job explaining why that hate / love dynamic existed.
The coyote, it turns out, is a lot like people. Our own homegrown avatar. Native cultures recognized the coyote as us, and celebrated the trickster cunning coyote god for ages. Europeans recognized the coyote as a competitor for our way of life, and needed dominion over them in the battle to claim the new continent.
Dan Flores' book is very readable, even the science parts and species evolution sections. He's giving a talk at the botanical garden next month, which I'm going to attend.
I just wish I'd see a coyote more often here in its original southwest ancestral home.
In Santa Fe we are at the edge of a dense city, with fences and sidewalks and close buildings. In Connecticut we lived surrounded by forest, in "edge habitat" that coyotes, black bears, bobcats, turkeys, and deer called home. They wandered in and out of our yards all the time.
But the southwest is the original home of the ancestor coyote, and the small wild song-dog is emblematic of this part of the country, reaching back to the origin stories of Pueblo natives who lived here millennia ago. Old Man Coyote, wise, tricky, full of human-like foibles and hubris, the creator of the earth and teller of morality tales, was the first deity of the Americas. Coyotl in Aztec.
Over the past century the adaptable, wily, smart, cunning, flexible coyote has spread from the west all over North America and into our cities, even Central Park in New York City. Close encounters with coyotes have now become the country's most common large-wildlife experience, writes Dan Flores.
He is the author of Coyote America, which I am reading now. Flores lives in the Galisteo Valley, just south of Santa Fe. His history of the large scale coyote eradication programs of the 1920s and 30s is mind blowing. First, wolves were virtually eradicated in America before environmental awareness changed our perceptions of other species and of predator niches.
And when the wolves went, it was the turn of the coyotes to be poisoned and trapped by the millions and millions with funding from the government in the millions of dollars over decades.
And yet coyotes persisted. Unlike wolves, who are rigidly social and dramatically affected if any part of the group collapses, coyotes are cooperative sometimes, but perfectly fine hunting alone and being solitary. They adapt to the conditions they find. Like humans do.
Coyotes have a biological ability to produce larger litters (ten or more pups) when populations are low, and fewer pups (two at a time) when coyote packs are stable. Much of their yipping and singing at night is a way to determine how many coyotes are in the area, and they adjust hunting behaviors and breeding fertility based on what they hear. The government found it was impossible to eradicate them, they just produced more pups when more coyotes were killed off.
They are smart, adapting easily to humans, and when vast acreage in the west was being carpet poisoned in an effort to eliminate them, coyote packs simply moved north to Canada, east to cities and south to bayous and swamps. They moved to Chicago, to Quebec, to Miami and New York and to Boston, and made new homes spreading out very quickly into strange new environments. Just like us.
When leash laws started going into effect in cities to control what had been the urban scourge of feral dogs in the last century, coyotes moved into the vacated niche. But they are so much more secretive and elusive than dog packs, and we hardly noticed at first.
They have never approached being an endangered species like gray wolves, even though both were targeted for elimination. Just a hated one by Europeans and sheepmen, a revered one by native Americans. The author does a great job explaining why that hate / love dynamic existed.
The coyote, it turns out, is a lot like people. Our own homegrown avatar. Native cultures recognized the coyote as us, and celebrated the trickster cunning coyote god for ages. Europeans recognized the coyote as a competitor for our way of life, and needed dominion over them in the battle to claim the new continent.
Dan Flores' book is very readable, even the science parts and species evolution sections. He's giving a talk at the botanical garden next month, which I'm going to attend.
I just wish I'd see a coyote more often here in its original southwest ancestral home.
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