Green Blog: Learning to Live With Urban Coyotes

Only a few decades ago, Wile E. Coyote in hapless pursuit of Road Runner may have been the most readily conjured image of Canis latrans, the coyote, for most city dwellers. But increasingly, residents of urban and suburban areas are having firsthand experience with coyotes in their own yards, parks and neighborhoods.

Coyotes now inhabit every state in the country except Hawaii, eating mostly rodents, rabbits, and fruit while making their homes between apartment buildings and in industrial parks and popular recreation areas in metropolitan areas from New York City to Chicago to San Francisco. Recent research suggests that coyotes could prove to be just the first of a wave of larger carnivores ? bears, cougars, and wolves ? moving into residential areas.

?There?s a number of things that coyotes really find to their liking in suburban communities, more than adjacent wild areas,? said Robert Timm, a wildlife specialist and the director of the University of California?s Hopland Research and Extension Center. Food set out continually for a pet or stray cat, fallen fruit left in the yard, a small dog running off-leash or a cat allowed to wander the neighborhood, a bird feeder stocked year-round ? all of these things can attract coyotes.

?It may only take one person feeding coyotes to develop a really aggressive one,? Mr. Timm said in a phone interview. ?If some people are just ignoring them and coyotes are finding a lot of resources, they can start to think, ?Oh, this is a really good place to be. I own this neighborhood now.??

A bold coyote that lacks a natural wariness of humans can be a problematic one. But according to Camilla Fox, founder and executive director of Project Coyote, an organization based in Larkspur, Calif., that seeks to promote appreciation of coyotes and minimize lethal control, the animals? behavior is often misinterpreted. ?I may see a coyote in my neighborhood, and recognize that coyote is moving through, looking for a mate,? she said. ?A neighbor might say that coyote is a danger.?

Founded in 2008, Project Coyote works with communities to develop ?coexistence plans? that focus on strategic hazing, or training residents, animal control officers and parks staff to use consistent and persistent deterrents like loud noises, water spraying, bright lights, throwing objects, shouting and chasing coyotes.

Denver adopted a hazing-based management plan three years ago, sending out teams, for example, to scare off coyotes that had taken to trotting after joggers in a public park. And according to a case study prepared by wildlife specialists with the Humane Society of the United States and Denver?s Parks and Recreation Department, officials report that hazing has successfully reversed ?aggressive and undesirable behaviors in coyote family groups and solitary coyotes, reduching pet attacks in neighborhoods and reducing the overall number of complaints from residents.?

In Denver, the killing of coyotes was reserved as a last resort ? an action to be taken only in response to human attacks ? but no lethal control has been used since the hazing program began in 2009. According to the case study, ?one of the novel and cost-savings aspects of the program is its hands-on and empowering nature ? it gives local residents the ability and confidence to address coyote conflicts in their own backyards, without outside help.? Similar programs are being developed or put into effect around the country.

Ms. Fox said that education was crucial. ?Whether it?s coyotes, mountain lions, or bears, in urban areas ? particularly when law enforcement are the first responders ? they may dispatch an animal, kill an animal that didn?t necessarily need to be killed, wasn?t necessarily a public safety threat and simply needed to be hazed away.?

When coyotes come to town, attitudes are often polarized. ?People have very strong opinions on coyotes and carnivores in general ? very strong support, and very strong negative attitudes, some of which may be unjustified,? said Paul Curtis, a wildlife biologist at Cornell University who co-led a five-year-long study of coyote behavior in Westchester County in New York.

But while the long-running battle over how best to protect and manage another, larger carnivore ? the wolf ? has often pitted environmentalists and animal welfare groups against sportsmen and ranchers, much of the debate over urban coyote management is now playing out at a local level. ?Coyotes are more opportunistic and harder to deal with than wolves are,? Mr. Timm said. ?They are much more clever, in come cases able to adapt to new situations and able to outsmart control efforts.?

Through hunting, trapping, and poisoning, people were able to nearly wipe out wolves in the continental United States, he added. Coyotes survived.

Research in the 1970?s registered generally negative attitudes toward both coyotes and wolves among the American public. Later, a 1985 study out of Yale University found that survey respondents ranked coyotes and wolves as the least-liked animals ? below skunks, vultures, rats, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, and cockroaches (dogs ranked as the most liked).

Although attitudes vary among different segments of the population residents in at least some regions, including Minnesota, New England, Colorado, and Michigan developed generally positive attitudes toward wolves and coyotes in the 1980?s and 1990?s.

?Although there?s been a general trend toward greater tolerance for wildlife and large carnivores in particular in U.S. society, that?s not a one-way street,? said Adrian Treves, founder and director of the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ?That tolerance can reverse.?

Mr. Treves, who studies conflicts between humans and carnivores and also serves on the advisory board for Project Coyote, has tracked such a reversal in Wisconsin. Recent surveys, he said, suggest that attitudes toward wolves over an eight-year period turned more negative in a variety of measures.

The data show increased fear of the wolves, a greater sense of competitiveness with them in hunting or trapping for deer, and an increased inclination to kill them illegally, as well as greater approval for the state to kill wolves for purposes of depredation and for a public hunting season.

Not surprisingly, coyote incidents reported close to home, if not experienced firsthand, can have a strong influence on attitudes toward the animals. ?People are initially really excited, or at least intrigued: ?I want to see what their behavior is, and where they live, and what they eat, what their pups are like,?? Mr. Timm said.

?But if your pet gets bitten, or your cat gets killed and you find parts of it on your front lawn in the morning, then you have a whole different conception of whether it?s good to have coyotes in the community,? he said.

Mr. Treves said he had witnessed that kind of shift in sentiment very close to home. In Madison, Wis., he lives with his family beside a 90-acre park where coyotes have made their home for at least 15 years. ?We hear coyotes and their pups every year, and it?s a noise we love,? he said.

But in 2009, coyotes attacked two dogs on the west side of town. ?It caused quite a bit of alarm among neighbors, and I was right there in the audience, listening to the experts, trying to get a handle on what was going on in my own community,? Mr. Treves said. For nearly a year afterward, the family golden retriever was kept inside at night. His family was vigilant about leaving more lights on in the yard after dark and making sure no food was left outside to attract coyotes.

?People are coming into contact with coyotes in a setting that?s novel,? he said. ?And novelty often creates fear and uncertainty.?

?Go an hour outside Madison, they?re used to seeing coyotes and there wouldn?t be an outcry? on the level Madison experienced after those two dog attacks, Mr. Treves said.

According to a paper by Cornell researchers who surveyed residents of four Westchester towns before and after two coyote attacks on children in July 2010 in that New York county, ?residents were aware that coyotes could harm pets? at the time of the first survey in the autumn of 2006. ?But the possibility of harm to people was a hypothetical risk until the events during summer 2010.?

The fall after the attacks, nearly half of respondents in each of two study areas (Somers and Yorktown, two rural-suburban towns along the county?s northern border, and Mount Pleasant and Greenburgh, two more densely populated towns along the southwestern edge) expressed ?great concern? about the threat to small children. Four years earlier, only about 37 percent had expressed that sentiment.

More than a year after the attacks, the worries had not subsided. The community?s concern about coyotes and perception of risk, the study?s authors wrote, appeared to have been elevated to ?a new norm.?

?The reality is coyotes are incredibly adaptable, intelligent, resilient animals, and they have learned how to coexist with us,? Ms. Fox said. ?But we?re still trying to figure out how to coexist with them.?

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/learning-to-live-with-urban-coyotes/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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