The wily coyotes of New York

The coyote that led cops on a wild chase through Central Park last week illustrates how this supremely adaptive wild dog can live anywhere -- including in the heart of a big city.

By Christopher Ketcham

Read more: Politics, New York City, News, Central Park

April 1, 2006 | NEW YORK -- Last night the coyotes called by the covered bridge ... 'We are here,' they say; 'we'll eat your apples, your voles, your cats, the afterbirth of your calves; we're here, we set your dogs to barking, we intend to multiply.' The coyote: evolving, getting better all the time, under heavy pressure. -- Robert Michael Pyle, "Wintergreen: Listening to the Land's Heart"

American Indians referred to the coyote as Trickster: the sneak, the fooler of fools. This explains events in Manhattan last week when a coyote from the city's northern greenswards led cops, photographers, reporters, tourists and helicopters on a two-day chase across Central Park before finally succumbing to a tranquilizer dart.

The canid himself was no anomaly, no confused wanderer. He was a colonist, looking for new terrain, probing the limits of his range. At one point, cops cornered him near a duck pond but he dove in the water, swam to shore and was gone. Nicknamed "Hal" by park workers, he was not the first coyote to visit Manhattan this year. Six weeks earlier, on Super Bowl Sunday, a coyote was found smashed up by the side of a road on the Upper West Side. In January 2004, a coyote was seen bounding among the ice floes on frozen Rockaway Inlet, in Queens, near the piney dunes of Breezy Point, 23 miles south of Central Park.

In the Bronx, New York's greenest borough, coyotes are now established New Yorkers, living in sprawling parks, edging through the trees that line golf courses and baseball diamonds, where the garbage and mice and raccoons are plentiful. It was assumed that last week's coyote had made his way south from the Bronx beachhead, a young male dispersing in the springtime to find new and better land.

The rise of a northeastern coyote is an unprecedented biological event on the American continent. When white men settled the coasts of the Atlantic, there were no coyotes anywhere on the seaboard. The lonesome Canis latrans, the "barking dog," ranged only on the prairies of the high plains and deserts of the West, hemmed in by dominant wolf packs in old growth forests.

But the reach of industrial Homo sapiens transformed the coyote's habitat. By the early 20th century, the forests that fed the wolf had been felled, and the wolf (along with the cougar) was soon decimated, vast swaths of land were subordinated to agriculture, and in this kinder environment, the deer population, freed of top predators, began an inexorable climb to its current saturation point.

The coyote, ingeniously plastic, always adapting, saw opportunity. He pushed east and north and south, assuming the niche of top dog, and today his numbers nationwide are more than twice what they were in 1850. The coyote, says wildlife ecologist Justina Ray, "is the most successful colonizing mammal in recent history."

The rate of expansion was astonishing. According to Ray, who works with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the coyote's march during the 20th century covered thousands of miles, even reaching isolated regions in the Atlantic provinces of Canada, including Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, arriving in Newfoundland on sea ice as early as 1987.

Today, coyotes live in or near every major American city. They are reported in Atlanta, Toronto, Portland, Maine, running across a schoolyard in Philadelphia, hiding under a taxi in Chicago, and everywhere in the metro west, including Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. A landmark study from Ohio State University, to be published this spring, tracked coyote behavior in urban Chicago for six years, concluding that the Windy City's coyote population was vastly larger -- at least 2,000 and growing -- and more successful than ever expected. Urban coyotes, the study found, live longer than their country cousins, their range per pack is more compact (much like urban humans), and they hunt more often at night (also like urban humans). The study also found that the creatures likely do not pose a threat to people.

Their acculturation serves as a lesson in the rigors of urban survival. Coyotes have learned to negotiate traffic, listen for voices, watch for lights. They've become ever more nocturnal, remote, secretive. They learn that uncollected garbage, weedy lots and abandoned buildings are their friends. They eat primarily everything: garbage, grass, frogs, chipmunks, shoes, dragonflies, air. They follow human trails. They use our roads, our riverbanks, our bike and hiking paths, our railways and backyards. In Boston, biologists who radio-collared a female coyote during 2004 reported that the dog traveled freely across the towns of Revere, Medford, Somerville and Cambridge, at one point crossing into Boston itself via a railroad line at 3 a.m. before bedding down in an abandoned rail yard north of the Charles River. The coyote, nicknamed Fog, had "little more than shrubs for her to sleep in."

Fog was technically an eastern coyote, as distinguished from the western coyote. Scientists believe there is considerable genetic difference between the two animals, enough that the eastern coyote, now expanding fully in our midst, may represent an entirely new subspecies of canid -- a larger, smarter, more versatile creature. Coyotes, as they foraged east and north over the past 100 years, have grown to twice the maximum weight of their Western ancestors, with the biggest males topping out at over 50 pounds. The slimmer western coyote hunts alone, but the big eastern coyote has learned cooperation, pack-hunting, a wolf behavior. Some biologists argue that the eastern coyote developed through commingling with the Wisconsin timber wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf that, rather than face extinction, perpetuated at least a portion of its gene pool by joining the migrant coyote flood (thus the coyote's boost in size). Other scientists say that natural selection in the face of bigger game, higher snows, and colder weather catalyzed the coyote's physical flowering.

Whatever it is, big dog or little wolf, the eastern coyote has met and deftly answered the speed of ecological change wrought by man. This is what fascinates: his tenacious adaptation, his vastly accelerated evolution.

Next page: Hal recuperates in Long Island