The wily coyotes of New York

Hal's adventure in Central Park last week was a repeat performance of seven years ago when, on April Fool's Day 1999, a similarly tricky coyote named Lucky Pierre led cops, photographers, reporters, tourists and helicopters in a chase across the park before, yes, finally succumbing to a tranquilizer dart. Whence do the coyotes come?

At least 20,000 now live in New York state, and an unknown number in New York City. The dogs first appeared out of Canada, in 1925. Some 70 years later, they arrived in the Bronx. A Bronx woman in 2002 claimed she watched a coyote quietly "saunter" across her backyard. There were sightings that same year of a mother and two pups in Van Cortlandt Park. At least one coyote a year is road-killed along Bronx expressways.

Each spring, coyotes disperse from the pack to find new proving grounds, a space of their own in which to hunt and dominate and attract a mate, with whom they will remain for life. A few days before he made his madcap debut on April Fool's Day, Lucky Pierre, a classic spring disperser, was sighted at Riverside Park near 149th Street. Maybe he crossed the George Washington Bridge 30 blocks north (New Jersey hosts at least 3,000 coyotes). More likely, he traversed the Henry Hudson Bridge at Manhattan Island's northernmost tip, or followed the Metro North line south through Riverdale, using the weedy rail span to cross the Harlem River. Or maybe he swam the river. From there, it would be easy going along the green cliffs of Inwood and the Cloisters, with the gem light of the water of the Hudson below him and rats in their burrows wherever he looked.

Lucky Pierre, so named because he was holed up in a cave across from 5th Avenue's Pierre Hotel, was rechristened Otis and brought to the Queens Zoo, where he resides today. He paces a lot, though he enjoys an expensive diet of strawberries, blueberries, yams, kale and fish. His seven-year-itch brother of last week met with a kinder fate. Hal was handed over to a Long Island couple, Bobby and Rebecca Horvath, who are rehabilitating him before releasing him into the wilderness.

Bobby Horvath is a firefighter, Rebecca a cop. During their off-time, mostly out-of-pocket, with their suburban home as menagerie, they run a teeming nonprofit called Wildlife in Need of Rescue and Rehabilitation. In their backyard, in big cages, they have two barred owls from Connecticut, four red-tailed hawks from New York City, a bald eagle from Alaska, and a 40-pound bobcat, Tasha, rescued from a fur farm. Inside their house, they keep two white-faced capuchin monkeys, a one-legged German shepherd, four fat cats, and a parrot that ululates wildly but doesn't speak. Among other animals, they've treated foxes, raccoons, opossums, seals, sea birds such as cormorants, herons and egrets, cats like Tasha who never made it to the factory shears, and primates such as squirrel monkeys, marmosets, or their own capuchins.

And now, for the first time, they have coyotes. Hal is the second in two months. The first was the coyote nearly road-killed on Super Bowl Sunday. He was a yearling, about 32 pounds, in healthy condition. His eyes were clear, his teeth were pearly, he had few ticks, no internal parasites. "He was spectacular," said Rebecca Horvath. From the accident, however, he suffered a laceration on his back leg that needed suturing, head trauma, and one of his back teeth was cracked and had to be pulled out. He was dewormed, deticked and treated with steroids to reduce the swelling behind his eyes and in his brain. He was 38 pounds when the Horvaths freed him, 25 miles north of the New York City limits, in Westchester, on the large wild acreage of a friend's property.

At the Horvaths' house, Hal was curled in a dog cage that Bobby had placed in the humid dark of the basement to approximate a den. Hal, who was runtish for an eastern coyote, about 30 pounds, just bones and fur, lay in a far corner of the cage, his eyes pooled black but flashing green and gold and orange in our lamps. He shifted a little among the blankets, looking worried. Bobby reached in and touched him and the animal allowed the caress. His fur was coarse as Brillo and shaded tawny with black ticking. "Hey, guy," Bobby softly told the coyote. "They're not after you anymore."

Bobby turned to me. "Can you imagine being chased around by a mob of people for two days and then being shot with drugs?" Bobby shook his head in shame. He said he counseled the Parks Department to set out a cage with a trap door and wait. No, they had to make a spectacle of things. The coyote might be dangerous. Someone might get hurt.

"Look at this guy, he's not a killer. He wants nothing to do with us," Bobby said. "People react with ignorance. Fear. But we're gonna need to learn to live with them. Because they're not going away."

A few days later, Rebecca handed Hal into the custody of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, whose biologists were to release him in a state forest 40 miles north of the city. "He wanted to leave. I could see it," Rebecca said. "He watched out the windows of his cage. He seemed excited to see the outdoors." On Friday morning, March 31, a warm spring day in the Northeast, good weather for finding a mate, the Horvaths received word that Hal had died just as he was about to be released. A spokesman for the DEC said the cause was unknown. He simply stopped breathing.

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