Among Us

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Among Us
As more coyotes are spotted in the Washington area, residents are facing a disturbing reality: They are here to stay.

The golf course looked deserted, but, as Boelens and I walked on a paved path past the low skirts of a red cedar tree, there was a rustle of boughs and a gray shadow bolted out from underneath, toward a knoll 30 yards to the right. An adult coyote stood there, in the characteristic coyote stance -- its body facing away, in case quick escape was needed, but its head twisted back, watching us. Within moments, a second coyote materialized and stood beside the first. They were the size of adult German shepherds, but skinnier, with stick-like legs, long narrow muzzles and large, pointed ears. Their winter coats were thick and healthy-looking. Each time we stepped toward them, the coyotes took an equal step back, maintaining a constant distance. They looked wary and alert, but not afraid.

"That look they are giving us now means: Who are you? What are you going to do?" Boelens said.

This pair of coyotes had become comfortable with golf course life. Generally they were seen only at dawn and dusk, although last spring a female and her litter of rambunctious pups had kept the course's maintenance crew entertained for weeks.

Just beyond the golf course, however, there were garden apartments from which outdoor pet cats routinely went missing, some assumed to have been snatched by coyotes. "It isn't much fun to come out in the morning and find half of your cat on the front lawn," Boelens said. Coyotes had taken small dogs, too, even dogs walking at the end of a 20-foot flexi-leash. Sometimes the coyote's pounce snapped the leash, and the dogs came right out of their collars, leaving behind nothing but a frayed length of nylon and an empty collar ring.

Failing to show dominance toward a coyote is always a mistake, Boelens said. It undermines the coyotes' fear of humans and, with that, the urban coyote's best chance for peaceful coexistence with us. So now it was time for Boelens to go to work, to remind these coyotes that hanging around and staring at humans, even out of curiosity, was unacceptable behavior.

He turned and looked directly at them. He raised his arms, widened his eyes. Then he ran toward them, arms over his head. Before he'd taken three steps, the coyotes hopped in place, and then took off, so silently and fluidly that they seemed to float over the open ground. Within seconds, they were gone.

SCIENTIFIC CERTAINTIES ABOUT COYOTES, urban and otherwise, are few and far between. Coyotes are famously difficult to trap. Too smart to be tricked into box traps and fast-learning enough to step around all but the most cannily set leg-hold traps and snares, they have eluded wildlife biologists for decades. But as coyotes establish themselves in cities and suburbs, they are drawing renewed attention from a younger generation of scientists armed with new tools, such as DNA analysis, GPS tracking and radio telemetry. New and confounding facts about coyote behavior are emerging, and they highlight the vital ecological function that coyotes serve.

At Quantico Marine Corps Base, an hour south of Washington, one such study is well underway. Like many military bases around the country, Quantico functions as a de facto wildlife preserve. Its 60,205 acres are managed by an ecologist, and the land is home to several rare and endangered species of plants and birds. The base is more than 70 percent forested, but it also has miles of open field. These so-called edge habitats, where field and forest meet, are ideal terrain for coyotes. The past 200 years of land use in the eastern United States -- clear-cutting of forests for farming, followed by gradual reforestation -- has created plenty of it.

Five years ago, a wildlife biology graduate student at George Mason University named Kristi Robinson heard that deer hunters who use the base during hunting season were reporting the presence of coyotes for the first time. The hunters saw the coyotes as potential competition -- a threat to the base's large deer herd. Coyotes are considered nuisance animals in Virginia, as they are in most states, and can be shot at will by a property owner. What did the base intend to do about the coyotes, the hunters wanted to know.

Robinson suspected, based on the limited scientific data available about coyote diet, that the only adult deer coyotes ate were roadkill. She decided to find out for sure. She began traveling the base's 460 miles of paths and streams (on foot, mountain bike and kayak) collecting coyote scat, part of a five-year study that would eventually become her master's thesis.

She discovered that, for much of the year, coyotes at Quantico eat a diet that is more than 50 percent non-game, including berries, fruit and copious amounts of grasshoppers. The balance of the diet consists of mice, voles and other small rodents. Analysis of scat shows that deer meat accounts for less than 7 percent of the diet and tends to show up in the coyote droppings in the fall, coinciding with hunting season.

Coyotes do take spring fawns, however, which, once coyotes are established here, could help stabilize the size of the local deer population, which in the absence of predators, is now wildly out of balance. But mainly, Robinson said, her study shows that coyotes favor much smaller fare. "There's such a huge abundance of small mammals available here year-round," Robinson said. "There'd be no reason for a coyote, which is 35 to 40 pounds, to hunt a 100-pound animal twice its size with real sharp hooves."