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.

Robinson's findings agree with a larger study of urban coyote behavior underway in suburban Chicago. The Cook County Coyote Project, led by wildlife biologist Gehrt, has tracked urban coyotes in a 700-square-mile area that includes 128 cities and towns and O'Hare International Airport. Gehrt, an assistant professor in the school of environment and natural resources at Ohio State University, and a team of graduate students have fitted 220 coyotes with ear tags and radio collars and set them loose. The information shows coyotes' remarkable adaptability to urban life. One of the study's animals regularly traveled more than 22 miles a night, across five cities and the runways at O'Hare. Coyotes particularly like the easements between interstates and malls and subdivisions. "They use the interstates like we do, to cover large areas quickly. I've seen them sitting by the highway, watching traffic."

Analysis of 1,500 scat samples has found that less than 1 percent of the Chicago coyotes' diet is trash or human food. Instead, mice and voles are the preferred meal. When those populations crash, coyotes readily shift their attention to rats. "Rats of a size that a cat or a fox might not tackle present no obstacle to an adult coyote," Gehrt said.

The Chicago coyotes also displayed a keen ability to learn and adapt. Coyotes generally do not hunt deer, and do not hunt in packs. But Gehrt and his research team have found one coyote group that does. The coyotes have figured out how to drive an adult deer out onto frozen pond or lake ice, knowing that the deer will slip on the ice and fall.

Perhaps the most crucial question Gehrt hopes to answer with the Cook County study is whether all coyotes living in close proximity to human settlements are fated to become so-called nuisance animals.

"Coyotes have to be taught that humans are boss," Gehrt said. "We believe it's easy to do that with animals that are just starting to test the waters. But with other coyotes, that have been habituated for decades, we just don't know. With each generation, they become a little bit more familiar with people and the landscape of people -- cars, small patches of land. Where that ends, nobody knows."

ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, the author of The Hidden Life of Dogs , a bestseller, has been watching coyotes at her home in rural New Hampshire since they first began appearing there in the 1960s. Seeing them interact with her dogs and with one another has made her think about our selective human affections.

"Having coyotes around could be very educational," for the people in Fallsgrove, Thomas said. Coyote behavior offers a valuable lesson about nature and our own place in it. Like most wild animals, coyotes observe strict rules of engagement and complicated protocols that determine who belongs where. Around her house, Thomas said, "the coyotes have the woods, and the dogs have the lawn and field." Sometimes the coyotes will trespass, and then the dogs bark. "All the members of the dog family -- domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes -- are very aware of territory. A group must control its own territory -- you can't have others taking it from you, because then you won't have enough food."

The coyotes singing along with the ambulances in Fallsgrove, she said, pose no threat. Instead, she said, they most likely are simply trying to "answer" the sirens and maintain order in their new world. "They may be trying to learn what the siren is saying. Does it say, 'Here is a large coyote?' In that case the coyotes may be answering, 'Don't come over, because we are already here.'"

The prodigious expansion of the coyotes' range in the past 100 years is the result of our own refusal, since the earliest days of European settlement, to tolerate the presence of wolves. With wolves out of the picture, new swaths of rabbit- and rodent-rich territory beckoned, and coyotes were free to move in.

Humans are uneasy with the idea of predators in their midst. But predation is in fact part of nature's design, a finely tuned and highly beneficial system by which sick or unwary animals are culled from the population, leaving more food for the remaining animals and increasing their chances for survival. Rancher and celebrated memoirist Dayton O. Hyde, a coyote defender, has described coyotes as vital partners in on his 6,000-acre east Oregon ranch, keeping the ecosystem in balance by checking mouse, grasshopper and squirrel populations. Biologists consider wolves and coyotes to be "nature's veterinarians," carefully selecting the weakest or least wary among the animals they hunt, leaving more food and terrain for the healthy animals that remain.

The federal government, through the Department of Agriculture, has been killing tens of thousands of coyotes annually on public and private lands for decades. But the control effort has had little effect on coyote populations.

"You can lower the population temporarily, but they will be back," Gehrt said. "Coyotes are made to deal with the adversity we thrust upon them. They can adjust very quickly." This is because of a highly intriguing and anomalous coyote behavior. Unlike deer or Canada geese, coyotes self-regulate their population size. When coyote numbers are falling, coyotes have bigger litters to compensate. When numbers are high, straining the food supply, litters get smaller. Scientists do not precisely understand the control mechanism, which may be hormonal, but they have replicated the effect in captivity by varying the proximity of caged coyotes to one another. This means that coyotes will never become as ubiquitous as white-tailed deer. But they are here to stay. And there are many people who are glad about that.

"Coyotes are a symbol of wilderness here in our midst," Gehrt said. "Even out West, where coyotes are unloved, people associate the call of the coyote with wilderness."

"The sound is different from a wolf howl," said wildlife biologist Robinson, who had coyotes 30 feet from her back door when she lived in Southern California. "One or two start with a very high-pitched yip-yip-yip. Not like a lap dog, but yipping. Then more will join in, and it builds to a kind of crescendo, and then they break out into howling. It's very haunting."

Gehrt and Robinson have come to see coyotes as highly useful members of the ecosystem. "There tends to be this knee-jerk reaction: 'Oh, we can't have another predator competing with us. Let's go kill it,'" Robinson said. "That's not only philosophically wrong, it's just plain ill-informed."

Coyote predation becomes a problem, however, when the weak or unwary prey is a small human. But such attacks on children are rare, despite coyotes' increasing numbers. Dog bites still vastly outnumber coyote bites. In the Chicago area, for example, there are an average of 3,000 dog bites annually, and there have been no coyote bites in recent memory. Coyotes rarely attack humans without warning, rarely carry rabies and almost never attack adults, according to Gehrt. "It's usually an accumulation of events that lead up to a biting incident," he said. "You'll see a coyote that was nocturnal becoming diurnal. You might have seen it in the back yard once or twice at dusk, now you see it every day. That's a bad sign. Also, if they're hanging around where children normally play. There have been a couple of cases where coyotes follow people fairly closely -- especially children to bus stops -- and that's not a good thing."

Another bad sign is a coyote that stands its ground and growls or barks when you step toward it. "In that case, the coyote is actually trying to assert dominance," Gehrt said. But that is still no reason for an adult to retreat. "The thing to do is back off at a very slow pace, keeping your eyes on the animal. I've never felt threatened, even by the ones that growl and bark," Gehrt said. "I would never be subordinate to a coyote, ever. People forget it's just a 35-pound dog. I'm 200 pounds. It's not hard to do what you have to do."

Fortunately, most of the time, successful coexistence is less charged than that. It's more a matter of teaching humans how to respond when coyotes cross a behavioral boundary and constantly reinforcing coyotes' fear of humans. "What we've found is that when coyotes start to change their behavior toward humans, it's a result of people feeding them. Coyotes are not like raccoons," he said. "It takes special circumstances to get a coyote to go to the dark side."

Our ambivalence about coyotes is not news to the people who make a living trapping them. "We have a saying about high-profile trapping jobs," said Fauquier County trapper Sam Poles, sole proprietor of Flat Tail Trapping Services. "They'll make you a hero or zero, right quick."

Michael Adcock, the trapper hired by Fallsgrove to kill its coyotes, likely knows something about that. The Humane Society's lawsuit was dismissed in January, after Adcock's lawyer argued that Adcock was not subject to state hunting regulations, as the suit contended. But before that, Adcock told Fallsgrove resident Cheryl Hays that the controversy had cost him thousands of dollars. And, at one point, when a process server showed up at his house, Adcock confronted the man, according to court records, yelling threats and throwing rocks at his car. Adcock declined to comment for this article. But other trappers, not entangled in court cases, are willing to talk about their trade.

Poles lives in a modest ranch house in the Virginia hunt country. He is middle-aged and mild-mannered, a married father of two who has been trapping beavers, coyotes and other animals for more than 20 years. When he started, no one saw coyotes in Fauquier County, he said. But in the past 10 or 15 years, "they've really taken off." Since then, he's trapped and killed coyotes regularly, mostly on estates and farms, for clients who report coyotes preying on small livestock -- chickens, lambs, calves -- and family pets.

Poles avoids high-profile jobs. "Bottom line -- people hate what you're doing," he said, sitting at his kitchen table. "A lot of people think what I do is wrong. They think it's not necessary. They think it's barbaric.

"I respect every animal that I catch," Poles said. "But I'm like a fireman or a policeman. I fill a need."

"The Canadian government has done a lot of tests -- so traps are more humane than they used to be," Poles said. Then he shifted in his chair and sighed. "But my job is to go out and trap an animal and kill it, so how is that humane? How is death humane?"

The tool of his trade is a small, two-pound leg-hold trap. The one he brings out of an outbuilding behind the house has seen plenty of use. Its metal is worn and stained a dark brown. Closed, it fits in the palm of his hand. The trapper buries the open trap in a few inches of dirt. When the coyote steps on the center disk, or "pan," the trap snaps shut. It holds the animal until the trapper returns. (In Maryland and Virginia, trappers are required by law to check their traps every 24 hours.) The trappers kill the coyotes by a shot to the head or, if a client wants a more "humane" end, with a lethal injection.

The tension created by the trap's piano-wire springs is not strong enough to break a coyote leg, or even a human finger, Poles said. Trappers sometimes demonstrate this using their own fingers at county fairs. Poles says he has caught his fingers by accident hundreds of times. But to demonstrate on this afternoon, he picks up a wooden stick, about an inch in diameter. The trap closes with a sharp "thwack." The impact breaks and splinters the stick, but that is because the stick is dead and dry, Poles says.

Poles and other longtime trappers argue that kindness is not the law of nature. Poles said he has found half-devoured foxes in his traps, the animals attacked by a coyote before Poles could return to kill them himself. "I have to laugh at how people say how cruel trappers are; there's nothing crueler than nature."

In any case, eradication is futile. "They've been trying to get rid of coyotes out West since the earliest days of settlement," Gehrt said. "It hasn't worked. So it really doesn't matter what our view of coyotes is. They're here."

In Fallsgrove, coyote sightings diminished over the past winter. But Aubrey Bursch, the volunteer wildlife rehabilitator and Fallsgrove resident who joined the Humane Society lawsuit, was busy researching coyotes and their behavior. She attended a meeting of Fallsgrove's nascent civic association and, in front of its president and the handful of other people who showed up, made a case for starting a community education program about coyotes.

"Basically, it didn't go over well," she said afterward. "No one wanted to hear about coyotes. Their thinking was, 'The trapper's done, it's over.' Basically, I was seen as a 'coyote lover.'" But the association's president did say that Bursch might come to a larger town meeting, this spring, and make her case again.

Bursch suspects that persuading residents to focus on the conditions that may have drawn coyotes to Fallsgrove will be a challenge. The Safeway and restaurant dumpsters across the street frequently are filled to overflowing, but it's unclear in whose jurisdiction that problem would lie. The shopping center is outside the community's boundaries but was built by the same developer. The residents of the townhouses who put their trash out in black plastic bags say they do so because their city-issued trash cans are too small. The city of Rockville says it can't give them bigger cans because the development's quaint alleys are too narrow for the large trucks that could lift them. Black plastic trash bags are a magnet for rats. And on it goes.

It all comes down to how much thought and effort people are willing to put into managing the coyote problem. Whether they want the quick but temporary relief of trapping, or whether they value the presence of coyotes enough to make larger changes that might, in the short term, require more work. In a way, it is like the question the researchers say coyotes ask every time they encounter us: "Who are you? What are you going to do?"

Cheryl Hays did not make it to Bursch's civic association presentation. But she has been listening at night. She reports that the coyotes are still out there, and they are singing.

Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.