Coyote America Page 2
The starting point is this: the truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. The news media have given us a false impression that coyotes have no business in places like Los Angeles or Chicago or Manhattan, that for reasons related to either the inviolable nature of modern cities or the coyote’s suspect character, coyotes in cities make up a bizarre and inexplicable invasion. Yet the archeological and historical evidence is undeniable: for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. Something about our lifestyle has always drawn coyotes to human camps, villages, and cities. That something is ecology at its simplest, even if it makes us squirm a bit. A coyote’s primary prey happens to be our close fellow travelers, the mice and rats that flourish around and among us in profusion. As for fearing us too much to tolerate our presence, coyotes have taken our measure far too perceptively for that.
Aztec rendering of coyotl. From The Voice of the Coyote by J. Frank Dobie. © 1947, 1949 by J. Frank Dobie, renewed © 1976 by The Capital National Bank. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc.
So the urban coyote is not a new thing. By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica. One of their initial experiments with urban living seems to have been in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, on the site that became modern Mexico City. Half a millennium ago, coyotes and city-dwelling Aztecs came to know one another very well. We believe this because of place-names within the city. Coyoacan, or “place of the coyotes,” was the name of both a suburb of the Aztec capital and a religious cult devoted to coyotes. A thousand years later we still use a form of the original Aztec name for this small American wolf: coyotl, pronounced COY-yoht, accent on the first syllable, silent l, in their Nahuatl language.
The Aztecs were fascinated with animals that hunted, and one that hunted within their cities drew special attention. Their rich mythology produced numerous coyote gods, including one called Coyotlinauatl, ceremonies for whom featured acolytes costumed with tails, sharp snouts, and erect ears. The Aztecs associated another of their coyote namesakes, Nezahualcoyotl, with sensuous pleasure and thought of him as a patron of the high arts, naturally of song but also of poetry, a musical language. Another of their gods was Coyotlinahual, a coyote sorcerer known for his ability to assume the shape and form of people. The Aztecs also honored a deity they called Huehuecoyotl, or “Venerable Old Coyote,” who sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar often called “Old Man Coyote” that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward, in what is now the western United States.
Tenochtitlan wasn’t alone in having an urban coyote population in Indian America. Coyotes seem to have been actively working at least on the margins of many Indian cities, villages, and camps in the centuries before Columbus. A thousand years ago, Chaco City, within present-day Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northwestern New Mexico, was the Vatican of a far-flung civilization in the deserts of the American Southwest. During times of religious gatherings it was the largest Indian city anywhere in the future United States, with a population in excess of 40,000. Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city.
Until dogcatchers, dog pounds, and leash laws (as I detail at some length later in this book) began to curb impressive stray dog populations in the cities of the late-nineteenth-century United States, coyotes had a difficult time infiltrating American cities. They were always on the margins though. As early as the 1830s, in the mission towns of California’s Central Coast, naturalist Thomas Nuttall described coyotes “tame as dogs” yapping every night “through the villages” of the region. But in post “dog war” America, coyotes began to trickle into urban cores. They first attracted modern attention in the cities of Southern California and Arizona early in the twentieth century. In Denver coyotes had become an urban presence by the 1970s. Chicago, in the 1990s, was next, and by roughly 2000 almost every city in the United States and Canada, no matter how small and picturesque or sprawling and ear splitting, possessed a thriving population of coyotes as full-time residents. Urban North Americans, who thirty years before had assumed that nothing wilder than starlings and English sparrows coinhabited their concrete world, suddenly discovered that a small wolf (if indeed they knew what a coyote was), thought of as an animal of the desert wilderness, was now trotting down their streets and through their backyards.
Maybe it really was “the end of civilization,” as a shocked Manhattanite phrased it, but eighty years after wildlife managers confirmed the first coyotes in upstate New York, in 1999 strollers spotted a particularly adventurous coyote (“wild and unleashed!” according to one metro headline) loping through New York City’s Central Park. “Otis” was a ballsy young male who had somehow followed rail lines and crossed bridges into the midst of the largest, most densely developed urban complex in the United States. Captured among skyscrapers that rivaled the red-rock canyons of the desert Southwest, Otis spent the remainder of his years in a zoo in Queens, an outcome somewhat reminiscent of the fates that befell some of the Indian performers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, left behind to be pursued and ogled in the East in the 1890s.
Otis turns out not to have been the first coyote to venture into the Big Apple. In Van Cortland Park in the Bronx there is a bronze statue of a twenty-nine-pound female coyote, run over on an expressway nearby in 1995 and said to be the first coyote in New York City since a coyote visitor in 1946. But Otis seemed different, more settler than explorer. He was the advance wave of a coyote river that now joins the boroughs of New York with neighborhoods in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, and Chicago in harboring resident wild canids as part of big-city ecology in modern America. In 2006 another coyote, this one nicknamed “Hal,” navigated his way into Central Park. New Yorkers’ response to another coyote in their midst involved more than giving it a name. Hal adroitly evaded capture long enough to trail a shouting entourage of policemen, park workers, reporters, photographers, news helicopters, and assorted street people. A spellbound media followed his adventures for days before Hal fell to a tranquilizer dart. Speculation was that he had gotten to Midtown from Westchester County via an Amtrak train bridge over the Harlem River.
Tragically, Hal the coyote died a few days after capture, probably from the stress of days of harrowing pursuit through downtown Manhattan, although he did also suffer from heartworms. But four years later, in 2010, another coyote, this one a female, got two months of freedom in Central Park before her capture. That same year also brought news of another female in Harlem, of one in Chelsea, of a coyote hit by a car on the West Side Highway, of three coyotes spotted on the grounds of Columbia University, and of coyotes successfully raising litters in Van Cortland Park and cavorting on a golf course in the Bronx. In 2011 residents of Queens began phoning in frequent coyote sightings. In 2012 one crossed a bridge onto Staten Island—the island’s first coyote—and in 2013 the New York Police Department (again trailed by a swarm of reporters) pursued and darted a coyote in Crotona Park in the Bronx. In the spring of 2015, a coyote once again captured a news cycle in the Big Apple by nonchalantly peering down at city traffic from the rooftop of a bar in Queens, then doing a Hollywood action hero escape through the broken window of a nearby building. By that point the coyote population in the city was robust enough that biologists Chris Nagy and Mark Weckel were already seven years into a study of the animals in their inner-city habitat, an endeavor they styled the Gotham Coyote Project.
If one’s argument for civilization holds that wild predators should never roam in broad daylight through the boroughs of America’s largest, loudest, most radically urban metropolis, then, truly, the end of civilization had arrived on paw prints in the snow.
What makes predators unusually compelling for so many of us lies deeply enough in the human psyche that it could be called a genetic memory. We identi
fy with them because we, too, emerged out of the dim, hazy consciousness of our early origins to find ourselves fellow carnivores and pursuers of prey. But we also preserve more chilling memories, of the fitful night and the leopard, of bright teeth and being hunted down ourselves. To confront a predator is to stand before the dual-faced god from our deep past. That is why we look longer, more intently, with more studied fascination at predators than at other kinds of animals.
The fact that coyotes have now become the most common large wild predators most Americans have ever seen may be one reason why in our own time just about everyone has a coyote story. The tawny, tail-swishing, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our furtive alley predator everywhere from Miami to Anchorage, San Diego to Maine, and the stories are piling up. During a 2007 heat wave, a coyote strolls in broad daylight into a Quiznos sandwich shop in Chicago and hops up on a freezer to cool off. Customers and staff flee for the street, where a shocked crowd gathers to peer in the windows as the coyote commandeers the store. In Los Angeles in 2009 a coyote snatches Daisy, actress Jessica Simpson’s beloved Maltipoo, almost from her grasp. The tearful actress offers a reward for her pup, but Daisy, like a fair number of pets in Coyote America, is never heard from again. Meanwhile, the Internet is abuzz for a few days in 2012 with another story (it turns out to be true) from the Pacific side of the country. A California couple, cruising along at freeway speeds in the early morning on the Utah-Nevada border, drive through a pack of coyotes crossing I-80. Six hundred miles and ten hours later, unpacking the car in their driveway near Nevada City, they discover a full-grown coyote snagged like a bug in the grill of the car. Their flying coyote ornament is fully alert, with one cut on a paw and another on its muzzle. After hitchhiking from Utah to the West Coast, it is otherwise unhurt.
This twenty-first-century American familiarity with the coyote is simultaneously a new thing under the sun and—if you grasp something of the wholly remarkable history behind it—a revelation, about not just one animal but two: them and us. Like all species, coyotes have a history. It’s just that not many animals on any continent have a history that even comes close to the one they have managed to fashion. We’re one of their few rivals in biography; it’s another of our many convergences.
“Coyote America” is what I call their story. Understanding the twists and turns of it, the historical roots and the modern scientific sense of an animal that is demonstrably under no one’s control but its own, can help explain why coyotes are enveloping us. But naturally, in more ways than you would imagine, this story is about us. The coyote is a kind of special Darwinian mirror, reflecting back insights about ourselves as fellow mammals. Europeans had old experiences, stories, myths, and preconceptions about gray wolves, bears, and foxes and long employed folk tales about them to investigate human nature. But coyotes are different. The coyote is an American original whose evolutionary history has taken place on this continent, not in the Old World. We see it not from the traditional vantage but from a sideways one, and from that perspective everything looks different.
The first human eyes to assess the coyote for clues about its nature, then to be struck by what those clues revealed about the observers themselves, belonged to Indian peoples more than one hundred centuries ago. Only in the past five hundred years have Americans of European, Asian, and other backgrounds tried to make sense of the coyotes of the continent. So what the coyote offers up as illumination about us is often America-specific. These insights are edgier than the kinds of truths in animal tales from Europe. They are more ironic and growing hipper all the time. Some thoughtful Indian observer many thousands of years ago took precedence in this epiphany, no doubt, but it turns out the coyote really is The Dude, and The Dude absolutely abides.
Coyotes initially confused the Europeans and Africans who arrived in North America. What kind of animal was this insolent wild canine? A wolf? A fox? A jackal perhaps? After a couple or three centuries of indecision, we ended up making a conscious (and even datable) effort to malign these creatures, a sentiment that gained speed in the twentieth century, until we were hurling around wild epithets like “Original Bolsheviks.” Eventually no American animal called up more heroic measures from us to achieve its total eradication. Yet for reasons that mystified everyone until just a few decades ago, coyotes proved they could take every haymaker we could throw, then respond with an almost nonchalant takeover of the ground we were standing on. By the time our attitudes about them finally began to shift in the 1960s, coyotes were well into their own manifest destiny, even into a variation on the classic American melting pot.
Circulating among us now like ghosts of the continent’s ancient past, as if to make us cognizant that we are new and barely real here, coyotes oddly appear to grasp with those vivid yellow eyes that they function as avatars, stand-ins to help humans see themselves. If so, they have often reflected an edginess back to us. Like us, coyotes are bold, sometimes aggressive, occasionally menacing. Edgy. We certainly see that in them and perhaps perceive it in ourselves. No better example of edginess in the coyote-human relationship exists than this: as a general topic of conversation in today’s America, coyotes are political. That shouldn’t really be surprising, on reflection, but coyotes have a remarkable ability to demonstrate just how easily we can find things to disagree about in modern society.
In the 1980s a Yale University study of the US public’s appreciation of wild creatures offered dramatic proof of the success of a century of hate messages about coyotes. Yale’s poll ranked coyotes dead last in public appeal—behind rattlesnakes, skunks, vultures, rats, and cockroaches. Then, as a result of a new predator appreciation that elevated gray wolves to media and environmental stardom in the 1990s, the coyote’s stock as a smaller wolf cousin began to rise, at least among liberals and environmentalists. Coyotes have never risen to full gray wolf status as environmental darlings. But their colonization of our cities is, if anything, exposing humans and coyotes to one another with an intimacy that’s allowing new generations of Americans to form their own opinions. The shock of that intimacy has earned them enemies but also an awful lot of admirers.
Coyotes may now have more fans in the United States (and, as an iconic American animal, around the world) than ever before, but in contemporary America, coyotes still do one thing more than anything else: die, at a rate unmatched by any other large animal. Other than a federal poison ban riddled with loopholes and a handful of state restrictions against leghold traps and coyote-hunting contests, coyotes enjoy no governmental protection against being killed. The best guess is that altogether we kill about 500,000 of them a year. Roughly once every minute, about the time it takes to read this page, someone somewhere is ending the life of a coyote. That is only the current body count in a history that easily wins them the title of most persecuted large mammal in American history.
Persecuting an animal in a battle you can’t win is an act of political ideology. Indeed, the political thing with coyotes reaches surprising dimensions. It’s hard to escape a sense that coyotes have joined religion, the Iraq War, Obamacare, and climate change as one more thing the culture warriors in America have to disagree about. Asking people what they think about coyotes is akin to asking them what they think of John Wayne. The answer is immediately diagnostic of a whole range of belief systems and values.
The political disagreement even extends to how to pronounce the name of the animal. Simple pronunciation, I’ve come to realize, can serve as a clue in coyote politics, if not a hard-and-fast rule. Defenders and supporters of coyotes, usually (but not always) from educated, urban backgrounds, tend to pronounce the animal’s name ki-YOH-tee, with the accent on the second syllable and a t so soft it’s almost a d. Americans from rural backgrounds—who commonly fill the ranks of those who manage coyotes, shoot and trap them, or fear them and want them killed—struggle with a three-syllable name, a rendering that apparently sounds pretentious. Or maybe as a word out of the Southwest, ki-yoh-tee just sounds too fancy, perha
ps too Spanish. In any case, to rural people the comfortable name is ki-yote, accent on the first of the two syllables. (I make an effort to untangle this pronunciation war later in the book.)
Let me tell you what this simple difference in pronunciation can mean. Working on this book I had occasion to do a couple of public talks that left me with, let us say, an enhanced perspective on coyotes as a gateway into the culture wars. That began when, in 2013, a representative of a Nebraska society dedicated to the career and literature of a famous Great Plains woman writer invited me to do a talk in her honor. Asked by a board member what I had in mind as a topic, I innocently offered up “something on coyotes.” There was a moment of silence, and then the midwestern voice on the other end of the line said flatly, “Let me check with the group on that,” followed by this polite warning: “But if we have you do that, could you please call them ki-yotes?”
In fact the board said no, so I ended up doing a talk on a different topic that had nothing to do with coyotes. But apparently because I had merely suggested coyotes as a topic, at the dinner before the public event, not a single member of the board of this literary society, all of them well-heeled ranchers judging by their attire, bothered to greet or shake hands with their speaker. It was not one of Nebraska’s finer moments.
A month later I was addressing a large and enthusiastic crowd in Northern California, this time doing a talk about coyotes and this time among obvious coyote fanciers. Inside a classic old theater where Mark Twain and Jack London had once held forth, the coyote’s intelligence and life story were held in high regard. Everyone in the audience had a personal coyote story. Outside, the sweet and unmistakable scent of the marijuana harvest in the surrounding hills marked the time of year and suffused the balmy California air. Somehow that seemed appropriate as another coyote culture war marker; in California I was obviously speaking (as a friend put the matter) to “coyote-loving hippies.”