The things I’ve read indicate that coyotes were not originally found in North Carolina, as an example. Now they’re present all the way from the mountains to the beach. They also seem to be missing from Native American mythology in North Carolina.
The counterpoint to that is that our native North Carolina Red Wolves seem to have a substantial amount of Coyote DNA. The maps I’ve seen showing historic coyote distribution seem to show the coyotes avoiding forest habitats until the 19th century, but Wikipedia talks about coyote fossils coming from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I’d be interested to check out the research you’ve read.
In any case, coyote expansion into populated areas is effectively a force of nature. They’re like humans in their galling ability to adapt to inappropriate environments.
Coyotes are all over the place in urban and suburban settings; the example I made was in a suburban school yard with woods nearby. My collie/shepherd cross and I used to chase coyotes down the street in the middle of Vancouver.
A doctor I knew was walking her standard (big) poodle and miniature poodle (leashed) around the soccer and baseball fields at the community center (about 22nd Av. and Heather St. in Vancouver) - 8:00AM on a summer day. A coyote came down between the houses across the street, grabbed the miniature poodle, pulled it out of the collar and made off with it. The woman was completely traumatized.
Coyotes are the only mammal whose numbers have increased in North America since Europeans have settled it. They are extremely adaptable and comfortable in urban settings.
I read in the past that Coyotes suppress fox populations, so I was just checking up on that to rebut your argument. They do tend to depress North Carolina’s population of red foxes. But. . .those are an invasive species, too. Our native gray foxes seem indifferent to foxes. Food for thought.
Domestic cats in general may be fair game for coyotes in your book, but my precious little fuzzy angel is surrounded by a mobile 50 yard Coyote Exclusion Zone.
North American Canids all shared a common ancestry within 100,000 years ago according to DNA. The Coyote’s range being limited to the desert Southwest is probably fairly recent, but before the arrival of Europeans or even Native Americans. There’s even a theory that proto-coyotes were displaced from the Southeastern US by their hybrid offspring the red wolf, which displaced them from their niche beneath the grey wolf.
All that being said, it’s an exercise in futility to try and determine where the coyote’s native range is or was. They interbreed with other canids and natural selection has apparently grown and shrunk them depending on what was available to prey upon. Nature is not a fixed unchanging thing.
Thank you. Even more recent development has had a huge impact. Prior to 1980s, coyote sightings were relatively infrequent in the more urban areas. But we’ve built sprawling suburbs and we’ve encroached in their habitat. I’m not just talking about the newer cities and developments in Orange County, Riverside, or San Bernardino either. Many parts of the South Bay, Cerritos and Cypress were not as fully developed as they are now. Coyotes gotta go somewhere.
I wonder if anyone has tried immunocontraceptive approaches to sidestep the problem of having birth rates go up if you pressure the population. Most of the mention of that is for deer; but I suspect that the principle(if not necessarily the administration to wild populations) is readily adaptable to coyotes, the technique exploits fairly common mammal features.
Not sure how sustainable that solution could be… Non-fertile coyotes could claim their territory for a while, but actively fertile coyotes can and will make up for it later…
@zuludaddy Some family friends have a field with ducks, hens and sheep. They also have a few Alpacas in there to scare off any foxes. Those crazy looking pajama-beasts have tiny little sharp hooves and a powerful kick. Having said that, the sheep are from some small, but vicious French breed, so the entire field is weaponised.
In my (layman’s) understanding; effectiveness varies with thoroughness/difficulty of vaccination.
In the coyote case it would have the advantage of leaving all infertilized coyotes still present to provide the relevant population-management cues to any that are missed, which would help results a generation to few generations out vs. just shooting them; but my understanding is that if you actually want the population to crater you need to hit enough otherwise-going-to-breed individuals to, ideally, push the population below whatever natural viability requirements demand; or be willing to do follow-on inoculation essentially forever(since we are currently committed to an open-ended and not wildly effective shooting campaign that might not be such a hard sell).
I assume that the holy grail for the technique would be a distribution method more effective than individual darting; but, especially for canids in populated areas, anything oral/bait would probably go really, really, badly once a few dogs get inadvertently neutered; and for immunological contraception generally I suspect that, even if technically doable, a carrier pathogen is probably way too Children Of Men for approval(though there seems to be surprisingly little written specifically about how that’s a no; I assume that “so, hypothetically, how easily could this jump to people if we popped it in a virus?” is one of those questions that it’s just tactless to ask).
Of course you are right about that but that’s a different problem entirely. We can’t ignore one threat to safety simply because other threats also exist.
For mosquitoes, a technique that could theoretically wipe them has been developed. If I remember well, basically they genetically modify males so they can have only male offsprings. After few generations, no females, no more mosquitoes. This is still in lab, no deployment on field, even if mosquitoes kill far more people than coyotes there are still doubts for side effects on the ecosystem.
if the same technique can be applied to mammals with much different genome and reproduction rate, I can’t say.
Coyotes are a fact of life around here. They keep the rats down, which I appreciate.
They are winnowing out the friendlier cats though. The only cats that go outside and survive to old age tend to be the freaky, antisocial ones (such as my old geezer who survived to die naturally at 18 despite routinely hanging out in the forest behind our house).
Frankly, around here I worry more about the resident bears than the coyotes. We have a big sow that makes her rounds every couple of days, and I’ve surprised more than one bear in my driveway when I’m rushing out the door to get to work.
I had an interesting coyote encounter Monday-before-last.
I had just started my 5:30 am dog walk, which begins by walking along a road toward a local park which is half wetlands, half disc golf course.
Standing right next to the sidewalk, on a grassy margin beyond which was a slope down to a meadow and then a creek, was a coyote. Standing so his side was facing me, but looking right at Ivory and I.
“Hey, you!” I shouted, “Get out of here!”
He retreated . . . a bit. I could still see his ears poking up above the slope.
“I SEE YOU COYOTE!” I shouted. By this time Ivory (German shepherd) started barking. She knows what “coyote” means! I lifted my arms up and shouted “BWOAAAAAHHHH!”
As I passed by the spot where he’d been, I shined my flashlight down the slope. He was still there, with a buddy! I flashed the light at them and shouted “BWOAAAAHHH!” again. That got them running.
I haven’t seen them since. I wonder if they just wanted to cross the street; there’s a highly overgrown creek-bed on the other side, the kind of place coyotes could have a den.
When I got home I wrote an advisory for the home owner’s association. Don’t feed them, scream and shout, etc.
