Field Guide: Coyotes

Our new Southern apex predator — and our shadow self

Last weekend, on Sunday night, a family went out for an evening walk along the edge of New Orleans City Park. Then they heard the howling. On their phones, they captured at least eight coyotes—though full pack had more than twice that, they told a reporter.

Yesterday, after I read the article, I fell down a coyote-hole.

“Residents in a Metairie neighborhood say coyotes are terrorizing their block,” another recent story declared. The coyotes had killed feral cats and needed to be stopped “before something really, really bad happens,” as one resident said. Last month, Jefferson Parish spent $60,000 to hire trappers to try to remove the beasts. And it’s not just here in New Orleans: Visitors to Vicksburg National Military Park have been warned to watch for an aggressive coyote.

It’s likely that you have your own coyote story. As writer and natural historian Dan Flores points out in Coyote America, his excellent biography of this species, close encounters with coyotes are now “the country’s most common large-wildlife experience.” We’re almost all familiar with what Flores calls “that characteristic lope,” and with the look a coyote gives you as it trots away—as if it’s giving you “something of a been-good-to-know-you wave.”

I’ve mentioned my own coyote stories in this newsletter, which come from a decade back, when I moved into a drafty old farmhouse set amid a rare stand of forest in the former Cotton Kingdom (now soybean kingdom) that is the modern Mississippi Delta. Nearly every night, I’d hear a haunting howl. It sounded at times like a horde of ghost babies, surfing on the winds. If I got out early enough for my runs on the property’s trails, I might startle a trio of coyotes away from a deer carcass.

I knew, too, that coyotes were relatively recent arrivals in the South. They had once been denizens of the Great Plains and crossed the Mississippi River in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the decades since, coyotes have expanded their range by around 40%—reaching every U.S. state except for the long swim to Hawaii.

From Hody & Kays (2018), ZooKeys

Through the years, though, I’ve learned that story is slightly more complicated, as nature stories always are. There’s evidence that coyotes were former easterners: back in the Pleistocene, they lived in grasslands in Florida. Flores, in Coyote America, posits that coyotes snuck into the South sometime after the first European explorers arrived—prompted, in part, by the epidemics they left behind, which turned human-occupied territory into new wilderness—where they mated with red wolves. Still, we know that for at least ten thousand years, the South had been without a substantial population of true coyotes. Now they have returned: a symbol of how wildness persists.

The delight I felt upon hearing my coyotes sets me on one side of a distinct feud. In Jefferson Parish, the loss of the feral cats felt to one resident like the death of a family member, apparently: “You hurt my baby, like you hurt my child, imma hurt you, you hurt my babies imma hurt them,” she told WWL-TV. Such fury is common across the country. Flores notes that when he proposed giving a talk on coyotes to a literary society in Nebraska, the idea was shot down—and the whiff of the word (which he pronounced with three syllables, in an unsuitably urban style) meant that after the talk he gave, on a completely different topic, none of the board members was willing to shake his hand.

Over the years, I’ve had to temper my coyote romance. Yes, coyotes have persisted—but they are “one of the few species that’s been a winner in the Anthropocene,” as a scientist told Smithsonian a few years ago. (The occasion for that quote was a study that suggested the coyote was preparing for its latest expansion, into the further south: Panama.) What that phrase makes clear is that the success of the coyote has been accompanied by so much loss. Indeed, that loss is a part and parcel of the coyote’s success: coyotes were able to re-enter the South in part because we cut down so much of the forest, and in part because we killed off nearly all the red wolves. And disturbances in ecosystems can have worse effects than the death of feral cats. In the Northeast, by killing off red foxes coyotes have helped spread Lyme disease.

As Flores points out, there’s only one other species that’s been as successful in North America as coyotes: human beings. You might think of coyotes, then, as our shadow selves. They even like the same sorts of landscapes we build: the open space of farmland; the mottled wooded edges of suburbia.

As I was researching this essay, I realized that over the past year I’ve assembled an inadvertent bestiary here at Southlands: a look at our region’s apex predators. In rare cases, they’re thriving, as we saw with alligators. For terrestrial bests, though, I’ve mostly offered eulogies. The Florida panther is nearly gone. The black bear—a species I plan to cover soon—is dismayingly common in much of America, but so rare in the South’s agricultural epicenters that there are debates over whether it needs stronger protection. And red wolves face perhaps the direst straits. A few weeks back, just days after a minor legal victory for conservationists, a red wolf was shot in North Carolina. There were only thirteen known wolves in the wild.

Now, apparently, we want to rid our southlands of coyotes. Scientists will point out that that’s impossible: when a few coyotes get culled, the survivors begin to breed at younger ages and produce bigger litters, quickly replacing what’s lost. We’ve tried for decades to eradicate coyotes across the country, and instead their populations boomed.

Nature fills a void: we’re going to live with predators. Get rid of the wolves and pumas, and the wily coyote is what you unleash. I can’t help but love these tricksters, though really I would not mind seeing a wolf instead.