Cocoposts

They wake me in the morning, keening. Crying and counting themselves. Telling about the territories and where mean humans live. Calls about when and where to cross the highways and probably boasts about their conquests.

“They can live almost anywhere; they can eat almost anything. Poison them, shoot them, trap them – coyotes come back. It is their super power.”

Just finished the 2024 book, Coyotes Among Us: Secrets of the City’s Top Predator. Authors Stanley Gehrig and Kerry Luft describe their groundbreaking twenty-years of coyote research in the Chicago area.

They found that coyotes avoid people and human attacks are very rare. Conflicts are almost entirely limited to cases where humans feed coyotes and encouraged boldness. They are well equipped to survive with or without us, as they have survived centuries of persecution.

They are monogamous, unlike the wolf. They rarely fight each other, unlike the wolf.

Their howling indicates individual personalities and communication bonds. The researchers speculate that they can assess the health and location of others.

As if coyotes can count.

Generally they can be hard for us to see. Two are very good at appearing as one. A ghost presence, their shadowing partner, often sees you first.

What I can see is what they eat. Unlike felines, they’re very proud of their scat. There is little or no fur in the piles they leave in paths. They eat everything and they’ve wiped out the native foxes and outdoor cats. Undoubtedly they brag about that in their song too.

I didn’t like that they began to routinely harass the visiting cranes on my pasture.

So I got a slingshot and a bag of little clay balls and began wielding it, practicing on a target and shooting at them a couple times. Hindsight suggests I was far more threatening chasing them in by bathrobe waving a walking stick.

Whatever. It worked. They’re wary of me now and that’s healthier for them. They see me and trot a little faster, a little further away. I expect the word is out about me and that it’s tinged with mockery.

.