The Urban Coyote

If you were listening to one of the Phoenix radio talk stations recently, you may have heard a troubled young woman complaining about coyotes. She lived in the northeastern part of the city, she said, and there was a vacant lot nearby where a coyote lived. The animal had killed her cat and was spooking her horse. "I mean," she said, and there was an angry edge to her voice, "right in the middle of town!" Actually, there are coyotes in the middle of just about every town in Arizona. This sly, often grungy, gray-brown animal (resembling, in the words of one wildlife observer, "a German shepherd with a long history of malnutrition") has done what no other wild creature has managed to do. At a time when wolves and grizzly bears have almost disappeared, their habitats shrunk by encroaching civiliza-tion, the coyote has expanded its range. Once essentially a Western critter, it is now found in every one of the contiguous states, in Alaska and Canada right up to the Arctic, and as far south as Panama.

Keep an eye peeled around Tucson, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe and you're likely to spy ol' Br'er Coyote. Dr. Norman S. Smith, adjunct professor of wildlife and fisheries at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says he saw one on the Randolph Park golf course, another on Broadway between Swan and Craycroft, and one near Fifth Street and Wilmot. Coyotes also have been spotted around Apache Junction and Sunnyslope and close to the Arizona State University West Campus near the Glendale-Phoenix border. One was killed in front of an ASU dormitory in Tempe.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department caught a coyote prowling around the Avra Valley area west of Tucson and put a radio collar on it. John Phelps, a department biologist, says the transmissions showed that the animal crossed Interstate 10 four times, went downtown, and stayed quite awhile, apparently living on restaurant garbage. And Phelps seems rather pleased that one lives or did at this writingin the deparment's "back yard," on Greenway Road in north Phoenix, a few blocks from the Sheraton Greenway Hotel and not far from some rather nice condo-miniums. "People call about spotting coyotes," he says, "and I tell them that unless the animal is an obvious threat, just enjoy the chance to see a wild creature. Anyway, I don't really think coyotes are going to overrun Scottsdale.

There are two good reasons for the coyote's showing up just about anywhere.

First, our suburbs are expanding into coyote country. As Peter Siminski, curator of birds and mammals at the ArizonaSonora Desert Museum in Tucson, puts it, "They're not so much extending their range as repopulating old ranges." Second, the coyote is an extraordinarily durable animal. People shoot, poison, trap, and generally launch all manner of offensives against coyotes, yet they continue to thrive.

They eat anything and everythinggrasshoppers, lizards, snakes, berries, rodents, livestock, mesquite beans, cholla, and, of course, garbage. "The coyote," wrote Mark Twain, "is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry."

They're crafty hunters, too. They've even been known to work in two-coyote teams, one chasing a rabbit while the other hides behind a bush to leap on it as it goes by. J. Frank Dobie, the revered Texas folklorist, once swore that he knew of a coyote that leaped stiff-legged into the air, clowning, to hold the attention of a passing rabbit while his pal crept up from behind to surprise the mesmerized bunny.

Coyotes can dig mice out of anywherefollowing snowplows that flush them from deep snow, doing the same with tractors working hay, even using elk as mouse-detectors.

They're notoriously trapwise as well. Trappers tell of coyotes uncovering every trap in an area and snatching the bait without getting caught. Ranchers have impregnated sheep carcasses with poison, only to find the coyotes stopped eating them. "To catch a coyote," said one dairy farmer, "a man's got to have a little of the coyote in him."

Says the Arizona Game and Fish Department's John Phelps, flatly: "We can never exterminate them. It would require killing 75 percent of the coyote population each year for a hundred years."

But do we want to exterminate themcity-invaders, sheep-killers, and garbage prowlers though they be? Of course not. After all, the coyotes were here first. They belong here. François Leydet said it well in his book The Coyote: Defiant Songdog of the West: "Certainly we need the coyote, and I for one rejoice in his apparent invincibility. We need him in the same way that we need the tides and the seasons and, yes, even such awesome manifesta tions of Nature's untamed power as earthquakes and hurricanes and volcanic eruptions. We need all of these as remind ers that Man is not God!"