Ep. 20: Coyote: America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History

00:00:01
Speaker 1: As a poster animal of the West. The coyote has a roller coaster biography, seen as a sacred deity in one phase and a varmit meriting eradication and another. The ultimate outcome is not what anyone would predict. I’m Dan Flores and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt.

00:00:25
Speaker 2: Meets the harvest.

00:00:26
Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: Enjoy Responsible.

00:00:51
Speaker 1: Coyote, America’s jackal and its roller coaster ride through history. In the year nineteen hundred, the Canadian American nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton wrote one of the more intriguing stories ever penned about coyotes. Since coyotes have been inspiring human storytellers for more than ten thousand years, that’s not faint praise among early American writers. Even Lewis and Clark, who introduced Americans to the animal and named it Prairie wolf, were late to the game. Way back in sixteen fifty one, Spanish author Francisco Hernandez had written concerning the coyote or Indian fox, a piece that included a curious take about an intelligent animal who didn’t forget. The coyote is a persevering revenger of injuries, the Spaniard wrote. But by the same token is God grateful to those who do well by it. Closer in time to Setan, there was Mark Twain’s several pages of coyote description in his best selling book Roughing It. The proper pronunciation of the name is coyote, Twain told readers, but he didn’t stop there. He is a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it. He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want.

00:02:38
Speaker 2: The bar then was high.

00:02:41
Speaker 1: But Setan’s Tito, the story of the Coyote that learned How, wasn’t just the lead piece in scribners in the nineteen hundred August issue. Like many of the Indian coyote stories folkloris were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely deservable truth and offered an explanation for it. That truth was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes. Why weren’t these wild dogs doing the proper thing and dying off. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was waist deep in the largest destruction and die off of wildlife discoverable anywhere in modern world history. Thirty million bison were down to fewer than one thousand. Fifteen million prong horns were all but gone. We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep, and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny remnants hiding in the deepest mountains. Five million wild horses were about to end up in pet food cans, and by nineteen twenty we would have poisoned to death a million gray wolves. When Seatan wrote Tito the most numerous bird species on Earth, American passenger pigeons had fourteen years of existence left. Yet, as the scribner’s article put it, despite the fierce war that had for a long time been waged against the coyote kind, for some inexplicable reason, coyotes were not following suit. Indeed, the more we shot them, poisoned them, trapped them random with dogs, blew up their dens, the more of them there seemed to be. By way of an explanation, Setan invented the Tto of his story. She has a little female coyote who is captured as a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity, where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs, and poisons against her kin. Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate, has pupps of her own, and then proceeds to teach her pups and their children’s children. As Setan phrased it, all the tricks of coyote extermination. Satan’s human analog Moses, of course, and Israelite, who, by growing up among the Egyptians was able to learn their plans, which enabled him to save his people from destruction. Tito is a charming story belonging to a genre the literati among us would call allegory. If you weren’t a sheepman or a predator hunter paid by one of the livestock associations, No doubt, it was fun to imagine it might be true, and in any case, it fit well with the kind of Darwinian animals are our ken stories. Writers like Setan and Jack London were writing then, But in nineteen hundred coyotes really were becoming more numerous, and not just that in arid Southwestern cities like Los Angeles, the wild song dogs were already attracting attention as urban dwellers. They were also primed for spreading out of the West, and over the next eighty years would start showing up in urban jungles as far flung as Denver, Chicago, New York, as well as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. It turned out the coyote puzzle Seaton tried to resolve with Tito was going to require figuring out a hell of a lot more of the coyote biography than we ever knew looking both directions in nineteen hundred, What a crazy roller coaster of a biography that has turned out to be. When we humans got to North America twenty three thousand years ago, coyotes greeted us at.

00:06:48
Speaker 2: The front door. The Canada family.

00:06:51
Speaker 1: It produced not just dire wolves, gray wolves, jackals, and coyotes, but also your pup at home is a five and a half million year old family of American animals. Jackals, gray wolves and others did eventually migrate across the land bridges into the Old World. Gray wolf ancestors in particular colonizing most of the northern Hemisphere before returning to America about thirty thousand years ago. Coyotes, though, never left, and by eight hundred thousand years ago, were evolving into their modern form as a medium sized jackal like wolf.

00:07:32
Speaker 2: If you want to know what it’s like to be.

00:07:33
Speaker 1: An America, get to know the canid that never left. Coyotes have been yipping and howling, the original national anthem across the continent for nearly a million years. When humans wandering out of Africa and across Asia finally made it to North America, they confronted a massive die off, oddly similar to the one seatan would one day invoke in Scribner’s magazine. Mammoths, camels, horses, lions all were disappearing, but a particular survivor of that crash caught the attention of these first Americans, and soon they started thinking of it as an avatar, a stand in for humans in the imagination. Coyote with a capital S is not only a native deity from the Paleolithic, thus the oldest American god of which we have a record as old Man America, Coyote was also the chief protagonist in this continous oldest literature, both hero and fool of stories told around campfires and preserved by native people for ten millennia or more. Europeans arrived in America with experiences with bears, foxes, and wolves, but no prior experiences of any sort with coyotes in a set of any knowledge of Indians ancient familiarity with the animal, even from accounts in meso America, where the Aztecs had long before named the animals coyotal. Americans on the eastern Seaboard didn’t know of coyotes until Lewis and Clark named them prairie wolves. A line in Moby Dick testifies that when Melville was writing his masterpiece, we were still using that name, but by then Southwestern travelers like Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Ruxton, Josiah Gregg, and Mark Twain were hearing the hispanis sized three syllable version coyote that Western locals used. That led Twain to instruct Americans on how to say the name in his book in the early eighteen seventies, but not before mountain men and trappers, unwilling to decorate a dog like animal that snuck around their camps with three whole syllables took coyote back to the Midwest and the South. With no Old World mythology to call on and scant interest in Indian religions or fables about a coyote deity, Americans found coyotes ripe for original interpretation. Beginning in the eighteen seventies and for the rest of the nineteenth century, a new, unflattering impression formed in the American mind. Twain’s coyote description in Roughing It was intended as comedy, but laid the foundation for an assessment that grew worse as time went on. God now was the Indian deity who had created the world. God was even the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century. Now a new, repetitive trope emerged. To New York journalists Horace Greeley, the coyote was a sneaking, cowardly little wretch. Ernest Ingasol’s eighteen eighty seven The Hound of the Plains in Popular Science Monthly and Edwin Sabans The Coyote in Overland Monthly in nineteen oh eight described coyotes as contemptible and especially perverse. Their howls were eerie and blood stilling. Even defiant coyotes lacked higher morals and were cowardly to the last degree. They wrote exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing of coyotes. By nineteen twenty, an article in no less than Scientific American asserted that while coyotes weren’t worth the price of the ammunition to shoot them, every patriotic American ought to kill coyotes on site. Since the coyote, the writer averred, was the original Bolshevik, the original Communists. From the perspective of western stockman, the impression the coyote gave of being a small wolf seemed all they needed to know. The first environmental act Old World colonists had implemented in America was to launch a war of extermination against wolves and the coyotes. Urn had now come. Both stock associations and governments lavishly funded bounties, to the point of creating a new economic nish in the West. The bounty hunter Montana was typical as a territory. It created the first bounties on canid predators in eighteen eighty three and proceeded then to prostitute itself to the ranching industry’s predator hatred. Between eighteen eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana paid bounties on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred and forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, three hundred sixty seven coyotes, a ranching subsidy that grew so large during the territorial stage that it devoured two thirds of the government’s budgets. As a state, Montana outdid mere bounties. In nineteen o five, its legislature passed a law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild hanted population, an early form of state sanctioned biological warfare. A century later, coyotes and wolves in the northern West still haven’t recovered from that disease. When the forerunner of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Biological Survey, began to cast about for more reliable congressional funding in the early twentieth century, director C.

00:13:41
Speaker 2: Heart Miriam hit on.

00:13:42
Speaker 1: The idea of making the Bureau the answer to the so called predator problem.

00:13:48
Speaker 2: Faithful to a fault. To their packs mates and pops.

00:13:52
Speaker 1: Wolves were relatively easy marks for government hunters armed with poisoned bait, as ernestmson Seton wrote and perhaps the most famous of his wildlife stories, Lobo King of Corumpaul, With the scent of a dispatched pack member, a hunter could proceed to lure and kill every additional member of a wolf pack. In Montana, twenty three thousand, five hundred and seventy five wolves had died in eighteen ninety nine. By nineteen twenty the number had fallen to seventeen. So by the mid twenties, the Bureau reset its focus on coyotes, an animal that Bureau scientist E. A. Goldman now labeled the arch predator of our time. Typical of American wildlife decisions of the age, the most vicious war of extermination we ever attempted against a native animal took place entirely absent of any scientific research into how coyotes functioned in ecosystems are indeed in human economies. When government finally did dispatch ecologists with the charge of proving coyote villainy and justifying their eradication, only to have studies by O Loss and Adolf Muri determined that in fact, coyotes were ancient curators of ecologies whose actions were overwhelmingly beneficial to humans. The Bureau doubled down on coyote eradication. Its public relations arm even sent canned articles to newspapers that brainwashed whole generations about predators, positioning coyotes in the minds of many as the most contemptible of American animals. Old world folk wisdom had long since said predators had to go so with little evidence to send its coyotes to eradication. That’s what had to happen, first with strychnine, then with newer, more effective poisons la like thalium sulfate, sodium fluoro acetate better known as ten eighty, and sodium cyanide. Federal hunters between nineteen fifteen and nineteen seventy two killed an incredible eight and a half million coyotes in the wake of Rachel Carson’s historic anti poisons book Silent Spring. Though of all the unlikely politicians, it was Richard Nixon who finally ended blanket coyote genocide. The old notion that the only good predator is a dead one is no longer acceptable, he told the American public in nineteen seventy two. Nixon went on the widespread use of highly toxic poisons to kill coyotes and other predatory animals and birds is a practice which has been a source of increasing concern to the American public. I am today issuing a executive order banning the use of poisons for predator control on all public lands. Looking back on this history, it seems clear that persecuting coyotes without any scientific basis was purely and simply an act of myopic ideology. The nations of Western Europe had long before destroyed their own wild predators, and making America into the image of Europe obviously meant we should do the same. That European template was in place prior to Darwin, though, and preceded the emergence of the new twentieth century science of ecology to issue a corrective But starting in the nineteen twenties, ecologist like Joseph Grinnell, who with his student E. Raymond Hall, did foundational work on ecological niches, and eventually Aldo Leopold, who combined first rate science with a litter gift for reaching the public, became opponents.

00:18:04
Speaker 2: Of the reflexive war on coyotes.

00:18:07
Speaker 1: So were the Muri Brothers, who did basic foundational science on Coyotes and Jackson Hole and Yellowstone in the late nineteen thirties. Since Ernest Thompson Seton had written Tito at the start of the twentieth century, policymakers had just assumed that tripling down on the coyote of war eventually would work. According to a story in Sports of Feel, by the late nineteen fifties, with thrown five hundred million dollars of taxpayer money at coyote killing, no one was prepared for the actual entirely unexpected outcome. Millions of individual coyotes died, to be sure, But so how Coyotes not only were undiminished in the West, the war began to spread them out of their original range and interstates in the Midwest, South and East, where predator eradication had successfully wiped out wolves, and with towns and cities of every size setting up dog catchers and pounds to eliminate stray town dogs, now new possibilities open for coyotes and cities. Coyotes, after all, have lived in our midst forever. Archaeological work at ancient American cities like Chaco Canyon indicate as much soda. Suburbs named for coyotes in the old Aztec capital of Teenotes. Teeth Line naturalist Thomas Nutdall found coyotes running through the streets of Carmel Mission on the central coast of California in the eighteen thirties. Los Angeles has never been without coyotes since its founding. So as coyotes spread across America in the twentieth century, they eyed rats, mice, geese, and fruit trees, in short, all the opportunities where people weren’t trapping or poisoning them or calling Wildlife Service hunters on them, and moved in with us. Coyotes in Denver, Chicago, and everywhere else, including my parents’ little town of six hundred people in Louisiana, have been the result. Yet again, we have to learn to coexist because resistance is feudile. How if coyotes managed to survive what wolves and scores of other species could not. Tito had been an allegorical answer. Another came from folk tradition in the Southwest, the only thing smarter than a coyote is God. But a pair of biologists, Guy Connolly and Fred Knowlton finally came up with the answer. As a result of co evolution. Alongside larger wolves which had long harassed them, coyote had evolved a remarkable set of survival traits. Under assault, they have larger litters. If coyote numbers go down, more food sources mean they get more pups to adulthood. If the breeding alpha female of a pack dies, beta females breed and have more pups. Most remarkably, coyotes had evolved a rare ability we humans share, called fishing fusion. Like us, they are normally a social or fusion species, but also like us, when conditions warrant, they can split into floaters and pears fishing and scatter and colonize. Connolly and Knowlton showed that you could kill seventy percent of a coyote population year after year without ultimately reducing its numbers, but you very likely did spread them. Let me share a personal story. In the twenty first century West, something resembling this is so common the experience might not even be mine, although I’m pretty sure this particular one is. My wife Sarah and I are up early brewing coffee as crimson and gold set off the kitchen of our house and technicolors southwestern hues an ordinary autumn dawn, beautiful enough to break your heart, is unfolding in the Galileo Valley south of Santa Fe. Then I see Sarah’s eyes widen. She’s looking past me through the windows, so I track her line of sight.

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Speaker 2: Five coyotes, three.

00:22:46
Speaker 1: Of them gangly fall pups, looking for all the world like a posse of cruising teenagers, are trotting single file past our kitchen, back lit by the colors of the breaking day. Every hair on their sharp muzzles, ears, and floating tails is outlined in chromium yellow light. The alpha pair, a robust male and a grassisle female, is bringing up the rear, and as they trot that effortless coyote gate pass us. I know two more details right off. The female is familiar.

00:23:20
Speaker 2: I know her.

00:23:22
Speaker 1: She’s an unusual coyote, recognizable because she sports a white rather than the more normal black tip at the end of her tail. At the same time, I register that two of the yearlings carry that same genetic marker, although in a less pronounced form, their cream tail.

00:23:40
Speaker 2: Tips speckled with black.

00:23:42
Speaker 1: This distinctive female has raised pups in the canyon below the house for at least the past three years, I’ve watched her even longer. Second detail, the male seems to be a new consort, has some accident befallen her mate with the split ear, and.

00:23:59
Speaker 2: His reaction makes me laugh.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: Gliding past the house as if he’s on skates, his golden eyes suddenly narrow as he spots our brawny Alaska and malame Cody sleepily lounging on the front porch, never breaking stride, but with a quick lip curl and grimace.

00:24:17
Speaker 2: No time to hang out. The new male bears a row of lovely white teeth.

00:24:22
Speaker 1: Cody has been around coyotes all his life, and seeing them in the yard isn’t all that novel, so he merely sits up and watches as the parade goes by.

00:24:31
Speaker 2: So do we.

00:24:32
Speaker 1: It’s a wild canid show to match the dawn, and we haven’t had to go to Yellowstone or Alaska to see it. Our coffee cups steaming the air. We’ve just stood in the kitchen and looked outside, and one of the most intriguing wildlife stories of our time, not just Westerners, but everyone in America is now getting to see small Western wolves out the kitchen windows. The coyote has turned out to be the dude, and the dude absolutely abides.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: Difficult as it.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: Is to expel politics from our minds these days, a coyote in the yard can manage it. Whether those golden eyes that slender snout are the insolent swish of a tale charm you or outrage you. The site of a coyote is never boring, materializing magically into familiar surroundings we long ago assume we’re bled of anything wild. A single coyote can evaporate all illusions of our successful transplant of civilizations of the continent. No world that has a jackal like wolf glancing at you as it trounts by, with houses and highways in the background can ever be said to have banished the wild. I’ve never had so much fun writing a book as I had writing one I called Coyote America, and one of the reasons was that its narrative arc inverted everything we’re used to environmental stories, and Coyote America nature wins. Coyotes have taken everything we humans can throw at them, then calmly occupied the very ground we’re standing on, and they’ve done it repeatedly. Direwolves, mammas and saber tooth cats may not have been able to survive the pleisosine, but coyotes did. America’s scorched Earth campaigns against the country’s wildlife a century ago drove numerous species to extinction or the edge of it. That was not the coyotes fate, who thrived as other creatures big and small, disappeared on all sides targets of wholesale extermination in the twentieth century. Coyotes have responded to that by spreading across America, making it to Delaware their forty ninth conquests in twenty eleven. Only Hawaii lacks them. No other mammal except humans, has ever exhibited such cosmopolitan talents for that kind of successful expansion. To do the coyote justice, you have to engage not just with the animal itself and every feel from evolution biology, ecology to anthropology, history and folklore. Even literature, art and film has done so, but also with a rich range of us bipedal animals involved. Obviously, Ernest Thompson Seton is there, and so is everyone from Mark Twain to the Biological Survey Coyote Killers to Richard Nixon, and to be honest, the psychologist Carl Jung, the poet Gary Snyder, the painter Harry Fonseka, and if you can imagine such a person, the genius Paleolithic American who created the first coyote avatar story. So far back in time we can’t fathom either the depths of coyote stories or their future. Of course, our resident super genius, Wiley Coyote is in the mix, and I can report with some delight about Wiley that his New Yorker inspired product liability lawsuit against the Acme Corporation is about to have its day in court, with the film Coyote v Acme coming to movie theaters in late twenty twenty six. What I’ve also learned following coyotes through history is that their story is far from over. As one remarkable example of that, right now, coyotes are on the cusp of becoming the first North American species in three million years to cross from this continent into another one, in this case, into South America. Expansion across a continent is one thing, but into another. While the locus of their evolutionary origin seems to have been in the southwest of the president United States, coyotes do seem to have been occasionally on the scene south of Mexico in Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador and Nicaragua. Even before Spanish colonization, there fond of open country and most certainly attracted the sheep and goats. Spanish colonizers introduced. Coyotes apparently veered away from the cat filled jungles to the south, but as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest, dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa Rica during the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. Since then they have steadily pushed into Panama and the grand Isthmus between the continents. They crossed the Panama Canal in twenty ten and are colonizing south at a rate of about forty miles a year, which means that by twenty eighteen they began to approach Darian National Part athwart the Isthmus, beyond which lies Colombia and all of South America. The intertwined ring density of Darian National Park, a jungle of spider monkeys, tapers, giant and eaters, peckeries and birds, reptiles and amphibians almost beyond count would not strike a fan of Wiley coyote roadrunner cartoons as classic coyote habitat replete with mountain lions and jaguars that would enjoy taking out a migrating canid. Darien Shirley looms as a coyote obstacle, but coyotes have confronted unfamiliar settings before without blanching. Their numbers, like ours, possess some individuals who can take on situations like big cities or jungles with a calm conviction of purpose. Adventurous ones may be hit by cars or taken out by a jaguar, but just as there are coyotes in Chicago and Manhattan, some are without question pushing through Darian Park to Columbia as I write this. When they succeed, they will almost certainly spread across all of South America. For coyotes, this may well be their version of a planet b of a Mars. Perhaps given their candid version of a human like self confidence, coyotes have a certain pensiont for making the news. Colonizing another continent is a story that’s hard to top, but there are other candidates. Not many other animals are participating in the rescue of fellow mammal from extinction. But a particular coyote population in Texas and Louisiana, which residents and biologists have now named ghost wolves, has attracted attention from geneticists for doing exactly that. The species they’re helping to rescue is the red wolf, the most endangered wolf on the planet. There’s a true irony in this particular story, since a half century ago, biologists believe the primary threat to red wolf’s survival was interbreeding with mygrating coyotes who were swamping red wolf genetics. I was a young teenager in Louisiana just when these hybridization events were happening among the coyotes I was seeing. Back then, I twice came face to face with strapping, leggy animals with mesmerizing yellow eyes.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: That sure looked like wolfy coyotes.

00:32:24
Speaker 1: If these were coyote red wolf hybrids, and they almost certainly were, that mixture made for gorgeous animals. But for the next several decades, the recovery program for saving red wolves under the Danger Species Act largely meant destroying hybrid animals and sequestering pure red wolves away from coyotes. So how delicious is it? Now that unlike gray wolves in the West, red wolves, having been particularly difficult to pull back from the brink, have a new chains with a rescued population in nineteen eighty of a mere fourteen founding animals. Red wolves, for half a century have suffered from a sharply constrained genetic diversity on the paril of North Carolina National Wildlife Refuges where we’ve tried to save them. The wild population of red wolves right now has dropped to a mere twenty five Meanwhile, though local residents in Galveston, Texas, have for several years been noticing that some of the coyotes on their island are at the least unusual looking. Starting in twenty eighteen, genetic analysis of coyotes there and in nearby Louisiana reveals something that in retrospect shouldn’t have surprised us. It turns out there are still canids in that part of the world carrying red wolf ancestry, often ten percent or more. Occasionally, an animal has turned up whose red wolf genes approach seventy five percent. Even more startling, some of these wild coyotes possess red wolf alels entirely distinctive from the makeup of the North Carolina red wolf populations, whose complete genome had suffered when we attempted to rebuild their numbers from such a small group of founders. So not only are these mixed coyote red wolf animals I saw as a teenager still out there all along, they preserved wolf genetics that, with the assistance of modern science, can diversify red wolves and help save them. Colossal biosciences the fame the extinction company that in twenty twenty five genetically engineered dire wolves, simultaneously announced that it had birthed four cloned red wolf puppies from the lost wolf genetics preserved by these Deep South hybrid coyotes. Hope are Nika Kaida. Her Kakawa name is the sole female of the four. Blaze, Concern and Sender are the three males. The odds of saving red wolves and a more healthy and complete version of them have suddenly gone dramatically. Paying attention to coyotes has taught me one final valuable lesson about them and us. Since the beginnings of wildlife management, we humans, all committed individualists, ourselves have thought of other animals almost entirely in terms of species a lumping aggregate of l like creatures. Naturalists such a seat and try to redirect that thinking with articles like Tito, only to have no less than a President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, castigate him as a nature faker. Yet when famed ecologists Adolph Muri studied the wolves of Mount McKinley Park forty years later, he found the gray wolves there to be very distinct individuals. Murray even gave his study animals’ names Dandy, Robber, Mask, Grandpa, and Wags.

00:36:18
Speaker 2: It strikes me as a.

00:36:20
Speaker 1: Myopic disconnect that we humans have no trouble understanding our companion animals as individuals, yet can still insist that Walt Disney was anthropomorphizing deer when he gave one a personality and called him Bambie. That long standing recourse to a species focus and wildlife management is still there, but the world of twenty first century human wildlife coexistence is shifting. Despite it, the evidence is everywhere. The New York Times actually ran an obituary of the female Yellowstone wolf biologists had named six when she was killed by a Montana hunter. Park naturalist Rick McIntyre is even now publishing biographical books about individual wolves.

00:37:13
Speaker 2: In Yellowstone, the.

00:37:15
Speaker 1: Hollywood Hills Griffith Park cougar, known as P twenty two, became a celebrity lion in Celebrity Fill Los Angeles on the opposite side of the country. For several decades now, Manhattanites have recognized Central Parks red tailed hawks, barn owls, and yes, coyotes with individual names like Romeo and Juliet, the mated pair in Central Park in twenty twenty five.

00:37:44
Speaker 2: Coyotes are not just their.

00:37:46
Speaker 1: Own animals who experience existence differently one from the other and love their own unique aliveness. As science at the Predator Research Facility in Utah has shown, they are truly remarkably singular. To understand the coyotes we’re coexisting with in a way that’s good both for you and for the four legged animal looking back at you, sometimes make an effort to identify a specific individual coyote to be sure. Coyotes tend to look the same to us, and no doubt, initially they returned that non discriminating favor, but there are often distinctive markers you can pick out. I can tell you from my experience with the female with the white tipped tail who dens in the canyon below my house in New Mexico. Once I identified her as a particular animal, she quickly did.

00:38:42
Speaker 2: The same with me. Our mutual curiosity has.

00:38:46
Speaker 1: Led to an interesting, even intriguing relationship. We sometimes don’t see one another for weeks. Then hiking in the canyon, I’ll spot her, often with other coyotes, and before she moves off, she will sometimes direct me with her nose and ears to something of interest to both of us. I’ll return from an absence and she’ll be sitting in the front yard like a dog I’ve absent mindedly forgotten to take along, moving off calmly and reluctantly as I park my jeep from a respectable distance, She’s inspected our new malamew kishka, and she is clearly willing to bring her family her new pups past the windows. I don’t know why she does these things, and I’m not about to claim I do. She knows she’s not in danger, of course, but I certainly don’t feed her or otherwise encourage her.

00:39:42
Speaker 2: But this much I do know. I like it that every so.

00:39:46
Speaker 1: Often a while coyote apparently thinks of me. So I’ll suggest something radical. Try meeting a coyote halfway and see how it goes.

00:40:02
Speaker 3: I think there’s a lot of ways we could start this one, but I think because we can take coyotes anywhere, they go everywhere. But as you point out, this is one story in which the animals win. Yeah, and so if I unpacked that a little bit, because it’s a fun it’s a fun idea to play with.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, as I as I said in the in the episode Coyote America, what it has been was still is because I’m doing a new version of it that’s coming out, saying, the most fun book to write I’ve ever written.

00:40:43
Speaker 2: And that’s really.

00:40:45
Speaker 1: The reason we’re dealing with the coyote, with an animal that has a biography that not only does a rollercoaster ride up and down and around swerving curves, and it’s also an animal that, as native people recognize, is very much like us. It’s an animal that lives by its wits and is successful as a result of that. And it’s also the rare, irrepressible animal. So many of our grand species in the past, all the way back to the Pleistocene. I mean, we lose our mammos, we lose our sabertoothed cats, we lose our lions, and then in the more modern historic period, I mean, we lose passenger pigeons, the most numerous bird on earth. We lose Carolina parakeets, and I rebuild woodpeckers. I mean, just on and on, and yet here is this creature that, in fact, we do everything we can possibly think of to wipe them out, and the result is exactly the opposite of what our intentions are. We end up not only do their numbers remain viable even in the West, where we’re launching such a war against them, but in fact our efforts spread them out across the rest of the country and so and into cities and towns. And it’s this kind of remarkable story to me. And one of the things I wanted to say here, and because I think it is a remarkable thing.

00:42:30
Speaker 2: Is that we can’t.

00:42:35
Speaker 1: We can’t delude ourselves that we have created a completely tamed, as it were, emasculated country. When you can look out the window of your house in a suburb anywhere in America and see a jackal sized wolf trotting down the street, glancing at you, with highways and houses behind it as it goes By. I mean, that’s a kind of a rare wildlife victory in America that you don’t get to enjoy very much.

00:43:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think.

00:43:13
Speaker 3: Another point that stood out to me here is when you’re talking about coyotes moving into South America, and whenever you’re reading environmental history and you’re thinking about these giant, large scale movement of animals around the world, you know, without human help, right just say, you know.

00:43:36
Speaker 2: Ignoring the.

00:43:38
Speaker 3: Old New World exchanges. When you think about animals moving across the Siberian land Bridge or the Bearing Land Bridge, or you know, like bison moving east and then moving back west, I often find myself thinking like, wow, I wonder what that would have looked like. It’s almost unimaginable. But in fact, as you point out, we’re witnessing what we would think of as like this ancient sort of unimaginable phenomenon right now. And it just looks like, you know, a coyote showing up in someone’s backyard.

00:44:13
Speaker 2: That’s what it looks like, you know.

00:44:14
Speaker 1: And I mean I got to experience it as a kid growing up in Louisiana. I got to experience a little bit of what this was because when I was younger, and you know, being a kid, I grew up in a small town with the woods one hundred yards away. I mean, from the time I was really little, I was going out into the woods and hanging out on creeks and looking at the natural world. But from the time I was, you know, six or seven years old, my parents would let me do that. Up until the time I was about thirteen or fourteen, I never saw a coyote or what. When they first started showing up in Louisiana what people have heard they called them wolves. I never saw a single one. Never even occurred to me that there might be something like that. And all of a sudden, one day, here is this animal that to me, it was like rounding a corner in New Orleans and having a moose be standing on the street on the intersection. Suddenly here was an animal that I in no way expected to ever be in Louisiana, and here it was. And as I started paying attention, they were there more and more and more. And what I realized later on I began to in fact engage with biologists at Louisiana Parson Wildlife. What’s going on. I think I’m seeing these and they did the generosity of writing me back saying, yes, you have probably seen coyotes, because coyotes are beginning to colonize in Louisiana. So I think that’s why people in Columbia and the first, the most and earthly of the South American countries are going to experience It’s something like I did in Louisian. Here’s this animal that.

00:46:03
Speaker 2: What in the hell? Yeah?

00:46:05
Speaker 1: And that’s kind of the reaction. And you know, maybe it’s really magnified when you’re thirteen, fourteen years old and are seeing it, But that’s what is about to happen in South America, coyotes. And you know, as the biologists here are studying this have pointed out, man, once they get through Daria National Park and cross into Columbia into more open and cleared country, all of South America is in front of them, they’re probably going to colonize into our country Contina.

00:46:34
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I am.

00:46:38
Speaker 3: Another aspect of this story is the when we think of wildlife politics today, we often imagine, you know, rural residents and urban dwellers, and it’s it’s sort of a social issue. But you introduce here the role of just institute inertia and government agencies and sort of steering the course of history, right with the Bureau of Biological Survey needing something to hold on to as a sort of organizing mission or organizing principle, and it’s coyote eradication, predator radication more broadly. But the role of the government in this story is striking just in terms of government intervening in the natural world in a way that’s unimaginable to us today.

00:47:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is a massive intervention, and it happens in part in order to keep a bureau alive. Seahart Mariam, who’s the first director of Biological Survey, is finding it difficulty to get funding from Congress in like nineteen four nineteen five, and he comes up with the idea, they don’t want to fund us because we’re doing pure science. Let’s become the resolution for the predator problem. And of course he’s right. Once he lays out the Bureau as that kind of agency, then the funding does follow. And so I think, to your point Randall about this is a government agency that needs to have something solid to rest its feet on going into the future. In the twentieth century in America, they come out of so many of them come out of this background where they’re not ecologists. Ecology is a brand new science they’re a little suspicious of, and so they don’t know it well, and they just come from this assumption that what we’re doing in America is we’re remaking North America into a kind of a Western European country. And what people in Western Europe did, which we don’t even question, is they got rid of all the predators, and so this is something we’re going to do. And what struck me also when I was doing the research on this is the fact that they’re willing to do this without ever having any scientific research to back it up. And then when they send people out to come up with the information, the scientific research they’re convinced is going to, you know, make coyotes the arch predator of our time. And the Muri brothers come back and say, well, wow, that’s not what we’re finding, you know. I mean, it looks like eighty to ninety percent of what coyotes do in the world is actually beneficial to humans. And they also are seemed to be they seem to have this really long term predatory relationship with other creatures out there in the world. And they’re all these these kind of intertwined relationships that seem to balance one another out. That was absolutely not what the bureau wanted to hear. And so, I mean, and this has happened a lot of times in history. You get a report that, Okay, that’s not what I want to hear. You just throw it out the window and double down. And that’s what they did. I mean, they just doubled down again and again. And of course, no amount of doubling down or tripling down inventing a whole host of new poisons to kill coyotes, none of it ended up working. All it essentially did, as biologists finally figured out, was to trigger these adaptive responses that coyotes had long ago evolved because they were harassed by wolves, and now as humans harassed them, they called on these adaptations to keep their populations alive, and it also triggered their expansion. And so, as I said, it’s this kind of really you know, fun story, because it’s like you know, like the movie Avatar, where you don’t expect that the blue people in the inn are going to win, but they do. And so in this case, it’s the coyotes who win, and that’s pretty fun.

00:51:12
Speaker 3: And one final question, speaking of surprises, I’m usually never surprised when I learned something new about Richard Nixon in environmental politics, but his statement about the use of poisons for coyote control was that was a new one for me. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I’m ready for the unexpected when it comes to Nixon. But yeah, I mean it’s an interesting moment in environmental politics at the federal level.

00:51:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.

00:51:44
Speaker 1: And you know, the truth is, if you have a bookcase of American presidents and you’re looking for the people who are most interested in the natural world, you have like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt on one end, and on the other end of those least interested, Richard Nixon is one of those who is going to appear as the other book d But in this particular instance, Nixon, of course is a consummate politician, and his idea is the ecology movement is in full swing. We’ve just had the first Earth Day. The public after Silent Spring is really alarmed at the use of poisons. I’m going to get on top of this because it’s going to be a political surge on my behalf.

00:52:30
Speaker 2: It doesn’t work out that way.

00:52:32
Speaker 1: But I mean he’s essentially attempting to take advantage of a movement that he perceives he might be able to surf. Yeah, always calculating, always calculating. Yeah, well Dan, thanks again, oh Rand, great fun.