At tables spread out around a room, citizen scientists of all ages and all backgrounds inspected piles of scat. (Scat is the technical name for wild animal poop). He was at a scat party organized by the National Park Service. “There were teeth, claws and whiskers,” he reports. Raphael poked through a pile of coyote poop. Such studies are teaching us how city coyotes thrive amongst people. Other studies in Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago have looked at where city coyotes go and how they behave. The goal was to learn what city coyotes eat. These citizen scientists collected coyote poop and then sorted through it.
Urban Coyote Project recruited kids and others without science training. From 2015 through 2019, the National Park Service’s L.A. Raphael is glad he’s gotten to see them so many times.
Occasionally, coyotes may bite or attack people or their pets. The coyote had simply hidden itself too well. After three hours, they gave up the chase. They aimed to move the animal out of the city. In 2015, New York City police officers in trucks, cars and helicopters chased a coyote through Riverside Park in Manhattan. In Chicago, Ill., for instance, coyotes once denned on the top floor of a parking garage across from Soldier Field, the home stadium of the Chicago Bears football team. Ashley Wurth/Cook County Coyote ProjectĮncounters with coyotes happen regularly across the United States as well as in Canada, Mexico and parts of Central America. These pups were born in a den in a backyard in suburban Chicago. Coyotes could be living in your backyard. If you live in North America, chances are good that you have coyote neighbors. Many, however, make their homes in cities and suburbs. Despite all this, coyotes have survived and spread. Hunters and trappers kill hundreds of thousands every year. government poisoned around 6.5 million coyotes. During the middle of the 20th century, the U.S. But then people wiped out nearly all of North America’s wolves because the predators sometimes kill farm animals. They will eat just about anything and can learn to survive in nearly any environment.īefore 1700, coyotes only lived in the midwestern and southwestern United States and Mexico. But they are a separate species, Canis latrans. He’s also seen them walking down his street.Ĭoyotes look like medium-sized dogs or small wolves with short gray and brown fur. The fourth grader says he sees coyotes all the time, often at that golf course. They were “hanging out,” he says, “just lying down and waiting for us to pass.” This wasn’t an unusual experience for Raphael, who is 10 years old. He looked through a fence surrounding a golf course and saw two coyotes. Late one afternoon, Raphael Kaplan and his family were out walking near their home in Los Angeles, Calif., the second largest U.S.
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