New Dog in Town
The coyote as city dweller, and what it means for the country
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM PHOTOGRAPHS BY TRISH CARNEY
WILD COYOTES HAVE SETTLED in or around every major city in the United States, thriving as never before, and in New York they have taken to golf. I’m told the New Yorker
coyotes spend a good deal of time near the tenth hole on the Van
Cortlandt Park Golf Course in the Bronx. They apparently like
to watch the players tee o= among the Canada geese. They hunt
squirrels and rabbits and wild turkeys along the edge of the forest surrounding the course, where there are big old hardwoods
and ivy that looks like it could strangle a man — good habitat in
which to den, skulk, plan. Sometimes in summer the coyotes
emerge from the steam of the woods to chew golf balls and spit
them onto the grass in disgust.
They also frequent the eighth and the ninth and the twelfth
holes, where golfers have found raccoons with broken necks,
the cadavers mauled. At the tenth hole, a coyote ran alongside a
golf cart last summer, keeping pace with the vehicle as the golfers shook their heads in wonder. “I stop the cart, he stops,” one
golfer who was there told me. “I start it up, he follows. I jump
out, he jumps back. I sit down in the cart, he comes forward. We
hit for a while— we’re swinging, and he’s watching.” Here the
golfer, an animated southerner named Chris, mimes the animal,
following with his head the coyote-tracked ball’s trajectory up
and up, along the fairway, then its long arc down. It was pleasing
to Chris that coyotes like golf.
Until recently, I couldn’t quite believe that coyotes were established New Yorkers. Among neophyte naturalists, it’s an anomaly,
a bizarrerie, something like a miracle. Coyotes, after all, are natives of the high plains and deserts two thousand miles to the
west. But for anyone who takes the time to get to know coyotes,
their coming to the city is a development as natural as water finding a way downhill. It is also a lesson in evolution that has gone
largely unheralded. Not in pristine wilderness, but here, amid the
splendor of garbage cans filthy with food, the golf carts crawling
on the fairway like alien bugs, in a park full of rats and feral cats
and dullard chipmunks and thin rabbits and used condoms and
bums camping out and drunks pissing in the brush, a park ringed
by arguably the most urbanized ingathering of Homo sapiens in
America — here the coyote thrives. It seemed to me good news.
THE COYOTE, unlike its closest cousin, the wolf, is a true American. The coyote’s earliest relatives began evolving in the Southwest 10 million years ago, with Canis latrans arriving roughly at
the dawn of the Pleistocene Epoch, when huge predators roamed
the continent. I imagine the coyote in its prehistoric form as a
thing small and weak and quiet, slinking in the shadows alongside the megafauna of American prehistory. The little dog had to
deal with the appetites of cave lions, which weighed upward of six
hundred pounds; the predations of the saber-toothed cat; the fury
of the short-faced bear, which, at a height of fourteen feet and a
weight of up to nineteen hundred pounds, was the largest bear
that ever lived. It tried not to get stomped by the mastodon and
the mammoth and the stag-moose and the elephant-sized ground
sloth and the armored glyptodon, a turtle as big as a Volkswagen.
Then, beginning some twelve thousand years ago, the coyote
got a break. In one of the great extinction events of prehistory,
North America’s megafauna, these giants of the continent, disappeared. What precipitated the mass extinction is unknown,
and is today the stu= of much speculation. The cause might have
been climate change — the retreat of the glaciers, the warming of
the planet—or perhaps it was a change in weather combined
with overkill from newly arrived human predators who crossed
the Bering Strait, armed with the technology of spears that the
megafauna were not adapted to fend o=. The coyote, fighting for
so long in this hard world of giants, was among the few prehistoric American mammals to survive in the new environment.
Other sizable fauna soon filled the extinction vacuum. But they
were foreigners. Like the spear-chucking humans, the new mammals were descendants of Asia. They are the creatures that we
know now as bison, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, grizzly bear—
invasives that we generally find ghettoized in our national parks.
Another invasive species that crossed from Asia was the gray
wolf. Fast-forward several thousand years, and the coyote and the
wolf have become mortal enemies. They have fought for space
over the millennia, with the wolf claiming most of the American
continent because the wolf is bigger, more aggressive, works in
packs, and operates well in dense forest. Enter the white man,
whose technology and avarice allowed for sweeping control over
