Urban Coyote

What can you communicate to a huge live audience? When your back is the only part of you they see, it's a question Shen Zhong strives to answer every time she conducts. Shen is the Seattle Symphony's new music director, and on the latest Meet Me Here, she explains how conducting an orchestra is a dialogue with musicians and with the audience. Listen to Meet Me Here on the KUOW app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Where is the music director? What? The first two or three of them? Listen to him. Hey, what's up? I'm a student. What do you mean "deana"? You should know this is a sign of your own. Now, when you're asking for a "deana" you're going to hear a lot of news about the internet. It's not like we're going to be talking about it. What's up, "deana"? "Deana" in the air is a very popular news in the world. Is it real? Oh yes, it is. A wild coyote in the heart of the city. Anything could happen on the streets of Chicago? Not exactly where you might expect to find a coyote. Just before two o'clock employees at this downtown Quiznos say the coyote simply walked in, and why not? The front door was open. Right into a fast food restaurant full of people, an event so rare, it made the evening news. Then he went around and tried to jump over the soda cooler and just fell back in. And he can sell themself there. For one hour the coyote sat in the soda cooler at times it looked like he was sleeping. All the while attracting a large crowd of onlookers and people armed with cell phones and cameras. So it's not every day that you see a wild animal essentially say, "Ah, this will do, this is part of my territory too." This is Professor Chris Shell, a researcher who focuses on urban wildlife. That is very abhorrent behavior for those of you all listening to this podcast. That's not normal. So to have that happen in downtown Chicago was mind-boggling. Why did the coyote walk into the Quiznos? How is it so tolerant of people? It's not normal for a wild animal to be less than six feet away from his house. Six feet away from a human without a care. All questions that Chris has been asking as part of his work as an urban ecologist. Because most people thought that cities were inhospitable, that they couldn't foster any life. And what we're finding is that no, in fact, life, this is a Jeff Goldblum line, finds a way. Right? Life is finding a way in cities so much so that it is subverting the ways in which we thought about nature. It is resulting in a paradigm shift for how we understand our role in this entire process. Sometimes you start to think about a story that you want to tell, but the story itself takes you to unexpected places. In this case, to some of the biggest questions of our time about urban ecology, race, and our future relationship with nature, this is one of those stories. And really one of the most important lessons in all of this is that we are connected to almost everything. And by helping to save the natural world in our cities, it serves as a proxy for the blueprint to saving ourselves. Today, we look at how a coyote and a refrigerator can teach us to rethink our entire relationship with nature, from deep in the wilderness to deep downtown in our cities. From K-U-R-W in Seattle, I'm Chris Morgan. Welcome to the wild. You think that's one scar? Oh it's one scar, yeah. It's huge. Yeah, that's a massive quantity. Yeah, they are not small by any means. Oh yeah, that's great. I'm out with Sam Creeling. She's doing a PhD under the guidance of Chris Shell. Sam runs a research project called the Seattle Coyote Study. Oh, we're going to have to double bag that one. She scoops along very soggy piece of coyote scat into a plastic bag. I've met her at a city park in Seattle, tucked in between a football stadium, a medical centre, and some city housing. Is it a huge pile? Yeah, so this one I'm going to collect, I don't have a lot of hope for this one working out genetically, but we might be able to get some diet genetics off of it. We almost are. Sam's plan is to gather information on diet and genetics from this scat, and hundreds of other samples just like it, to help her and Chris understand how these coyotes are finding a way to survive in an urban setting. Coyotes are about as big as a medium sized dog, and then make it gray and make the snout kind of elongated with big ears. They're a part of the Canard family, a relative of the wolf, and your golden retriever. But they usually max out at about 30 pounds. So they're relatively small, they just look really lengthy. So like a lengthy, a lengthy dog. Sam is out here in the Seattle rain, collecting bags of poop among the dog walkers and joggers, because from these samples, she's able to extract DNA, a treasure trove of information, not just about the individual coyote that left it there, but also DNA from the things that that coyote consumed, like the plants, animals, insects, and other stuff. From that, she can then build a picture of how they're surviving in a place you wouldn't expect them to be, how they're adapting. I just think it's so cool that they can live in urban areas because so many species can't cope with it. Doesn't take much more time on our walk around the park before we spot another pile of the fecal gold. There's a scout right there. Right here. Oh, good on. Wow, that one's really camouflaged. This one's nice because you actually can really tell what they've been eating. So you can see this fur right here. It's got these little white and gray spots and that kind of little bit of orangey color. And this is almost definitely a rabbit. So these eastern cottontails that they eat a lot of. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So this is about each one of these sort of many logs here. Here's about the size of my index finger. And sort of very pinched off at one end, which is fairly typical. Is it of the coyote scout you see? Yeah, when they're eating, when they're eating a lot of vertebrates and they have a lot of fur, this is what we see. They're eating fruit. There's no shape. Right. It's more sort of segmented and belong to the end. Yeah, exactly. Or just kind of a pile. They're eating cherries. It's just kind of a, I'm going to use the word "sploop". It's best to describe that. Are people gorgeous and you scout lady yet? I've gotten doctor-pupologist. That's one. Usually coyote lady, usually not scout lady. Okay. I don't know which I prefer. The key thing here is that coyotes are opportunistic when it comes to food, meaning they'll eat just about anything they can find. Sam tells me it's a common misconception that coyotes are only meat eaters. And really, they're huge omnivores, just like our dogs. We feed our dogs. Dog food, which is combinations of, you know, usually some sort of grain and meat and other vegetables. So coyotes are the same way. They'll eat pretty much anything that they can get their mouths on. But a lot of that is fruit. Sam has found some pretty curious contents in some of the coyote scout that she's analyzed, like chocolate and even cannabis. This ability to eat whatever, whenever, is part of the reason coyotes have done so well in urban environments. Coyotes are really good at kind of making use of human-dominated systems. They're just really adaptable. We don't exactly know when coyotes kind of first arrived in Seattle, but they've definitely been here for quite a while. But it's not just Seattle. Coyotes have been on a march to take over pretty much all of North America. Coyotes know how to adapt to multiple environmental conditions, settings, climates, and differences in human densities. Chris Schell tells me that coyotes weren't always the city slick as they are today. And it's extraordinary how they've been able to expand their kind of natal range from what was the great planes out to many, many reaches of the continental US. Before European settlers came to America, coyotes were mostly in the wide open plains of the Midwest. Grassland, open spaces, ideal for running down prey, just like your dog at home loves to chase down a ball. So in that range, that was the bread basket for coyotes. And then all of a sudden, you know, in about the last 250 years, they have moved to either ends of the continental US up through to Canada and have established themselves in Central America as well. So they don't just stay in grasslands anymore. Many of the coyotes ancient Canard cousins followed land bridges to other continents, but the coyote stayed for the last million years or so. these coyotes have developed into North American specialists. And while other large mammals have been on the decline, the coyote seems to have cornered the market on population growth. Chris tells me it's only a matter of time before coyotes even make their way into South America, but place they have never been. There are a few things that have enabled this widespread expansion. First, we killed off almost all the wolves. Wolves and coyotes are cousins that don't really get along. These two caned species were competing for similar resources, but the bigger, more dominant wolves kept the coyotes out of the wolves' territory. So wolves will oftentimes, if they see a coyote, they will chase it out of its territory or kill it. And that's oftentimes to save resources, to essentially conserve the same number or type of resources that the two individual organisms eat. In other words, if you're a wolf, the coyote is your competitor and has to be eliminated. But as white settlers moved west, they practically eradicated wolves, and this created a vacuum for the coyotes to fill. The coyotes were basically free to move into terrain that wolves would have kept them from entering before. Mountain lions were also widely exterminated, which left their niche for the coyote to exploit too. And the other main factor in the coyote success was landscape conversion. European settlement meant that a lot of dense forest land, which is not ideal for coyotes, was converted into open agricultural land and urban developments, perfect for coyotes, and the diversity of prey they enjoy. Think rodents, think rabbits, and the like, and that would help a ton for coyotes in their diet. So it was kind of this dual exercise of wolves weren't around anymore, which left a lot of space for coyotes. And now all of a sudden, these coyotes have more food resources as a function of land cover change. Who wouldn't take over the continent with all that how you feed, right? That's like bingo. If you're a coyote, you think, okay, this is the best possible world. That's just open up to me here. It's the new frontier for them, right? In every direction, real. Yeah, and we like to joke that coyotes when they came into more human-dominated environments was essentially like them walking into a country kitchen buffet. They could choose a whole bunch of different things that they would love to eat, right? Okay, maybe you can get the natural prey items, get the small mice or get the Norway rats, but then you also could dine on berries. You also could dine on, say, human food subsidies, whether it's dog food that's left out by people or trash that maybe was left on the floor and anything in between. So pretty good look for the coyote. Coyotes just have a crazy ability to adapt to new environments. There's no way a kuga or a grizzly backer just wander in and adjust to city life. Chris attributes the coyote success in cities to why he calls the Goldilocks effect. They're not too big to the point where if they're seen by people, they raise alarm for the entirety of the city, take for instance any mountain lion moving through any city. Alarm bells would be going off while life officials would be called into remove or kill a mountain lion in a major city. But coyotes fit this niche where they are just big enough to assume the apex predator role inside of cities. So they don't get out competed by larger carnivores. See what I'm saying? So they're just small enough. That's the Goldilocks. Yeah, that's the Goldilocks effect. They're just small enough to not be perceived as a tremendous threat to the entire community. But they're just large enough to not be bullied out of their ecological niche by other carnivores. So we know that coyotes can adapt. They're happily making cities like Chicago, LA, and Seattle home. But now some Creelings research is revealing something else. She's looking at way more than just what coyotes are eating. She's digging deep into their DNA too. And with that we can tell a whole bunch of information about who they are, how related they to each other. Are they genetically what we'd say like kind of healthy? Are we seeing good gene flow across the city? Good gene flow would mean good genetic diversity, say from one city part to another. This genetic diversity helps keep a coyote population strong to help them avoid disease and to adapt to changes over time. Some study looks at how genes are flowing throughout the city. And how movement and reproduction might be affected by things like highways or other city infrastructure. Seattle is kind of a special case where we're surrounded by water and that kind of adds another interesting element. I kind of have a theory that urban areas act as kind of pseudo-island genetically. So we expect to see limited new individuals coming into the city and limited kind of gene flow around the city. Some is expecting to find that these urban populations of coyotes in Seattle show reduced gene flow and genetic diversity and that the very DNA of these coyotes will start to change over time. So theoretically in an urban area we could have urban coyotes as kind of like a different group than non-urban coyotes. In fact a recent study similar to Sam's but in California found just that the DNA of coyotes in Los Angeles is distinct from their country cousins. There isn't really evidence yet that this means they're adapting into a new species but it does signal to the relevance of the urban landscape that alter coyote population dynamics. Overall Sam is hoping that her research into coyote diet and genetics will reshape the predominantly negative view the public has of these canals. Do you think that wild animals belong in our cities? So this might go against your whole podcast title but I don't believe in wilderness. I know! So I think wilderness is kind of a dichotomy that doesn't necessarily exist so it kind of inherently says things are wild or not wild. Things are animal or human where and I kind of view urbanization in cities is kind of this great confluence of both. Nothing in this world is untouched by human hands. Sam tells me it's time we start viewing our cities as wild places. They are functioning ecosystems in and of themselves and I think that that's kind of a narrative that maybe a lot of people don't explore. Well let's explore that right after the break. [Music] On the latest sound politics the state legislature has adjourned so what is your state senator or representative doing now? Their day jobs include lawyering, farming, forestry, even bison ranching. This has been the story since Washington state was born but now some politicians on both sides of the aisle think it's time to move to a full-time legislature. We'll talk about it on sound politics wherever you get your podcasts. Early one evening a few weeks ago I made this recording. Two coyotes from a pack that lived just down the hill from me. I live in a pretty rural area on the edge of the city of Balingham. We have bears and cougars passing through too so it's wild but it's not wilderness and it's not the city either. It's on the spectrum somewhere in between. One thing was very clear to me during my conversation with Chris Schell over Zoom. He puts no limits on his definition of wilderness. It means everything to him literally. I have wilderness behind my head as we're on this call with plants just in front of the window pane. Wilderness to me can mean something as small as a small plot of grass, a piece of wood for a fire or it can mean a small vacant lot because wilderness isn't something that's separate from us. That even includes the gray infrastructure of our cities, causeways, skyscrapers, sidewalks. Even in those cracks you start to see things grow out of the cracks and it's an important reminder that life is all around us and wilderness is all around us if you just take the time to look for it. So much so that we start to de-center ourselves as a species and re-center everything around us, understanding that the same atoms that create us are in fact the same atoms that create the things that we see across the way. I love that reminder for all of us that we are made up of the very same substances all natural things around us. That's amazing as a connector isn't it? It's a really good place to start. Right. Right. If that's your foundation like we should be saying that the kids in kindergarten as we're teaching them ecology in kindergarten right you know where that's their understanding of the world around them that it's just made of the same space to us as you are. To be fair my six and my four year old have really helped me come back to that narrative because they see nature with fresh eyes, right? They aren't shackled by the traditional notions of what ecology should be. They are growing up in an urban environment where ecology just is. And imagine that if ecology just is from jump street, from when you are young, then everything around you is ecology. What is ecology in this context? Ecology at its base level is a study of organisms in relationship to other organisms and organisms to their environment. And in that definition, why would the city not be something we study? Because we are interacting with each other, interacting with other non-human organisms, and interacting with our environment, hence urban ecology. It's the same thing. We just do it in a different system. As the coyotes are expanding the notion of what their home can be, Chris is expanding the ideas of ecology. And what we include in our conversations around communities and cities. But Chris didn't always think this way. He told me he grew up with a mind for science, but took the long road to find his calling with urban coyotes. But I'll say, like many of the folks that may be listening to this and are people of color and interested in wildlife sciences, when I was growing up as an undergrad, and a graduate student kind of being academically raised, a lot of what I was thinking about in science was medicine. He had a family in the medical field, so it seemed like the obvious choice. Injured studying the brain and behavior, and set his sights on becoming a neurosurgeon. Of course, as a high schooler, you don't know. As Chris puts it, he tried for a hot minute to volunteer at hospitals during his undergrad, but quickly realized that medicine was not for him. But in the summer, having soft more year, he went to the Dominican Republic for an immersive environmental science program to study tarantulas. After that, he was hooked on environmental studies. Then 15 years ago, came grad school and time to choose a specialty. Remember the coyote and the cooler? During his grad school interview at the University of Chicago. There were about 10 different professors that came up to me and said, "Hey, had you heard about this Quiznos coyote, you should really take a look into this course? I think you're going to like this Quiznos coyote story." That's when I went down the rabbit hole, right? Or the coyote did. Fivitol. Wow. Okay. God, that video, that one coyote, if it knew the effect that it's had on your life, saved us from another darn brain surgery. Right. Yeah. It was one of those inflection points, right? Coyote in a cooler moment marked the beginning of a long relationship with this species for Chris. He told me he admires their flexibility and how they persist in a myriad of environments. Even where ecosystems don't look healthy enough to support them. What would you say to someone who says, "Coyotes don't belong here?" I'll say that the question of whether or not coyotes belong here doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. They're here. They're not going anywhere. So we need to be able to build creative, imaginative, proactive strategies that allow us to coexist with these species. And it would be a crying shame if we didn't figure this out because having coyotes in the city is a great benefit. Coyotes perform a lot of ecosystem services for us in cities. They help to keep down the rabbit population that might want to eat the carrots in your garden. And they eat the rats that might otherwise try to live in your basement. This tells me this can be a mutually beneficial relationship. We might as well just keep it going and figure out ways for us to change our behaviour in the same vein as us figuring out ways to change their behaviour. In other words, when we think about our cities, we need to think of them as functioning ecosystems. It goes beyond just the coyote. Chris says we are all interconnected and how we decide to use the land has an impact from where we put roads, construct buildings, and even what we plant in our own yards. So completely disregarding our part in this equation essentially is missing the entire link of how we exist on this planet and are part of this planet. And why that's criminal is because for a long time we have thought of ourselves as a species separate from nature, which is part of the reason why up until the 1990s the majority of ecological research was outside of cities. The relationship that Chris has developed with coyotes runs deep beyond the science. He tells me he has a kind of kinship with them. Seeing coyotes living in these urban environments similar to the black experience in America and how essentially coyotes have made lemonade out of lemons, which is very analogous to the ways in which black people and black community has created solutions really creating something out of nothing. Coyotes are oftentimes in cities and loved by many, but hated by a lot. So for instance many of the folks that have cats and have their pets that are injured or killed by a coyote attack will instantly jump to vilify the entire coyote population or all coyotes generally and say that they need to be eradicated, that they're vermin, that they're pests. And that stereotype is also something that the black community faces day in and day out. And yet finding a way to persist through all of that chaos across many different cities, environments, institutions is akin to what it's like to be black in America. Chris now heads up his own research lab at the University of California, Berkeley, with a laser focus on the intersection of society, ecology and evolution. To try and understand how coyotes and other species are rapidly adapting to life in cities. And my lab is predominantly black, queer, femme, and we have these conversations quite extensively because of the fact that we see a lot of what we love about our people, our community, ourselves, our ancestors, imbued in this species. I only have half of your story too, you know, I can't relate to the things that you relate to as a person of colorant and that whole element to it is just something I want to understand and lean into and learn more about and know about, you know, like all of us should be doing. Especially when it comes to this, like you say, this all-inclusive science called ecology, right? Right. And that's the way it should be, all-inclusive, right? Chris says it's not only a parallel story between coyotes and underrepresented members of society, it's essential to have these views in ecology, especially when it comes to urban ecology. Because for so long, the impact that systemic racism and oppression have had on nature and wildlife in cities has been invisible. Chris point to redlining as an example. Redlining was a discriminatory practice the US government used in the 1930s to help mortgage landers determine areas considered risky for investment. Collocoded maps drew red lines around black and immigrant neighborhoods, suppressing home loans and development in those areas. And Chris's research sees that reflected in the green spaces that existed then and now. So if we just take, for instance, the parks that exist within red line neighborhoods, there are fewer parks, the parks are smaller and they have less plant diversity. You may be asking, "Okay, well why is that important?" Well, if they have less plant diversity, that means that they can host less wildlife diversity. That means there will be fewer wildlife species in those areas. Chris tells me that this has impacted the relationship that people in these communities have when it comes to the wildlife around them. You can imagine, for many of the communities of color, many of the communities I've been in and interacted with that I'm a part of, they may see wildlife, right? They may see rodents, raccoons, other species like pigeons, as pests because they're causing considerable damage. And us not giving any credence to their experiences and invalidating their perspectives is essentially just reifying the maps that were created over 60 years ago. These race-based red line maps were abolished in the 1960s, but the effects of that housing segregation created inequalities that we still see today. Take air pollution, for example. Residents of Seattle's South Park neighborhood will live eight years less on average than the rest of the city. These areas where redlining held back family wealth and urban development have higher rates [BLANK_AUDIO] higher rates of asthma, preterm births, less tree canopy cover, less nature. Chris calls these negative factors disturbances. So take all of those disturbances together and any urban ecologists, any wildlife ecologists will quickly realize all of these disturbances are concentrated in one area of a city. Of course we're not going to be able to see wildlife be able to establish themselves in those areas because they're trying to deal with just living in the city generally and in all of a sudden in that one hotspot of the city, there are all of these disturbances all at once. Are you able to bring, I mean your experiences as a black man and being part of the black community, do you have the opportunity to bring what you've just told me? Bring people into the fold of coyotes for the reasons you've just explained. Does it get that direct? Do you have the opportunity to present that to youth in the black community, for example, as a species that they might be interested in or like you in some ways have a kinship with like you said? Right, I think just being able to take the science that I have learned in predominantly white spaces and being able to share that with my family and friends back at home has been some of the most profound and I call it work but really as it been work, it's been me sharing my life with the people I grew up with, the people I'm in community with. Chris had an experience with his own family that shows how the knowledge he's bringing back helps his community. His mother lives in LA and one morning she let her small dog out into the backyard to go for a pee. She carried on getting ready to go to work, turned around and right there was a coyote on top of the cinder block fence in her backyard. And the coyote was eyeing the dog as if to say, "Oh, you're alone!" So of course my mom's dog makes a lot of noise, my mom runs outside and she had told me that she raised herself up, made a lot of noise and walked straight towards the coyote. She would have never done that in the past and she's told me as much. Is mom scared the coyote away by being dominant? It's called hazing or reverseive conditioning, teaching the coyote, making it back away. So my mom effectively hazed the coyote and then she proceeded to tell me, "I would have never known to do that if you weren't doing this work, Chris." So that made me just take a minute to think about even in those small little moments that I feel like I'm making a difference in a way that allows for people in my community, specifically my family, to coexist with wildlife. And here's the kicker to all of this, right? With climate change, with increasing, say, drought, wildfires, flooding, there are a lot of wildlife species that are going to start interacting with people more and more frequently. So having these conversations is necessary. There you go. Beautiful. Pretty fresh, too. Coyote Scout. Yeah, this is actually quite nice. Back on the front line in the city park with Chris' protégé Sam Creeling, we find one more coyote scout for her genetic sampling study. She's slowly figuring out the puzzle of the urban coyote as these creatures reshape themselves for city life in Seattle. There's also something to be said for, like, how adaptive coyotes are and how well they're able to kind of cope with change. Coyotes are kind of a mirror to ourselves. So we can kind of look at the advances that coyotes make and kind of understand ourselves as well. And for the coyote, they'll continue to expand and adapt. They're pretty good at it, after all. They've been doing it for a million years. For the rest of us, it's about recognizing the impact we have on our natural world, whether it's outside or inside of the city. There is no place on this planet that is not touched by people. So if we disregard that part of the equation, we will almost always fail. It makes me think about the future and how our understanding of urban wildlife might be needed even more in the future. It's almost a certainty that urbanization and urban development is going to continue. It's almost a certainty that the human population is also going to continue to grow. And because of those realities, it's important for us to acknowledge and recognize the fact that many wildlife species are going to have to grapple with interacting with us. Along the way, we might even be able to learn from the coyote. It's a paradigm shift that we face in our relationship with nature, where every species is valued as part of an ecosystem, and absolutely, including those that find themselves making a life in the urban parts of our planet. Building better future cities that will be more hospitable to both people and wildlife. We may not get to see it, Chris. You and I, boomers, gin exers, millennials, ginsiers, we may not see that. We may not see the fruits of our labor. And yet, we have to work hard in order to prepare our kids and our kids' kids for a future that's going to look very different. For giving them the same flexibility that that coyote has to adapt to whatever is next. Knowing full well that part of our mission is to make sure that we help continue to reconnect them back to the planet. So we can start healing the planet. So we can start, again, healing ourselves. For some lovely coyote content head over to our Instagram at The Wild Pot. And you can find me at Chris Morgan Wildlife. The Wild is inspired not just by nature, but by the people who work in it. Love it. Protect it. The Wild is a production of KUW in Seattle and me, Chris Morgan. With support from Wildlife Media. Our producers are Matt Martin and Lucy Sucek. Jim Gates is our editor. A very special thank you for their kind financial support to Jill and Scott Walker, Rose Letwin, Ellen Ferguson, Anna Kimble, John Taylor, Paul Lister, Mark Wilkins and Rebecca Badger, Bob Yellowlees, Barbara Stolman and Annie Meyers. Our production team includes Juan Pablo Chiquiza, April Craig, Michaela Gianotti Boyle, Tatiana Latre, Cara McDermott, Darcy Riggand Schmidt and Brendan Sweeney. Our theme music is by Michael Parker. I'm Chris Morgan. I hope you're enjoying the Wild. We love making it for you. So feel free to share it with a friend or two. You might just inspire them and it helps us too. Thanks so much for listening and take care of each other. [Music] I told some random people that I saw a coyote and they were like, I just ran into someone that was looking for a coyote. I was like, who are they? And she was like, I think they're from some podcast maybe. I was like, and they mentioned the word wild. I was like, the wild podcast. It's here looking for coyotes. I just saw a coyote. So yeah, there's a coyote. Seattle Now is your one stop shop for local news. Twice a day, every weekday. We give you a deep dive into a story for your morning routine and a roundup of the day's top stories for your commute home and some laughs every Friday. Hosted by me, Patricia Murphy and Paige Browning. Start and end your day with Seattle Now on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. [Music]