Cities As Coyote Habitat

Event the densest and most populated urban areas in America are seeing increasing numbers of coyotes.

1 minute read

October 7, 2010, 7:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg


Christopher Ketcham reviews this growing urban phenomenon in this piece from Orion.

"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. "

Wednesday, October 6, 2010 in Orion

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