Speaker 1: As a poster animal of the West. The coyote has
Speaker 1: a roller coaster biography, seen as a sacred deity in
Speaker 1: one phase and a varmit meriting eradication and another. The
Speaker 1: ultimate outcome is not what anyone would predict. I'm Dan
Speaker 1: Flores and this is the American West, brought to you
Speaker 1: by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt.
Speaker 2: Meets the harvest.
Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters
Speaker 1: and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2: Enjoy Responsible.
Speaker 1: Coyote, America's jackal and its roller coaster ride through history.
Speaker 1: In the year nineteen hundred, the Canadian American nature writer
Speaker 1: Ernest Thompson Seton wrote one of the more intriguing stories
Speaker 1: ever penned about coyotes. Since coyotes have been inspiring human
Speaker 1: storytellers for more than ten thousand years, that's not faint
Speaker 1: praise among early American writers. Even Lewis and Clark, who
Speaker 1: introduced Americans to the animal and named it Prairie wolf,
Speaker 1: were late to the game. Way back in sixteen fifty one,
Speaker 1: Spanish author Francisco Hernandez had written concerning the coyote or
Speaker 1: Indian fox, a piece that included a curious take about
Speaker 1: an intelligent animal who didn't forget. The coyote is a
Speaker 1: persevering revenger of injuries, the Spaniard wrote. But by the
Speaker 1: same token is God grateful to those who do well
Speaker 1: by it. Closer in time to Setan, there was Mark
Speaker 1: Twain's several pages of coyote description in his best selling
Speaker 1: book Roughing It. The proper pronunciation of the name is coyote,
Speaker 1: Twain told readers, but he didn't stop there. He is
Speaker 1: a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a
Speaker 1: gray wolf skin stretched over it. He has a general
Speaker 1: slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing
Speaker 1: allegory of want.
Speaker 2: The bar then was high.
Speaker 1: But Setan's Tito, the story of the Coyote that learned How,
Speaker 1: wasn't just the lead piece in scribners in the nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred August issue. Like many of the Indian coyote stories
Speaker 1: folkloris were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely
Speaker 1: deservable truth and offered an explanation for it. That truth
Speaker 1: was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes. Why weren't these wild
Speaker 1: dogs doing the proper thing and dying off. At the
Speaker 1: turn of the twentieth century, the United States was waist
Speaker 1: deep in the largest destruction and die off of wildlife
Speaker 1: discoverable anywhere in modern world history. Thirty million bison were
Speaker 1: down to fewer than one thousand. Fifteen million prong horns
Speaker 1: were all but gone. We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep,
Speaker 1: and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny
Speaker 1: remnants hiding in the deepest mountains. Five million wild horses
Speaker 1: were about to end up in pet food cans, and
Speaker 1: by nineteen twenty we would have poisoned to death a
Speaker 1: million gray wolves. When Seatan wrote Tito the most numerous
Speaker 1: bird species on Earth, American passenger pigeons had fourteen years
Speaker 1: of existence left. Yet, as the scribner's article put it,
Speaker 1: despite the fierce war that had for a long time
Speaker 1: been waged against the coyote kind, for some inexplicable reason,
Speaker 1: coyotes were not following suit. Indeed, the more we shot them,
Speaker 1: poisoned them, trapped them random with dogs, blew up their dens,
Speaker 1: the more of them there seemed to be. By way
Speaker 1: of an explanation, Setan invented the Tto of his story.
Speaker 1: She has a little female coyote who is captured as
Speaker 1: a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity,
Speaker 1: where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs,
Speaker 1: and poisons against her kin. Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate,
Speaker 1: has pupps of her own, and then proceeds to teach
Speaker 1: her pups and their children's children. As Setan phrased it,
Speaker 1: all the tricks of coyote extermination. Satan's human analog Moses,
Speaker 1: of course, and Israelite, who, by growing up among the
Speaker 1: Egyptians was able to learn their plans, which enabled him
Speaker 1: to save his people from destruction. Tito is a charming
Speaker 1: story belonging to a genre the literati among us would
Speaker 1: call allegory. If you weren't a sheepman or a predator
Speaker 1: hunter paid by one of the livestock associations, No doubt,
Speaker 1: it was fun to imagine it might be true, and
Speaker 1: in any case, it fit well with the kind of
Speaker 1: Darwinian animals are our ken stories. Writers like Setan and
Speaker 1: Jack London were writing then, But in nineteen hundred coyotes
Speaker 1: really were becoming more numerous, and not just that in
Speaker 1: arid Southwestern cities like Los Angeles, the wild song dogs
Speaker 1: were already attracting attention as urban dwellers. They were also
Speaker 1: primed for spreading out of the West, and over the
Speaker 1: next eighty years would start showing up in urban jungles
Speaker 1: as far flung as Denver, Chicago, New York, as well
Speaker 1: as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. It turned out the
Speaker 1: coyote puzzle Seaton tried to resolve with Tito was going
Speaker 1: to require figuring out a hell of a lot more
Speaker 1: of the coyote biography than we ever knew looking both
Speaker 1: directions in nineteen hundred, What a crazy roller coaster of
Speaker 1: a biography that has turned out to be. When we
Speaker 1: humans got to North America twenty three thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: coyotes greeted us at.
Speaker 2: The front door. The Canada family.
Speaker 1: It produced not just dire wolves, gray wolves, jackals, and coyotes,
Speaker 1: but also your pup at home is a five and
Speaker 1: a half million year old family of American animals. Jackals,
Speaker 1: gray wolves and others did eventually migrate across the land
Speaker 1: bridges into the Old World. Gray wolf ancestors in particular
Speaker 1: colonizing most of the northern Hemisphere before returning to America
Speaker 1: about thirty thousand years ago. Coyotes, though, never left, and
Speaker 1: by eight hundred thousand years ago, were evolving into their
Speaker 1: modern form as a medium sized jackal like wolf.
Speaker 2: If you want to know what it's like to be.
Speaker 1: An America, get to know the canid that never left.
Speaker 1: Coyotes have been yipping and howling, the original national anthem
Speaker 1: across the continent for nearly a million years. When humans
Speaker 1: wandering out of Africa and across Asia finally made it
Speaker 1: to North America, they confronted a massive die off, oddly
Speaker 1: similar to the one seatan would one day invoke in
Speaker 1: Scribner's magazine. Mammoths, camels, horses, lions all were disappearing, but
Speaker 1: a particular survivor of that crash caught the attention of
Speaker 1: these first Americans, and soon they started thinking of it
Speaker 1: as an avatar, a stand in for humans in the imagination.
Speaker 1: Coyote with a capital S is not only a native
Speaker 1: deity from the Paleolithic, thus the oldest American god of
Speaker 1: which we have a record as old Man America, Coyote
Speaker 1: was also the chief protagonist in this continous oldest literature,
Speaker 1: both hero and fool of stories told around campfires and
Speaker 1: preserved by native people for ten millennia or more. Europeans
Speaker 1: arrived in America with experiences with bears, foxes, and wolves,
Speaker 1: but no prior experiences of any sort with coyotes in
Speaker 1: a set of any knowledge of Indians ancient familiarity with
Speaker 1: the animal, even from accounts in meso America, where the
Speaker 1: Aztecs had long before named the animals coyotal. Americans on
Speaker 1: the eastern Seaboard didn't know of coyotes until Lewis and
Speaker 1: Clark named them prairie wolves. A line in Moby Dick
Speaker 1: testifies that when Melville was writing his masterpiece, we were
Speaker 1: still using that name, but by then Southwestern travelers like
Speaker 1: Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Ruxton, Josiah Gregg, and Mark Twain were
Speaker 1: hearing the hispanis sized three syllable version coyote that Western
Speaker 1: locals used. That led Twain to instruct Americans on how
Speaker 1: to say the name in his book in the early
Speaker 1: eighteen seventies, but not before mountain men and trappers, unwilling
Speaker 1: to decorate a dog like animal that snuck around their
Speaker 1: camps with three whole syllables took coyote back to the
Speaker 1: Midwest and the South. With no Old World mythology to
Speaker 1: call on and scant interest in Indian religions or fables
Speaker 1: about a coyote deity, Americans found coyotes ripe for original interpretation.
Speaker 1: Beginning in the eighteen seventies and for the rest of
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, a new, unflattering impression formed in the
Speaker 1: American mind. Twain's coyote description in Roughing It was intended
Speaker 1: as comedy, but laid the foundation for an assessment that
Speaker 1: grew worse as time went on. God now was the
Speaker 1: Indian deity who had created the world. God was even
Speaker 1: the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century. Now
Speaker 1: a new, repetitive trope emerged. To New York journalists Horace Greeley,
Speaker 1: the coyote was a sneaking, cowardly little wretch. Ernest Ingasol's
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty seven The Hound of the Plains in Popular
Speaker 1: Science Monthly and Edwin Sabans The Coyote in Overland Monthly
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh eight described coyotes as contemptible and especially perverse.
Speaker 1: Their howls were eerie and blood stilling. Even defiant coyotes
Speaker 1: lacked higher morals and were cowardly to the last degree.
Speaker 1: They wrote exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing
Speaker 1: of coyotes. By nineteen twenty, an article in no less
Speaker 1: than Scientific American asserted that while coyotes weren't worth the
Speaker 1: price of the ammunition to shoot them, every patriotic American
Speaker 1: ought to kill coyotes on site. Since the coyote, the
Speaker 1: writer averred, was the original Bolshevik, the original Communists. From
Speaker 1: the perspective of western stockman, the impression the coyote gave
Speaker 1: of being a small wolf seemed all they needed to know.
Speaker 1: The first environmental act Old World colonists had implemented in
Speaker 1: America was to launch a war of extermination against wolves
Speaker 1: and the coyotes. Urn had now come. Both stock associations
Speaker 1: and governments lavishly funded bounties, to the point of creating
Speaker 1: a new economic nish in the West. The bounty hunter
Speaker 1: Montana was typical as a territory. It created the first
Speaker 1: bounties on canid predators in eighteen eighty three and proceeded
Speaker 1: then to prostitute itself to the ranching industry's predator hatred.
Speaker 1: Between eighteen eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana paid
Speaker 1: bounties on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred
Speaker 1: and forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred sixty seven coyotes, a ranching subsidy that grew
Speaker 1: so large during the territorial stage that it devoured two
Speaker 1: thirds of the government's budgets. As a state, Montana outdid
Speaker 1: mere bounties. In nineteen o five, its legislature passed a
Speaker 1: law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild
Speaker 1: hanted population, an early form of state sanctioned biological warfare.
Speaker 1: A century later, coyotes and wolves in the northern West
Speaker 1: still haven't recovered from that disease. When the forerunner of
Speaker 1: the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Biological Survey,
Speaker 1: began to cast about for more reliable congressional funding in
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century, director C.
Speaker 2: Heart Miriam hit on.
Speaker 1: The idea of making the Bureau the answer to the
Speaker 1: so called predator problem.
Speaker 2: Faithful to a fault. To their packs mates and pops.
Speaker 1: Wolves were relatively easy marks for government hunters armed with
Speaker 1: poisoned bait, as ernestmson Seton wrote and perhaps the most
Speaker 1: famous of his wildlife stories, Lobo King of Corumpaul, With
Speaker 1: the scent of a dispatched pack member, a hunter could
Speaker 1: proceed to lure and kill every additional member of a
Speaker 1: wolf pack. In Montana, twenty three thousand, five hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy five wolves had died in eighteen ninety nine. By
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty the number had fallen to seventeen. So by
Speaker 1: the mid twenties, the Bureau reset its focus on coyotes,
Speaker 1: an animal that Bureau scientist E. A. Goldman now labeled
Speaker 1: the arch predator of our time. Typical of American wildlife
Speaker 1: decisions of the age, the most vicious war of extermination
Speaker 1: we ever attempted against a native animal took place entirely
Speaker 1: absent of any scientific research into how coyotes functioned in
Speaker 1: ecosystems are indeed in human economies. When government finally did
Speaker 1: dispatch ecologists with the charge of proving coyote villainy and
Speaker 1: justifying their eradication, only to have studies by O Loss
Speaker 1: and Adolf Muri determined that in fact, coyotes were ancient
Speaker 1: curators of ecologies whose actions were overwhelmingly beneficial to humans.
Speaker 1: The Bureau doubled down on coyote eradication. Its public relations
Speaker 1: arm even sent canned articles to newspapers that brainwashed whole
Speaker 1: generations about predators, positioning coyotes in the minds of many
Speaker 1: as the most contemptible of American animals. Old world folk
Speaker 1: wisdom had long since said predators had to go so
Speaker 1: with little evidence to send its coyotes to eradication. That's
Speaker 1: what had to happen, first with strychnine, then with newer,
Speaker 1: more effective poisons la like thalium sulfate, sodium fluoro acetate
Speaker 1: better known as ten eighty, and sodium cyanide. Federal hunters
Speaker 1: between nineteen fifteen and nineteen seventy two killed an incredible
Speaker 1: eight and a half million coyotes in the wake of
Speaker 1: Rachel Carson's historic anti poisons book Silent Spring. Though of
Speaker 1: all the unlikely politicians, it was Richard Nixon who finally
Speaker 1: ended blanket coyote genocide. The old notion that the only
Speaker 1: good predator is a dead one is no longer acceptable,
Speaker 1: he told the American public in nineteen seventy two. Nixon
Speaker 1: went on the widespread use of highly toxic poisons to
Speaker 1: kill coyotes and other predatory animals and birds is a
Speaker 1: practice which has been a source of increasing concern to
Speaker 1: the American public. I am today issuing a executive order
Speaker 1: banning the use of poisons for predator control on all
Speaker 1: public lands. Looking back on this history, it seems clear
Speaker 1: that persecuting coyotes without any scientific basis was purely and
Speaker 1: simply an act of myopic ideology. The nations of Western
Speaker 1: Europe had long before destroyed their own wild predators, and
Speaker 1: making America into the image of Europe obviously meant we
Speaker 1: should do the same. That European template was in place
Speaker 1: prior to Darwin, though, and preceded the emergence of the
Speaker 1: new twentieth century science of ecology to issue a corrective
Speaker 1: But starting in the nineteen twenties, ecologist like Joseph Grinnell,
Speaker 1: who with his student E. Raymond Hall, did foundational work
Speaker 1: on ecological niches, and eventually Aldo Leopold, who combined first
Speaker 1: rate science with a litter gift for reaching the public,
Speaker 1: became opponents.
Speaker 2: Of the reflexive war on coyotes.
Speaker 1: So were the Muri Brothers, who did basic foundational science
Speaker 1: on Coyotes and Jackson Hole and Yellowstone in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Since Ernest Thompson Seton had written Tito at
Speaker 1: the start of the twentieth century, policymakers had just assumed
Speaker 1: that tripling down on the coyote of war eventually would work.
Speaker 1: According to a story in Sports of Feel, by the
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifties, with thrown five hundred million dollars of
Speaker 1: taxpayer money at coyote killing, no one was prepared for
Speaker 1: the actual entirely unexpected outcome. Millions of individual coyotes died,
Speaker 1: to be sure, But so how Coyotes not only were
Speaker 1: undiminished in the West, the war began to spread them
Speaker 1: out of their original range and interstates in the Midwest,
Speaker 1: South and East, where predator eradication had successfully wiped out wolves,
Speaker 1: and with towns and cities of every size setting up
Speaker 1: dog catchers and pounds to eliminate stray town dogs, now
Speaker 1: new possibilities open for coyotes and cities. Coyotes, after all,
Speaker 1: have lived in our midst forever. Archaeological work at ancient
Speaker 1: American cities like Chaco Canyon indicate as much soda. Suburbs
Speaker 1: named for coyotes in the old Aztec capital of Teenotes.
Speaker 1: Teeth Line naturalist Thomas Nutdall found coyotes running through the
Speaker 1: streets of Carmel Mission on the central coast of California
Speaker 1: in the eighteen thirties. Los Angeles has never been without
Speaker 1: coyotes since its founding. So as coyotes spread across America
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, they eyed rats, mice, geese, and
Speaker 1: fruit trees, in short, all the opportunities where people weren't
Speaker 1: trapping or poisoning them or calling Wildlife Service hunters on them,
Speaker 1: and moved in with us. Coyotes in Denver, Chicago, and
Speaker 1: everywhere else, including my parents' little town of six hundred
Speaker 1: people in Louisiana, have been the result. Yet again, we
Speaker 1: have to learn to coexist because resistance is feudile. How
Speaker 1: if coyotes managed to survive what wolves and scores of
Speaker 1: other species could not. Tito had been an allegorical answer.
Speaker 1: Another came from folk tradition in the Southwest, the only
Speaker 1: thing smarter than a coyote is God. But a pair
Speaker 1: of biologists, Guy Connolly and Fred Knowlton finally came up
Speaker 1: with the answer. As a result of co evolution. Alongside
Speaker 1: larger wolves which had long harassed them, coyote had evolved
Speaker 1: a remarkable set of survival traits. Under assault, they have
Speaker 1: larger litters. If coyote numbers go down, more food sources
Speaker 1: mean they get more pups to adulthood. If the breeding
Speaker 1: alpha female of a pack dies, beta females breed and
Speaker 1: have more pups. Most remarkably, coyotes had evolved a rare
Speaker 1: ability we humans share, called fishing fusion. Like us, they
Speaker 1: are normally a social or fusion species, but also like us,
Speaker 1: when conditions warrant, they can split into floaters and pears
Speaker 1: fishing and scatter and colonize. Connolly and Knowlton showed that
Speaker 1: you could kill seventy percent of a coyote population year
Speaker 1: after year without ultimately reducing its numbers, but you very
Speaker 1: likely did spread them. Let me share a personal story.
Speaker 1: In the twenty first century West, something resembling this is
Speaker 1: so common the experience might not even be mine, although
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure this particular one is. My wife Sarah
Speaker 1: and I are up early brewing coffee as crimson and
Speaker 1: gold set off the kitchen of our house and technicolors
Speaker 1: southwestern hues an ordinary autumn dawn, beautiful enough to break
Speaker 1: your heart, is unfolding in the Galileo Valley south of
Speaker 1: Santa Fe. Then I see Sarah's eyes widen. She's looking
Speaker 1: past me through the windows, so I track her line
Speaker 1: of sight.
Speaker 2: Five coyotes, three.
Speaker 1: Of them gangly fall pups, looking for all the world
Speaker 1: like a posse of cruising teenagers, are trotting single file
Speaker 1: past our kitchen, back lit by the colors of the
Speaker 1: breaking day. Every hair on their sharp muzzles, ears, and
Speaker 1: floating tails is outlined in chromium yellow light. The alpha pair,
Speaker 1: a robust male and a grassisle female, is bringing up
Speaker 1: the rear, and as they trot that effortless coyote gate
Speaker 1: pass us. I know two more details right off. The
Speaker 1: female is familiar.
Speaker 2: I know her.
Speaker 1: She's an unusual coyote, recognizable because she sports a white
Speaker 1: rather than the more normal black tip at the end
Speaker 1: of her tail. At the same time, I register that
Speaker 1: two of the yearlings carry that same genetic marker, although
Speaker 1: in a less pronounced form, their cream tail.
Speaker 2: Tips speckled with black.
Speaker 1: This distinctive female has raised pups in the canyon below
Speaker 1: the house for at least the past three years, I've
Speaker 1: watched her even longer. Second detail, the male seems to
Speaker 1: be a new consort, has some accident befallen her mate
Speaker 1: with the split ear, and.
Speaker 2: His reaction makes me laugh.
Speaker 1: Gliding past the house as if he's on skates, his
Speaker 1: golden eyes suddenly narrow as he spots our brawny Alaska
Speaker 1: and malame Cody sleepily lounging on the front porch, never
Speaker 1: breaking stride, but with a quick lip curl and grimace.
Speaker 2: No time to hang out. The new male bears a
Speaker 2: row of lovely white teeth.
Speaker 1: Cody has been around coyotes all his life, and seeing
Speaker 1: them in the yard isn't all that novel, so he
Speaker 1: merely sits up and watches as the parade goes by.
Speaker 2: So do we.
Speaker 1: It's a wild canid show to match the dawn, and
Speaker 1: we haven't had to go to Yellowstone or Alaska to
Speaker 1: see it. Our coffee cups steaming the air. We've just
Speaker 1: stood in the kitchen and looked outside, and one of
Speaker 1: the most intriguing wildlife stories of our time, not just Westerners,
Speaker 1: but everyone in America is now getting to see small
Speaker 1: Western wolves out the kitchen windows. The coyote has turned
Speaker 1: out to be the dude, and the dude absolutely abides.
Speaker 2: Difficult as it.
Speaker 1: Is to expel politics from our minds these days, a
Speaker 1: coyote in the yard can manage it. Whether those golden
Speaker 1: eyes that slender snout are the insolent swish of a
Speaker 1: tale charm you or outrage you. The site of a
Speaker 1: coyote is never boring, materializing magically into familiar surroundings we
Speaker 1: long ago assume we're bled of anything wild. A single
Speaker 1: coyote can evaporate all illusions of our successful transplant of
Speaker 1: civilizations of the continent. No world that has a jackal
Speaker 1: like wolf glancing at you as it trounts by, with
Speaker 1: houses and highways in the background can ever be said
Speaker 1: to have banished the wild. I've never had so much
Speaker 1: fun writing a book as I had writing one I
Speaker 1: called Coyote America, and one of the reasons was that
Speaker 1: its narrative arc inverted everything we're used to environmental stories,
Speaker 1: and Coyote America nature wins. Coyotes have taken everything we
Speaker 1: humans can throw at them, then calmly occupied the very
Speaker 1: ground we're standing on, and they've done it repeatedly. Direwolves,
Speaker 1: mammas and saber tooth cats may not have been able
Speaker 1: to survive the pleisosine, but coyotes did. America's scorched Earth
Speaker 1: campaigns against the country's wildlife a century ago drove numerous
Speaker 1: species to extinction or the edge of it. That was
Speaker 1: not the coyotes fate, who thrived as other creatures big
Speaker 1: and small, disappeared on all sides targets of wholesale extermination
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. Coyotes have responded to that by
Speaker 1: spreading across America, making it to Delaware their forty ninth
Speaker 1: conquests in twenty eleven. Only Hawaii lacks them. No other
Speaker 1: mammal except humans, has ever exhibited such cosmopolitan talents for
Speaker 1: that kind of successful expansion. To do the coyote justice,
Speaker 1: you have to engage not just with the animal itself
Speaker 1: and every feel from evolution biology, ecology to anthropology, history
Speaker 1: and folklore. Even literature, art and film has done so,
Speaker 1: but also with a rich range of us bipedal animals involved. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Ernest Thompson Seton is there, and so is everyone from
Speaker 1: Mark Twain to the Biological Survey Coyote Killers to Richard Nixon,
Speaker 1: and to be honest, the psychologist Carl Jung, the poet
Speaker 1: Gary Snyder, the painter Harry Fonseka, and if you can
Speaker 1: imagine such a person, the genius Paleolithic American who created
Speaker 1: the first coyote avatar story. So far back in time
Speaker 1: we can't fathom either the depths of coyote stories or
Speaker 1: their future. Of course, our resident super genius, Wiley Coyote
Speaker 1: is in the mix, and I can report with some
Speaker 1: delight about Wiley that his New Yorker inspired product liability
Speaker 1: lawsuit against the Acme Corporation is about to have its
Speaker 1: day in court, with the film Coyote v Acme coming
Speaker 1: to movie theaters in late twenty twenty six. What I've
Speaker 1: also learned following coyotes through history is that their story
Speaker 1: is far from over. As one remarkable example of that,
Speaker 1: right now, coyotes are on the cusp of becoming the
Speaker 1: first North American species in three million years to cross
Speaker 1: from this continent into another one, in this case, into
Speaker 1: South America. Expansion across a continent is one thing, but
Speaker 1: into another. While the locus of their evolutionary origin seems
Speaker 1: to have been in the southwest of the president United States,
Speaker 1: coyotes do seem to have been occasionally on the scene
Speaker 1: south of Mexico in Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador and Nicaragua.
Speaker 1: Even before Spanish colonization, there fond of open country and
Speaker 1: most certainly attracted the sheep and goats. Spanish colonizers introduced.
Speaker 1: Coyotes apparently veered away from the cat filled jungles to
Speaker 1: the south, but as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest,
Speaker 1: dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa Rica during the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: and nineteen eighties. Since then they have steadily pushed into
Speaker 1: Panama and the grand Isthmus between the continents. They crossed
Speaker 1: the Panama Canal in twenty ten and are colonizing south
Speaker 1: at a rate of about forty miles a year, which
Speaker 1: means that by twenty eighteen they began to approach Darian
Speaker 1: National Part athwart the Isthmus, beyond which lies Colombia and
Speaker 1: all of South America. The intertwined ring density of Darian
Speaker 1: National Park, a jungle of spider monkeys, tapers, giant and eaters,
Speaker 1: peckeries and birds, reptiles and amphibians almost beyond count would
Speaker 1: not strike a fan of Wiley coyote roadrunner cartoons as
Speaker 1: classic coyote habitat replete with mountain lions and jaguars that
Speaker 1: would enjoy taking out a migrating canid. Darien Shirley looms
Speaker 1: as a coyote obstacle, but coyotes have confronted unfamiliar settings
Speaker 1: before without blanching. Their numbers, like ours, possess some individuals
Speaker 1: who can take on situations like big cities or jungles
Speaker 1: with a calm conviction of purpose. Adventurous ones may be
Speaker 1: hit by cars or taken out by a jaguar, but
Speaker 1: just as there are coyotes in Chicago and Manhattan, some
Speaker 1: are without question pushing through Darian Park to Columbia as
Speaker 1: I write this. When they succeed, they will almost certainly
Speaker 1: spread across all of South America. For coyotes, this may
Speaker 1: well be their version of a planet b of a Mars.
Speaker 1: Perhaps given their candid version of a human like self confidence,
Speaker 1: coyotes have a certain pensiont for making the news. Colonizing
Speaker 1: another continent is a story that's hard to top, but
Speaker 1: there are other candidates. Not many other animals are participating
Speaker 1: in the rescue of fellow mammal from extinction. But a
Speaker 1: particular coyote population in Texas and Louisiana, which residents and
Speaker 1: biologists have now named ghost wolves, has attracted attention from
Speaker 1: geneticists for doing exactly that. The species they're helping to
Speaker 1: rescue is the red wolf, the most endangered wolf on
Speaker 1: the planet. There's a true irony in this particular story,
Speaker 1: since a half century ago, biologists believe the primary threat
Speaker 1: to red wolf's survival was interbreeding with mygrating coyotes who
Speaker 1: were swamping red wolf genetics. I was a young teenager
Speaker 1: in Louisiana just when these hybridization events were happening among
Speaker 1: the coyotes I was seeing. Back then, I twice came
Speaker 1: face to face with strapping, leggy animals with mesmerizing yellow eyes.
Speaker 2: That sure looked like wolfy coyotes.
Speaker 1: If these were coyote red wolf hybrids, and they almost
Speaker 1: certainly were, that mixture made for gorgeous animals. But for
Speaker 1: the next several decades, the recovery program for saving red
Speaker 1: wolves under the Danger Species Act largely meant destroying hybrid
Speaker 1: animals and sequestering pure red wolves away from coyotes. So
Speaker 1: how delicious is it? Now that unlike gray wolves in
Speaker 1: the West, red wolves, having been particularly difficult to pull
Speaker 1: back from the brink, have a new chains with a
Speaker 1: rescued population in nineteen eighty of a mere fourteen founding animals.
Speaker 1: Red wolves, for half a century have suffered from a
Speaker 1: sharply constrained genetic diversity on the paril of North Carolina
Speaker 1: National Wildlife Refuges where we've tried to save them. The
Speaker 1: wild population of red wolves right now has dropped to
Speaker 1: a mere twenty five Meanwhile, though local residents in Galveston, Texas,
Speaker 1: have for several years been noticing that some of the
Speaker 1: coyotes on their island are at the least unusual looking.
Speaker 1: Starting in twenty eighteen, genetic analysis of coyotes there and
Speaker 1: in nearby Louisiana reveals something that in retrospect shouldn't have
Speaker 1: surprised us. It turns out there are still canids in
Speaker 1: that part of the world carrying red wolf ancestry, often
Speaker 1: ten percent or more. Occasionally, an animal has turned up
Speaker 1: whose red wolf genes approach seventy five percent. Even more startling,
Speaker 1: some of these wild coyotes possess red wolf alels entirely
Speaker 1: distinctive from the makeup of the North Carolina red wolf populations,
Speaker 1: whose complete genome had suffered when we attempted to rebuild
Speaker 1: their numbers from such a small group of founders. So
Speaker 1: not only are these mixed coyote red wolf animals I
Speaker 1: saw as a teenager still out there all along, they
Speaker 1: preserved wolf genetics that, with the assistance of modern science,
Speaker 1: can diversify red wolves and help save them. Colossal biosciences
Speaker 1: the fame the extinction company that in twenty twenty five
Speaker 1: genetically engineered dire wolves, simultaneously announced that it had birthed
Speaker 1: four cloned red wolf puppies from the lost wolf genetics
Speaker 1: preserved by these Deep South hybrid coyotes. Hope are Nika Kaida.
Speaker 1: Her Kakawa name is the sole female of the four. Blaze,
Speaker 1: Concern and Sender are the three males. The odds of
Speaker 1: saving red wolves and a more healthy and complete version
Speaker 1: of them have suddenly gone dramatically. Paying attention to coyotes
Speaker 1: has taught me one final valuable lesson about them and us.
Speaker 1: Since the beginnings of wildlife management, we humans, all committed individualists,
Speaker 1: ourselves have thought of other animals almost entirely in terms
Speaker 1: of species a lumping aggregate of l like creatures. Naturalists
Speaker 1: such a seat and try to redirect that thinking with
Speaker 1: articles like Tito, only to have no less than a
Speaker 1: President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, castigate him as
Speaker 1: a nature faker. Yet when famed ecologists Adolph Muri studied
Speaker 1: the wolves of Mount McKinley Park forty years later, he
Speaker 1: found the gray wolves there to be very distinct individuals.
Speaker 1: Murray even gave his study animals' names Dandy, Robber, Mask, Grandpa,
Speaker 1: and Wags.
Speaker 2: It strikes me as a.
Speaker 1: Myopic disconnect that we humans have no trouble understanding our
Speaker 1: companion animals as individuals, yet can still insist that Walt
Speaker 1: Disney was anthropomorphizing deer when he gave one a personality
Speaker 1: and called him Bambie. That long standing recourse to a
Speaker 1: species focus and wildlife management is still there, but the
Speaker 1: world of twenty first century human wildlife coexistence is shifting.
Speaker 1: Despite it, the evidence is everywhere. The New York Times
Speaker 1: actually ran an obituary of the female Yellowstone wolf biologists
Speaker 1: had named six when she was killed by a Montana hunter.
Speaker 1: Park naturalist Rick McIntyre is even now publishing biographical books
Speaker 1: about individual wolves.
Speaker 2: In Yellowstone, the.
Speaker 1: Hollywood Hills Griffith Park cougar, known as P twenty two,
Speaker 1: became a celebrity lion in Celebrity Fill Los Angeles on
Speaker 1: the opposite side of the country. For several decades now,
Speaker 1: Manhattanites have recognized Central Parks red tailed hawks, barn owls,
Speaker 1: and yes, coyotes with individual names like Romeo and Juliet,
Speaker 1: the mated pair in Central Park in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Coyotes are not just their.
Speaker 1: Own animals who experience existence differently one from the other
Speaker 1: and love their own unique aliveness. As science at the
Speaker 1: Predator Research Facility in Utah has shown, they are truly
Speaker 1: remarkably singular. To understand the coyotes we're coexisting with in
Speaker 1: a way that's good both for you and for the
Speaker 1: four legged animal looking back at you, sometimes make an
Speaker 1: effort to identify a specific individual coyote to be sure.
Speaker 1: Coyotes tend to look the same to us, and no doubt,
Speaker 1: initially they returned that non discriminating favor, but there are
Speaker 1: often distinctive markers you can pick out. I can tell
Speaker 1: you from my experience with the female with the white
Speaker 1: tipped tail who dens in the canyon below my house
Speaker 1: in New Mexico. Once I identified her as a particular animal,
Speaker 1: she quickly did.
Speaker 2: The same with me. Our mutual curiosity has.
Speaker 1: Led to an interesting, even intriguing relationship. We sometimes don't
Speaker 1: see one another for weeks. Then hiking in the canyon,
Speaker 1: I'll spot her, often with other coyotes, and before she
Speaker 1: moves off, she will sometimes direct me with her nose
Speaker 1: and ears to something of interest to both of us.
Speaker 1: I'll return from an absence and she'll be sitting in
Speaker 1: the front yard like a dog I've absent mindedly forgotten
Speaker 1: to take along, moving off calmly and reluctantly as I
Speaker 1: park my jeep from a respectable distance, She's inspected our
Speaker 1: new malamew kishka, and she is clearly willing to bring
Speaker 1: her family her new pups past the windows. I don't
Speaker 1: know why she does these things, and I'm not about
Speaker 1: to claim I do. She knows she's not in danger,
Speaker 1: of course, but I certainly don't feed her or otherwise
Speaker 1: encourage her.
Speaker 2: But this much I do know. I like it that
Speaker 2: every so.
Speaker 1: Often a while coyote apparently thinks of me. So I'll
Speaker 1: suggest something radical. Try meeting a coyote halfway and see
Speaker 1: how it goes.
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of ways we could start
Speaker 3: this one, but I think because we can take coyotes anywhere,
Speaker 3: they go everywhere. But as you point out, this is
Speaker 3: one story in which the animals win. Yeah, and so
Speaker 3: if I unpacked that a little bit, because it's a
Speaker 3: fun it's a fun idea to play with.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as I as I said in the in the
Speaker 1: episode Coyote America, what it has been was still is
Speaker 1: because I'm doing a new version of it that's coming out, saying,
Speaker 1: the most fun book to write I've ever written.
Speaker 2: And that's really.
Speaker 1: The reason we're dealing with the coyote, with an animal
Speaker 1: that has a biography that not only does a rollercoaster
Speaker 1: ride up and down and around swerving curves, and it's
Speaker 1: also an animal that, as native people recognize, is very
Speaker 1: much like us. It's an animal that lives by its
Speaker 1: wits and is successful as a result of that. And
Speaker 1: it's also the rare, irrepressible animal. So many of our
Speaker 1: grand species in the past, all the way back to
Speaker 1: the Pleistocene. I mean, we lose our mammos, we lose
Speaker 1: our sabertoothed cats, we lose our lions, and then in
Speaker 1: the more modern historic period, I mean, we lose passenger pigeons,
Speaker 1: the most numerous bird on earth. We lose Carolina parakeets,
Speaker 1: and I rebuild woodpeckers. I mean, just on and on,
Speaker 1: and yet here is this creature that, in fact, we
Speaker 1: do everything we can possibly think of to wipe them out,
Speaker 1: and the result is exactly the opposite of what our
Speaker 1: intentions are. We end up not only do their numbers
Speaker 1: remain viable even in the West, where we're launching such
Speaker 1: a war against them, but in fact our efforts spread
Speaker 1: them out across the rest of the country and so
Speaker 1: and into cities and towns. And it's this kind of
Speaker 1: remarkable story to me. And one of the things I
Speaker 1: wanted to say here, and because I think it is
Speaker 1: a remarkable thing.
Speaker 2: Is that we can't.
Speaker 1: We can't delude ourselves that we have created a completely tamed,
Speaker 1: as it were, emasculated country. When you can look out
Speaker 1: the window of your house in a suburb anywhere in
Speaker 1: America and see a jackal sized wolf trotting down the street,
Speaker 1: glancing at you, with highways and houses behind it as
Speaker 1: it goes By. I mean, that's a kind of a
Speaker 1: rare wildlife victory in America that you don't get to
Speaker 1: enjoy very much.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think.
Speaker 3: Another point that stood out to me here is when
Speaker 3: you're talking about coyotes moving into South America, and whenever
Speaker 3: you're reading environmental history and you're thinking about these giant,
Speaker 3: large scale movement of animals around the world, you know,
Speaker 3: without human help, right just say, you know.
Speaker 2: Ignoring the.
Speaker 3: Old New World exchanges. When you think about animals moving
Speaker 3: across the Siberian land Bridge or the Bearing Land Bridge,
Speaker 3: or you know, like bison moving east and then moving
Speaker 3: back west, I often find myself thinking like, wow, I
Speaker 3: wonder what that would have looked like. It's almost unimaginable.
Speaker 3: But in fact, as you point out, we're witnessing what
Speaker 3: we would think of as like this ancient sort of
Speaker 3: unimaginable phenomenon right now. And it just looks like, you know,
Speaker 3: a coyote showing up in someone's backyard.
Speaker 2: That's what it looks like, you know.
Speaker 1: And I mean I got to experience it as a
Speaker 1: kid growing up in Louisiana. I got to experience a
Speaker 1: little bit of what this was because when I was younger,
Speaker 1: and you know, being a kid, I grew up in
Speaker 1: a small town with the woods one hundred yards away.
Speaker 1: I mean, from the time I was really little, I
Speaker 1: was going out into the woods and hanging out on
Speaker 1: creeks and looking at the natural world. But from the
Speaker 1: time I was, you know, six or seven years old,
Speaker 1: my parents would let me do that. Up until the
Speaker 1: time I was about thirteen or fourteen, I never saw
Speaker 1: a coyote or what. When they first started showing up
Speaker 1: in Louisiana what people have heard they called them wolves.
Speaker 1: I never saw a single one. Never even occurred to
Speaker 1: me that there might be something like that. And all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, one day, here is this animal that
Speaker 1: to me, it was like rounding a corner in New
Speaker 1: Orleans and having a moose be standing on the street
Speaker 1: on the intersection. Suddenly here was an animal that I
Speaker 1: in no way expected to ever be in Louisiana, and
Speaker 1: here it was. And as I started paying attention, they
Speaker 1: were there more and more and more. And what I
Speaker 1: realized later on I began to in fact engage with
Speaker 1: biologists at Louisiana Parson Wildlife. What's going on. I think
Speaker 1: I'm seeing these and they did the generosity of writing
Speaker 1: me back saying, yes, you have probably seen coyotes, because
Speaker 1: coyotes are beginning to colonize in Louisiana. So I think
Speaker 1: that's why people in Columbia and the first, the most
Speaker 1: and earthly of the South American countries are going to
Speaker 1: experience It's something like I did in Louisian. Here's this
Speaker 1: animal that.
Speaker 2: What in the hell? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the reaction. And you know, maybe
Speaker 1: it's really magnified when you're thirteen, fourteen years old and
Speaker 1: are seeing it, But that's what is about to happen
Speaker 1: in South America, coyotes. And you know, as the biologists
Speaker 1: here are studying this have pointed out, man, once they
Speaker 1: get through Daria National Park and cross into Columbia into
Speaker 1: more open and cleared country, all of South America is
Speaker 1: in front of them, they're probably going to colonize into
Speaker 1: our country Contina.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I am.
Speaker 3: Another aspect of this story is the when we think
Speaker 3: of wildlife politics today, we often imagine, you know, rural
Speaker 3: residents and urban dwellers, and it's it's sort of a
Speaker 3: social issue. But you introduce here the role of just
Speaker 3: institute inertia and government agencies and sort of steering the
Speaker 3: course of history, right with the Bureau of Biological Survey
Speaker 3: needing something to hold on to as a sort of
Speaker 3: organizing mission or organizing principle, and it's coyote eradication, predator
Speaker 3: radication more broadly. But the role of the government in
Speaker 3: this story is striking just in terms of government intervening
Speaker 3: in the natural world in a way that's unimaginable to
Speaker 3: us today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is a massive intervention, and it happens in
Speaker 1: part in order to keep a bureau alive. Seahart Mariam,
Speaker 1: who's the first director of Biological Survey, is finding it
Speaker 1: difficulty to get funding from Congress in like nineteen four
Speaker 1: nineteen five, and he comes up with the idea, they
Speaker 1: don't want to fund us because we're doing pure science.
Speaker 1: Let's become the resolution for the predator problem. And of
Speaker 1: course he's right. Once he lays out the Bureau as
Speaker 1: that kind of agency, then the funding does follow. And
Speaker 1: so I think, to your point Randall about this is
Speaker 1: a government agency that needs to have something solid to
Speaker 1: rest its feet on going into the future. In the
Speaker 1: twentieth century in America, they come out of so many
Speaker 1: of them come out of this background where they're not ecologists.
Speaker 1: Ecology is a brand new science they're a little suspicious of,
Speaker 1: and so they don't know it well, and they just
Speaker 1: come from this assumption that what we're doing in America
Speaker 1: is we're remaking North America into a kind of a
Speaker 1: Western European country. And what people in Western Europe did,
Speaker 1: which we don't even question, is they got rid of
Speaker 1: all the predators, and so this is something we're going
Speaker 1: to do. And what struck me also when I was
Speaker 1: doing the research on this is the fact that they're
Speaker 1: willing to do this without ever having any scientific research
Speaker 1: to back it up. And then when they send people
Speaker 1: out to come up with the information, the scientific research
Speaker 1: they're convinced is going to, you know, make coyotes the
Speaker 1: arch predator of our time. And the Muri brothers come
Speaker 1: back and say, well, wow, that's not what we're finding,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, it looks like eighty to ninety
Speaker 1: percent of what coyotes do in the world is actually
Speaker 1: beneficial to humans. And they also are seemed to be
Speaker 1: they seem to have this really long term predatory relationship
Speaker 1: with other creatures out there in the world. And they're
Speaker 1: all these these kind of intertwined relationships that seem to
Speaker 1: balance one another out. That was absolutely not what the
Speaker 1: bureau wanted to hear. And so, I mean, and this
Speaker 1: has happened a lot of times in history. You get
Speaker 1: a report that, Okay, that's not what I want to hear.
Speaker 1: You just throw it out the window and double down.
Speaker 1: And that's what they did. I mean, they just doubled
Speaker 1: down again and again. And of course, no amount of
Speaker 1: doubling down or tripling down inventing a whole host of
Speaker 1: new poisons to kill coyotes, none of it ended up working.
Speaker 1: All it essentially did, as biologists finally figured out, was
Speaker 1: to trigger these adaptive responses that coyotes had long ago
Speaker 1: evolved because they were harassed by wolves, and now as
Speaker 1: humans harassed them, they called on these adaptations to keep
Speaker 1: their populations alive, and it also triggered their expansion. And so,
Speaker 1: as I said, it's this kind of really you know,
Speaker 1: fun story, because it's like you know, like the movie Avatar,
Speaker 1: where you don't expect that the blue people in the
Speaker 1: inn are going to win, but they do. And so
Speaker 1: in this case, it's the coyotes who win, and that's
Speaker 1: pretty fun.
Speaker 3: And one final question, speaking of surprises, I'm usually never
Speaker 3: surprised when I learned something new about Richard Nixon in
Speaker 3: environmental politics, but his statement about the use of poisons
Speaker 3: for coyote control was that was a new one for me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, I feel like I'm ready for the unexpected
Speaker 3: when it comes to Nixon. But yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 3: an interesting moment in environmental politics at the federal level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: And you know, the truth is, if you have a
Speaker 1: bookcase of American presidents and you're looking for the people
Speaker 1: who are most interested in the natural world, you have
Speaker 1: like Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt on one end, and
Speaker 1: on the other end of those least interested, Richard Nixon
Speaker 1: is one of those who is going to appear as
Speaker 1: the other book d But in this particular instance, Nixon,
Speaker 1: of course is a consummate politician, and his idea is
Speaker 1: the ecology movement is in full swing. We've just had
Speaker 1: the first Earth Day. The public after Silent Spring is
Speaker 1: really alarmed at the use of poisons. I'm going to
Speaker 1: get on top of this because it's going to be
Speaker 1: a political surge on my behalf.
Speaker 2: It doesn't work out that way.
Speaker 1: But I mean he's essentially attempting to take advantage of
Speaker 1: a movement that he perceives he might be able to surf. Yeah,
Speaker 1: always calculating, always calculating. Yeah, well Dan, thanks again, oh Rand,
Speaker 1: great fun.