WEBVTT - Ep. 20: Coyote: America’s Jackal and Its Roller-Coaster Ride Through History 0:00:01.440 --> 0:00:04.560 As a poster animal of the West. The coyote has 0:00:04.600 --> 0:00:08.480 a roller coaster biography, seen as a sacred deity in 0:00:08.520 --> 0:00:13.000 one phase and a varmit meriting eradication and another. The 0:00:13.240 --> 0:00:17.880 ultimate outcome is not what anyone would predict. I'm Dan 0:00:17.960 --> 0:00:22.439 Flores and this is the American West, brought to you 0:00:22.520 --> 0:00:25.239 by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt. 0:00:25.040 --> 0:00:25.960 Meets the harvest. 0:00:26.480 --> 0:00:30.000 A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters 0:00:30.000 --> 0:00:35.680 and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. 0:00:35.840 --> 0:00:37.480 Enjoy Responsible. 0:00:51.680 --> 0:01:06.000 Coyote, America's jackal and its roller coaster ride through history. 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:10.840 In the year nineteen hundred, the Canadian American nature writer 0:01:11.400 --> 0:01:15.520 Ernest Thompson Seton wrote one of the more intriguing stories 0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:19.920 ever penned about coyotes. Since coyotes have been inspiring human 0:01:20.000 --> 0:01:23.160 storytellers for more than ten thousand years, that's not faint 0:01:23.280 --> 0:01:27.800 praise among early American writers. Even Lewis and Clark, who 0:01:27.840 --> 0:01:31.560 introduced Americans to the animal and named it Prairie wolf, 0:01:31.800 --> 0:01:35.680 were late to the game. Way back in sixteen fifty one, 0:01:36.040 --> 0:01:42.000 Spanish author Francisco Hernandez had written concerning the coyote or 0:01:42.040 --> 0:01:46.880 Indian fox, a piece that included a curious take about 0:01:46.920 --> 0:01:52.840 an intelligent animal who didn't forget. The coyote is a 0:01:52.880 --> 0:01:58.240 persevering revenger of injuries, the Spaniard wrote. But by the 0:01:58.280 --> 0:02:02.320 same token is God grateful to those who do well 0:02:02.360 --> 0:02:07.120 by it. Closer in time to Setan, there was Mark 0:02:07.200 --> 0:02:12.160 Twain's several pages of coyote description in his best selling 0:02:12.200 --> 0:02:17.480 book Roughing It. The proper pronunciation of the name is coyote, 0:02:17.680 --> 0:02:21.640 Twain told readers, but he didn't stop there. He is 0:02:21.919 --> 0:02:26.799 a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a 0:02:26.880 --> 0:02:30.720 gray wolf skin stretched over it. He has a general 0:02:30.880 --> 0:02:35.760 slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing 0:02:36.000 --> 0:02:37.799 allegory of want. 0:02:38.400 --> 0:02:40.400 The bar then was high. 0:02:41.240 --> 0:02:45.680 But Setan's Tito, the story of the Coyote that learned How, 0:02:46.400 --> 0:02:50.120 wasn't just the lead piece in scribners in the nineteen 0:02:50.280 --> 0:02:54.880 hundred August issue. Like many of the Indian coyote stories 0:02:55.080 --> 0:02:59.680 folkloris were just beginning to collect, Tito took a widely 0:03:00.000 --> 0:03:04.680 deservable truth and offered an explanation for it. That truth 0:03:05.040 --> 0:03:10.600 was a widespread puzzlement about coyotes. Why weren't these wild 0:03:10.639 --> 0:03:14.560 dogs doing the proper thing and dying off. At the 0:03:14.600 --> 0:03:17.400 turn of the twentieth century, the United States was waist 0:03:17.560 --> 0:03:22.160 deep in the largest destruction and die off of wildlife 0:03:22.200 --> 0:03:26.799 discoverable anywhere in modern world history. Thirty million bison were 0:03:26.840 --> 0:03:30.519 down to fewer than one thousand. Fifteen million prong horns 0:03:30.600 --> 0:03:34.880 were all but gone. We had so devastated elk, bighorn sheep, 0:03:34.960 --> 0:03:38.880 and grizzly bears that they were surviving only as tiny 0:03:38.920 --> 0:03:43.480 remnants hiding in the deepest mountains. Five million wild horses 0:03:43.520 --> 0:03:46.400 were about to end up in pet food cans, and 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:49.560 by nineteen twenty we would have poisoned to death a 0:03:49.720 --> 0:03:54.800 million gray wolves. When Seatan wrote Tito the most numerous 0:03:54.840 --> 0:03:59.720 bird species on Earth, American passenger pigeons had fourteen years 0:03:59.800 --> 0:04:05.160 of existence left. Yet, as the scribner's article put it, 0:04:05.640 --> 0:04:09.000 despite the fierce war that had for a long time 0:04:09.120 --> 0:04:14.000 been waged against the coyote kind, for some inexplicable reason, 0:04:14.560 --> 0:04:19.279 coyotes were not following suit. Indeed, the more we shot them, 0:04:19.320 --> 0:04:22.679 poisoned them, trapped them random with dogs, blew up their dens, 0:04:22.960 --> 0:04:29.320 the more of them there seemed to be. By way 0:04:29.360 --> 0:04:34.160 of an explanation, Setan invented the Tto of his story. 0:04:34.920 --> 0:04:38.160 She has a little female coyote who is captured as 0:04:38.200 --> 0:04:41.920 a pup and chained in a ranch yard as a curiosity, 0:04:42.120 --> 0:04:48.160 where she shrewdly observes how her human captors use guns, traps, dogs, 0:04:48.240 --> 0:04:54.679 and poisons against her kin. Ultimately, she escapes, finds a mate, 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:58.400 has pupps of her own, and then proceeds to teach 0:04:58.440 --> 0:05:03.000 her pups and their children's children. As Setan phrased it, 0:05:03.640 --> 0:05:10.120 all the tricks of coyote extermination. Satan's human analog Moses, 0:05:10.320 --> 0:05:13.919 of course, and Israelite, who, by growing up among the 0:05:13.920 --> 0:05:17.760 Egyptians was able to learn their plans, which enabled him 0:05:17.800 --> 0:05:23.719 to save his people from destruction. Tito is a charming 0:05:23.760 --> 0:05:27.479 story belonging to a genre the literati among us would 0:05:27.480 --> 0:05:31.880 call allegory. If you weren't a sheepman or a predator 0:05:31.960 --> 0:05:35.680 hunter paid by one of the livestock associations, No doubt, 0:05:35.720 --> 0:05:39.120 it was fun to imagine it might be true, and 0:05:39.160 --> 0:05:41.960 in any case, it fit well with the kind of 0:05:42.160 --> 0:05:47.560 Darwinian animals are our ken stories. Writers like Setan and 0:05:47.760 --> 0:05:52.520 Jack London were writing then, But in nineteen hundred coyotes 0:05:52.640 --> 0:05:56.760 really were becoming more numerous, and not just that in 0:05:56.960 --> 0:06:01.400 arid Southwestern cities like Los Angeles, the wild song dogs 0:06:01.400 --> 0:06:06.279 were already attracting attention as urban dwellers. They were also 0:06:06.440 --> 0:06:09.680 primed for spreading out of the West, and over the 0:06:09.720 --> 0:06:13.600 next eighty years would start showing up in urban jungles 0:06:13.640 --> 0:06:17.760 as far flung as Denver, Chicago, New York, as well 0:06:17.760 --> 0:06:22.720 as Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. It turned out the 0:06:22.800 --> 0:06:27.160 coyote puzzle Seaton tried to resolve with Tito was going 0:06:27.200 --> 0:06:29.760 to require figuring out a hell of a lot more 0:06:29.960 --> 0:06:34.359 of the coyote biography than we ever knew looking both 0:06:34.400 --> 0:06:38.919 directions in nineteen hundred, What a crazy roller coaster of 0:06:38.960 --> 0:06:43.760 a biography that has turned out to be. When we 0:06:43.839 --> 0:06:47.000 humans got to North America twenty three thousand years ago, 0:06:47.320 --> 0:06:48.960 coyotes greeted us at. 0:06:48.800 --> 0:06:51.239 The front door. The Canada family. 0:06:51.480 --> 0:06:56.159 It produced not just dire wolves, gray wolves, jackals, and coyotes, 0:06:56.440 --> 0:06:59.200 but also your pup at home is a five and 0:06:59.240 --> 0:07:04.880 a half million year old family of American animals. Jackals, 0:07:05.040 --> 0:07:08.960 gray wolves and others did eventually migrate across the land 0:07:08.960 --> 0:07:13.200 bridges into the Old World. Gray wolf ancestors in particular 0:07:13.560 --> 0:07:17.800 colonizing most of the northern Hemisphere before returning to America 0:07:17.840 --> 0:07:22.760 about thirty thousand years ago. Coyotes, though, never left, and 0:07:22.880 --> 0:07:26.640 by eight hundred thousand years ago, were evolving into their 0:07:26.680 --> 0:07:31.120 modern form as a medium sized jackal like wolf. 0:07:32.000 --> 0:07:33.680 If you want to know what it's like to be. 0:07:33.720 --> 0:07:36.679 An America, get to know the canid that never left. 0:07:37.520 --> 0:07:41.840 Coyotes have been yipping and howling, the original national anthem 0:07:42.040 --> 0:07:46.400 across the continent for nearly a million years. When humans 0:07:46.440 --> 0:07:49.320 wandering out of Africa and across Asia finally made it 0:07:49.360 --> 0:07:53.320 to North America, they confronted a massive die off, oddly 0:07:53.400 --> 0:07:56.600 similar to the one seatan would one day invoke in 0:07:56.680 --> 0:08:03.040 Scribner's magazine. Mammoths, camels, horses, lions all were disappearing, but 0:08:03.120 --> 0:08:06.120 a particular survivor of that crash caught the attention of 0:08:06.160 --> 0:08:09.480 these first Americans, and soon they started thinking of it 0:08:09.720 --> 0:08:13.480 as an avatar, a stand in for humans in the imagination. 0:08:14.640 --> 0:08:18.880 Coyote with a capital S is not only a native 0:08:19.000 --> 0:08:23.840 deity from the Paleolithic, thus the oldest American god of 0:08:23.880 --> 0:08:27.880 which we have a record as old Man America, Coyote 0:08:28.000 --> 0:08:32.680 was also the chief protagonist in this continous oldest literature, 0:08:33.280 --> 0:08:37.720 both hero and fool of stories told around campfires and 0:08:37.880 --> 0:08:44.000 preserved by native people for ten millennia or more. Europeans 0:08:44.200 --> 0:08:49.160 arrived in America with experiences with bears, foxes, and wolves, 0:08:49.559 --> 0:08:53.280 but no prior experiences of any sort with coyotes in 0:08:53.320 --> 0:08:56.960 a set of any knowledge of Indians ancient familiarity with 0:08:57.080 --> 0:09:01.240 the animal, even from accounts in meso America, where the 0:09:01.280 --> 0:09:06.760 Aztecs had long before named the animals coyotal. Americans on 0:09:06.800 --> 0:09:10.240 the eastern Seaboard didn't know of coyotes until Lewis and 0:09:10.320 --> 0:09:15.280 Clark named them prairie wolves. A line in Moby Dick 0:09:15.480 --> 0:09:20.320 testifies that when Melville was writing his masterpiece, we were 0:09:20.400 --> 0:09:24.960 still using that name, but by then Southwestern travelers like 0:09:25.040 --> 0:09:30.720 Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Ruxton, Josiah Gregg, and Mark Twain were 0:09:30.760 --> 0:09:37.079 hearing the hispanis sized three syllable version coyote that Western 0:09:37.120 --> 0:09:41.160 locals used. That led Twain to instruct Americans on how 0:09:41.200 --> 0:09:43.800 to say the name in his book in the early 0:09:43.880 --> 0:09:48.359 eighteen seventies, but not before mountain men and trappers, unwilling 0:09:48.400 --> 0:09:51.600 to decorate a dog like animal that snuck around their 0:09:51.640 --> 0:09:56.320 camps with three whole syllables took coyote back to the 0:09:56.360 --> 0:10:01.400 Midwest and the South. With no Old World mythology to 0:10:01.520 --> 0:10:05.840 call on and scant interest in Indian religions or fables 0:10:05.880 --> 0:10:12.319 about a coyote deity, Americans found coyotes ripe for original interpretation. 0:10:13.240 --> 0:10:15.800 Beginning in the eighteen seventies and for the rest of 0:10:15.840 --> 0:10:20.560 the nineteenth century, a new, unflattering impression formed in the 0:10:20.640 --> 0:10:26.160 American mind. Twain's coyote description in Roughing It was intended 0:10:26.200 --> 0:10:29.680 as comedy, but laid the foundation for an assessment that 0:10:29.760 --> 0:10:34.040 grew worse as time went on. God now was the 0:10:34.200 --> 0:10:38.960 Indian deity who had created the world. God was even 0:10:39.040 --> 0:10:43.800 the perplexing prairie wolf of earlier in the century. Now 0:10:44.120 --> 0:10:49.720 a new, repetitive trope emerged. To New York journalists Horace Greeley, 0:10:50.160 --> 0:10:56.560 the coyote was a sneaking, cowardly little wretch. Ernest Ingasol's 0:10:56.720 --> 0:11:00.960 eighteen eighty seven The Hound of the Plains in Popular 0:11:01.000 --> 0:11:06.520 Science Monthly and Edwin Sabans The Coyote in Overland Monthly 0:11:06.679 --> 0:11:13.120 in nineteen oh eight described coyotes as contemptible and especially perverse. 0:11:13.800 --> 0:11:19.520 Their howls were eerie and blood stilling. Even defiant coyotes 0:11:19.720 --> 0:11:24.240 lacked higher morals and were cowardly to the last degree. 0:11:24.480 --> 0:11:29.760 They wrote exploring ideas for commercial gain from the killing 0:11:29.800 --> 0:11:33.440 of coyotes. By nineteen twenty, an article in no less 0:11:33.480 --> 0:11:38.040 than Scientific American asserted that while coyotes weren't worth the 0:11:38.160 --> 0:11:42.160 price of the ammunition to shoot them, every patriotic American 0:11:42.240 --> 0:11:46.080 ought to kill coyotes on site. Since the coyote, the 0:11:46.160 --> 0:11:54.480 writer averred, was the original Bolshevik, the original Communists. From 0:11:54.480 --> 0:11:59.000 the perspective of western stockman, the impression the coyote gave 0:11:59.120 --> 0:12:02.680 of being a small wolf seemed all they needed to know. 0:12:03.679 --> 0:12:07.360 The first environmental act Old World colonists had implemented in 0:12:07.400 --> 0:12:11.360 America was to launch a war of extermination against wolves 0:12:11.800 --> 0:12:16.880 and the coyotes. Urn had now come. Both stock associations 0:12:16.920 --> 0:12:21.000 and governments lavishly funded bounties, to the point of creating 0:12:21.040 --> 0:12:24.439 a new economic nish in the West. The bounty hunter 0:12:25.360 --> 0:12:29.320 Montana was typical as a territory. It created the first 0:12:29.360 --> 0:12:33.960 bounties on canid predators in eighteen eighty three and proceeded 0:12:34.000 --> 0:12:38.359 then to prostitute itself to the ranching industry's predator hatred. 0:12:38.480 --> 0:12:42.680 Between eighteen eighty three and nineteen twenty eight, Montana paid 0:12:42.760 --> 0:12:47.319 bounties on a staggering one hundred eleven thousand, five hundred 0:12:47.320 --> 0:12:51.960 and forty five wolves and eight hundred eighty six thousand, 0:12:52.120 --> 0:12:57.520 three hundred sixty seven coyotes, a ranching subsidy that grew 0:12:57.640 --> 0:13:01.240 so large during the territorial stage that it devoured two 0:13:01.400 --> 0:13:06.480 thirds of the government's budgets. As a state, Montana outdid 0:13:06.640 --> 0:13:10.520 mere bounties. In nineteen o five, its legislature passed a 0:13:10.640 --> 0:13:16.200 law requiring veterinarians to introduce sarcoptic mange into the wild 0:13:16.280 --> 0:13:22.040 hanted population, an early form of state sanctioned biological warfare. 0:13:22.600 --> 0:13:25.760 A century later, coyotes and wolves in the northern West 0:13:26.080 --> 0:13:30.920 still haven't recovered from that disease. When the forerunner of 0:13:30.960 --> 0:13:34.240 the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Biological Survey, 0:13:34.559 --> 0:13:38.520 began to cast about for more reliable congressional funding in 0:13:38.559 --> 0:13:40.840 the early twentieth century, director C. 0:13:41.160 --> 0:13:42.679 Heart Miriam hit on. 0:13:42.679 --> 0:13:46.280 The idea of making the Bureau the answer to the 0:13:46.280 --> 0:13:47.920 so called predator problem. 0:13:48.800 --> 0:13:52.839 Faithful to a fault. To their packs mates and pops. 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:57.560 Wolves were relatively easy marks for government hunters armed with 0:13:57.720 --> 0:14:02.280 poisoned bait, as ernestmson Seton wrote and perhaps the most 0:14:02.320 --> 0:14:07.160 famous of his wildlife stories, Lobo King of Corumpaul, With 0:14:07.320 --> 0:14:11.040 the scent of a dispatched pack member, a hunter could 0:14:11.080 --> 0:14:15.320 proceed to lure and kill every additional member of a 0:14:15.360 --> 0:14:20.440 wolf pack. In Montana, twenty three thousand, five hundred and 0:14:20.440 --> 0:14:25.080 seventy five wolves had died in eighteen ninety nine. By 0:14:25.200 --> 0:14:31.200 nineteen twenty the number had fallen to seventeen. So by 0:14:31.200 --> 0:14:34.560 the mid twenties, the Bureau reset its focus on coyotes, 0:14:34.960 --> 0:14:39.000 an animal that Bureau scientist E. A. Goldman now labeled 0:14:39.320 --> 0:14:43.920 the arch predator of our time. Typical of American wildlife 0:14:43.920 --> 0:14:47.640 decisions of the age, the most vicious war of extermination 0:14:47.760 --> 0:14:52.000 we ever attempted against a native animal took place entirely 0:14:52.200 --> 0:14:56.920 absent of any scientific research into how coyotes functioned in 0:14:57.040 --> 0:15:02.360 ecosystems are indeed in human economies. When government finally did 0:15:02.400 --> 0:15:06.240 dispatch ecologists with the charge of proving coyote villainy and 0:15:06.520 --> 0:15:10.280 justifying their eradication, only to have studies by O Loss 0:15:10.320 --> 0:15:14.240 and Adolf Muri determined that in fact, coyotes were ancient 0:15:14.360 --> 0:15:19.520 curators of ecologies whose actions were overwhelmingly beneficial to humans. 0:15:19.880 --> 0:15:25.359 The Bureau doubled down on coyote eradication. Its public relations 0:15:25.520 --> 0:15:30.360 arm even sent canned articles to newspapers that brainwashed whole 0:15:30.520 --> 0:15:35.600 generations about predators, positioning coyotes in the minds of many 0:15:35.920 --> 0:15:41.120 as the most contemptible of American animals. Old world folk 0:15:41.160 --> 0:15:46.080 wisdom had long since said predators had to go so 0:15:46.240 --> 0:15:50.240 with little evidence to send its coyotes to eradication. That's 0:15:50.280 --> 0:15:54.800 what had to happen, first with strychnine, then with newer, 0:15:54.960 --> 0:16:00.520 more effective poisons la like thalium sulfate, sodium fluoro acetate 0:16:00.800 --> 0:16:05.400 better known as ten eighty, and sodium cyanide. Federal hunters 0:16:05.480 --> 0:16:11.120 between nineteen fifteen and nineteen seventy two killed an incredible 0:16:11.520 --> 0:16:16.560 eight and a half million coyotes in the wake of 0:16:16.680 --> 0:16:22.280 Rachel Carson's historic anti poisons book Silent Spring. Though of 0:16:22.520 --> 0:16:27.560 all the unlikely politicians, it was Richard Nixon who finally 0:16:27.880 --> 0:16:33.840 ended blanket coyote genocide. The old notion that the only 0:16:34.040 --> 0:16:38.400 good predator is a dead one is no longer acceptable, 0:16:38.680 --> 0:16:43.080 he told the American public in nineteen seventy two. Nixon 0:16:43.160 --> 0:16:47.960 went on the widespread use of highly toxic poisons to 0:16:48.080 --> 0:16:52.400 kill coyotes and other predatory animals and birds is a 0:16:52.480 --> 0:16:56.360 practice which has been a source of increasing concern to 0:16:56.400 --> 0:17:01.080 the American public. I am today issuing a executive order 0:17:01.480 --> 0:17:05.560 banning the use of poisons for predator control on all 0:17:05.760 --> 0:17:11.639 public lands. Looking back on this history, it seems clear 0:17:11.680 --> 0:17:16.560 that persecuting coyotes without any scientific basis was purely and 0:17:16.600 --> 0:17:21.920 simply an act of myopic ideology. The nations of Western 0:17:22.000 --> 0:17:26.399 Europe had long before destroyed their own wild predators, and 0:17:26.520 --> 0:17:29.840 making America into the image of Europe obviously meant we 0:17:29.840 --> 0:17:33.439 should do the same. That European template was in place 0:17:33.560 --> 0:17:37.480 prior to Darwin, though, and preceded the emergence of the 0:17:37.520 --> 0:17:41.800 new twentieth century science of ecology to issue a corrective 0:17:42.640 --> 0:17:47.000 But starting in the nineteen twenties, ecologist like Joseph Grinnell, 0:17:47.400 --> 0:17:52.160 who with his student E. Raymond Hall, did foundational work 0:17:52.320 --> 0:17:58.159 on ecological niches, and eventually Aldo Leopold, who combined first 0:17:58.280 --> 0:18:01.920 rate science with a litter gift for reaching the public, 0:18:02.400 --> 0:18:04.439 became opponents. 0:18:04.000 --> 0:18:06.520 Of the reflexive war on coyotes. 0:18:07.240 --> 0:18:11.800 So were the Muri Brothers, who did basic foundational science 0:18:12.119 --> 0:18:16.360 on Coyotes and Jackson Hole and Yellowstone in the late 0:18:16.480 --> 0:18:21.479 nineteen thirties. Since Ernest Thompson Seton had written Tito at 0:18:21.560 --> 0:18:25.399 the start of the twentieth century, policymakers had just assumed 0:18:25.600 --> 0:18:29.320 that tripling down on the coyote of war eventually would work. 0:18:30.080 --> 0:18:33.359 According to a story in Sports of Feel, by the 0:18:33.440 --> 0:18:38.720 late nineteen fifties, with thrown five hundred million dollars of 0:18:38.920 --> 0:18:43.600 taxpayer money at coyote killing, no one was prepared for 0:18:43.640 --> 0:18:50.520 the actual entirely unexpected outcome. Millions of individual coyotes died, 0:18:50.680 --> 0:18:54.200 to be sure, But so how Coyotes not only were 0:18:54.359 --> 0:18:58.480 undiminished in the West, the war began to spread them 0:18:58.520 --> 0:19:02.440 out of their original range and interstates in the Midwest, 0:19:02.720 --> 0:19:09.080 South and East, where predator eradication had successfully wiped out wolves, 0:19:09.960 --> 0:19:13.920 and with towns and cities of every size setting up 0:19:14.040 --> 0:19:19.040 dog catchers and pounds to eliminate stray town dogs, now 0:19:19.240 --> 0:19:25.000 new possibilities open for coyotes and cities. Coyotes, after all, 0:19:25.040 --> 0:19:29.880 have lived in our midst forever. Archaeological work at ancient 0:19:29.920 --> 0:19:34.880 American cities like Chaco Canyon indicate as much soda. Suburbs 0:19:35.000 --> 0:19:39.440 named for coyotes in the old Aztec capital of Teenotes. 0:19:39.520 --> 0:19:44.399 Teeth Line naturalist Thomas Nutdall found coyotes running through the 0:19:44.440 --> 0:19:48.200 streets of Carmel Mission on the central coast of California 0:19:48.480 --> 0:19:52.399 in the eighteen thirties. Los Angeles has never been without 0:19:52.480 --> 0:19:56.920 coyotes since its founding. So as coyotes spread across America 0:19:57.080 --> 0:20:01.439 in the twentieth century, they eyed rats, mice, geese, and 0:20:01.520 --> 0:20:05.000 fruit trees, in short, all the opportunities where people weren't 0:20:05.040 --> 0:20:09.920 trapping or poisoning them or calling Wildlife Service hunters on them, 0:20:10.119 --> 0:20:14.879 and moved in with us. Coyotes in Denver, Chicago, and 0:20:15.040 --> 0:20:19.000 everywhere else, including my parents' little town of six hundred 0:20:19.040 --> 0:20:23.639 people in Louisiana, have been the result. Yet again, we 0:20:23.800 --> 0:20:30.000 have to learn to coexist because resistance is feudile. How 0:20:30.000 --> 0:20:34.280 if coyotes managed to survive what wolves and scores of 0:20:34.280 --> 0:20:39.280 other species could not. Tito had been an allegorical answer. 0:20:39.840 --> 0:20:43.200 Another came from folk tradition in the Southwest, the only 0:20:43.280 --> 0:20:46.760 thing smarter than a coyote is God. But a pair 0:20:46.800 --> 0:20:51.800 of biologists, Guy Connolly and Fred Knowlton finally came up 0:20:51.840 --> 0:20:56.120 with the answer. As a result of co evolution. Alongside 0:20:56.200 --> 0:21:00.760 larger wolves which had long harassed them, coyote had evolved 0:21:00.800 --> 0:21:05.879 a remarkable set of survival traits. Under assault, they have 0:21:06.040 --> 0:21:11.080 larger litters. If coyote numbers go down, more food sources 0:21:11.200 --> 0:21:15.120 mean they get more pups to adulthood. If the breeding 0:21:15.200 --> 0:21:19.199 alpha female of a pack dies, beta females breed and 0:21:19.320 --> 0:21:23.960 have more pups. Most remarkably, coyotes had evolved a rare 0:21:24.119 --> 0:21:29.880 ability we humans share, called fishing fusion. Like us, they 0:21:29.880 --> 0:21:35.320 are normally a social or fusion species, but also like us, 0:21:35.560 --> 0:21:40.080 when conditions warrant, they can split into floaters and pears 0:21:40.600 --> 0:21:46.239 fishing and scatter and colonize. Connolly and Knowlton showed that 0:21:46.359 --> 0:21:50.920 you could kill seventy percent of a coyote population year 0:21:51.080 --> 0:21:56.480 after year without ultimately reducing its numbers, but you very 0:21:56.760 --> 0:22:07.359 likely did spread them. Let me share a personal story. 0:22:07.680 --> 0:22:10.960 In the twenty first century West, something resembling this is 0:22:11.000 --> 0:22:14.040 so common the experience might not even be mine, although 0:22:14.080 --> 0:22:18.240 I'm pretty sure this particular one is. My wife Sarah 0:22:18.280 --> 0:22:21.840 and I are up early brewing coffee as crimson and 0:22:21.880 --> 0:22:25.560 gold set off the kitchen of our house and technicolors 0:22:25.640 --> 0:22:31.200 southwestern hues an ordinary autumn dawn, beautiful enough to break 0:22:31.240 --> 0:22:35.119 your heart, is unfolding in the Galileo Valley south of 0:22:35.200 --> 0:22:40.359 Santa Fe. Then I see Sarah's eyes widen. She's looking 0:22:40.440 --> 0:22:43.160 past me through the windows, so I track her line 0:22:43.160 --> 0:22:43.480 of sight. 0:22:44.400 --> 0:22:46.240 Five coyotes, three. 0:22:46.080 --> 0:22:48.720 Of them gangly fall pups, looking for all the world 0:22:48.840 --> 0:22:52.800 like a posse of cruising teenagers, are trotting single file 0:22:52.960 --> 0:22:56.040 past our kitchen, back lit by the colors of the 0:22:56.160 --> 0:23:01.000 breaking day. Every hair on their sharp muzzles, ears, and 0:23:01.160 --> 0:23:07.320 floating tails is outlined in chromium yellow light. The alpha pair, 0:23:07.720 --> 0:23:11.680 a robust male and a grassisle female, is bringing up 0:23:11.720 --> 0:23:15.520 the rear, and as they trot that effortless coyote gate 0:23:15.760 --> 0:23:19.080 pass us. I know two more details right off. The 0:23:19.200 --> 0:23:20.440 female is familiar. 0:23:20.840 --> 0:23:21.480 I know her. 0:23:22.040 --> 0:23:26.800 She's an unusual coyote, recognizable because she sports a white 0:23:27.119 --> 0:23:30.320 rather than the more normal black tip at the end 0:23:30.400 --> 0:23:33.399 of her tail. At the same time, I register that 0:23:33.440 --> 0:23:37.159 two of the yearlings carry that same genetic marker, although 0:23:37.200 --> 0:23:40.440 in a less pronounced form, their cream tail. 0:23:40.280 --> 0:23:41.760 Tips speckled with black. 0:23:42.560 --> 0:23:46.160 This distinctive female has raised pups in the canyon below 0:23:46.200 --> 0:23:49.280 the house for at least the past three years, I've 0:23:49.359 --> 0:23:54.239 watched her even longer. Second detail, the male seems to 0:23:54.280 --> 0:23:58.000 be a new consort, has some accident befallen her mate 0:23:58.040 --> 0:23:59.520 with the split ear, and. 0:23:59.560 --> 0:24:01.119 His reaction makes me laugh. 0:24:01.920 --> 0:24:05.159 Gliding past the house as if he's on skates, his 0:24:05.359 --> 0:24:09.200 golden eyes suddenly narrow as he spots our brawny Alaska 0:24:09.240 --> 0:24:13.920 and malame Cody sleepily lounging on the front porch, never 0:24:13.960 --> 0:24:17.040 breaking stride, but with a quick lip curl and grimace. 0:24:17.280 --> 0:24:20.159 No time to hang out. The new male bears a 0:24:20.280 --> 0:24:22.040 row of lovely white teeth. 0:24:22.720 --> 0:24:25.399 Cody has been around coyotes all his life, and seeing 0:24:25.440 --> 0:24:27.720 them in the yard isn't all that novel, so he 0:24:27.840 --> 0:24:30.800 merely sits up and watches as the parade goes by. 0:24:31.720 --> 0:24:32.199 So do we. 0:24:32.920 --> 0:24:36.600 It's a wild canid show to match the dawn, and 0:24:36.680 --> 0:24:39.840 we haven't had to go to Yellowstone or Alaska to 0:24:39.920 --> 0:24:43.919 see it. Our coffee cups steaming the air. We've just 0:24:43.960 --> 0:24:48.000 stood in the kitchen and looked outside, and one of 0:24:48.040 --> 0:24:52.080 the most intriguing wildlife stories of our time, not just Westerners, 0:24:52.119 --> 0:24:55.680 but everyone in America is now getting to see small 0:24:55.800 --> 0:24:59.960 Western wolves out the kitchen windows. The coyote has turned 0:25:00.160 --> 0:25:03.960 out to be the dude, and the dude absolutely abides. 0:25:04.840 --> 0:25:05.720 Difficult as it. 0:25:05.720 --> 0:25:08.919 Is to expel politics from our minds these days, a 0:25:09.040 --> 0:25:12.880 coyote in the yard can manage it. Whether those golden 0:25:12.920 --> 0:25:16.280 eyes that slender snout are the insolent swish of a 0:25:16.359 --> 0:25:20.040 tale charm you or outrage you. The site of a 0:25:20.080 --> 0:25:26.080 coyote is never boring, materializing magically into familiar surroundings we 0:25:26.280 --> 0:25:29.959 long ago assume we're bled of anything wild. A single 0:25:30.080 --> 0:25:34.879 coyote can evaporate all illusions of our successful transplant of 0:25:35.000 --> 0:25:38.920 civilizations of the continent. No world that has a jackal 0:25:39.160 --> 0:25:42.639 like wolf glancing at you as it trounts by, with 0:25:42.760 --> 0:25:46.639 houses and highways in the background can ever be said 0:25:46.680 --> 0:25:50.280 to have banished the wild. I've never had so much 0:25:50.320 --> 0:25:52.679 fun writing a book as I had writing one I 0:25:52.800 --> 0:25:56.160 called Coyote America, and one of the reasons was that 0:25:56.240 --> 0:26:01.240 its narrative arc inverted everything we're used to environmental stories, 0:26:01.800 --> 0:26:06.679 and Coyote America nature wins. Coyotes have taken everything we 0:26:06.840 --> 0:26:10.280 humans can throw at them, then calmly occupied the very 0:26:10.280 --> 0:26:14.840 ground we're standing on, and they've done it repeatedly. Direwolves, 0:26:14.920 --> 0:26:17.480 mammas and saber tooth cats may not have been able 0:26:17.480 --> 0:26:22.400 to survive the pleisosine, but coyotes did. America's scorched Earth 0:26:22.440 --> 0:26:26.400 campaigns against the country's wildlife a century ago drove numerous 0:26:26.400 --> 0:26:29.960 species to extinction or the edge of it. That was 0:26:30.040 --> 0:26:33.600 not the coyotes fate, who thrived as other creatures big 0:26:33.600 --> 0:26:39.080 and small, disappeared on all sides targets of wholesale extermination 0:26:39.320 --> 0:26:43.120 in the twentieth century. Coyotes have responded to that by 0:26:43.160 --> 0:26:48.119 spreading across America, making it to Delaware their forty ninth 0:26:48.280 --> 0:26:54.680 conquests in twenty eleven. Only Hawaii lacks them. No other 0:26:54.840 --> 0:26:59.679 mammal except humans, has ever exhibited such cosmopolitan talents for 0:26:59.800 --> 0:27:04.679 that kind of successful expansion. To do the coyote justice, 0:27:04.720 --> 0:27:07.840 you have to engage not just with the animal itself 0:27:08.280 --> 0:27:14.560 and every feel from evolution biology, ecology to anthropology, history 0:27:14.880 --> 0:27:18.600 and folklore. Even literature, art and film has done so, 0:27:19.160 --> 0:27:25.680 but also with a rich range of us bipedal animals involved. Obviously, 0:27:25.840 --> 0:27:29.320 Ernest Thompson Seton is there, and so is everyone from 0:27:29.359 --> 0:27:34.360 Mark Twain to the Biological Survey Coyote Killers to Richard Nixon, 0:27:34.840 --> 0:27:38.760 and to be honest, the psychologist Carl Jung, the poet 0:27:38.840 --> 0:27:42.600 Gary Snyder, the painter Harry Fonseka, and if you can 0:27:42.640 --> 0:27:47.080 imagine such a person, the genius Paleolithic American who created 0:27:47.119 --> 0:27:50.880 the first coyote avatar story. So far back in time 0:27:50.960 --> 0:27:54.560 we can't fathom either the depths of coyote stories or 0:27:54.600 --> 0:28:00.000 their future. Of course, our resident super genius, Wiley Coyote 0:28:00.200 --> 0:28:02.480 is in the mix, and I can report with some 0:28:02.680 --> 0:28:08.480 delight about Wiley that his New Yorker inspired product liability 0:28:08.560 --> 0:28:12.360 lawsuit against the Acme Corporation is about to have its 0:28:12.440 --> 0:28:16.919 day in court, with the film Coyote v Acme coming 0:28:16.920 --> 0:28:21.840 to movie theaters in late twenty twenty six. What I've 0:28:21.920 --> 0:28:25.919 also learned following coyotes through history is that their story 0:28:26.000 --> 0:28:29.560 is far from over. As one remarkable example of that, 0:28:30.000 --> 0:28:33.359 right now, coyotes are on the cusp of becoming the 0:28:33.400 --> 0:28:37.840 first North American species in three million years to cross 0:28:37.960 --> 0:28:42.240 from this continent into another one, in this case, into 0:28:42.280 --> 0:28:46.160 South America. Expansion across a continent is one thing, but 0:28:46.560 --> 0:28:51.000 into another. While the locus of their evolutionary origin seems 0:28:51.040 --> 0:28:54.320 to have been in the southwest of the president United States, 0:28:54.680 --> 0:28:58.520 coyotes do seem to have been occasionally on the scene 0:28:58.800 --> 0:29:03.880 south of Mexico in Guatemala, Honduras, San Salvador and Nicaragua. 0:29:04.200 --> 0:29:09.400 Even before Spanish colonization, there fond of open country and 0:29:09.520 --> 0:29:14.360 most certainly attracted the sheep and goats. Spanish colonizers introduced. 0:29:14.720 --> 0:29:19.080 Coyotes apparently veered away from the cat filled jungles to 0:29:19.160 --> 0:29:24.440 the south, but as humans steadily cleared the Central American forest, 0:29:24.920 --> 0:29:30.760 dispersing coyotes began colonizing Costa Rica during the nineteen seventies 0:29:30.760 --> 0:29:34.040 and nineteen eighties. Since then they have steadily pushed into 0:29:34.120 --> 0:29:39.200 Panama and the grand Isthmus between the continents. They crossed 0:29:39.240 --> 0:29:43.920 the Panama Canal in twenty ten and are colonizing south 0:29:44.000 --> 0:29:46.920