![]() ![]() Sometimes, coyotes have a negative impact on wildlife, including endangered species. ![]() Drake says preliminary analysis of his scat data suggests that Madison coyotes also prefer natural foods such as mice over garbage and pets. “There’s not as much predation on domestic animals as most people think,” says David Drake, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who recently launched a long-term study of coyotes in and around that city. Less than 2 percent contained signs of either garbage or cats. The most common foods were small rodents (42 percent of samples), fruit (23 percent), deer (22 percent) and rabbit (18 percent). In Chicago, biologists with the Urban Coyote Research Program analyzed more than 1,400 coyote scat samples to determine what the predators eat. Thus coyotes “restore a balance of nature by controlling invasive predators,” Kays says.Īt the same time, coyotes prey on domestic cats far less frequently than pet owners fear. Native to North America, coyotes rarely prey on the songbirds killed by cats, which are nonnative. Cats appear to be avoiding habitats where coyotes roam, Kays says. The opposite was true in suburban yards, where coyotes were rare and cats were 300 times more abundant than in protected areas. Their results, published in 2015 in the Journal of Mammalogy, showed that in protected areas, coyotes were abundant while cats were rare. In more recent work, Roland Kays, head of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ Biodiversity Lab, enlisted hundreds of citizen scientists in six eastern states to survey cats, coyotes and other mammals using camera traps at 2,117 sites, including protected wild lands, city parks and residential backyards. Each year free-ranging cats kill billions of birds and mammals nationwide. The likely reason, the researchers said, is that more coyotes mean fewer small predators such as opossums, raccoons and, especially, domestic cats. In a landmark 1999 study published in Nature, scientists in southeastern California found that patches of sage-scrub habitat with resident coyotes had a higher diversity of native birds, including California quail, spotted towhee and Bewick’s and cactus wrens, than patches without coyotes. While the impact of coyote expansion is complex, there is evidence the carnivores can benefit some wildlife, especially birds, by keeping other predators at bay. Among other findings, the scientists have discovered that city coyotes prefer natural foods such as mice over garbage or pet cats. Because of their lower energetic requirements and diet flexibility, the predators can live in small habitat patches, a clear advantage in human-dominated landscapes.īiologists with Chicago’s Urban Coyote Research Program measure a 4-week-old coyote pup. Unlike gray wolves, which top the scale at 60 to 140 pounds or more, coyotes can survive on a diet of small prey like mice and voles. Medium-sized carnivores that weigh in at about 25 to 45 pounds, coyotes also “occupy a sweet spot in terms of size,” says Brent Patterson, a research scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry who has studied the predators since the 1990s. In addition, humans have helped the animals spread by converting forests to more hospitable open lands and by killing off cougars, wolves and other large predators that once competed with or preyed on coyotes. Scientists cite several reasons for this remarkable range expansion, including the coyote’s intelligence, adaptability and rapid reproduction. Historically confined to the deserts and prairies of Mexico and the central United States, coyotes today inhabit nearly every part of the continent, from tundra, grasslands and forests to city parks and suburban backyards. One resident told The New York Times she had not seen so much commotion since a man was caught running naked through the park.Ĭity coyotes such as these are frequently in the public spotlight, but it’s not just urban areas that have been colonized in recent decades by this uniquely North American predator. ![]() The latter set off a three-hour police chase that shut down the city’s Riverside Park. That spring alone, coyotes were reported in the Bronx, suburban New Jersey and a tony neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was hardly the first such sighting in the local news. IN APRIL 2015, A COYOTE MADE HEADLINES when it was spotted on the rooftop of a bar in Queens. In Illinois, another Canis latrans (right) devours a vole it caught beneath the snow. Once restricted to the continent’s midsection, this adaptable predator now roams from coast to coastĪ coyote crosses a street at dawn in San Francisco (above), one of many cities where the predator thrives. ![]()
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