Coyotes think they can trust us - and it’s killing them

The wolf is a big conservation success story. Once eradicated across much of the Lower 48, the carnivore is making a comeback in woods from Michigan to Washington.

Ecologists had hoped the big, bad wolf’s return would help keep another canine often considered a pest - the coyote - in check.

But something stranger is happening instead.

New research tracking the movements of 154 radio-collared animals across northern Washington reveals coyotes and bobcats aren’t often dying in the jaws of bigger carnivores such as wolves or cougars. Instead, they are fleeing their predators by moving closer to farms, suburbs and other human-inhabited areas that wolves avoid.

That’s turning out to be disastrous: People are proving to be far deadlier to coyotes than any other four-legged animal.

The paper published Thursday in the journal Science shows how humans are changing the way species interact - and how some animals, like the coyote, appear not to be evolving fast enough to perceive people as the lethal threat they are.

The findings were “surprising because we don’t expect wildlife to behave in such an ultimately dangerous way,” said Chris Darimont, a wildlife conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada who was not involved in the research.

“Yet they do,” he added.

As biodiversity declines in the wild, coyotes and many other animals are increasingly making urban and suburban areas their home, putting themselves under new threats from humans who are trying to figure out how to live alongside their wild neighbors.

‘The hardest animal to catch’

Coyotes have denned near people for ages, inhabiting the outskirts of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán and other ancient dwellings. Some of the oldest Native American tales are about cunning coyotes.

As European colonists drove wolves from the landscape, coyotes took their place, spreading from their native homelands in the Great Plains and Southwest to now nearly every corner of North America. More recently, as cities grew and farms were converted into neat subdivisions, coyotes moved deeper into urban areas, today thriving in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

There are plenty of reasons why coyotes like to snuggle close to people. One is trash: We produce a lot of it, and it’s delicious treasure for hungry animals. Another is to get away from big predators that tend to avoid humans.

Coyotes are hardly the only wildlife to seek protection among people. In and around Yellowstone, moose give birth near roads to avoid automobile-averse grizzlies. In South Africa, monkeys get more adventurous in the presence of people who keep leopards away. Scientists have a name for the phenomenon: the human shield effect.

In the most recent study, a team led by Laura Prugh, a University of Washington wildlife ecologist, placed trackers on 35 coyotes, 22 wolves, 37 bobcats and 60 cougars in Washington to see how they interacted with each other - and with people.

Coyotes are “extremely smart,” Prugh said, “so they’re pretty much the hardest animal to catch” and put a collar on. Unlike in Wile E. Coyote cartoons “where the Road Runner is smarter than Wile E., Wile E. is usually smarter than we are.”

The real top dog

In the real world, researchers found coyotes and bobcats tend to bolt toward human-dominated areas when wolves and cougars are on the prowl.

But humans turned out to be no shield. People killed the tracked coyotes and bobcats at more than three times the rate the bigger four-legged carnivores did. One was hit by a car. Eight were finished off by traps. And 16 others were shot dead.

By contrast, the large carnivores killed eight coyotes and bobcats during the study.

For Darimont, the findings are yet more evidence that people armed with lead bullets and steel traps are the real “superpredator” on the landscape, altering ecosystems in profound ways.

“It’s my view and increasingly the view among conservation scientists and wildlife managers that humans are the supremely most influential predator on the planet - and by a long way,” he said, noting the new paper is “of very high quality.”

But there are other researchers still skeptical of slapping the “superpredator” label on people.

“This framing has become popular in the ecological literature, but it’s simplistic,” said Peter S. Alagona, an environmental historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara who wrote the book “The Accidental Ecosystem” on urban wildlife.

The complex relationship between people and the wild animals that live side by side can be difficult to untangle, he added, and only so much can be learned about animals’ behavior by following them as a dot on a map.

Wildlife managers sometimes need to get creative. In 2014, for example, biologists hazed one well-known urban dweller dubbed Coyote 748 with noisemakers and paintball guns after it denned in a parking garage near Soldier Field in Chicago. He and his mate moved to a safer site.

“One goal of urban conservation should be not only to provide greater connectivity, but also to help animals perceive urban ecological traps before they wander into them,” Alagona said.

Wily coyotes

Coyotes continue to face a ruthless assault. In the United States, with few protections for the animal, people shoot, trap, poison and otherwise kill about 400,000 every year.

But the coyote really is wily, adapting to the onslaught by roving urban areas at night while people sleep and giving birth to pups at a prodigious rate to keep their numbers up.

Coyotes are not going extinct any time soon. But other midsize predators poised to move closer to cities are at risk as urbanization increases around the world.

“Globally, there are other major carnivores that have lower reproductive rates and might be more sensitive,” said Prugh, the University of Washington researcher.

For her, the coyote’s resilience makes it her favorite animal. “A lot of people favor the wolf, or a more majestic or rare creature,” she said.

“But a nice thing about having your favorite species be a fairly widespread, common one is I actually get to see them around Seattle.”