Coyotes are Kings of the Coal Creek Food Chain
A coyote along Coal Creek in Lafayette. Photo by Jeff Goldberg
This is really a coyote appreciation post, but first, let’s start with some strong takeaways on staying safe around our top wild predators so you can appreciate them safely.
Don’t approach coyotes. Give them 50 yards of space to do their thing.
Leash your dog. Coyotes may prey on dogs smaller than 30 lbs.
Gather up small children. Keep them close.
If the coyote approaches you, haze it. Yell, make yourself look big, throw rocks, and carry on like a lunatic.
If one attacks you, report it to the city. Municipalities control problem animals.
Great. The reason I’m so impressed with coyotes is their adaptability. Humans aren’t easy to live around, and yet coyotes manage it so well that they now live everywhere people do in this country. As a species, they are poised to jump the Darien Gap in Panama, which would allow them to spread across South America with the same strategy they have used up here. In this day and age, it is pretty rare for a species to make a continental jump without being actively transported by people.
The urban group of Coal Creek coyotes are especially wily. I have observed them looking both ways and waiting until it was safe to cross South Boulder Road. They also seem to have a decent sense of boundaries. The ones living near Public Road tend not to approach too close. (By contrast, the ones in the Two Creeks Open Space in East Lafayette are a little more curious, but they will scatter if you run at them.)
“For the short instant of your encounter, coyotes force your thinking into primal areas that don’t see a lot of action in the comfort of modern life. ”
And I don’t know, maybe it’s weird, but this is my favorite thing about coyotes: For the short instant of your encounter, they force your thinking into primal areas that don’t see a lot of action in the comfort of modern life. Coyotes have teeth and claws and an intelligence you can recognize by looking at them. They are predators. They are sizing you up. Immediately, you are back on the food chain, the actual blood-and-bone commission of which is utterly foreign and so sort of exciting. You’re still on top and you become aware of this fact, maybe only in that you might have to prove it. It’s scary and exhilarating in a way you’ll probably tell the first passerby you see. Anyway, end rant.
The coyote pictured here looks pretty good, but others around here get mange from a parasitic mite. In what I’m just learning and I hope will be the biggest bummer of my day, there is mounting evidence that coyotes become susceptible to mange after eating rodents who have been treated with anticoagulant rodenticide. These are found in those little black boxes outside many businesses. And just like that, we have a new Friends of Coal Creek initiative.
Coyotes with mange are weak and thus have a harder time competing with other coyotes, hence you tend to see them during the day. But there isn’t a mental component to mange as there is with rabies. Mange is easily treatable.
Coyotes eat whatever they can catch, which is a lot of things. Their diet is primarily rodents, small mammals, amphibians, and pint-size pets. This time of year is pup season. Be on the lookout in the next weeks and months for some of Coal Creek’s newest babies.
