Are you a coyote living in California? Here’s what you should do if you see a person

Recent headlines could make a California human nervous, and not just about the housing crisis, the climate crisis and the impending budget crisis. I write, of course, of the coyote crisis.

Coyotes, in case you haven’t read, are “hiding in wait” for our dogs. They’re holing up in middle school bathrooms. They’re loping across busy thoroughfares in midtown Sacramento and, perhaps misled by its enticingly herbivorous name, San Francisco’s Cow Hollow.

It reminds me of what Lou Reed said about the “Last Great American Whale”: “My mother said she saw him in Chinatown. But you can’t always trust your mother.”

You can’t trust a coyote either, at least not around your kids: One made a frighteningly bold attempt on a toddler this month on the driveway of a home in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley — not far from where I narrowly survived a childhood surrounded by the wild canines.

The kid is OK, thank goodness, and the coyote, having been hunted down by local authorities, is no longer with us. But the rare attack on a human probably accounts for much of the heightened media interest in the carnivores, which could give the impression of an interspecies invasion. It’s an impression that isn’t entirely incorrect, though the identity of the invader might be.

Coyote attacks on people have risen over the decades, but they’re still unusual. One systematic review of U.S and Canadian coyote attacks found 146 over nearly half a century, about three a year. Only two coyote killings of humans have been recorded.

The review by Ohio State University researchers Stanley Gehrt and Lynsey White found that many of the coyotes gone wild had actually gone tame. About a third of the attacks were linked to human feeding of the animals, either unintentional — such as through untended garbage, pet food and even fruit trees — or intentional, including one “victim” who had been hand-feeding the coyote that bit him.

Based on the nature of the attacks and research showing substantial human contributions to coyote diets, particularly in California, the authors concluded that human habituation plays an even greater role in coyote attacks on humans than the reports documented. Indeed, one expert reported that residents of the neighborhood where the toddler was attacked were regularly feeding coyotes in a nearby park.

Coyotes are among the rare nonhuman animals that have dramatically expanded their range in what some are calling the Anthropocene — the age of humans — partly by adapting to life alongside the species that is literally changing the world, mostly for the worse. There may be as many as 750,000 coyotes in California, and they have fanned out from their Western homeland to colonize much of the continent.

Their success seems to have been abetted not just by our handouts but also by our helpful eradication of other predators that fill similar ecological niches — particularly wolves, which were largely eliminated from California a century ago.

And yet coyotes’ relationship with civilization remains more ambivalent than that of the typical dumpster-diving rat or raccoon. Another study found that while coyotes thrive in metropolises, most prefer the parks and other undeveloped spaces therein. Even city coyotes can subsist mainly on wild prey such as rodents and birds.

That study, by Gehrt and others, concerned Chicago coyotes, but its description of the animals’ preferred habitat evokes the classic California patchwork of sprawling suburbs and exurbs. That is, besides exacerbating housing shortages, polluting the air and promoting wildfires, California’s metastatic development patterns may have created a kind of coyote paradise.

Having done so, we then tempt the animals to travel the last few fateful steps to our driveways by leaving our garbage and Chihuahuas lying around — or by deliberately feeding them in a misguided attempt to commune with nature without leaving our cul-de-sacs.

For the coyotes, the allure of such easy prey is understandable. But the truly wily among them will continue to keep their short but crucial distance from us.

This story was originally published December 21, 2022 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Are you a coyote living in California? Here’s what you should do if you see a person."