The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (38 page)

That the coyote has expanded his range does not surprise biologists. What does confound is the suggestion, hotly debated, that the coyotes now taking over the eastern United States in fact represent a new subspecies of wild dog on the continent, the
Canis latrans varietas.
The western coyote is a smaller creature than the eastern cousin. The westerner weighs in at perhaps thirty pounds, looking somewhat like a fat fox. The eastern coyote grows as big as sixty pounds at his heftiest. The tracks I found on Cape Cod and in the Catskill Mountains suggest a big dog indeed.

So whence the bigger muscles, the extra weight, the new song? Perhaps natural selection in the face of bigger game, or the higher snows and colder weather of places like Chicago and New York, sparked the coyote's physical flowering. Perhaps coyotes in their dominance arrived at a sexual detente with the last wolves in the East and began breeding with their old enemies, which added to the girth of the eastern coyote and also gave him his new voice. Perhaps the wolves, in this same pivotal moment, realized they were outnumbered and preserved, in a copulative leap of hopelessness, what little remained of their genetic pool. I like to think that all these factors commingled and were further complicated by the reality of dealing with the human ecosphere—the byways and hidden passages of the city, the dynamism of interaction with cars, highways, apartment buildings replete with comings and goings, the all-night bodegas, the light of streetlamps, the conniving of rats, the surfeit of accident and possibility. I like to think the eastern coyote's build, its behavior, and, not least, its song reflect this complexity.

So the coyote runs across schoolyards in Philadelphia; he hides under a taxi on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. He is in Atlanta, and in Los Angeles, and Miami, and Washington, D.C. He follows into the cities our paths, our roads, our railways, our bike and hiking trails. In Seattle, a coyote ran into an elevator in a skyscraper for a ride, and another ended up in the luggage compartment of a tram at the SeaTac Airport. In Boston, biologists who radio-collared a female coyote during 2004 reported that the dog traveled freely across the towns of Revere, Medford, Somerville, and Cambridge, at one point crossing into Boston proper via a railroad line at three
A.M.
before bedding down in a railyard north of the Charles River. The dog, nicknamed Fog, had "little more than shrubs for her to sleep in." Stanley Gehrt, a biologist at Ohio State University who recently spent six years tracking the coyote populations of Chicago, concluded that there were at least two thousand of them living in the Windy City, and they were growing in number. Urban coyotes, Gehrt found, live longer than their country cousins; their range per pack is more compact, much like urban humans; and they hunt more often at night, very much like urban humans. Gehrt also found that coyotes howl in answer to the sirens from firehouses—calling to the sounds of men. "Originally known as ghosts of the plains, coyotes have become ghosts of the cities," Gehrt writes. "Coyotes are watching and learning from us."

 

I got a beer from a bodega in the Bronx and sat on a bench and thought about the ghost dog. To the American Indians, coyote is Trickster, the magician among the animals, the shadow creature, the player on the edges of human encampments. "Along the edge I am traveling, in a sacred manner," goes an old Lakota song honoring the Trickster. Sacred manner? Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner comes more readily to mind. Chuck Jones, the animator, pegged the Trickster, in cartoon Latin, as
Eatibus anythingus.
Which is true: coyotes eat garbage, darkness, rats, air—they'd lap my beer if I let them.

The Trickster in myth appears as rotten-minded as Wile E., as creepy and ill reputed, as underhanded as Bronx rats. But in the system of native myth, unlike Wile E., unlike Bronx rats, the coyote's lying and conniving and cheating is in the last act a leap of creation, bearing the new out of things that are busted down and old and not working. The cartoon hints at this: Wile E. falling off cliffs, born again from the smashed puffball of bones at the canyon bottom to try for a meal once more.

In the various coyote myths, the Trickster makes things happen by sheer pushy will and wackiness. He is a shape-shifter, blown apart, come together again. Coyote is sometimes the creator of the world itself in his tumbledown accidental manner; sometimes he brings fire to the hominids who are freezing in the cold; sometimes he gets the smartest and most beautiful girls pregnant when dumbstruck men can't get it up to perpetuate the line; sometimes he makes sure that animals get anuses when the Creator, whoever that fool is, forgets to do so. The Trickster, in other words, is a teacher of possibilities, pointing humankind down new paths when the poor bummed-out hominids are stumped.

 

My own amateur coyote study in New York's Van Cortlandt Park last autumn went not so well. Day after day I made the long trip by subway north from Brooklyn into the Bronx, my hopes up, maps out, binoculars in the backpack, notepad ready, boots laced high, a flashlight with extra batteries in case I found the creatures after dark. I got lost in the Van Cortlandt woods, scrambling near the border with Westchester. I got paranoid about muggers (who, like coyotes, never seem to show up). I got covered in mud tramping in washes looking for tracks. I got poison ivy up my leg and into my crotch.

The golfers at the Van Cortlandt Golf Course snickered at my efforts. "Saw more of your little friends just the other day," they'd tell me. "Haven't found any yet?" They'd laugh. "Coyotes don't do interviews," they'd tell me. They suggested I take up golf.

I took to wandering at night where I thought coyotes might be making their way into the Bronx. I imagined them arriving in Van Cortlandt Park via the Putnam Trail, a soil vein pounded smooth as glass, where I walked and walked. Or perhaps they followed the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, the outmoded passage for the Catskill reservoir water that keeps the city alive (the Croton Aqueduct has long been supplanted by more modern piping). From the Bronx, the passage south onto the island of Manhattan is more difficult. Perhaps they cross the Harlem River, swimming the water, or, more likely, they walk the bridges at night. It is only some five miles from the tip of Manhattan to Central Park, which is the place to be if you're a coyote in Manhattan. On April Fool's Day 1999, a coyote named Lucky Pierre led reporters, helicopters, photographers, cops, and tourists in a chase across Central Park before succumbing to a tranquilizer dart. Pierre got his name because for a time he holed up in a cave across from the luxe Pierre Hotel. In the winter of 2004, a coyote was seen bounding among the ice floes on frozen Rockaway Inlet in Queens, near the dunes of Breezy Point, twenty-five miles south of Central Park. The animal apparently had gotten across Manhattan, across the East River, either dog-paddling in the water or hiking one of the bridges to Brooklyn, and thence across that borough to the shores where Brooklyn meets Queens and the sea. Cops in boats tried to capture the creature, but he dove into the cold surf, swam to shore, and was gone.

A coyote made it across Brooklyn? Incredible. I sometimes find it hard to cross Brooklyn.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2006, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a coyote was found smashed at the side of a highway. That same year a second coyote was captured in Central Park. In 2008 a coyote appeared on the Bronx campus of the Horace Mann School, the
New York Sun
reporting that it was out for a '"jog" with the students and "offered no resistance" when animal-control officers scooped it up. On February 4, 2010, a coyote, described as "timid and skittish," stopped in the middle of a frozen Central Park pond long enough to be captured on film by a photographer. Three days later a trio of coyotes appeared out of nowhere on the Columbia University campus in upper Manhattan, then disappeared as quickly. On March 24 a coyote was reported inside the Holland Tunnel, then it was sighted wandering Tribeca. "Manhattan's coyote population continued its inexorable push southward," concluded the
New York Times.
There will of course be many more of them, and we will welcome the romance of the wild dogs, until we don't. The creatures will have to be hunted and killed once they hunt and kill one too many of our domesticated foot warmers (or, worse, the little ones in our own domesticated breed). We like our gardens in the East, we like our vines run amok, our tall trees in the backyard, the deer grazing on bluegrass, the pretense of wildness; we like our animals at home pretending at atavistic habits, but we don't want a carcass at the door in the morning. In other words, let's have gardens but not nature. Herein lies the irony of the coyote's arrival in the urban East. He does not represent wildness; he is an adaptee to the garden. Without our subjugating the land to the ridiculous extent that we have, he wouldn't be walking alongside us.

 

My guide to the parks of the Bronx was a fifty-six-year-old New York City Parks Department wildlife biologist named Dave Kunstler, who gives the impression that he prefers the conversation of nighthawks and tree frogs. It was October, the days growing short, and we hiked the woods until dusk, looking for coyote dens where he suspected they might be, findi ng none. We searched under rocks, behind boulders, in tree trunks. We ended up purloining a golf cart at the Van Cortlandt Golf Course to hunt them on the fairway. Kunstler didn't seem much interested in the quest. What he mostly talked about were invasive plants. Kunstler saw invasives everywhere pushing out the natives: porcelain-berry and Asiatic bittersweet and mugwort; the
Ailanthus
and the Norway maple among the tall trees; and elsewhere, whole stretches of forest swallowed in kudzu.

Many of the plants Kunstler pointed out could be classified as weeds. Coyotes, it seems to me, are also a kind of weed species. And their success is indicative of a larger problem facing the human race, the problem of weeds relentlessly encroaching, their effect the strangulation and diminishment of complex ecosystems everywhere. Weed species, writes David Quammen, "reproduce quickly, disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad range of habitat, take hold in strange places, succeed especially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they're established. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists." The coyote, exactly. Also, brown rats, cockroaches, crows, kudzu, raccoons, the white-tailed deer, ragweed, Russian thistle, feral cats, feral dogs, squirrels, wild turkeys—all of them weed species, all exploding in number across the country, but especially along the suburban-urban gradient. In his essay "Planet of Weeds," Quammen singles out another spectacularly successful weed species,
Homo sapiens,
and notes that other weeds down the food chain tend to follow where human beings tread. The planet of weeds, as Quammen describes it, is an impoverished place in its abundance because it heralds the end of diversity. And it is likely our inexorable future.

Kunstler and I rode around on the cart like a pair of tin cans, driving away beautiful geese, hundreds of them fleeing on the fairway—weeds with wings. We rode and rode.

Eventually we stopped a young man who was tending to the carts. "Sure, I seen one just yesterday."

I threw up my hands.

"They're probably watching us right now." Kunstler shrugged.

Not finding a single coyote suddenly made me depressed.

Where is Trickster? We need him. The hominids are screwing up and don't have a plan to fix things. We've got global warming and rising seas and peak oil and fish dying off and deserts spreading. We've got a planet of weeds, and we seem utterly incapable of adapting to forestall disaster. The coyote survived the great Pleistocene extinction and may very well survive the present one, the planet's sixth great extinction, an event that has been greatly accelerated by the industrialization of
Homo sapiens
to the point that many thousands of species have disappeared in the last century alone. One wonders whether, before it is all through,
Homo sapiens
might be among the deceased. Perhaps the message that Trickster brings to us is this:
The more of us you see, the more impoverished the world will be.

FROM
Popular Mechanics

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly you're wide awake. There's cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound.
Where am I?
you think.
Where's the plane?

You're six miles up. You're alone. You're falling.

Things are bad. But now's the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you're better off up here than if you'd slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You'll be unconscious soon, and you'll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a six-mile plummet are extraordinarily slim, but at this point you've got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by the Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page—an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet. That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane. In 1972 a Serbian flight attendant, Vesna Vulovic, was traveling in a DC-9 over Czechoslovakia when it blew up. She fell 33,000 feet, wedged between her seat, a catering trolley, a section of aircraft, and the body of another crew member, landing on—then sliding down—a snowy incline before coming to a stop, severely injured but alive.