<
https://lithub.com/how-los-angeles-and-chicago-came-to-appreciate-their-coyote-neighbors/>
"What urban coyotes eat depends a good deal on the city where they live. In
Chicago, the large lakeshore population of Canadian geese has become a major
food source for Cook County coyotes, not so much the adult geese themselves as
the contents of their nests, nearly half of which get raided in most years.
Where there are populations of deer in American cities, coyotes can quickly
become major predators of fawns. Coyotes acting as a control for urban
populations of deer and geese, it turns out, is one of those “beneficial”
outcomes Olaus Murie wrote about in the 1930s. Although not many cat owners
will want to hear it, increasing numbers of studies indicate that when coyotes
come to town and pilfer the odd cat, the survivability of local songbirds goes
up markedly.
Compliments of the Los Angeles of thirty years ago, coyote dumpster diving is
an urban legend with legs. Some biologists believe that as much as 25 percent
of the diet of some coyote packs in LA in the naive 1980s was human food. More
recent studies of urban coyote scat indicate that in most cities the percentage
of trash, pet food, and other human food actually comes in at only about 2
percent. A recent study in modern Denver pegged that figure at less than
one-half of 1 percent, and today it has dropped to 6 percent even in LA.
Despite all the anecdotes from the 1980s, except in rare cases of localized
coyote culture, the vast majority of town coyotes are not scavenging behind
Sonic and Burger King. They’re not really much of a threat to the six-pack of
tallboys you left on the porch.
Sometimes, especially in summers when a coyote pair is stressed trying to raise
pups, the parents might become serial killers of cats (one British Columbia
coyote den yielded fifty-five cat collars). If you are halfway intelligent with
your animals, though, coyotes are not remotely as great a threat to your cat or
dog as traffic is. Coexisting with coyotes just requires paying attention, the
way we’ve done around predators for a couple hundred thousand years, after all.
Still, coyotes are a kind of wolf. Living in our midst, are they a danger to
us?"
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
