Why are coyotes appearing in big cities?

It’s not because they eat rats. I spoke with Stan Gehrt, Ph.D., a wildlife ecologist from School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University and author of Coyotes Among Us, to find out.?

I’m Jenn Bane, by the way. I’m not a scientist myself, which is about to become abundantly clear.

You have been tracking and observing coyotes since 2000. Why coyotes?

In the 1990s, they began appearing in parts of Chicago where they had not been seen before, and this generated interest and concerns among the general public.?

I was asked to begin a study [by different agencies] to see what was going on. We assumed they were poor, unfortunate animals that didn't want to be in a city. A lot of our assumptions were wrong.

They actually thrive in urban areas. Why’s that?

They’re incredibly adaptable and so flexible in their behavior. Coyotes expanded from the West and basically colonized these new habitats.

Another word to describe coyotes is opportunistic. When there's resources available to them that are new and novel, they will test out a food or water source, or even a place to have a den. They’ll experiment.

Plus, Chicago has so many delicious rats for them to eat.

Actually, they rarely eat rats. Rodents like mice and voles make up a large part of their diet, but actual city rats are not included in that group.

So they’re not helping our rat problem?

If they were, that would help with their PR quite a bit.

Do you think they have image issues?

They are predators, so they do run into conflicts with us. Their conflicts are a prism through which most people see or hear about coyotes. I think it's changing in recent years, but there’s a lot of adversity that they face and a lot of misunderstanding. Larger carnivores have had a hundred years of bad press.?

What do you wish more people knew?

That most people are living with coyotes whether they realize it or not. The vast majority of these animals are going about their lives without absolutely any conflict with us at all. In fact, they're going to great efforts to avoid conflicts with us.

Finish this sentence: When someone sees a coyote, they should …

It depends. For those who don't want them there, they should yell or wave their hands and scare it away. If they’re walking a little dog, they may want to pick up their dog and hold it.

If you're me, you become so excited you want to cry.

It’s a very special thing to see one [in Chicago]. Nine million people are going about their lives without ever seeing coyotes among them.

Tell me what you’ve learned by observing them.

Some are bold. Most are shy. Most will lay down passively [when we capture them to put collars on them]. We typically track between 70 to 80 animals at any point in time, and they're not all doing the same things. These animals do not follow the same pathways to success. We think that’s related to personality — that’s a theory we’re trying to validate.?

Pups of?Canis latrans,?exhibiting?early stages of being adorable.

How do you remain impartial in your research? Especially with the puppies. They are so, so cute.?

They’re so calm and so cute. They’re even cuter when you're actually holding them in your hand. The adults too. We caught an adult one this morning [to put on a radio collar]. That's what I was doing at 7 this morning.

That’s much cooler than what I was doing, which was reading email.

He was a sweetheart. I mean, he would have liked to take my face off, but once we had him under control, he was a delight to work with. I like all of them.

And I don't think that we have to be impartial toward individual animals. We are truly unbiased in terms of how we're doing our science. We're doing both the animal and ourselves a service by doing the best science we can do and sharing that with people, and then letting people make whatever decisions they want to make based on actual, reliable information.

I was delighted to read in your book that they mate for life and that the males are dedicated parents.

They're so involved. They go to great lengths to assist the female.

Damn right. Finally, how can we help your research?

Well, volunteers can’t really help us in the field...

I would definitely just get in the way.

Right. But, you know, when Facebook posts emerge — when someone's seeing coyotes in their neighborhood — point them in the right direction for information. That’s the biggest thing to do to help the project right now.

Visit UrbanCoyoteResearchProject.com for more info.

If you enjoyed a word of this, please subscribe and share!

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Illustrations by Kevin Budnik.