Marcia Bonta, lives in centra PA on hilltop acreage, is a friend of Ro's and a naturalist with a nature blog.
New post on Marcia Bonta
Coyote America, by Dan Flores
by Marcia Bonta
Here is a review of the book Coyote America which I wrote for the November/December 2016 issue of The Gnatcatcher, published by the Juniata Valley Audubon Society:
If you, like me, are a fan of coyotes, this book will both delight and sicken you. Subtitled A Natural and Supernatural History, Flores covers every aspect of coyotes’ lives, present and past, the Native American fables and stories that feature Coyote, and the western settlers as well as present day Americans’ approach to these amazing and resilient creatures.
Their story begins in the American Southwest 3.2 million years ago when coyotes split from gray wolves. While wolves crossed into Asia and Europe, coyotes remained here and eventually became the heroes of Indian folk tales.
Early American explorers called them “prairie wolves” and seemed to admire them. But the farmers, ranchers, and hunters of the late nineteenth century demonized them along with larger predators such as wolves.
Our “Hundred Years War,” as Flores calls it, against these animals, has been subsidized by taxpayers beginning in the early twentieth century up to the present day. Unlike wolves, which are pack animals and were easy to kill with poison bait, coyotes are known for what scientists call their “fission-fusion” adaptations in which they can be either pack or solitary animals, depending on outside pressures and are not as easily drawn into bait.
Despite killing more than six and a half million coyotes from 1945 to 1971, the Animal Control Board, renamed the Division of Wildlife Services in 1997, under the Department of Agriculture, has continued their war against coyotes, most recently killing 512,710 coyotes from 2006 to 2011. But coyotes can adjust their population, having as many as 20 pups if they are persecuted or as few as two if they are not.
They also began their incredible expansion to the East and as far north as Anchorage, Alaska and lately have discovered the safest places to live are cities where they are not hunted and there is plenty of food. So while a coyote requires 10 square miles of territory in the country, it only needs 3 square miles in a city.
Flores covers the many human heroes in Coyote America as well as the villains. Mammalogists such as Olaus and Adolph Murie, who studied coyotes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yellowstone back in the 1930s. Olaus concluded that coyotes were not arch predators of game animals but omnivorous generalists that mostly ate mice, gophers, and hares and that only fed on elk carcasses. Adolph agreed and added grasshoppers and crickets to their diet as well as the weakest mule deer fawns and antelopes. But coyotes are opportunists and in the cities they not only prey on the occasional pet, especially cats, but they also eat the eggs and young of Canada geese and white-tailed deer fawns.
Still, despite the championing by informed mammalogists, the killing continued unabated. It took an unlikely person, namely Walt Disney, to begin a sympathetic portrayal of coyotes that reached the general public. In 1961 Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color ran a six-part series entitled “The Coyote’s Lament.” At the time federal poisoners, bounty hunters and state trappers were killing between 250,000 and 300,000 coyotes a year. Disney ended his series with, “When the time comes when you can’t hear the song of the coyote, the West is going to seem a mighty dull place.”
Since then more and more people are opposed to the war on coyotes. Still, that war has brought bigger coyotes to the East. Scientists now claim, based on genetic studies, that coyote hybridization with gray wolves began 550 to 950 years ago in the Great Lakes region and have resulted in as much as 20% wolf genes in Great Lakes’ coyotes and 40% in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. They also claim that the South’s red wolves are a hybrid of southern gray wolves and coyotes that began 290 to 430 years ago.
And so the coyote, fact and legend, has become larger than life. As we know here in Pennsylvania our so-called eastern coyotes are bigger than those of the West. They continue to evolve and adapt to us and our ways. For instance, studies of urban coyotes find that fewer and fewer are killed by cars every year.
But, as Flores wonders, will we adapt to them, stop killing them and allow their populations to stabilize?
Marcia Bonta | November 11, 2016 at 3:53 pm | Categories: Books, coyote | URL: http://wp.me/p2MUG-AU
New post on Marcia Bonta
Coyote America, by Dan Flores
by Marcia Bonta
Here is a review of the book Coyote America which I wrote for the November/December 2016 issue of The Gnatcatcher, published by the Juniata Valley Audubon Society:
If you, like me, are a fan of coyotes, this book will both delight and sicken you. Subtitled A Natural and Supernatural History, Flores covers every aspect of coyotes’ lives, present and past, the Native American fables and stories that feature Coyote, and the western settlers as well as present day Americans’ approach to these amazing and resilient creatures.
Their story begins in the American Southwest 3.2 million years ago when coyotes split from gray wolves. While wolves crossed into Asia and Europe, coyotes remained here and eventually became the heroes of Indian folk tales.Early American explorers called them “prairie wolves” and seemed to admire them. But the farmers, ranchers, and hunters of the late nineteenth century demonized them along with larger predators such as wolves.
Our “Hundred Years War,” as Flores calls it, against these animals, has been subsidized by taxpayers beginning in the early twentieth century up to the present day. Unlike wolves, which are pack animals and were easy to kill with poison bait, coyotes are known for what scientists call their “fission-fusion” adaptations in which they can be either pack or solitary animals, depending on outside pressures and are not as easily drawn into bait.
Despite killing more than six and a half million coyotes from 1945 to 1971, the Animal Control Board, renamed the Division of Wildlife Services in 1997, under the Department of Agriculture, has continued their war against coyotes, most recently killing 512,710 coyotes from 2006 to 2011. But coyotes can adjust their population, having as many as 20 pups if they are persecuted or as few as two if they are not.
They also began their incredible expansion to the East and as far north as Anchorage, Alaska and lately have discovered the safest places to live are cities where they are not hunted and there is plenty of food. So while a coyote requires 10 square miles of territory in the country, it only needs 3 square miles in a city.
Flores covers the many human heroes in Coyote America as well as the villains. Mammalogists such as Olaus and Adolph Murie, who studied coyotes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and Yellowstone back in the 1930s. Olaus concluded that coyotes were not arch predators of game animals but omnivorous generalists that mostly ate mice, gophers, and hares and that only fed on elk carcasses. Adolph agreed and added grasshoppers and crickets to their diet as well as the weakest mule deer fawns and antelopes. But coyotes are opportunists and in the cities they not only prey on the occasional pet, especially cats, but they also eat the eggs and young of Canada geese and white-tailed deer fawns.
Still, despite the championing by informed mammalogists, the killing continued unabated. It took an unlikely person, namely Walt Disney, to begin a sympathetic portrayal of coyotes that reached the general public. In 1961 Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color ran a six-part series entitled “The Coyote’s Lament.” At the time federal poisoners, bounty hunters and state trappers were killing between 250,000 and 300,000 coyotes a year. Disney ended his series with, “When the time comes when you can’t hear the song of the coyote, the West is going to seem a mighty dull place.”
Since then more and more people are opposed to the war on coyotes. Still, that war has brought bigger coyotes to the East. Scientists now claim, based on genetic studies, that coyote hybridization with gray wolves began 550 to 950 years ago in the Great Lakes region and have resulted in as much as 20% wolf genes in Great Lakes’ coyotes and 40% in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. They also claim that the South’s red wolves are a hybrid of southern gray wolves and coyotes that began 290 to 430 years ago.
And so the coyote, fact and legend, has become larger than life. As we know here in Pennsylvania our so-called eastern coyotes are bigger than those of the West. They continue to evolve and adapt to us and our ways. For instance, studies of urban coyotes find that fewer and fewer are killed by cars every year.
But, as Flores wonders, will we adapt to them, stop killing them and allow their populations to stabilize?
Marcia Bonta | November 11, 2016 at 3:53 pm | Categories: Books, coyote | URL: http://wp.me/p2MUG-AU