I don’t live in Chicago or follow the news there, but it didn’t take long for social media to deliver a video of Chicago police officers pulling a live coyote out of a refrigerated display in the produce section of an Aldi supermarket there. Instagram clearly knows that I live for videos of wild animals turning up in unlikely places.
A black bear relaxing in a Gatlinburg hot tub? Yes, please! A mountain lion strolling through downtown in the California city of Vacaville? Of course! A groundhog gobbling pizza on a Philadelphia sidewalk, or a barred owl perched atop a family-room Christmas tree in Arlington, Va.? Send me those first!
But it’s the coyote videos that have my truest heart. Coyotes — like red-tailed hawks, opossums, raccoons, skunks, foxes, deer and a host of other wild creatures — have learned to thrive among us, even when we live in densely populated areas. Attempts to eradicate the coyote have been failing spectacularly for hundreds of years. People who have lost pets to coyote predation often demand revenge from animal control departments, but even if a particular coyote is killed, it won’t change the underlying reality; other coyotes will simply move into the newly open territory. Coyotes live among us, and they will always live among us.
In 2019, a coyote trotted past security at Nashville’s convention center and made its way into an exhibit hall before guards managed to trap it in a bathroom. In the police photo, which went viral, the gorgeous animal, its fur thick with winter, is sitting calmly on the counter just past the last sink in the row.
In the video shot this month in the Aldi market, the coyote is hiding in the back of a refrigerated shelf, behind the food. After a police officer finally manages to pull the animal out by its tail, it leaps right back onto the shelf and disappears, once again in plain view but completely out of sight.
This is the way wild animals mostly live among us. They are right there, crouched under a bush, curled up beneath a toolshed, tucked next to the trunk of an evergreen. An ancient, one-eyed box turtle once turned up in my yard decades after I thought he’d died. I spend a lot of time in my small yard — I’ve written a whole book about my small yard — and yet I had no idea that turtle was still there.
The creatures who have adapted to our ways are adept at remaining out of sight. They learn our patterns and modify their own accordingly. That’s why you see so many more dead animals on the side of the road after the clocks spring forward in March. A lost hour of sleep for us means the lost safety of sparsely traveled roads for them. They’ll learn to adjust the timing of their own travels, but soon enough the clocks will fall back. Inexplicably to them, our patterns will change again, and more animals will lose their lives as a result.
The coyote is a highly intelligent and adaptive species, able to live in a variety of habitats, adjusting its diet and denning habits. Nevertheless, it is likely that neither Nashville’s convention center coyote nor Chicago’s supermarket coyote truly intended to find themselves there. As Chris Anchor, a senior wildlife biologist with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, told CBS News Chicago, “These animals are doing everything they can to stay away from us.” How surprising is it, then, that a wild animal would duck into an open door at the unexpected sight of human beings?
As human-caused changes in habitat — development and redevelopment, pesticides and pollution, forest fires and flooding — become ever more widespread and ever more intense, such encounters will become more frequent as truly wild spaces become uninhabitable for wildlife. More raccoons will raid our garbage cans, and more bears will raid our kitchens. More groundhogs will den up under our tool sheds, and more wrens will nest in our mailboxes and our charcoal grills. More skunks and more opossums will waddle across our streets in the dark, more fox kits will wrestle on our lawns, and more flickers will pound out their love songs on our downspouts at dawn.
And when those encounters are captured on video, social media will deliver them to us as charming reminders that we still live in a wild world. As dauntingly separate from it as we have let ourselves become, we somehow retain an atavistic fascination with the animals we live among but rarely understand. Any reminder of what we’ve forgotten — an owl blinking on top of a Christmas tree, a groundhog harvesting our tomatoes, a coyote howling after nightfall — delights us, though usually only briefly.
We make way for them in our own lives far more briefly than that. With the new administration already in the process of turning the natural world into its own personal toxic waste dump — gleefully dismantling federal climate-resilience efforts; stripping industry of pollution control requirements, seeking every possible way to fill our atmosphere with more greenhouses gasses — it is up to us to do better. In whatever small ways we can, for as long as we still can, we need to do far, far better.
We need to keep cats indoors, both to save the lives of the billions of birds that cats kill every year and to keep our beloved pets safe from growing coyote populations. And now, it seems, from avian influenza, too.
We need to keep clean sources of water available for wildlife, particularly during hard freezes and drought seasons. Water offers more than hydration. It’s also a way for animals to cool down during the heat waves that are growing more frequent and more intense.
We need to plant native flowers, trees and shrubs. The best way to feed the birds, and everybody else, is to provide the natural foods they evolved to eat.
We need to skip the yard poisons. The lawn services industry calls them weeds, but the wildflowers that spring up in untreated yards are the very food sources insects need. And insects are the very food sources that almost every other species needs.
Where conflicts arise, we need to look for humane solutions that keep parents and young together and that keep animals in their own home territories, where they know where to find food, water and shelter. “Live and let live” doesn’t mean letting wild animals live inside our homes, but there are effective ways to keep them out and keep them safe.
Most of all we need to rethink our own relationship to the natural world. Learning to coexist peacefully — as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities — isn’t easy in the human realm, but it’s almost effortless where wildlife is concerned. It’s just a matter of remembering that this is their world, too. It costs us almost nothing to move over a little and make room. After all, they were here first.
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