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Two years ago, when the freelance photographer Loren Elliott moved back to San Francisco after a stint in Sydney, Australia, he quickly noticed a new feature of city life: signs warning people of coyotes were everywhere.
He had always loved wildlife journalism and had honed his skills while photographing koalas and platypuses that had weathered the ferocious Australian wildfires of 2020.
Could he pull off a documentary look at urban coyotes, too? The answer, as New York Times readers saw last week in the story “The Coyotes of San Francisco,” proved a definitive yes. He managed to capture photographs of coyotes living in one of the densest cities in the country — climbing out of their dens on golf courses, hanging out on baseball fields and howling mere feet from a woman jogging past.
After writing the words to accompany Loren’s stunning photography, my inbox was filled with different versions of the same question: How did he do that?
Frankly, I only knew the general outlines of the answer, so I interviewed him to get more details.
Loren explained to me that he had tried several times in the fall of 2023 to photograph coyotes at Bernal Hill, one of the city’s prime locations for the wild canines. He didn’t see a single one.
“I started to doubt whether this was actually a viable photo story,” he said. “Like, you’re going to see way more signs than you’re ever going to see coyotes.”
On the verge of abandoning the idea, he tried once more. On the morning of Nov. 3, 2023, he heard a howl. He walked along a hillside trail, following the sound, and found the animal, who had just stirred from a rest in the grass and was communicating to the rest of its pack.
Loren took photos, one of which framed the howling coyote’s head in the morning sunlight, as a car and jogger passed by.
“I got that feeling like, ‘Oh, there’s really a story here,’” Loren said.
And then he got to work.
Many of his photographs were taken with a remote camera, typically used for professional sports games or big political events when photographers cannot get up-close-and-personal with, say, Steph Curry or Donald J. Trump. Instead, photographers position a camera close to the action and stand at a distance with a remote to click the shutter.
Loren practiced that technique and used a new camera feature that can track animal eyes and automatically focus on them, perfecting it in his living room with his terrier mix, Boots. The camera followed the coyotes’ eyes with precision while Loren stood about 100 yards away, so as not to disturb the animals while taking pictures.
That technique resulted in the story’s lead photo of a coyote on Bernal Hill appearing to loom over the city skyline. It also captured the face of a curious coyote who spotted the camera, checked it out and then sauntered away.
Loren always used silent cameras that make no sound when clicking, and he never used flashes. He said he considered this an ethical imperative because he did not want to disturb the coyotes. Plus, he wanted photos of them behaving naturally, not irritated by strange noises and lights.
He used drone cameras, too, always flying them far enough away so that the coyotes would not notice them, capturing videos of the animals walking along hillsides and photographs of them playing on a baseball diamond at St. Mary’s Park.
In 2024, Loren pitched the story to The Times. We had worked together a few times before, and I was thrilled to team up with him. I love telling stories about the quirky side of San Francisco, and the city’s now ubiquitous and wily coyotes certainly fit the bill.
Together, we talked to coyote scientists and followed San Francisco Animal Care and Control workers on the job. But the story really came together after Phoebe Parker-Shames, a wildlife ecologist at the Presidio Trust, the entity that runs the park in the northwest corner of the city, met us to recount the middle-of-the-night shooting of an overly bold coyote.
She mentioned that the coyote would need a necropsy to determine whether he had a disease that led to his aggression. I asked where his corpse was in the meantime, and she offered to show us, taking the frozen body out of a freezer in an office basement. I will never forget the thunk as she placed it on a table.
Just one element of our article was missing. Loren had tried in the spring of 2024 to capture photos of coyote pups. Under the guidance of Dr. Parker-Shames, he had placed a camera with an infrared motion-and-heat sensor inside waterproof housing, mounted it on a tripod and locked the contraption to a tree in the Presidio near a known coyote den.
While the camera did capture an adult coyote emerging from the den, it found no pups, and the effort could not be tried again for another year since pups are only born in the spring.
Loren gave it another try this spring, but the same equipment was not available.
A couple of weeks ago, again under the supervision of Dr. Parker-Shames, Loren spotted an errant golf ball near the coyote den at the Presidio Golf Course. Knowing baby coyotes have a playful side, he placed his remote camera near the ball, covered a ladder in camouflage netting, placed it behind a nearby tree, stood on it and waited. After more than six hours, he got photos of pups, siblings of the slain coyote, playing with the ball.
The story of San Francisco’s coyotes was finally complete.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
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