Coyotes in the City

Sometimes in groups, more often alone, they swagger through Bel Air, Brentwood, Malibu and other smart-set residential areas around Los Angeles, ignoring keep-out signs, crashing uninvited into swimming pools and filling the night air with unholy howling. Hollywood partygoers gone astray? Marauding hippies from Haight-Ashbury? No, these intruders in the hills and canyons around tinsel town are, of all things, a new breed of citified coyotes.

To hear some irate Angelenos tell it, coyotes have not only invaded the city's ever spreading residential areas but are also wreaking vengeance on encroaching civilization by decimating the pet population. Local wildlife authorities receive a dozen complaints a week about coyotes making off with dogs or cats. One Brentwood Hills matron lost three cats in 18 months; a Briarcliff public relations man reports losing a treasured Persian cat when a coyote "trotted right up to our front lawn and casually carried it off." Says Charles Rosenberg, a stockbroker in suburban Sherman Oaks: "At 10:30 at night, it is always the same thing: the howling begins, then the bloodcurdling screams, then silence."

Lately, the intruders have become so confident that they amble about in broad daylight. An angry Pacific Palisades resident tells of how he, his milkman and a passing motorist "stopped in amazement one morning to watch a pack of four with two pups strolling up Sunset Boulevard."

Moving East. Actually, coyotes are on the march almost everywhere. Once concentrated almost entirely in the West, they have begun to turn up as far east as Maine, where they are replacing the larger but less intelligent wolf as a wildlife predator. On the Great Plains, coyotes are now so numerous--and so hated by sheep raisers--that the Government recently eased restrictions on the use of poisons to kill them. But the most striking evidence of the coyote's adaptability is its emergence in urban areas. Unlike other animals displaced by the growth of cities, says Donald Balser of the Denver Wildlife Research Center, "they alone have managed to re-adjust in the shadow of civilization. There are coyote populations in every major metropolis in the West today."

Coyotes are formidably equipped for survival. They can sprint at 40 m.p.h., cover 200 miles a day in search of food, and eat just about anything. But, experts say, coyotes are particularly successful in urban areas because they are unusually crafty--perhaps, some animal behaviorists theorize, because decades of hunting and trapping by man have weeded out the less clever and wary of them. Concedes Robert Rush, chief of the Los Angeles Animal Regulation Department: "The coyotes have a lot of smarts. They can get water out of a pool in Brentwood while the pet dog is sleeping inside."

Right at Home. Los Angeles has more than its share of coyotes because much of the city is spread out over and around pockets of brush and canyons in which the animals feel right at home. For a while, the city tried helicoptering troublemaking coyotes to the outlying Angeles National Forest, but it gave up because the beasts would simply trot 100 miles back to their home turf in town. Now, when there is a specific complaint against a coyote, wildlife authorities shoot it on the spot--if they can track it down, that is.

In fact, local officials have learned to respect the wily animals so much they have adopted a let's-not-be-beastly-to-coyotes policy. After all, no Los Angeles coyote has been known to have attacked a human, while there were 52,000 dog-bite cases in the city last year. Says Dennis Kroeplin, the San Fernando Valley wildlife control officer: "We tell people the coyotes are very beneficial. They keep the rodent population under control." Besides, he adds, "the coyote is part of the West."

Worried pet owners aside, many Angelenos are beginning to agree. Taking up the coyotes' cause, Hollywood Conservationist Lila Brooks almost single-handed led a successful campaign to get the city to begin construction of as many as a dozen watering holes for coyotes and other wild animals around town. "The coyote is not in our backyard," she says. "We are in his backyard." Some Angelenos are raising coyote pups as pets; one woman sets out 5 lbs. of chicken backs every day to feed the animals. Says June Gador, a writer in coyote-infested Hollywood Hills: "We figure the coyotes were here first, and they belong here."

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