Vol. 38, No. 18

1-17-2006
By: Holly Wagner

On the loose: Urban coyotes thrive in North American cities

Even in the largest American cities, a historically maligned beast is thriving, despite scientists' belief that these mammals intentionally avoid urban human populations.

The coyote's amazing ability to thrive in metropolitan areas has greatly surprised scientists, said Stanley Gehrt, an assistant professor of environmental and natural resources at Ohio State. Gehrt is in the sixth year of a multi-year study of coyote behavior in urban Chicago.

Since the study began, Gehrt and his colleagues have found that urban coyote populations are much larger than expected; that they live longer than their rural cousins in these environments; and that they are more active at night than coyotes living in rural areas.

Coyotes also do some good - they help control rapidly growing populations of Canada geese throughout North America.

And while his coyote research is concentrated in Chicago, the results likely apply to most major metropolitan areas in North America. Gehrt has even seen a pack of about a dozen on Ohio State's Columbus campus.

The study began in 2000 when Gehrt was a research biologist for the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation in Dundee, Ill. In the 1990s the foundation was increasingly inundated with complaints about coyotes taking pets and reportedly stalking children, so the Cook County Animal Control agency asked Gehrt to gather information on coyote populations in metropolitan Chicago.

The study was only supposed to last for a year.

"Nine million people live in the greater Chicago area," said Gehrt, who also is a wildlife extension specialist at Ohio State. "We didn't think very many coyotes could thrive in such a highly urbanized area. We also thought that the few animals that were causing problems were probably used to living around people."

The problem with studying coyotes in general is that the animals are incredibly difficult to catch. They quickly learn how to avoid traps. But Gehrt and his colleagues distributed their traps widely and successfully caught several animals. They put radio-tagged collars on the captured coyotes and let them go.

The original estimates of the greater Chicago coyote population were woefully low. The researchers had expected to find a few small coyote packs scattered throughout the city, with total population numbers in the range of several dozen. But the animals were everywhere: some live in city parks, while others live among apartment and commercial buildings and in industrial parks.

"We couldn't find an area in Chicago where there weren't coyotes," Gehrt said. "They've learned to exploit all parts of their landscape."

Since the beginning of the study, the researchers have caught and tagged more than 200 coyotes. They estimate that there may be somewhere between several hundred and a couple of thousand coyotes living in Chicago.

The funding agency, Cook County Animal Control and Conservation Medicine Coalition, renews the study every year because researchers keep finding results that surprise them. For the next phase of the study, Gehrt and his colleagues are conducting a genetic study of coyotes' social system. The researchers want to know if members of a pack are closely related - having such information could help to further explain coyote behavior.

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