Coyote America by Dan Flores

I've lived in the urban-wildlands zone--in West Texas, Montana, and now New Mexico--for much of my adult life, surrounded by coyotes in each location. Living among them, I have never felt a threat of any kind. They've functioned for me more as part of the occasional magic show of life, like whales breaching an ocean surface or the Galilean moons, glimpsed through a telescope, swinging around Jupiter over the course of a starry winter night. They coyote's remarkable resilience doesn't just put me in mind of us; it operates as shorthand for the greatest story ever told, the miracle of ongoing evolutionary adaptation to an endlessly changing world. Coyotes are the perfect expression of how life finds a way. They are also one of the iconic life-forms birthed in our part of the globe, an American original that makes us more American the more we know them. We and they are similar success stories in our shared moment on Earth. That's how I, at least, see the coyotes around me. How they see me, I can't know. But I do know this: when I make eye contact with a coyote, I can see the wheels turning inside her head. If I have a theory of mind, so does she.

Camping in the wilds of far west Texas last week, we were surrounded at night by the calls of coyotes from all sides. It's a little eerie, because the coyotes don't simply arrive at dusk. They were there the whole time, slipping through the open desert where you simply didn't notice them. At night they speak to each other, but it's almost as if they are speaking to you, reminding you they're there. As it turns out, I hadn't needed to go all the way to Texas to get a dose of coyote magic: while I was there, a coyote was fished out of the East River here in New York City. Coyotes now inhabit all the continental states, and they've become more prevalent over time, appearing not just in the rural parts of America but in its suburbs and urban centers. What does it mean to share our spaces, and our lives, with these animals?

Dan Flores' Coyote America is a "natural and supernatural" history of the coyote, perhaps even a kind of biography, rooted in stories of Native American religion, in which Coyote figures as a kind of wise trickster figure, and early American legends and tall tales. The Coyote of Indigenous stories is clever and shrewd; he overcomes his enemies and pursuers by the power of his intellect and wit, though he can also be sort of a clown. In Flores' description, this well fits the coyote as a natural specimen, which has been hunted doggedly by ranchers and government officials, but which has somehow managed to thrive no matter what we've tried to do to eradicate it. And I do mean eradicate: one of the things I didn't realize is that, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set out to extirpate the coyote as completely as it did the wolf. Millions of coyotes were killed in the west by poisons, but it is in the nature of the coyote to survive--even by naturally adjusting the size of its litter to compensate for the persecution.

The extent to which the United States government sought to eliminate an entire species seems shocking to a modern-day reader. We take for granted the perspective of early conservationists like Aldo Leopold, who believed that predator species have the right to exist, a purpose for which the early national parks were set aside. (I didn't know that either--wolves, coyotes, and bears seem to have had free reign within Yellowstone, Glacier, etc.) We know now, too, that eliminating predators monkeys with the balance of ecosystems in strange ways; in one area successfully voided of wolves and coyotes Flores describes roads slick with the roadkill of small mammals to the point where driving was made impossible. But mostly, we just never proved equal to the task of eliminating the wily canids. Flores hypothesizes that, by eliminating their senior competitor, the wolf, we actually set the stage for the coyote to fill in the vacuum and take over the whole of the United States. In any case, Flores draws a comparison between coyotes and human beings, two species marked by their profound adaptability, and, if urban coyotes are any sign, two species living closely intertwined lives.

I was really struck by a chapter on on the "threat" that coyotes pose to the red wolf, a small species of wolf that has been reduced to a couple dozen animals living in North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp. Red wolves hybridize so easily with coyotes that the wolves' stewards have gone to extreme lengths, trapping and killing coyotes en masse to protect the red wolves' genetic purity. This struck me as a great example of the kind of oft-unthinking tradeoff that Emma Marris writes about in Wild Souls: if the wolves want to breed with the coyotes and vice versa, who are we to stop them, and how many coyote lives equal a reasonable cost? Flores goes on to note that genetic evidence suggests that red wolves, like their larger cousins, have a significant portion of coyote DNA already--that perhaps the hybridizing is not a kind of bastardization but a reflection of a pattern that is much older than we are. Like in all things, it's proof of the coyote's ability to adapt.

I didn't always love Flores' ham-fisted style, but I did enjoy the thoroughness with which Flores sketches the profile of a single species. Coyote America makes a convincing case that the coyote ought to be considered a kind of American icon: ancient, resourceful, clever, and brave.