The other evening I was driving through a busy intersection near my house on the outskirts of Phoenix and I saw a coyote crossing the street. Thankfully there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic, but funny thing was he crossed with the light, as if he knew how to read traffic signals! After reading this book, I feel like he may well have!
Coyote America by Dan Flores, deservedly a PEN America finalist, details in a very engaging way the history of one of America’s most clever and resilient wild creatures. Though humans have tried everything we can to eradicate their presence – from horrid traps to prizes awarded in hunting contests to mass poisoning – unlike wolves, whom we very nearly drove to extinction, coyotes not only survived but thrived. Flores shows us how.
One of the main reasons for their remarkable survival – they have been around for nearly a million years – is actually a trait they share with us, called “fission fusion” adaptability, which enables them to become more social, hunting in packs for large prey, or solitary, hunting on their own for small prey and human refuse. Most predators, like wolves, are either solitary or social, but not both. As someone who knows nothing of ecology or animal biology, I found Flores’s discussion of fission-fusion really enlightening.
Coyotes now live in every major city in the U.S., and they’re there for a reason: us. We provide them with an awesome food source: carelessly tossed away garbage and the vermin it attracts. There’s a hilarious but real photo in the book of a coyote sleeping on a seat on a Portland, Oregon light rail train. They’ve also come to realize that we city dwellers aren’t much into hunting, so they’re safer in urban areas than they were out in the plains and forests.
This isn’t just a natural history. Flores also traces the animal’s evolution in American folklore, from Native American stories, where coyote is depicted as a endearingly flawed and fundamentally human, to Walt Disney’s sympathetic portrayal of his plight in his animated film The Coyote’s Lament (which I’d never heard of), to the hapless Wile E. Coyote of the Warner Bros. cartoons.
Though he has relatives in other parts of the world, our coyote is quintessentially American. Like it or not, we must learn to get along with them because they haven’t gone away for a million years and they’re not going to start now. And I for one don’t want them to. I’m a city person who pronounces the final “e” in the name (there’s a fascinating section on pronunciation alone), and I love seeing these wild animals among us. So long as they live on their terms and we on ours.
In the last section, Flores tells of an experience he had with his dog at his home outside of Santa Fe. He and the dog were walking along and they encountered a yearling coyote. Usually when this happened the coyote would be scared and run off. But this time was different. One yearling turned into two and both stood their ground, without coming toward Flores and his dog. Flores wondered why, then realized there was a female near them, standing in front of a den, likely containing her pups. The pack couldn’t run away because the babies were too little to travel. So they stood their ground without at all being aggressive. Flores and his dog turned around and went in the other direction. This is the perfectly peaceful way to get along: we leave them to their lives unharmed, and they will almost show us the same courtesy.
