![]() Decades later, Benjamin Sacks at UC Davis defined coyote genetic clusters specific to the Central Valley, the Cascades, the Sierra, and the Central Coast Range and speculated that coyotes disperse into habitat that is similar to that of their birthplaces’.ĭespite their apparent ubiquity, coyotes are not present in all of the regional parks. The authors recognized three coyote subspecies-valley, mountain, and desert-in California, but warned that the boundaries were blurry: “The coyotes display a greater range of variability without geographic coordination than does any other group of mammals we have studied.” With that caveat, Grinnell and his colleagues described mountain coyotes as larger and more wolflike, desert coyotes as scrawnier. Joseph Grinnell, founding director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, co-authored the landmark Fur-Bearing Mammals of California: Their Natural History, Systematic Status, and Relations to Man with Joseph Dixon and Jean Linsdale in the 1930s. Some eastern animals, bigger, more social, and more aggressive than western coyotes, appear to be coyote/wolf hybrids. By European settlement they had vacated the eastern regions, but they’ve made a recent comeback, filling the empty niches of gray wolves in the North and red wolves in the South. Coyotes may have spread all over the continent in prehistoric times. The species evolved in North America and has inhabited California for millennia, as attested by fossils dating back almost two million years in the Irvington gravels near Fremont, along with 11,000- to 32,000-year-old bones in the La Brea Tar Pits, where their remains are outnumbered eight to one by those of the larger, more powerful, smaller-brained dire wolf. Their range, from Alaska to Panama, includes every American state except Hawaii. They’re social, curious, adaptable, at home in deserts, mountains, farmland, and cities. Captives have lived up to 18 years life expectancy is shorter in the wild. Coat color includes many variations on brindled reddish-gray, but a black tail-tip is standard. Some basic information on the biological coyote: Coyotes are small wolves, about four feet long from nose to tail, 20 to 50 pounds males are larger than females. He gave them the bow and arrow, the net carry-bag, his recipe for acorn mush, and, inadvertently, death. Like Prometheus, Coyote stole fire for his people unlike Prometheus, he wasn’t punished for it. He made the world-that would explain a lot-either single-handedly or assisting Eagle or Falcon. The stories of the Rumsen Ohlone, Miwok, Yokuts, and other nearby native Californians feature Coyote in paradoxical detail: creator, liar, hero, thief, seducer, and buffoon. Harrington’s informants about Chocheño legends. “The coyote was wetéš, the one who commanded,” said one of anthropologist John P. But now, in the absence of their historic competitors and predators such as grizzly bears and wolves, and with a change in attitude on the part of their only serious remaining predator-humans-coyotes are back and doing quite well, thank you. ![]() ![]() As a result of determined attempts at extermination in the 19th and 20th centuries, coyote populations in the American West in general, and in California in particular, suffered substantial losses. What we do know is that coyotes have been remarkably resilient and tenacious, surviving-thriving, even-in our midst as a relict and a messenger from a much wilder California. University of Colorado emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Marc Bekoff, who has studied coyotes for years, calls Canis latrans a “protean predator.” So it makes sense that from wilderness to suburbia, Seattle to San Francisco to Chicago, coyote behavior defies generalization. And research done elsewhere depicts the biological coyote, to borrow linguist William Bright’s ( A Coyote Reader) useful distinction from the mythic one, as a shapeshifter in its own right. Surprisingly, there have been very few field studies of the local population, but people who work with wildlife in the regional parks have plenty of coyote stories of their own to tell. The Chocheño Ohlone, original inhabitants of much of the land now within the East Bay Regional Park District, had coyote stories, of which only a few tantalizing fragments were ever recorded. Coyote is the archetypal trickster of the American West. ![]()
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