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Scientists warn that aggressive coyotes to become problem

Monday, June 27, 2005 4:06 PM EDT
















By Bob Frye Capital Correspondent

Greensburg, Pa. -- In the future, hunters and others may have to worry about coyotes for more than their ability to kill deer.
Western states such as California have for decades experienced problems with coyotes attacking people, especially children. The rate of incidents has increased in recent years, too.

Now, some are wondering whether coyotes could become equally threatening in the eastern United States.

A study being done by Cornell University and the New York State Department of Environ-mental Conservation may answer that question. Set to kick off this summer, the five-year study will look at coyote biology as well as at how coyotes and people interact, with an eye toward preventing conflicts -- namely coyote attacks on people -- in the future.

Such attacks have not been a big problem to date. Despite being the second-largest predator in the East -- only black bears are bigger -- coyotes rarely have attacked people in this part of the country. A healthy adult coyote did seriously injure a small child in a Cape Cod, Mass., backyard a few years ago, but such cases are rare.
That's not true everywhere, though. Bob Timm is an extension wildlife specialist at the University of California at Hopland. He's been studying coyotes for the last few years, looking at how they're adapting to living around people.

Timm's work seems to suggest that coyotes become more aggressive when living among people in urban and suburban areas, where hunting and trapping don't generally occur.

Southern California experienced 41 coyote attacks on people in the 10-year span between 1987 and 1998. It had 48 attacks in the next five years alone, though.

Only one person -- a 3-year-old girl who was playing in her own yard -- died as a result of one of those attacks, but the potential for more deaths is very real, Timm said.

"We think that there are at least 30 to 35 other cases where, if a parent had not intervened, there would have been additional fatalities," Timm said.

Coyotes in California -- like western mountain lions and to a lesser degree black bears in the East -- seem to go through a four-step process on their way from avoiding people to potentially regarding them as prey, Timm said.

First, they go from roaming mostly at night to foraging during daylight hours, when people are more likely to see them. Next they start preying on pets like dogs and cats. After that, they start attacking pets while they're being walked on leashes. Finally, they become aggressive toward humans.

New York -- which has coyotes in every part of the state except Long Island -- has seen all of the behaviors Timm describes, said Gordon Batcheller, a wildlife biologist with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, who will be working on the study.

"We haven't seen any attacks on people, but we don't want them either, so we want to document the behavior of coyotes in relation to that human interface, if you will, so that we can develop management strategies to combat any aggressive behavior we find," Batcheller said.

"It appears as though all of the northeastern states, like New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, are all on that cusp where those kinds of behavioral changes might begin," agreed Paul Curtis, an associate professor of natural resources at Cornell who will be working on the project.

"We're trying to be proactive. If we're going to solve the problem, though, we need to learn more about how coyotes are behaving and how people are reacting to them."

Pennsylvania is home to between 25,000 and 30,000 coyotes spread across all 67 counties, said Matt Lovallo, furbearer biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. It has had its share of coyote problems, though not to the same degree as New York.

Coyotes prey on sheep, poultry, calves, pets and other domestic animals every year, but there has been only one case of coyotes attacking a person, and that was a mistake of sorts.

In Dauphin County, a man, who also happened to be an archer, was working outside when he saw some deer a short distance away. He knelt down and tried to crawl toward them to get a closer look. Two coyotes also stalking the deer apparently mistook him for one of them and jumped him. After a brief scuffle, he fought them off.

"Bent over in the brush he looked like a deer, he had some of his hunting clothes on so he probably smelled like a deer, and there were already deer in the area," said Jerry Feaser, press secretary for the Game Commission. "That seems to be what triggered it."

Whether that was a case of mistaken identity or not, there's no doubt that the number of places in Pennsylvania with coyote problems is growing. In 1993-94, 42 of the just more than 100 wildlife conservation officers working in the state reported complaints of coyote predation. In 2002-03, 58 officers reported complaints.

Increasingly, those complaints are coming from human population centers. Coyote populations are pretty well saturated in the state's big woods areas, Lovallo said. Coyotes are expanding fastest in the heavily urbanized southeastern corner of the state, with the southwest corner close behind.

That fact increases the likelihood of additional coyote-human encounters occurring, he said. A large part of the problem is that, in suburban areas, hunters and trappers have a tough time getting access to the places with the coyotes, Timm said. The animals then learn not to fear people.

"They kind of come to be at home in the suburbs," Timm said. "And society has no mechanism to deal with large predators now. It's a very political issue."

The Game Commission has taken steps in the last few years to eliminate conflicts between black bears and humans, extending bear season in a large portion of northeastern Pennsylvania where nuisance problems have occurred most frequently.

There's not much more the commission can do to control coyotes, though, Lovallo said. They can already be hunted 365 days a year, with no limit on how many hunters can kill.

New York has liberal seasons, too, but has taken the extra step of changing its public message regarding coyotes. In years past, the agency's stance was that while coyotes are worthy of respect, they are not necessarily dangerous if left alone. Now it is also warning people to be on the lookout for overly aggressive animals, and offering suggestions on how to avoid encounters.

That includes not feeding pets outside, not putting food scraps on compost piles, bringing pets in at night, and bringing down bird feeders that might attract rodents, which in turn become prey for coyotes.

The Game Commission is set to begin offering a similar message. Soon, the commission will post a new coyote section on its Web site (www.pgc.state.pa.us) talking about coyote-human interactions.

That information is being posted directly as a result of the increase in coyote-human encounters around the country, Feaser said.

In the meantime, researchers will do what they can to learn more about how to keep people and coyotes living together with as little friction as possible.