Coyotes at the Mall

April 28, 2008 By Development

by Tom Montgomery-Fate (MA ‘95)

It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of towns…
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Spring is here. How do I know? The coyotes are moving. They have mated and are searching for dens. I saw a pair in a subdivision in West Chicago last weekend and one jackknifed out of some waist-high weeds along the prairie path today while I was running.

The presence of coyotes in the suburbs and city has become a popular topic in recent years, with more people—or, quite unfortunately, their dogs—coming into contact with the animals. This has stirred both excitement and fear.

Urban coyotes excite us. Why? Because they don’t belong here. Because a coyote sparks a nostalgia for the wild, for the natural world we’ve conquered and nearly destroyed. They spark the memory of ourselves as animals.

But urban coyotes also prompt fear. Why? Because they don’t belong here. Because no one wants their miniature dachsund eaten as a midnight snack, or to be sitting in a lawn chair some evening and turn to see a “wild” animal steal a porkchop off a gas grill. The coyote reminds us: we are not wild, not animals, but human.

I grew up in Iowa—fishing and hunting on my friends’ farms––but in all those years I only saw four coyotes, and always from a distance. The first coyote I ever saw up close was in Glen Ellyn, the suburb where I now live. On a morning walk the crash of a garbage can lid drew my eyes to a neighbor’s driveway, where a thin, mangy dog was chewing on a wedge of pizza crust. He ran. I later figured out it wasn’t a dog, that coyotes and their families were moving to the burbs. And it wasn’t for the schools.

Recent studies show that urban and suburban coyotes do better than their country cousins. There’s more to eat and good places to hide. Rural coyotes have a 30% chance of making it through their first year; urban coyotes have a 60 % chance. In rural areas the leading cause of coyote death is hunting or trapping; for urban coyotes it’s cars. Thus, suburban towns with slow traffic speeds and large parks or forest preserves—like Glen Ellyn—are a more likely place to see coyotes than in the country.

But they’ve been popping up everywhere.

A suburban high school English teacher was walking through the Lincolnwood Mall parking lot back to her minivan, when she noticed a thin animal slinking between the rows of cars and slowly coming toward her. Suddenly, the coyote lunged for her 4 year-old miniature poodle, clamping his jaws around the dog’s hindquarters. The teacher grabbed the head and there, in the mall parking lot, she and the coyote had a tug of war.

Lured by the smell of sizzling meat, a coyote wove through a half mile of bumper to bumper traffic and harried shoppers and soapbox preachers to reach the propped open door of a Quiznos on Adams Street in downtown Chicago. The docile thirty pound canine walked past the counter without ordering and lay down on a stack of Diet Pepsi in an open cooler and stayed there.

Two jets had to abort their landings at O’Hare Airport until some coyotes could be cleared from the landing strip. Airport workers frequently see them trotting near the O’Hare runways. In the last fifteen years 23 coyotes have been hit by airplanes in Illinois. Cars and roadkill I understand. But airplanes? “Runway” kill?

The point is that beyond the excitement and fear that the coyote provokes is a simple truth: its arrival into our “territory” is less an intrusion than a natural migration. Their “reverse commute” from the disappearing “country” to the suburbs and city is largely in response to Chicago’s wild sprawl.

Like goldenrod and starlings and people, coyotes adapt well to changing and disturbed environments. They have learned to flourish in the niches of habitat that dot Chicago’s chaotic geometry of roads and towns and subdivisions. But as these green pockets and corridors shrink; as they continue to be divided and subdivided by new highways and Wal-Marts, our tolerance of these brash new neighbors may wane. At these points of frustration it may serve us well to remember that their behavior has evolved in response to ours. And that as the boundaries between country, suburb, and city have blurred, so has the definition of the “wild” and “the natural.”

Tom Montgomery-Fate is a professor of English at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn and the author of Steady and Trembling: Art, Faith, and Family in an Uncertain World.