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The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in history. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s human population will be living in towns and cities.

Many new Urbanites have long, furry muzzles, piercing, yellow eyes and are very, very wily. They’re coyotes.


"A coyote (without a metrocard!) takes a ride on a light rail train in Portland, Oregon, in 2002."

Until recently, scientists who study wildlife thought coyotes couldn’t live in heavily populated areas. Wild carnivorous animals and humans don’t typically mix. But, as previously reported, those scientists were proven wrong. There have been coyote sightings in dozens of U.S. cities — Chicago, Portland, Seattle, even New York City. Like the fox, the skunk and the raccoon before it, the coyote is the latest predatory animal to make the city its home.

About 5 miles from Chicago O’Hare International Airport is the smallest coyote territory ever found, which takes up all of a third of a square mile. Coyotes surviving in such a small area means they have plenty of food on which to survive. “They’re finding everything they need right there, in the suburbs of Chicago,” Stan Gehrt, an Ohio State University researcher, said in a statement. “It amazes me.” Regular dumpster-divers might not find this so surprising, with edible non-consumer (that’s straight off the store shelf, into the dumpster) waste in America alone totaling about 9.3 billion pounds per year. (Factoring in “individual post-consumer”, some reports come out with annual US food waste closer to 25 million tons!)

Unlike in rural areas, urban coyotes are the top predator — there’s no animal above them on the local food chain. Gehrt said humans are the only animals that pose a threat to urban coyotes, and the wild canines have taken some remarkable steps to avoid encounters with us.

They’re doing things we didn’t think they could do,” he said. “They became totally nocturnal. They’ll eat human food. They became really good at finding natural prey, even in areas of concrete and steel.”

Gehrt said coyotes now have longer life expectancies in downtown Chicago than they do just 50 miles away in the cornfields of rural Illinois, where they have to dodge trappers and hunters to stay alive. His research has revealed some surprises: For example, unlike their rural kin, urban coyotes are monogamous, sticking with one mate for life. That’s pretty rare in the animal kingdom, he said. In comparing his findings about coyote survival in cities to research by another group on those living in rural areas, Gehrt has found that the urban coyote pup survival rate is five times higher than the rate for rural pups.

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