The coyote paced in her enclosure, deeply uncomfortable with being displayed in a cage for a crowd of humans: milling around, watching, rustling bags of popcorn at hand, making a cacophony with their murmuring, the rub of fabric, the static crackle of a nylon windbreaker. She traced a broad figure eight in her nervous pacing, keeping up a steady fast trot, her eyes darting, trying to spy any opening, any missing links in the fence or unlocked door that would allow her to bolt. She was a 2 year old female, barely adult and inexperienced or she might have smelled the trace of human scent on the trapper’s cage or noticed the knife marks on the fragrant hare. She was unhappy, her skin crawled at the sensation of human eyes on her, and her sharp senses were overwhelmed - ringing with a static buzz. Full of nervous energy, her hot breath making her nose wet, she walked a fast trot, her pacing forming a deepening trench in the loose soil. She had been trapped and put up for display at a state fair, likely to face an ignominious end looking down the wrong end of a rifle barrel held by one of the whiskered trappers who ran the “Wild Animals of Your Backyard” display. Nearby, in an overgrown and untended byway adjacent to the rambling Olentangy River, a pack of her relatives lurked, guarding their privacy in the bush.
As a species the coyote has undergone an historic expansion of range - once confined largely to the Southwest coyotes are now well established across the North American continent, having adapted to a wide variety of climates, and established habitats even in densely packed urban environments.[1] In 2010 a female coyote somehow made her way to Tribeca, in densely packed Lower Manhattan, where she darted through traffic and tried desperately to find adequate cover, hiding under parked cars and in the sparse bushes of the little vest-pocket public parks. Somehow she must have ventured down through the backyards and parkways of Westchester, perhaps fording the Harlem River, or running across the Third Avenue Bridge in the cover of deep night, ambling through Central Park and down the long wide avenues until she finally was caught, sedated and hauled off by emergency services not more than a few blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center.
