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.
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A study of the coyote population in the Chicago Metro Area found intriguing evidence of the ability of the species to adapt to urban environments. Unable to trap any coyotes living in the densest urban areas researchers were only able to confirm coyote penetration of the inner-city of Chicago by placing radio tracking devices on individuals who had been captured on the outskirts and re-released, and they were surprised to find tagged coyotes venturing deep into the industrial areas of Chicago.[3] In the course of their research the authors found that coyotes in urban landscapes are adept establishing a geographic range, utilizing waste patches of land and incidental green areas to string together a habitat: golf courses, cemeteries, backyards, the green and bushy escarpments adjoining highway on-ramps. One of the field studies found a coyote who regularly hid in the reeds and cattails of a water retention pond abutting a strip mall housing the local post office. During the day the young mother huddled in the reeds with her pups while easily a thousand people walked past her, she only ventured out to hunt and forage under the cover of night, trailed by her gamboling pups.
Coyotes have been found to be highly adaptable: they adjust their rate of reproduction to the prey and other resources available to them; eradication campaigns have been likened to mowing the lawn, allowing for new and robust populations to emerge. Coyotes almost always prefer prey over garbage, but they have diverse and wide-ranging diets: eating deer fawns, raccoon pups, rabbits, wild plums, beetles, bird eggs, pigs, porcupines, watermelons; the Chicago study found that they were useful for controlling a troublesome population of Canadian Geese as they covet goose eggs, when finding nests coyotes were observed eating some and hiding the rest for later. Although generally considered less social than wolves coyotes have varied social patterns, often living in packs with social hierarchies associated with wolves and other wild canids, a dominant alpha pair ruling the brood, although there are also transient singles and pairs, who range across wide territories, cackling and yipping at each other to signal their transit. Coyotes hunt co-operatively and singly, and sometimes with other species - they have been observed working in tandem with badgers to root out ground squirrels. Ranchers and sheep herders in the west despise them for they will harry livestock, they are tenacious and tough; in controlled experiments it has been observed that a single coyote can take down a larger sheep by biting it at the throat and holding on until the sheep succumbs, suffocated.
The Aztecs called the loping canid Coyotl meaning “barking dog” in Nahuatl, referencing the coyote’s patterns of vocalizations. The scientific name, Canis Latrans also means barking dog, and it is no coincidence for anyone who has heard a coyote can attest to the variegated sounds that they make: a strange cackly yipping, a forlorn high pitched howl, a group of them vocalizing a symphony of pleading whines and barks. Coyotes are known to have an intricate communication system with 11 distinct vocalizations and a series of coded facial expressions and body positions that they use amongst themselves.
The German artist Joseph Beuys staged his second exhibition in the United States in the company of a coyote, calling it “Coyote: I like America and America likes me.”[4] For the exhibit, held for the opening of a gallery in Soho in the era when Soho was a scruffy outpost, Beuys arranged to be received at JFK Airport in an ambulance that brought him directly to the gallery bundled and wrapped head to toe in felt, a transformative and symbolic substance for Beuys. For one week Beuys lived behind fencing that had been installed in the gallery, sharing the delineated space with a coyote that Beuys dubbed Little John. Sometimes they would ignore each other, each of them installed on his own pile of straw, Beuys with his trademark broad-brimmed hat, wrapped in felt and smoking a cigarette, the coyote just sleeping but with his senses awake to the other being in the room. Beuys offered the coyote objects that to him represented the realm of mankind: felt, his walking stick, gloves, a flashlight, and copies of the Wall Street Journal, which the coyote appropriated by pissing on slowly and deliberately as he met Beuys’ gaze with his own. Beuys was a pioneer of modern performance and installation art, viewing sculpture as a kinetic process, never fixed or finished; Beuys conceived of Bewegung, or motion, as a central element of the sculptural process.[5] Beuys enacted tableaux with the coyote, sometimes approaching Little John with gifts, other times wrapping himself in felt and holding his curved walking stick above his head; he would strike a strange iconic figure, and the coyote’s responses to Beuys’ gestures varied from disregard to wild excitement, dancing and shredding the felt with his sharp teeth.
Beuys spent the week in the cage with Little John, at the end of his time he wrapped himself in felt and was returned to JFK in an ambulance, he wanted to see nothing of America other than the coyote. The animal world played a central role in Beuys’ cosmology, not simply as a representation of an idea -- Beuys had a sense of the subjectivity of animals, of individual animals as deserving protection and voice, as part of his projects Beuys founded a Political Party of Animals, claiming instant membership of billions, and hoped to bring animals into human political space. For Beuys the persecution of the coyote in the American West, the vision of the coyote as a pest to be eradicated, was an example of the tendency of human beings to place their own sense of inferiority onto an object of hatred: animals and racialized minorities, although the categories of the excluded could certainly be expanded to the disabled, women, lower economic classes, queers, deviants, and immigrants.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in North America, cartoons were a major cultural force in my childhood; my preference was the old Bugs Bunny cartoons with the anarchic Bugs, cross-dressing, singing arias, suffering the occasional setback, but always soundly tricking Elmer and his other pursuers. I didn’t particularly like the Road Runner cartoons, although I watched them happily and repeatedly; the Coyote always so hungry, looking as he was described by Mark Twain, a “living allegory of Want”[6], his skinny frame and mangy pelt a signal of his hunger and desperation for that tough desert sprinter. I usually ended up feeling a little bad for the Coyote, his failures were never for lack of effort, yet despite the assistance of bombs, traps and other products of the ubiquitous ACME Industries, he was inevitably outmatched by the Road Runner’s indomitable calm and effortless good luck. The Road Runner was from another world, with never a feather out of place, ending each deadly interaction by sprinting off with his signature “meep-meep” while the Coyote lay mangled at the bottom of a canyon, his body broken by a falling anvil, contemplating how he might next attempt to slake his hunger for that scrawny Road Runner.
Coyote is a major figure in many indigenous American myths and stories; although his characteristics vary depending on his place in the mythology it is fair to generalize that he is frequently a trickster, a character that ruptures the norms of the time-before-people to often comedic and occasionally tragic consequence, usually at the expense of Coyote’s life and well-being. In the Zuni myths about Coyote he is always in other people’s business, he is nosy and disrespectful of the limits between species, of the specialized knowledge of the different creatures in the animal realm; he is sweet and curious and something of a fool. Coyote often ends up hurting himself terribly to achieve some kind of physical transfiguration: when he comes upon a group of burrowing owls who are in the midst of their seasonal dance he is excited, he marvels at their movements, he sees the beautiful sphere that they carry, and he is covetous of the power of their dance; he asks the head of the owls if he can participate in the dance. The grandfather of the burrowing owls is annoyed and finds it presumptuous that Coyote would barge in on their ceremony, so he decides to trick him, sending him to kill his grandmother and chop off her head, to serve as the sphere, and instructing Coyote to then break his own legs, to mimic the dragging movements of the little burrowing owls. The grandfather of the burrowing owls ensures him that Coyote will be made new again in the dance, that his grandmother will come back to life and his legs made whole. Coyote drags himself to the place of the dance, incredulous at the pain of his broken legs, and dragging the horrible bloodied head of his grandmother, when he arrives the burrowing owls begin to mock his gullibility and flutter off, leaving Coyote in a state physical and mental agony. This delightful tale is likely an originary myth, perhaps explaining the little mating shuffle of the burrowing owl.[7]
For the Nez Perce, who once occupied a large part of contemporary Idaho, Washington and Oregon, Coyote plays a central role in preparing the world for the coming of human beings, he is a trickster and a transformer whose stories explain the creation of the world, the origins of rituals and customs, and the meaning of birth and death.[8] In one cycle of stories Coyote goes upriver and meets a magical creature, in one instance a Killer Baby: Coyote sees the baby and says to himself, “look at that baby - so cute” and he approaches it to take it away from the banks of the river where it could fall in, the baby seizes Coyote around the neck and squeezes until he is dead, then tosses the corpse in the river. Coyote’s body washes up on a bend, and along comes Magpie, who is hungry for some eye-fat and begins to peck at Coyote’s eyes, which revives him. In all the myth-cycles Coyote encounters a creature of benign appearance that kills him unexpectedly and without thought, Coyote is revived by the pecking of the magpie, and then he does a curious thing: he hits his side and out of him come little beings made from his own excrement who advise him how to overcome the obstacles before him. After receiving their advice he either commands them to re-enter his body or lets them amble free in the world. The Nez Perce Coyote stories have a certain darkness and magic, and being outside their world-view and inexpert I can only guess at the layers of meaning held within.
In 2006 a group of conservation biologists released a paper advocating what they termed Pleistocene Re-wilding[9], a long ranging proposal to re-introduce variants of extinct mega-fauna, or their taxonomic equivalents, into the North American landscape. The proposal advocates the controlled re-introduction of species of large animals that once thrived in North America, including ungulates like camels and wild horses, as well as predators like cheetahs and lions. Rather than constituting an exotic game ranch or private zoo, which already exist in incongruous places all over the United States, the proposal suggests a rigorous scientific effort, informed by an analysis of lost ecological niches eliminated by the vast changes brought on by the spread of human beings across the North American landscape that culminated in a vast extinction of large-bodied species about 13,000 years ago. Under the proposal a vast swathe of the under-populated Western North American plains would be fenced off, and on a managed basis certain large species, selected for their historical presence within the North American ecological system, would be re-introduced into the landscape.
The proposal is an optimistic reimagining of the role of conservation biology, which to date has been largely focused on managing the decline and extinction of species, and argues for a human role in restoring the ecological and evolutionary processes that our precipitous spread across the face of the planet interrupted. Of course the shadows, the traces and physical remnants of those complementary processes of evolution still exist: the North American pronghorn antelope is one of the fastest sprinters in the world, its lightning reflexes and rapid stride tuned by a four million year chase between its ancestors and the now-extinct North American cheetah. There are positive examples of human-led restoration and management of some great species. The North American Condor once ranged the skies of the entire continent, that enormous black-winged scavenger feeding on the carcasses of mastodons dispatched by saber-toothed tigers. The condor population dwindled with the elimination of the great predator and prey species, until it was reduced to a few individual wild condors that fed off the carcasses of marine mammals until their number were reduced to the point of extinction by the use of DDT and other pesticides. The condor has been slowly re-introduced through a careful captive breeding program and management of the wild condor population that still only numbers in the hundreds. In the persistent absence of a regular food source the condor population is partly supported by the regular deposit of slaughtered livestock carcasses as a food source.
The coyote is in the midst of its own personal re-wilding program, filling the ecological niches of wolves and other predatory species ill-suited to coexist without human cooperation, and without the reproductive fertility and elusive skills of the coyote. Coyote sightings are on the increase across the country, in rural, suburban and urban places and wildlife control agents increasingly find themselves ill-equipped to deal with their spread. In the New Orleans area, where coyote sightings have increased over the last several years, possibly prompted by high waters and other changes in the landscape, wildlife management officers express difficulty with eliminating them, advising the human population to adapt by removing food sources and keeping their pets inside.[10]
As a long-time resident of New York City, I have observed the slow and relentless recolonization of the urban human habitat by animals, aided by the elimination of certain poisons from the environment, the establishment of parks and other potential habitats, and a liberal ethos of animal protection that is slowly becoming a norm. I have observed from the window of my apartment on the Lower East Side the long swoop of a hawk circling in the sky, I fix in my imagination the reports of seals basking on a rocky outcrop adjoining the Hudson off of Inwood in upper Manhattan, the raccoon who was spotted red-eyed crossing Fourth Street in the middle of the night, perhaps drawn by the feathered scratching of the chickens in the community garden, my friends who live near Prospect Park reporting on the marsupial hiss of the possum that they encountered on the sidewalk, strangely big as it slowly retreated from their intrusion. There is a rush and surprise and an intense fascination on the part of human beings who encounter something wild that has penetrated and cohabits within the human environment, especially within a place as densely packed and constructed as a city. That leap of consciousness carries within it an immense possibility, the possibility that in realizing a sense of animal subjectivity human beings may recover a sense of their own place within the complex webs of ecology.[11]
Beyond the liberal ethos of protection there lies a radical possibility of interrelationship. There is evidence that human consciousness evolved partly out of an empathic relationship with the animal world, as our distant ancestors strove to understand the expressions and habits of predator and prey species in a world where we were not at the top of the food chain.[12] The coyote has proved itself to be a relentless colonizer of all kinds of habitats, and in many ways is an inoffensive neighbor, preferring to eat rats and mice to garbage, avoiding human interactions at all costs. The possibilities that greening cities might support more complex animal habitats, along with more integrated human social relationships within the ecological landscape make me hopeful that I might one day hear reports of coyote sightings in the backyards of Brooklyn, and maybe, if I’m lucky, I will hear the song of the barking dog on Avenue C.
[1]http://www.chicagolife.net/content/environment/The_Evolution_of_the_Urban_Coyote
[2]http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE1D6173CF935A15750C0A9669D8B63&ref=coyotes
[3] Home Range and Landscape Use of Coyotes in an Urban Landscape: Conflict or Coexistence, Gehrt, Anchor, Whyte, Journal of Mammalogy, 90(5): 1045-1057, 2009
[4] Joseph Beuys - Coyote, Caroline Tisdall, Munich, Schirmer/Mosel, 2008
[5] Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, Mark Rosenthal, Yale University Press, 2004
[6]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/science/28coyotes.html?scp=1&sq=mysteries+that+howl+and+hunt&st=nyt
[7] “Zuñi coyote tales”, compiled by Frank Hamilton Cushing, University of Arizona Press, 1998.
[8] “Nez Perce coyote tales : the myth cycle”, Deward E. Walker, Jr. in collaboration with Daniel N. Matthews, University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
[9] “Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for 21st Century Conservation”, Donlan et. al., The American Naturalist, Vol. 168, No. 5, November 2006
[10] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/new-orleans-coyote-sighting-swat_n_892221.html
[11] Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, Wolch and Emel ed., Verso 1998
[12] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/02/anthropology-pat-shipman-animals-language
this is awesome!
ReplyDeleteTauno, great writing.
ReplyDelete