Released Sept. 7, 2007

AUBURN UNIVERSITY, Ala. -- How have coyotes managed to become city slickers within the past few decades?

Inquiring minds want to know. They want to know how an animal almost exclusively associated with rural landscapes only a few decades ago has managed to survive and even thrive in urban and suburban environments.

These aren’t just any inquiring minds but a team of wildlife biologists who are investigating the problem with the zeal and scientific expertise of forensic scientists on a crime scene. What they discover may teach people a lot about what they — and we — can do to contain the spread of these troubling newcomers.

Jim Armstrong, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System wildlife specialist and Auburn University professor of forestry and wildlife sciences who heads the study, says his own experience with coyotes speaks volumes about how concerns associated with these animals have shifted in recent years.

When Armstrong started working at Auburn roughly 18 years ago, most of his coyote-related calls dealt largely with agriculture issues, namely threats they posed to livestock or crops. Now, the bulk of his calls deal with coyote sightings in urban and rural locations — a change he doesn’t find the least surprising.

“It’s a fairly predictable pattern of change based on what we’re seeing in other states, where more coyote activity is occurring in closer proximity to humans,” he says.

Indeed, wildlife biologists in some of the nation’s biggest cities — Chicago and even in New York’s Central Park — already are studying the problem.

Armstrong’s study, made possible by funding from the Center for Forest Sustainability and from Auburn’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, is exploring several aspects of coyote ecology to answer that central question — why are coyotes seemingly thriving on human turf?

Armstrong has three graduate students working on the problem.

One is exploring the coyote’s home ranges and survival rates of urban and suburban animals with their rural counterparts.

Meanwhile, another student is investigating the animal’s reproductive capacity within the urban and suburban environment, especially differences in the number of coyote pups as well as weaning and dispersal compared with coyotes in rural locations.

A third student arguably has the most thankless job of the three. She will be analyzing stomach contents of road-killed coyotes in an effort to determine how the food habits of urban coyotes differ from their rural counterparts.

And if that isn’t unpleasant enough work, she also will spend time on the roadside looking for coyote scat — wildlife parlance for common, everyday poop.

Armstrong says the three-pronged research findings will help fill in some voids in ongoing coyote research efforts.

For his part, Armstrong believes the findings ultimately will confirm what he’s suspected all along — that coyotes have undergone significant adaptation to survive in the urban environment.

He hopes that the study will help biologists better understand how coyotes are altering their eating habits to survive in this environment, possibly by exchanging a longstanding preference for rabbits, rodents and grasshoppers for other sources of food, including dogs and cats.

Yet, while the study is likely to teach wildlife biologists a lot about the animals and possibly how to minimize human-coyote conflicts in urban and suburban areas, Armstrong says there is no chance whatsoever that coyotes will entirely give up their city slicking ways.

He describes the coyote as a “total survivor” capable of weathering virtually any type of adversity.

Like it or not, they are here to stay, he says.

“When the last person on earth is dead, there will be cockroaches, but I would advise these cockroaches to look over their shoulders, because the coyote will be close behind.”

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http://www.aces.edu/department/extcomm/npa/daily/archives/003278.php

Contact: Jim Langcuster, (334) 844-5686, langcjc@auburn.edu