New research reveals more about the lives of Northeast Ohio's elusive urban coyotes

on January 24, 2010 at 12:01 AM, updated January 24, 2010 at 12:03 PM

Andersen coyote in Clev.jpgIn this photo taken from a Coast Guard ice breaker on Lake Erie in February 2007, a coyote trots along the frozen lake within sight of downtown.
In Northeast Ohio, coyotes trot across runways at Burke Lakefront Airport within sight of Cleveland's skyscrapers, and dodge traffic on busy highways like U.S. 422 near Solon. 

In Chicago a couple of years ago, one sauntered into a sandwich shop in the downtown Loop and plopped down in the beverage cooler. 

In New York, a frisky 35-pound male led cops, reporters and TV news helicopters on an hours-long romp around Central Park before being shot with a tranquilizer dart. 

Once the denizens of southwestern deserts and Great Plains prairies, mobile and highly adaptable coyotes have been on a relentless eastward march for much of the 20th century, aided by suburban land-clearing and the elimination of their chief competitor, the gray wolf. 

Coyote graphic.jpgView full size
Beginning in the 1990s, their presence escalated in Cleveland and other big Midwestern and Eastern metropolises, not just in fringe parklands, but in neighborhoods and the urban core.  

City-dwellers who spot them in parks and back yards are startled to find that a formidable tracker and hunter at the top of the food chain – what ecologists call an apex predator – is in their midst. 

"People are walking within a few feet or yards from coyotes every day and they don't know it," said Ohio State University biologist Stan Gehrt, whose decade-long-study of the Chicago area's estimated 2,000 coyotes  prompted him to dub them "ghosts of the city." "There are a whole lot more out there than what we see." 

Much remains unknown about these elusive creatures. They're one of the largest animals to dramatically expand, rather than shrink, their range in response to humans, though researchers still haven't figured out if they've settled in urban realms in spite of us, or because of us. 

"For an animal that's lived around humans for this long, we don't know much about it," said Cleveland State University biologist Robert Krebs

But new research, including a DNA study by Krebs and several CSU colleagues, is gradually revealing more about the habits of urban coyotes. 

The investigations are unearthing some surprises about how the animals got here, what they're doing now, how much of a threat they pose (hint: not a lot, although that may change) and their role in an ongoing evolutionary experiment that could play out in and around Ohio during the next few decades. 

The urban coyotes among us now are the descendants of an expanding Western coyote population spilled from the grasslands of Iowa, Missouri and Indiana into Ohio in the early 1900s. The animals' eastward progress across the state was slow; they didn't spread to western Pennsylvania until 1947. 

A separate wave of Western coyotes took another expansion route and followed a different genetic strategy that gave them a big advantage over the slow-moving Buckeye group, according to a
2009 study 
led by New York State Museum biologist Roland Kays

The coyotes skirted northeastward, moving above and around the Great Lakes. In the Canadian woods, they encountered remnant populations of wolves, which hadn't been eradicated like their American counterparts. 

Although natural rivals, a few coyotes and wolves cross-bred, DNA testing shows. "It may have been both sides trying to make the best of things," Kays said. 

The resulting Northeastern coyote-wolf hybrids have big bodies, broad skulls and strong jaw muscles, making them better suited to take down deer than Ohio's mainly rodent- and roadkill-eating coyotes. 

Kays' research shows the hybrid coyote-wolves spread across Ontario and southward into upstate New York five times faster than the purebred Western coyotes that colonized Ohio and the lower Midwest. 

Like advancing armies, the two expansion fronts, one composed of smaller non-hybrid coyotes and the other of larger coy-wolves, are just starting to encounter each other in western New York and western Pennsylvania. 

What happens next – further genetic mixing, one side out-competing the other and taking over its territory, or some kind of peaceful but separate co-existence – isn't clear. "That's playing out right now," Kays said. 

Whatever their future, Ohio's purebred coyotes have become an enduring, if still mostly stealthy, fixture on the urban landscape. 

North Chagrin Coyote d.JPGView full sizeIn this photo by park visitor Derek Nevar, a coyote trots along a roadside in the Cleveland Metroparks’ North Chagrin Reservation.
When Lake Erie freezes, U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife biologist Randy Outward sees coyotes using the icepack to move east and west along the downtown Cleveland shoreline. "It's like a highway for them," he said. 

Suburban police departments, especially those near the Cleveland Metroparks and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, get complaints from residents awakened by coyote howling, or alarmed to see coyotes jogging through their yards. The parks also hear from people demanding they do something about "their" coyotes. 

"A lot of folks think we're a refuge for them. We're not," said Rick Tyler, the Metroparks' senior natural resource manager. "Their home ranges use a lot of our parks, but some cross our boundaries freely. They're well-entrenched in municipalities around them. They're doing pretty well in the suburbs." 

The federal and regional park districts keep loose track of the coyotes within their boundaries using "howling surveys," remote trail cameras triggered by the animals' movement, and contact reports from park visitors. 

The annual howling surveys, where wildlife specialists and volunteers play amplified recordings of coyote calls and count the number of responses, are an inexact measure. But they indicate that between 100 and 150 coyotes are present in the 33,000-acre national park. 

The population climbed during the 1990s but seems to have leveled off, said Lisa Petit, the national park's chief of science and resources management. 

Lisa Petit tracks.jpgView full size“I love the rare occasion when I see one,” says biologist Lisa Petit, who looks for coyotes’ tracks in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. “They’re usually extremely intent on what they’re hunting. They’re very purposeful.”
"Anecdotally, I'd say there is greater pressure on the [coyote] population," Petit said. That's possibly due to activities outside the park, such as the trapping of nuisance coyotes in neighborhoods and the culling of deer whose carrion otherwise would be a coyote food source. 

In the Metroparks, the Brecksville and Bedford reservations both appear to have resident coyote family groups – a dominant "alpha" male and female, their pups and several subordinate animals, Tyler said. 

Other coyote family groups seem to be based outside the Rocky River, Mill Stream Run, West Creek, and North and South Chagrin reservations, but include parts of those parks in their "home range,"the area within which they hunt for food, and shelter and raise pups. 

Collars equipped with radio transmitters and GPS locators would enable researchers to precisely track the coyotes' movements, a major aid in managing them. But funding isn't currently available for the devices, which cost several thousand dollars apiece. 

So CSU graduate student Beth Judy is using a year's worth of Metroparks howling survey results and computer mapping software to try to figure out the animals' habitat and range. She's still crunching data but already knows "they're not just staying in the parks." 

Though mobile, Greater Cleveland's coyotes aren't mixing and freely inter-breeding as one big group. Instead, DNA collected from coyote droppings, or "scat," shows three clusters of animals, each genetically distinct from the others. Something is isolating the coyote groups, preventing a more wholesale blending of genes. 

The locations of the genetic clusters – one east of the Cuyahoga River, one west of the river but still in the national park, and the third in the Rocky River watershed – suggests that big north-south multi-lane roads, not rivers, are to blame, acting as physical barriers. 

"There's no problem with a coyote crossing the Cuyahoga [River]," said  Krebs, the CSU biologist who led the analysis. "They don't have the east-west issue except for the highways. [Interstates] 71 and 77 form far stronger boundaries for their movement than the natural features." 

The Cleveland-area coyote DNA samples also show a surprising amount of genetic differences from individual to individual. To Kays, that indicates the Ohio population arose from a large, diverse original wave of coyote pioneers arriving from the west, not just a few stalwart explorers. 

Krebs thinks the genetic diversity shows that new coyote immigrants are continuously arriving in the area. Greater Cleveland may be what biologists call a "sink habitat," he said – an area where animals can survive, but don't reproduce well enough to sustain a population without replenishment from nearby "source habitats" where coyotes thrive. 

In that regard, Cleveland is like a kitchen sink beneath a running faucet. The steady pipeline of rural coyotes that resupply the urban population means that trapping or killing is only a temporary solution to nuisance complaints. 

"Solitary animals float around the landscape and have huge home ranges," Gehrt said. "They're looking for gaps and will fill them quickly. If a city wants to hire a trapper, he's got a permanent job." 

While wildlife officials acknowledge that removing aggressive coyotes is necessary, their overall strategy is to teach people how to co-exist with the animals. 

They aim to prevent coyotes from becoming dependent on people which should reduce the chance of conflicts. That means keeping cats indoors, not leaving small dogs unattended outside, and securing potential food sources such as garbage and pet food. 

It also means accepting that urban coyotes are here to stay, even as scientists

try to figure out why.

Some evidence indicates they gravitate to urban sites. When they're captured and relocated to the country, they inevitably try to return. And yet in the city, coyotes avoid humans as much as possible, even altering their behavior and restricting their activity to nighttime to minimize contact. 

"They are a walking paradox," Gehrt said. "Every time you say they're a certain way, they do the exact opposite. All these things work against each other. But they work."