Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco

sfgate.com

395 pointsspking299 comments

What we think of wild nature is nothing compared to what used to exist.

Schools of fish so dense they would bring boats to a halt in the middle of the Atlantic. North America had more large wildlife than Africa. Whales as far as the eye could see all day long. Walruses in the Thames in London.

I did a couple video essays on what I learned from a wonderful book The Once and Future World:

My video essays: https://youtu.be/ZLAvBiols2Y and https://youtu.be/U4NZdciDozI

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-Could/dp/030...

What amazed me was after reading Unbroken (WWII novel set in the pacific) was the incredible amount of sharks in hawaii and the surrounding islands. A family member who was in the pacific theatre backed this up. Shark schools so dense that sailors would be attacked after they fell in. This was barely 70 years ago so alot has changed in terms of animal population.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-worst-shark-attac...

Thank you. Despite being in the midst of a pandemic, that is the worst thing I've read all week. It looks well cited, although I don't have the heart to check the sources...

Quint, the old shark hunter from the movie Jaws was said to have survived the USS Indianapolis (the character not the actor)

“Black eyes... dolls eyes”

There's a Hardcore History episode about the event:

https://dchhaddendum.libsyn.com/ep5-nightmares-of-indianapol...

Reminds me of a quote from Charles Eisenstein. He cites The Once and Future World and then channels Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found:

"Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”

I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now."

(I posted the MacKinnon section here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064787)

I'm not sure exactly what those quotes are referring to, but many reports of European settlers to the New World, while technically true, were greatly misleading.

Prior to arrival of the Europeans, the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife.

When the Europeans arrived, the diseases they brought wiped out 90+% of the indigenous population, according to some estimates. By the time they explored the continent, the population was mainly gone, far in advance.

So there's a strong theory that the incredible over-abundance of wildlife the Europeans saw was actually a huge ecological imbalance, as many animals had lost their natural (human) predators.

And that phenomena such as millions of passenger pigeons blocking out the sun overhead weren't "natural" at all, but actually severe ecological imbalance.

(This isn't to say, of course, that now we haven't swung way too far in the other direction. But just that the tales of abundance aren't necessarily a naturally balanced state either.)

Native Americans arrived less than 80,000 years ago. That's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. They were not the natural predators.

I think the phrase natural predator just means the predator in the environment that keeps some other species in check.

80,000 years may be a blink in an eye in evolutionary terms but it does not take that long for a predator to come into an environment and become entrenched as the natural check on some other species.

I would say https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1111 for example of introduction of species

something like this https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/285705 for how dominance of predator works.

However not sure how well the Native Americans were actually keeping animals in check given the many species they have been shown to have helped bring to extinction.

That said not sure how long it would take from being a natural predator to being a keystone species.

@nroets, Humans (the Europeans in this case) made the Dodo bird extinct quite fast, closer to 80 years than 80 000.

One doesn't need to be someone's long time natural predator to have an impact

I believe the accepted period is around 15,000 years ago, possibly slightly earlier.

Those dates are in flux recently. As is the pattern in discoveries of our very ancient history... the story gets more complicated as we go.

The fallacy that, IMO, we are falling into is (ironically) caused by scientific reductionism... the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. This doesn't work as well for the evidence types paleoanthropology has to work with.

With the advent of ancient DNA, we now have a second, relatively precise type of evidence also pointing at, IIRC, 15-20k years ago as when the initial peopling of the Americas took place.

Initial peopling, or oldest known genetic ancestors of current individuals.

Take Israel or Morocco as a comparative example. There were sapiens there before Neanderthals, but they are not thought to be ancestral to any modern people. The majority are not. This makes intuitive sense when thinking of species or subspecies (eg Neanderthals), but it works the same with populations.

Also, it's easy to think of ourselves in permanent "infinite growth" mide, where we colonise and dominate. But, recent years aside, humans bloomed and receded just like other species. Range expanding and contracting.

Just because a population is in the same place does not mean that it's ancestral. The first, second or eighteenth population may have no current ancestors... or none in that area.

As Dawkins puts it "descendants are common, ancestors are rare."

perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but humans are believed to have hunted many, many animals to extinction on the American content millennia before the Europeans got here. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010608081621.h...

> the continent was full of Native Americans who lived in an ecological balance with wildlife

Native Americans weren't a monolithic group, and the balance with wildlife is just a part of the noble savage myth, for most of the groups. Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

>noble savage myth

Closet racism. There is far more evidence that Europeans destroyed these cultures and ignored their advances, than there is proving this so-called myth.

See for example, the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

We are STILL uncovering major advances in these cultures today.

> … the Australian FNP. They were far, far more advanced than European propagandists could allow anyone to imagine.

Other thank some claims about land management and herbal medicine, what were that not only more advanced in but FAR more advanced?

Ship building, metallurgy, literature, maths, chemistry, conflict management, law?

I am genuinely curious.

Surely its easier to tell us all what the advancements were than downvote me?

I am genuinely curious. [after all propagandists have prevented me from imagining, let alone knowing.]

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. Flamewar dross and empty complaints about downvoting are both off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oldest continually running mining operation of mankind. Longest running school. A Hippocratic oath before Europeans genocided them. Forms of agriculture which literally guaranteed a well-fed populace. An understanding of antiseptic materials, and even micro-biology, in an age of European miasma theory and blood-letting.

There is much to learn about oneself once you drop the prejudice.

I'm not suggesting we haven't "advanced" beyond them now, but I am suggesting that we may have overlooked something in our race to the moon, and their 40,000 year old tradition of unbroken oral tradition ..

I'm sure Europeans would have adopted any advances of great value to them, just like they adopted a lot of crops from the new world.

In fact, Europeans did - eventually - catch up with the Australian FNP's innate knowledge of healing. They had a form of resilient Hippocratic oath for literally thousands of years before us, for example. An understanding of antiseptics in a European age of miasma theory. And so on ..

> Aztec

> before collapsing (and before Columbus)

In the alternate universe you come from, who was fighting Cortez?

Unsure why this is downvoted. Toltec empire ended around 1200 AD. Mayans... hard to define, like the Rome technically even still around. The Aztec Empire was right there when the conquistadors showed up.

They weren't saying the Aztecs weren't there. They were saying the Aztecs had massively deforested areas prior to the arrival of Europeans.

They weren't referring to Columbus as the person who conquered South/Central America (there were quite a few conquistadors involved there... not just Cortez).

They were referring to the arrival of Columbus as the watershed moment that signal the arrival of Europeans en masse to the Americas.

I'm not saying they were referring to Columbus as the person who conquered Central America. I was amused by GP's insinuation that the Aztecs had somehow collapsed before Columbus.

> Maya, Toltec, and Aztec societies deforested Central America quite significantly before collapsing (and before Columbus).

On a second reading it seems that GP had most likely meant that they were deforesting before Columbus, not that they had collpased before Columbus, but it's still strange to refer to getting conquered as a "collapse".

It might be seen as self serving for western industrialists to promote the noble savage idea as 'myth.'

Notice that there isn't a 'noble industrialist' meme? I wonder why?

It's possible that there was a temporary bloom in bison and/or a few other species during the formative period of American inland exploration. The populations were hunted out so quick after this that it's hard to know how temporary this was.. if it happened at all.

But those quotes are about a lot more than one iconic species. Overall, the picture is accurate.

   Native Americans who lived in an 
   ecological balance with wildlife.

One of the competing explanations for the disappearance of the woolly mammoth in North America about 10k years ago is that they were hunted to extinction. Other explanations make hunting a co-factor.

I find the state of the environment so shockingly depressing, it's incredible. What would I give to see the world like that?

Well, you’d have to give billions of lives.

Passenger pigeons, bison, wolves, etc.

Here is an interesting map of the historic and current grizzly bear ranges.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/historical-and-current-gri...

It is truly amazing how nearly completely we wiped the continent of wildlife. Many of our teams are named after the animals we wiped out. Florida Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, California Golden Bears, Michigan Wolverines, etc.

> Whales as far as the eye could see all day long.

The near extermination of whales along our shores changed geopolitics. One of the reasons why commodore perry "visited" japan was to open japanese ports to our whalers.

Oh, wow! For anyone that can't see the picture - the historical range shows grizzly bears past Texas and well into Mexico

And Jaguars were one time to be found with in territory that is presently USA.

I hear they are starting to come back in southern Texas.

As a counter, overpopulation isn’t necessarily a good thing. The waste alone can create issues on land and water.

Population was balancing itself for millions of year. We call overpopulation a population big enough to annoy us.

This is an npr article on the size of fish caught by tour boats. You can see the size reduce over the years.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...

Unblocked: https://archive.ph/mVxhG

Also, the amount of fish a ship caught decreased tremendously once steam powered ships were introduced https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1013 (scroll down to figure 2)

Wildlife encounters by Lewis And Clark

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/10/994/254987

If you put a 20 mile perimeter around every point of North America that had continued human activity, what percentage of North America would be covered? Is it more than we'd expect? At a first glance, it seems like there are still vast reached of North America that remain completely untouched by humans.

Nevertheless, is so sad that humans have effectively pushed animals outside of their habitats. Animals are smart enough to avoid humans, just as a deer is smart enough to avoid a wolf, but at some point the world is only so big.

Do you think that halting our activities for a few months will have a significant effect on wildlife growth?

One foggy morning I walked out to the rock at Morro Bay and as I got out on this spit of land, I realized that what I thought was a big sand dune was actually all birds, a huge see of birds. They started taking off and obscured the sky.

There are places still.

As an early morning runner in SF, I see coyotes in SF every week or two, including at Twin peaks as mentioned in the article. One morning in Golden Gate Park I warned a few people walkings dogs since there were about 4 coyotes around the corner.

From my first hand experience, I'd assume any wooded area with cover in SF has a coyote living there.

Not only that, many SF parks have signs warning about this, even years before the pandemic.

That they would wander out of the wooded areas is no shock. A couple years ago I saw one strolling along the sidewalk in the Presidio not far from Main Post, acting more or less the same way a tourist would.

I lived in the Presidio not too long ago and I would see and hear them all the time. That was a fun place to live.

Same. I even regularly see a few at Coit Tower.

There have been sightings in Corona Heights too (pretty far from GGP)

How appropriate.

I took the opportunity to visit Glen Canyon Park last time I was in San Francisco, after a local recommended to me, and it was a wonderful interlude in my visit; they had signs up noting that there would be coyotes about at twilight; alas I was there mid-day and didn't get to see them.

I did, however, get to see hummingbirds for the first (and so far only) time in my life.

That’s a great place for hikes. It’s got a seasonal creek and small wetlands. They’ve got signs posted about the local wildlife you can expect see. It’s a shame dogs aren’t limited to a given area as they drive away some wildlife.

I envied the kids whose pre-school was in it. What a great way to spend your early childhood days!

And I appreciated the signage for giving me some of the history and and pointers on what to keep an eye out for.

I walk through there every morning and regularly run into them! They're most active around 6:45am-ish.

I'd see Coyotes relatively often when I'd go on insomnia walks through Outer Richmond and Golden Gate.

They were pretty small though. I wouldn't want my Yorkie near them, but they were more like an oversized Fox.

I've seen them in the last year or two while driving through SF at night.

Coyote sightings were a regular occurrence on my NextDoor feed long before the quarantine.

Nextdoor is essentially a nationwide service for people to share coyote sightings in their neighborhood. No matter where they are, people won't shut up about them.

Here it's: "did anyone hear those gunshots last night?!?" (in reference to fireworks).

My neighbors on Nextdoor constantly complain about coyotes eating their cats. Yet they seem to resent my suggestions to keep cats inside.

Coyotes are pretty adapted to city living. I know in my city (Vancouver) they are not uncommon to see, even in some pretty densely populated areas of town. I once had one walk right in front of me in a residential area one night, it wandered by so casually that I was sure it was a dog until I was about 5 feet from it.

Reading the comments just above I was just thinking of commenting the same thing for Vancouver, which is why I don't see the big issue with a sighting. In Vancouver when I lived there, they were almost a daily thing even in very urban areas far from a larger forest, and frequently ate pets too. Skunks too. Skunks everywhere and quite brazen for all their fat, waddly slowness.

What advice do you have for dealing with coyotes when jogging? I've learned the hard way that running away tends to trigger their fight-or-flight reflex, which isn't good.

Coyotes are basically dogs with cat software. They’re pretty skiddish. Usually stomping or clapping will make them go away.

They've never bothered me, I treat them like any other wild animal, give them a wide berth, let them be, don't trap them, and don't turn my back on them. Normally they're going somewhere, and just let them go there.

I worry about people with dogs since dogs can easily chase a coyote, corner it then get bitten or eaten if it's small enough.

Do like Texas's former governor, Rick Perry—shoot it dead.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100501095227/http://www.chron....

I've heard that some sorts of animals (racoons?) have moved onto the top of the Facebook buildings.

Here in Santiago, Chile, where many neighborhoods are in complete lockdown, a wild Puma was seen roaming the streets[1]. This was their natural habitat before the city was established, and many of them still live in the mountains, which are not far from the busiest streets of Santiago.

https://www.france24.com/en/20200324-wild-puma-captured-in-d...

Seattle has occasionally gotten mountain lions and bears in the city.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/discovery-parks-co...

I used to live in Olympia before living in Seattle and wash pretty shocked to see a coyote casualty walking down the street one morning when I was drinking coffee. Turns out it is pretty normal.

LA as well.

Similarly Palo Alto, for years now: https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2004/05/17/mountain-lion...

The same animal also taking advantage of the lockdown in Boulder, CO: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/fos9k0/mountain_lions_...

I live south of San Jose up against the mountains and our neighbors will post pictures once in a while of mountain lions drinking out of the swimming pools in their back yards. It’s more common in bad drought years.

Are you anywhere near Joseph D. Grant County Park?

A bit further south, closer to Mount Madonna County Park

I grew up in LA and while I don't live there anymore I've seen pictures from the last few days.

Never in my life have I seen such blue skies over LA. And my parents don't ever remember it being clearer either.

At least this shows what some stricter climate controls can do to both the climate and the economy and the tradeoffs involved.

Keep in mind stricter climate controls wouldn’t even hurt the economy this bad. A harsh carbon tax on all fossil fuels in exchange for COVID-19 to disappear to be gone would be a welcome relief to the economy.

With ya on this one, but what kinds of problems would this cause for people who don't have another option to get to work? Un-doing this ridiculous culture of driving 40 minutes to work will take a lot time.

Still, I wholeheartedly agree on the concept. I'm curious as to how to fix the followup problems that will occur from fixing the primary problem.

Invert zoning, say housing must be built with businesses, and it must be mixed together.

This helps, but it seems vanishingly unlikely that both spouses will always be able to find good jobs in the same neighborhood for as long as their kids are in school.

Public transportation. They don't need to both be 5 minutes walk away

Honestly, a grotesque carbon tax of 300% on a barrel of oil would only put prices back to where they were before the Russia/Saudi dump.

You’ll find that people will adapt quite quickly as the price ramps up (we can smear over a year if we need to). Carpooling, switching to electric, or just getting a closer job will all suddenly seem very feasible when the numbers are concrete.

Do that tax and make a dividend. Amen.

I'm surprised no one brought up the idea more people will just telecommute and work remotely, as so many are now discovering they can.

I'm sure plumbers, nursing home workers, retail employees, carpenters and skilled trades, factory workers, and more will telecommute.

Do people not get that not everyone is a knowledge worker whose work is always done on a computer?

That's true, but I think the point is: people will witness first-hand how reducing pollution and emissions leads to much better environment in the span of weeks.

I also hope that there will be some dip in relevant global climate measurements, so there will be something to point to and say: "here's direct empirical evidence that climate change is man-made and that reducing emissions helps mitigate it".

This thread seems to be confusing climate change / carbon (dioxide) with local pollution.

climate change / carbon (dioxide) and carbon taxes are about long-term temperature change due to C02 concentration and the effects of that. COVID-19 isn't changing that in 1 year.

Local pollution is caused by burning gasoline and factory smoke.

I was talking both. They're related - local pollution does local damage to the environment; climate change is bad because it does damage to the environment everywhere simultaneously.

I don't expect COVID-19 to show up too strongly in temperature graphs, but I hope some of its effects show up somewhere with large enough effect size that we have a statistically significant dip in the chart to point to as direct evidence that human activity is causing this, and changes are meaningful to fixing it.

Why does global warming damage the environment everywhere?

because environments everywhere have adapted to a rhythm of temperature that will no longer exist due to global warming. a good definition of damage is "harmful change."

Yes, but Cars are the intersection of the two. That's a big intersection.

Walking around my neighborhood and the silence is absolutely sublime. Airplanes, cars, highway noise, all diminished. The birds and chirps and friendly "Hellos" are amplified. It's bee n marvelous.

That reminds me about stories of people trying to record nature untouched by man-made sounds.

It has become increasingly difficult to find locations which are purely nature. I wonder how much easier it has become since the number of people generating "work noise" has fallen so much?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/24/machine-...

Maybe in Europe, but in the US there is a ridiculous amount of untouched space a <20 miles from almost every major city with the exception of California and the north east.

Surprisingly, this isn't really true (as far as noise is concerned). Noise pollution travels far, and if you're using sensitive equipment, you can easily pick up the noise of planes flying nearby at 30,000 ft.

This is in fact how airplanes were detected before radar was invented. Not a joke.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/aircraft-detection-radar-19...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location

Now you've made me want to dress up as an Airplane Detector for Halloween!

Standing on a mountaintop in Yosemite, I could easily hear the airplanes above, one approximately every few minutes.

It turns out there is no where you can go in the United States that is more than 20 miles from a paved road.

Is there a citation for that? I’d guess there are large parts of northern Maine that only have logging roads.

There are a bunch of articles about it but nothing scientific. For example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42104894

And it turns out I was wrong. There is one spot 21.7 miles away from a road deep in Wyoming.

This is highly dubious. Logging roads might be considered "roads" but some are passable only by heavy equipment. If you have to stop and repair the road every few hundred meters then I don't think it counts as a road.

Not sure if that’s true but even if it is, 20 miles is a massive distance.

If you ever go camping far out in the wilderness you will realise how hard it is to get away from human noise at night. The sound of planes flying overhead is almost constant over the entire continental US, even in desolate and wild areas.

Maybe the Colorado Rocky Mountains are different, but they don’t have plane noise like that outside of the corridor the interstate follows, which the planes also mostly follow.

It definitely looks like there are some larger plane traffic gaps out that way compared to here in the midwest, but if you look at a live map (https://www.flightradar24.com/41.21,-101.72/6 ) they are still flying over even the remote areas pretty frequently unfortunately.

I am currently living in Korea and near a motor way. You can estimate the health of the economy by the sound emanating from the motor way.

This is really cool! (but not unexpected) On the east coast, there is a species called ‘Coywolves’. They are a hybrid of pure coyotes and timber or grey wolves.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf

They are known to be incredibly smart and stealthy. They are adept at adapting to, and living in urban environments.

Like domestic dogs, they understand line of sight, as in, they are keenly aware of what direction a person is looking. This helps them remain unseen, while surviving in very close proximity to humans.

We know coyotes are living in virtually every corner of the US at this point. I wonder if these are pure bloods, coywolves that have migrated to the west coast, or maybe a new hybrid or sub species?

PBS Nature has an amazing documentary describing the Coywolf. Check it out if you have PBS Passport!

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/coywolf-meet-the-coywolf/860...

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/meet-the-coywolf-infographic...

The same thing is happening in Barcelona but with boars coming from the forests outside the city, seems to have no correlation with the lock-down/quarantine that is happening (streets of Barcelona are basically empty right now, except for ambulances, police and delivery services) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/04/wild-boar-sigh...

Fun story about this.

I once did a night "hike" up to Tibidabo. This wasn't organized or anything, just a few friends and I took a commuter train out of the city to the base of the mountain, semi-stranding ourselves. Then we walked up to the top, slept outside on the hilltop and enjoyed the sunrise the next morning.

Tibidabo has an amusement park and a cathedral, so there was a night security guard who was very confused by the 4-5 tourists hanging out outside his gate at night, although he didn't complain much.

The relevant bit here though is that on the walk up the mountain, we saw more than one wild boar out on the roadside, including a whole family. It was unexpected and frightening.

Joey?

No, my name is pretty obvious ;)

Mort?

I think he is going by the name Ken Adams in this story ;)

> Tibidabo has an amusement park and a cathedral

And a funicular!

Boars are no joke. Some More News has been reporting on them for years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JMaFfAxq0o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFFls6mBb8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9MTMCo8JbQ

Berlin is full of them. They roam the parks and streets at night, but are generally harmless (back away if they have piglets with them) and most annoyingly will dig over gardens if the fence is insufficient.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/30/berlin-h...

And the foxes! Saw some gorgeous foxes crossing the street at night in Prenzlauerberg, near the Volkspark.

Time to make some Spanish ham!

Perhaps appropriate: The famous poem by Sara Teasdale, about a different context, which also lent its name to a short story by Ray Bradbury:

There will come soft rains

--------------------------

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Let's not romanticize this too much. Coyotes are literally all over North America, so it's not like they've suddenly reappeared or something. We also accidentally let them overpopulate by exterminating so much of the wolf population.

There are mountain lions in downtown Boulder: https://twitter.com/mitchellbyars/status/1242110542317096960

I should hope so too. Boulder is in a bloody huge mountain range.

I live _on_ a mountain with mountain lions all around, but I've only seen one twice in 20 years. So seeing three in a city is really unusual.

The first time I saw a Coyote was in broad daylight up on Corona Heights in San Francisco.

I'd never even seen a photo of one before, but I knew what it was straight away because its face looked like Wile E Coyote!

Yeah, I used to see them out there in that area too, they love it up there.

A disturbing story I heard when living in Russia in my childhood was that if you see a wild animal in the city, it means that beasts have ran out of trash and waste to eat, and are getting more riskier, and you shouldn't be coming close to them unless you want to be eaten.

There's truth to that in the sense that most wild animals will avoid humans if they can. And, if you can get close to them, there's often something else wrong (maybe the animal is sick, etc.).

Yes, we saw this quite strikingly with the koalas in Australia during the recent bushfires.

You have some rather bigger beasties running around in Russia than I'll ever see here.

I live in a small town in the SW of England, UK called Yeovil pop. 45,000. We have loads of foxes and badgers. Foxes seem roughly comparable to a coyote. I regularly see foxes here and not just in the parks. I do live rather close to a lot of park as well as the town so that helps.

Sadly the badgers in Somerset seem to be suicidal and shoot themselves before jumping over hedges into a road. That's before, during and after an official cull to try and avert TB in cattle. Science ... lol.

London has a lot of foxes; as a child a pair used to come through the garden of my home only to be chased out by our cat, which I thought was quite impressive of the cat.

Until, talking to a friend the grew up in Newfoundland that casually mentioned, to echo your parent comment, "From time to time, we had polar bears. Don't get close to a polar bear."

I grew up in the rural deserts of Eastern California where coyotes are abundant, and never directly saw one once. Just the occasional rustling in the brushes and darting glances, and sometimes the flick of a glowing eye.

And then I come to San Francisco and one just walks past me and sniffs my hand while I'm going to the 7-11. Didn't even register that it wasn't just a dog until it had walked past.

It's crazy how much more comfortable around humans animals become in urban environments.

Last summer my wife and I took pictures of one in a parking lot in the 3400 block of Avenue of the Cities, Moline, IL... middle of downtown, a mile south of the Mississippi.

Did not expect that.

Anecdotally, I think they have better instincts for how to stay concealed in natural environments. Wildcats are the same way. Bobcats are everywhere in the lower 48 of the US, but most people have never seen one, and may not even be aware that they're around.

After all these years in SF, every time I see a coyote my first thought is still "why is that German Shepherd so underfed?"

Those little guys are so cute. Our Eastern coyotes are about twice that size, having hybridized with timberwolves.

Domestic dogs too, which has resulted in less fear of humans.

I hadn't heard that. That's interesting given that I took a picture of what I thought was a coyote in NY and someone told me that it was a wolf.

There are multiple documentaries about "What if people suddenly leave earth?".

All those movies show how fast nature will take over. Within 10-14 days animals will be walking everywhere.

So I am not surprised we see animals moving into cities.

And it is also true a lot of animals are already around but are very shy. So we don't notice them but they are already around.

Can you recommend a good one? (Or two? I’ve suddenly got lots of time this weekend...)

Maybe this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath:_Population_Zero

I wish the article contained more than 1 image of a coyote on a SF street. Nonetheless, very "12 Monkeys"-esque.

Coyotes are terrorizing the once inhabited city.

If you are a grown adult, coyotes aren't that dangerous or scary.

They aren't very big. They will attack small pets and children that are alone, but they typically leave adult humans alone.

I used to go for six mile walks in the High Desert for exercise. I routinely ran into coyotes. They never bothered me.

I did tell my children to not go out alone at night. There had been two or three attacks on children in the previous five years.

I have a dog phobia due to things that happened when I was about four years old. I'm not similarly afraid of coyotes.

Of course, I wouldn't want to run into a large pack in the dark either. They can and will take down deer as a pack and did so sometimes within earshot of my tent when I was homeless.

So, I mean, don't be stupidly cavalier, but lone coyotes are known to not be particularly dangerous to adult humans.

> lone coyotes are known to not be particularly dangerous to adult humans

This is an important qualifier; they are not always alone.

Yes. It probably bears repeating. The pandemic seems to be causing people to gloss over important details in comments.

So thank you for pulling that out and highlighting it.

I've seen a coyote dart across the street in SoMa in the middle of rush hour. Nature's a bit closer than we think.

You mean the rest of nature. We are also nature :)

What do you call a place with no 7/11?

A food desert. :)

Boise, ID - the only one we had closed down some time ago.

Clean?

I like this game.

In the late 90s, I was going to college in northern Arizona, and had summer tires on my car when there was a rare snowfall. A coyote decided to cross the road in front of me, I wouldn't say "dart", but more expecting me to slow for it. When I demonstrated I had no traction by touching my brakes, it reacted to the sound of my tires sliding by promptly stepping out of the way.

Just wait until the mountain lions and brown bears start prowling around looking for snacks :-)

For folks further out into the 'human/wildlife interface' as the Forest Service calls it (or the 'cafeteria' as I call it) sightings of all wildlife is up. Some friends who retired out in Brentwood[1] (not the LA neighborhood, the town outside of Livermore CA) They now have nearly continual deer presence and multiple daily sightings of Coyote and Fox around mid-morning and dusk. They have heard mountain lions but haven't seen one yet, and no bears so far.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brentwood,+CA+94513/@37.90...

For what it’s worth, there aren’t thought to be any brown bears left in California; the closest ones are in Washington or maybe Idaho.

This is largely a matter of local lexical confusion. In the US, "brown bear" can mean two things: a black bear with a brown coat (ursus americanus), or a grizzly (ursus arctos horribilis, which makes me giggle every time).

Across the pond, "brown bear" probably means ursus arctos arctos, a cousin of our own more foul-tempered beasties.

But when a Californian says "brown bear", usually they just mean a brown-coated black bear (https://bear.org/black-bear-color-phases/).

> But when a Californian says "brown bear", usually they just mean a brown-coated black bear (https://bear.org/black-bear-color-phases/).

Well that's confusing. Whenever I hear brown bear (in hunting contexts, etc) I assume grizzly.

Idaho. There hasn't been a confirmed grizzly bear sighting in Washington since the late 90s. They're presumed to be extinct in WA.

They're there, though. https://www.backcountrychronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/gri...

EDIT: Also https://www.backcountrychronicles.com/grizzly-bear-distribut...

Probably. "Confirmed" just means that, if someone saw one, nobody was able to officially corroborate the sighting.

I hadn't seen that news about someone seeing a grizzly in the Cascades. I've been to the North Cascades several times. Ranger guidance has always been "There aren't really any meaningful populations of grizzlies here. We're pretty sure that, if there is one here, it's a transient from Canada."

You still have to take bear precautions there because of black bears, though.

Here in England we don't have coyotes but just today I saw a pheasant walking down a deserted road nearby. It looked slightly confused.

Is that unusual where you are?

Over the past few years I've seen the odd pheasant within ten minutes walk of the centre of Basingstoke as well as the occasional deer sprinting across the ring road dual carriageway.

Hopefully we all get to see more wildlife as life quietens down a little and, at least in the UK, we can be sure not to encounter anything even remotely dangerous.

We're not far from the edge of town and the fields, and it's common to see pheasants out there but not where I saw that one, which was quite a distance from there.

I walk a lot all over San Francisco, including at night. I’ve been seeing coyotes in the streets for at least a year now. Several times in North Beach, a couple times in the dogpatch/China basin area by the ballpark, etc. My phone doesn’t take great photos in low light, but I posted what photos I can on my Twitter [1] and Instagram and Facebook to try and get the word out. At this point I kind of just assumed everyone realized they are around.

[1] https://twitter.com/okgodoit/status/1082425011388829696

I live near twin peaks and seem them A LOT, the first pic in the article is on TP on the road to the top. They are frequently out during the day, one almost got hit by the 37 I was on a few months back.

I was walking around the Marina in SF about 15 years ago at night. I heard a rustling in a front yard and stopped to look. It took me a second to focus on what I was looking at in the dark. It was a skunk in a defensive posture with it's tail raised. I slowly backed away, and fortunately didn't get sprayed, although that would have made for a better story.

I had a similar encounter 10 years ago around 24th street and Mission. Was a raccoon though. Very cute one too and quite fat.

I live in the PNW. Every few days someone gets on nextdoor.com freaking out about having seen a coyote. My response is always the same. They were here long before humans were ever here and will still be here long after we are gone.

> ... in the PWN

I think we all got PWNed this time.

Ha ha! Fixed ;-)

> They were here long before humans were ever here and will still be here long after we are gone.

Actually, they weren't, in the PNW. Coyotes were restricted to central North America until 1700; when European settlers extirpated wolves, coyotes moved in to take their place.

See: https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/coyote-info/north-american-d...

Here in Vancouver there are social media accounts of cougar tracks on a beach and in a park. Unconfirmed. Unlike coyotes here (common)[1], or bears and deer (occasional), cougars are virtually unheard of near populated areas so this is notable if true.

Yes, yes, cue the "preying on young men in bars" jokes... :-P

[1] http://stanleyparkecology.ca/conservation/co-existing-with-c...

A security camera in SF caught a cougar on video a few years ago.

We've had quite a few cougar sightings up here in the north bay but its rarer now with all the watering holes closed.

I've seen coyotes in Buena Vista, and in october, Anza Vista (the hill just west of lower fillmore district). Seems like there is plenty of food in the area. In Dallas, Texas I would regularly see coyotes in the park.

Coyotes are generally quite meek around humans. You weigh 150 lbs and are 5' tall (or taller) they are perhaps 70 lbs wet and 26" at the shoulder. If you so much as make eye contact with them, they'll generally leave immediately.

Coyotes come out after dark. It takes about 20 minutes for them to figure out people aren't around. Mangy jerks.

Once I was walking through some brush in a city park in Calgary, AB and a siren went by. The whole area around me lit up with howling. Little unnerving, although coyotes are pretty cowardly out West (in the East they've interbred with wolves and will once in a blue moon take a hiker down).

Here in southern Ontario the coyotes are still pretty cowardly. I live rural (but close to town) and I might see them from 100 feet away before they skitishly run off. Except for one time there was one that brazenly marched down our driveway in broad daylight. Not sure how long that one lived for, never saw it again...

The ones in town are a bit less shy.

What's strange is last night our chickens were attacked by an eastern red fox. Usually they're super skittish and shy around humans, but as I (along with 3 other people) was rescuing my rooster from under a car, this one kept circling around, thinking he was going to get his prey back from us. Not scared at all.

(FWIW roosters are amazing animals... this one seems to have charged the fox to get it to drop one of the hens, and then fought with it and decoyed it away from the hens a good 200 feet down to the road, then it hid under a car of some people who passed by and witnessed this all happening and stopped. All birds survived, just missing some feathers. Rooster gets lots of treats today.)

Good boy!

In Berkeley we have these, plus bobcats, foxes, and mountain lions. One of the interesting things about California is that even though humans have stepped all over the ecology of the American West, that hasn't been going on long enough to extirpate literally every wild species. Compared to places that have been settled for 1000s of years, California can seem wild.

I live about a mile from the Minnesota river, and I see coyotes occasionally. Once right in our back yard, I even got a picture.

Toronto for example was full of Coyotes last summer. No need for COVID to see them around. I saw quite a few on my own.

I wonder how many peoples cats are missing right now.

Seeing nature flourish as humans pull back... I wonder if we are the virus

There's no need to wonder. Humans are.

Right now the planet is drawing a great big sigh of relief.

Yet we have politicians that are just busting to get things ramped back up to the crazed consumption-driven frenzy that we treated as normal until a few weeks ago.

When I was living in Daly City I saw them regularly if I went for a night walk in the Lake Merced area close to the Olympic or Thornton park. I once went pass one on the other side of the street, he glanced at me but was more interested in inspecting a trash bin. They usually ran away.

Plenty of raccoons too. For some reason those are more comfortable around people. One night I met one walking towards me on the sidewalk. First I thought it was a fat cat. I stepped aside as he strolled by me, he stopped, gave me a greeting stare and proceeded on his business.

Not surprised one bit. I definitely heard them (but never saw them) when I was living in Daly City. Also once nearly hit a deer while I was driving along Skyline Blvd, speaking of unexpected wildlife.

Coyotes pop up pretty regularly in Sacramento, too (which is somewhat unsurprising given the proximity to farmland and other open areas, but somewhat surprising given the degree to which Sacramento's suburbs sprawl and would be expected to push wildlife further away from Sacramento itself).

Here is a rarely seen Malabar spotted civet roaming the streets of Kozhikode city in India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t9IC1s2tbk . Endemic to Western ghats and critically endangered, most of us have only heard about it in books. Kozhikode along with the rest of India is currently in a lock-down.

EDIT: It could be the small Indian civet instead. Needs someone to identify

Do not coyotes bring in ticks and all the tick-borne diseases as well? perhaps public health priority #2 is to humanely remove these animals sooner than later.

I thought that was deer.

I wonder how much of this has to do with the lack of development in the bay area. With a huge amount of undeveloped area all over the bay area, there's probably a lot of places for coyotes to live, since so much living space has been zoned and allocated for them and other wild life. It's too bad, we're not this kind to human beings.

So kind of you to leave them a smidge of their former territory.

Chicago has lots of urban coyotes. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/ch...

Yep, the Chicago subreddit has a photo of one wandering around this week. We also occasionally get deer that make it into the city; usually walking down some of the long bike trails from Skokie.

The city of Chicago employees coyotes for rat control. They’re seen all over the metro area and have become familiar faces.

They use coyotes? I thought it was just cats. Huh ... I guess some of those photos of them on the street this week may not have been of wild coyotes like I thought.

Mainly feral cats but there are rats too big for them to go after. The coyote project started around ten years ago, it’s been a great success: https://cei.org/blog/chicago-coyotes-control-mice-and-rats

How about critically-endangered animals reappearing -- e.g. the Malabar large-spotted civet: https://www.ibtimes.sg/this-critically-endangered-animal-was...

Stuff You Should Know did a podcast about coyotes recently

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269...

In suburban upstate NY, coyotes, deer, and turkeys are pretty normal for many years. They wander across your lawn, eat your shrubbery and your pets, and generally seem to be well aware of where hunting is and isn't permitted.

...I showed a snapshot of a "coyote" once to someone who insisted it was actually a wolf.

There have been several reports going back at least a few months of a coyote wandering around Noe Valley at dusk, I think around 25th & Sanchez or that general area.

So this isn’t new although perhaps more are venturing out for longer periods of time due to the streets being emptier.

I live on Mt Davidson and I see em running down the street at least once a week...

It's not just San Francisco. I was driving onto the 406 in here Niagara (Canada) and I had to avoid one that had died after being hit by a car. In my entire life I've never seen coyote road kill.

There are large flocks of pigeons flying around the streets all day, like I've never seen before. I wonder where they get their food now the terraces and plazas are empty.

This makes me very happy. I wonder if we could some day come up with some way to coexist with nature instead of blindly blanketing it with asphalt and concrete.

Coyotes have already done an excellent job of coexisting with humans. They are one of the most successful species at adapting to human civilization. Pigeons, rats, roaches, etc. also quite successful.

They are even pretty regularly seen around Toronto still.

Normally they're just fine. They prefer to keep distance, but it's best to keep an eye. Any bold behaviour usually means they're hungry, which can lead to desperation.

Them and raccoons, those devils.

haha-- i've heard this in reference to raccoons many times, and i've always wondered: what kinds of things to raccoons get up to that earn them such a universal designation (condemnation?)? like, surely even though a coyote technically doesn't impose (much of) a physical threat, it is more threatening than a raccoon... i do know that they are terribly fond of pulling lids off trash cans, etc., so i assume the annoyance power has at least something to do with it?

(they're so _cute_ though!... xD)

they're super cute, but will claw and bite you viciously if threatened. there used to be a couple in my neighborhood in LA and i'd hear them fighting sometimes (when not raiding trash cans). they're also a rabies vector. but generally, they'll leave you alone if you leave them alone.

Do you mean LA as in Los Angeles or as in Louisiana?

If it is Los Angeles, then rabies from raccoons is not really a worry. The raccoon rabies reservoir in the United States is just in populations in the southeastern, mid-Atlantic, and northeastern states.

Raccoons can be downright creepy, though, in the right circumstances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW-6MxobUeU

that video is funny and very cute. but yes, los angeles, and that's good to know.

growing up out in the country taught me to not worry too much about wild animals generally, but that any animal can be dangerous under stress (including humans!).

> Coyotes have already done an excellent job of coexisting with humans

I have only seen them being 'successful' if are large tracts of land around the cities that they can live at. Would they be able to live in, say, Manhattan?

If not, as we expand the urban sprawl, they might become less successful... And coyotes are not the only species we should be worried about.

Manhattan is quite the edge case. It's one of the densest areas on the planet. I don't think that's a good model for development. Sprawl in the U.S. is more of the suburban variety and there coyotes do thrive quite well. They don't even need large tracts of land. They are fully capable of burrowing in little pockets of green space. See: https://urbancoyoteresearch.com/coyote-info/general-informat...

That is such a neat website, and very interesting research.

I thought the whole point of complaints about "sprawl" was that suburbs are bad and "urbs" are good. The suburbs are prime habitat for a lot of creatures including coyotes, especially because they don't have to worry about hunters.

Coyotes are very common in Dallas. I've seen then in the park 2 miles from downtown Dallas. Dallas is a concrete suburban hell for ~30 miles in all directions.

Dogs were domesticated by hanging out near humans. Seems like Coyotes are following the same general pattern from thousands of years ago.

You could say if more people lived in places like Manhattan, then there'd be more tracts of land elsewhere for coyotes (and other wildlife) to live.

> Would they be able to live in, say, Manhattan?

They do. https://centralpark.org/coyotes-in-central-park/

I hope so. I would extend this to vegetation. I would much rather have more big beautiful trees around than another golf course or parking lot.

Ah they finally made it in that city. I would see them often walking around late at night in the Silverlake and Los Feliz neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

I live down by west portal and have been seeing coyotes long before the shelter in place happened. Probably started a year or so ago.

Last year I saw one at night in San Diego walking down the boulevard. It trotted right past me like 5ft away!

I see them pretty regularly running GGP.

I saw one in GGP when I was running there a few months ago. Scared the hell out of this East Coaster!

I see coyotes up on Bernal Heights park all the time. Harmless, they tend to stay in their lane.

The other day I saw a video of a spotted Malabar civet walking through urban streets of Kerala, India. It is an endangered species https://twitter.com/DGrieshnak/status/1243077554224787457?s=...

I live roughly in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, and coyotes, deer, eagles, wabbits, etc., are a common sight. Last year a mom coyote and her 5 pups were often playing and hanging out in my front yard. (I didn't bother her and she didn't bother me, aside from stealing my Acme Rocket Sled.)

And I see thousands of storks flying on a deserted airport since few days.

There are also some unconfirmed sightings of mountain lions. Probably.

Are you being literal or is it a reference to something? This sounds awfully familiar, but I cannot remember where I heard that.

This isn't all that rare, lots of coyotes live in the parks

Once upon a time

I was of the mind

To lay your burden down

And leave you where you stood

Please donot feed them.

Finally some good news

They need to be careful not to step in human poop.

They are riding dolphins through the crystal clear canals of Venice, hunting swans.

No. Keep your fake news alert on max sensitivity these days. And possibly any day.

This article literally cites dolphins in the Venice canals as fake news. Please read the article before you comment.

Please turn up the sensitivity on your sarcasm detector.

I believe HN shorts out when the sarcasm detector reaches about 30%

RIP. Apologies to OP

The "earth is healing, we are the virus" narrative is overblown (and ecofascistic), but it's good to remember that humans are not special. We push other life forms out of our spaces, but many of those life forms continue a marginal existence. The end of humanity would not be the end of life and being reminded of that is a useful check on our tendency to put ourselves at the center of "the" world (instead of just the center of our world).

Taking comfort in the potential extinction of humanity because at least there would be some non-sapient critters still around strikes me as an odd value system. Couldn't you make the analogous argument that the extinction of all life on Earth would be fine since it would have absolutely no effect on the vast majority of the universe?

Major extinction events have historically paved the way for new and interesting forms of life, including humans.

What if humans are a unique higher lifeform that will never be matched in the history of the universe?

That seems really unlikely. That is, it's like the reciprocal of the Drake equation, multiplied by some additional infinitesimal factors.

Seems highly likely given how fantastically different we are from all other known life forms, especially in our mental ability.

If you assume humans are not unique in the universe, you're immediately confronted with the Fermi paradox. If the universe is filled with sapient life, wouldn't some of that sapient life be hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us--a tiny amount of time on the astronomical timescale, but more than enough for them to be observable in some way? Ultimately we're left with the unsatisfying task of speculating without evidence, at least for now.

It could be that life at our current level is more observable to life at our current level than more advanced life would be. The "Dark Forest" hypothesis from 三体 would be one explanation, but even that isn't required. It could be that advanced life can better meet its needs via technology that we can't sense. That was certainly plausible before we could broadcast over the electromagnetic field, which wasn't so long ago. Perhaps it is still plausible, because we're still missing out on something important.

With sapience enters ego...

But easy access to energy is gone. This is Earth’s last chance to bootstrap to the stars.

I never thought of it this way, but after reading your comment, this realization definitely hit me pretty hard.

Well, they're wrong, so...

That's not true: given enough time decomposing organic material will create new oil reserves, while all the metals excavated are still right here on the surface of the Earth used every day by us (cars, phones, ...) and ready to re-enter the surface once we are done using them.

I'm not sure I follow. How is it gone? We have fusion (solar) and fission. And we may find out how to more directly harness energy as we progress. I think our access to energy is limited by our lack of knowledge.

I agree though, we should get out on some new space vessels soon to buy some insurance and project ourselves into the far future.

If we go extinct, the next intelligent species (if there is one) won’t have the easy reserves we used to get started. You can’t jump directly from fire to fusion.

Give it a few million years and they'll have hydrocarbons the exact same way we got them.

I don't take comfort in the potential extinction of humanity!

Surely we recognize that living things exist independent and outside of us without needing to lessen our own existence.

>Couldn't you make the analogous argument that the extinction of all life on Earth would be fine since it would have absolutely no effect on the vast majority of the universe?

I suppose you could but that's not what I said.

>non-sapient critters still around

even leaving out monkeys and apes, i think other animals like for example racoons can make it to the "sapient" level with time if humans would "release" the space back to the Nature. And i think we have only very slightest idea about birds and insects. Cro-Magnon has been i'd say a version 0.7 of sapience with major bugs and broken&missing features, and i'd not be surprised if the Nature had other versions in the works.

That's entirely possible. But sapience isn't necessarily adaptive. Ancient humans combined sapience with other traits like endurance, dexterity, overhand throwing ability, and social instincts to carve out an ecological niche long enough to reap the benefits of culture. Removing any one of those factors would have made prehistoric humans unviable.

If I was going to bet on non-human sapience, though, I'd go with crows. Intelligence seems to be most effective if you combine it with social instincts to create culture. Crows do this already.

The entire milky way galaxy being swallowed by a super massive blackhole would have absolutely no effect on the vast majority of the universe.

> ecofascism

Oh, you're a "social ecologist" aren't you?

There is nothing fascist or right-leaning in the notion that human activity largely has a negative impact on the natural world.

We are part of the natural world

Haven't humans also cultivated much of the natural world? Some ecosystems fall apart once humans leave.

I'm not really any kind of ecologist?

Humanity has an outsized impact on the world (natural and artificial). Our influence has impacted nearly all the ecological niches on earth. That said, assigning moral agency to me (or you) for that depends on a series of logical connections between ways of being and the human impact on the world.

We each choose (somewhat - hard to choose to be born in the first world) how we live, but individuals have limited agency for what "humanity" does as a whole. It's all well and good to say "humans bad" (and I don't totally disagree?), but that perspective has been out there for a while and humans are still doing the bad things. Seems like we should search for different approaches.

I don't think any ecofacist exists outside of 4chan

If eco-terrorists are a subset of eco-fascists, they certainly exist in the real world and are dangerous.

I'm not aware of any "eco terrorist" who also as an eco-fascist, but I could be missing someone.

Scare quotes because I refuse to debase the word 'terrorism' by extending it to include property damage.

Edit: To put it mildly, the average Earth Firster has almost nothing politically in common with, e.g., the Christchurch shooter or the Unibomber.

They might exist in congressional testimony, if FBI decide they need more money or something.

Our concept of “world” includes and subsumes any animal concept of “world”. Chimpanzees may think of local forest as “the world” but our “world” includes their forest. This, compared to any other non-human species on earth, we are the center of “the” world.

In addition, our actions determine the fates of non-human species much more than their actions our fates.

What if humans are special, and help hold ecosystems together? We know of some, like the great plains and the redwood forests, where lack of human management leads to ecosystem breakdown.

That doesn't make humans special. Ecosystems are defined by the interrelations of many actors. The fact that humans are huge, impactful actors matters, but doesn't make them unique.

Also recall that humans, as an invasive species, can be adept at destroying ecosystems. There's a big, interlocking series of forests in South America, for instance, that gets a lot of attention, but that's hardly the only example.

If humans hold our ecosystems together, then elimination of humans will also result in the rest of animals dying off.

And if another species dies off, it can also destabilize the ecosystem. Where is the special role of humans coming from?

We are able to recognize, anticipate and avert ecological collapse. No other animal can do this. The rest of the animal kingdom can only adapt, at best.

I think you both overstate human understanding of ecological systems and desire to maintain them.

Humans mostly tend to radically reshape local ecosystems for their own ends, at times collapsing them.

Aside from some very local remediation successes here and there (which are more repair jobs than preservation), I'm unaware of any evidence that humans have "recognized, anticipated and averted" any of note.

Do you have any?

Farming and agriculture is ecological creation on a grand scale, and responsible for much of human flourishing, along with the animals and plants we cultivate.

Agriculture is an activity, not an ecosystem. Humans are but one element of the ecosystems in which they exist, and their flourishing is relevant only insofar as it preserves systemic viability.

Farms are inherently unstable - the 'system' is missing. From an ecological perspective, they're no more an ecosystem than you'd get if you released a bunch of random animals in your house. You'd have a new 'system' that lasts until they die.

Hence human's ability to avert collapse on a continyal basis. No other creature farms like humans.

You're not discussing ecosystems.

That's just a semantic argument. Humans have an ability no other organism has to create and maintain biological systems. It is the only thing that could possibly save an ecosystem from collapse. If humans are eliminated, then so is this ability.

So are insects & plankton - if you remove them, a lot of ecosystems would fall apart.

Insects and plankton cannot purposefully prevent collapse. Only humans can do this.

this is a guaranteed-fail way of introducing this topic IMHO, at a critical point in history.. please avoid "landmine" or "hot button" phrases discussing massive topics !

I fail to see how "ecofascistic" does not fly apart into its mutually repellant components. Fascism is strongly tied to modernity and modernism. It is the polar opposite of allowing nature to overtake cities. Intentional decline is decadence, which is expressly opposed by fascist ideology.

The end of humanity would not be the end of life, right now.

However it's only a matter of time until something large collides with Earth and destroys it all.

Like it or not humans are the best chance this planet has to continue life on after a cataclysmic event by hopefully colonizing another planet.

They're not empty. They're full of coyotes.

Bit weird to see them in broad daylight, but we definitely have an urban coyote problem in the US.

I swear the most common "crazy story from my vet" is the soccer mom that rescues a litter of puppies that she found on her run...

Probably something they heard from another vet, who heard from another vet - sounds very close to the classic "Mexican Pet" urban legend.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-mexican-pet/

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