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Comment by thePhytochemist | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for posting this, such a nice story and writeup!

Where I live in Vancouver the coyotes have been very noticeable this year. I love to hang out with them in the park and garden, and hear them howl with the cop cars at night. They are not pets though - I always keep my distance and keep aware of the possibility that they might sneak up on me.

I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog. I worry about her but there are many fences, she is smart as well as a good climber. There are many hazards in the city that don't have the positive sides that coyotes do, and I think it's important that we learn to live with them and honour what they bring to our lives. That includes rat control, which we rather need here.

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I take care of an outdoor cat in the neighborhood, and yes it's possible that a coyote will eat a cat or small dog.

I live near a trail which also serves as a wildlife corridor, including coyotes that we regularly see on our dog walks. Years ago, we had a feral cat that we would feed and care for (including neutering). He remained outside because he refused to even be brought inside, let alone live with us. This guy was huge, and looked like he had won his share of fights with the scars to prove it. If a cat would survive in the wild, it would be this guy. But even he wasn’t tough enough to hold off (what I assume were) coyotes forever, and one day he just quit coming around.

After that I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood.

(And for context, we aren't out in the boonies; this is within the city limits of Redmond, WA, where the local elementary gets locked down about once a year because mama bear and her cubs showed up off that same trail.)

This isn't such a bad thing. I love cats, but assuming coyotes are native to where you live, having them around is way better than outdoor cats (feral or otherwise) as they kill a ridiculous amount of native species.

Coyotes aren’t native to the northwest, they moved in after European settlers extirpated the wolves. They almost surely are less damaging to natives though.

Well, there is a place for both killers. The coyote down on the forrest floor- and the cat up int he tree canopy. Everyone is happy.

I'm in cottage lake woodinville, same.

Even more bizarre I fenced in my yard hoping to keep out the rabbits, but they always find a way in. Last winter I went out there and found a dismembered rabbit in the middle of the yard. I went to get a bag to pick it up, and when I got back, all that was left were a couple feet. An eagle maybe? I left the feet, but nothing came to get them :D

We had a house near Matthews Beach, and when we moved in there were many rabbits in the neighborhood and in our yard. We have a terrier-mix mutt, and there weren't rabbits in our yard for long...

We have had the opposite experience: over the years, mama rabbits have had multiple litters in our backyard. We have two pit bull terriers, and they would chase the rabbits (never catching them), so mama rabbit knows there are dogs. My only theory is that the dogs are a known quantity, and the dogs keep the real predators out of the backyard.

That, or rabbits are just that dumb.

My dog definitely caught rabbits. He even brought two kits into the house. He's a sweetheart in every other circumstance, but he loves toys that squeak when he mauls them.

We just had this a week or so ago. Stray cat was so cautious that at the end of convalescing in our garage following getting fixed (we had to trap him) he stayed in the garage all day after we opened the side door, and even then, near dusk he stood on the threshold and looked out for 11 straight minutes before taking a step out.

Last week coyotes took him (in part of the country quite far from King County) at night right next to our house, right next to his most familiar territory, and not 20-30 feet from a number of structures he routinely climbed on top of but which coyotes would have no chance of following.

I currently can’t help but take a dim view of coyotes at the current moment, for selfish reasons. I hadn’t thought this to be at all likely given the apparent caution the cat took, but I did spent a couple of years building up a good relationship with that sweet guy.

I lived in a semi-rural area with some foothills behind our property growing up.

I distinctly remember that our neighbor had a number of different cats over the years. They were never around that long. He always named them _C.B._

I never thought much of it, maybe he was just a fan of chatting of radios.

I was in my teenager when I finally realized what C.B. stood for in this context: Coyote Bait

"I’ve noticed that we just don’t have outdoor cats in our neighborhood"

Stop neutering cats, encourage alley cats.

poor kitty, but, native predators beating back invasive ones is a huge win

A huge win to whom?

I'm a little too simple to assign moral values like good/bad or win/lose to nature things, all I know is I like cats more because they're cute, so I'll always take them over coyotes.

Humans could be considered invasive too, it's not a huge win if a super predator starts beating us back. At least not from our agreed upon definitions of "win", then again if one starts to play with the meaning of words, one can say the sky is green.

Most natural populations of a given species have density-dependent population regulation. Be it from a reduced food supply, or multi-year cycles where they provide ample food for their predators population to grow to the point they become the food supply being reduced until their predators population shrinks and the cycle begins again. Disease transmission also acts to keep populations in check when density increases too much where food is essentially unlimited. Negative feedback loops are fascinating and were unique in the sense that we’ve managed to short-circuit nearly all of them to virtually every other species detriment.

A huge win to all the birds and smaller mammals that are killed in the billions every year by domestic cats that shouldn't be there. They fuck up the whole system.

outdoor cat's are an invasive species, they put unatural pressure on birds population so I hate them !

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You... hang out with coyotes in the park? I live near a park with coyotes and all of us are wary of them. The people who walk their dogs frequently carry sticks. As a parent of a 1 yr old and 4 yr old who likes to let them have some degree of age appropriate freedom running around in the park, I can't help but think of the coyotes. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem like they might be dangerous around people, particularly children.

Maybe it's HN's demographics speaking, but everyone here is talking about their pets, but what about children? Do coyotes not attack kids?

I think coyotes can get desensitized to humans.

I live in a rather rural area in King county and we have packs of coyote that hunted down a deer one winter, and is generally weary of humans and dogs (the neighborhood has 2+ dog per household on average).

Then the past weekend we played a round of Golf at Newcastle and a pack of coyote pups pop up in broad daylight and one of them lied down to watch us tee off then left when we're done. It was very cute and we had to fight the urge to pet them like puppies

Coyotes are wary of people and can usually be scared off by making loud noises. Coyote attacks on people are very rare. Off leash, escaped, or stray domestic dogs are much more of a threat to children than coyotes.

We have coyotes in our backyard (literally as I write this one is sleeping in our flower beds). They are extremely shy (and not very big). We have cats go through the same yard all the time. That said, coyotes do kill cats. I would be wary if confronted by a coyote and keep children away from. But attacks are apparently extremely rare:

https://tchester.org/sgm/lists/coyote_attacks.html

Union Hill representing. I’m a bit envious! We hear but seldom see ours.

On the topic of rat control, your comment interleaves two diametrically opposed approaches in the biological solutions space. Providing calorie input to a feral (invasive, nonnative) cat as opposed to merely recognizing the beauty and effectiveness of a species which is native to this continent (although maybe not Vancouver before 1900, TIL). I have an indoor cat so I understand the caretaking instinct. But the consequences for our urban ecosystems of artificially supporting feral cats are severe. They rarely kill rats, especially not when they have easier options like our birds and native small mammals. And with the surplus calorie supply that so many concerned city dwellers give them, they often fall back to their kill and play instincts instead of actually hunting for food, which leads to even less of the desperate “I shall attack a 12 ounce demon with buck teeth” behavior that we fantasize about.

I live in Chicago and had a coyote briefly staying under my deck last autumn when the juveniles leave their dens. They regularly prowl through my neighborhood, traveling north and south on the commuter rail line tracks and ducking off into parks and backyards for hunting. Such a magnificent creature to see up close. That experience motivated me to kill the ornamental boxwood that was in my backyard and start planting native plants which can support native birds, pollinators and small mammals and in turn provide a food supply all the way up the food chain to that coyote. I wish more people in my city spent their money and time on that food chain instead of one that begins and ends at PetSmart.

> I live in Chicago and had a coyote briefly staying under my deck last autum

Wow I misread this as “staying under my desk” a comical number of times before I managed to actually see the right word.

How delightful to imagine, a little pile of coyotes snuggled up under your desk, in the middle of some office building in Chicago!

I grew up in a buffer zone with a lot of coyotes and one day our (small male) dog was lured away by noisy females. The next day all I found was his collar about a km away, chewed through and bloody. They are most certainly not pets and are incredibly smart and resourceful.

In our neighborhood near Boston, coyotes have become very active at night and trot in the middle of roads and between houses. Several times in the morning I have found absolutely shredded carcasses of squirrels and rabbits on our property in locations which are not likely to be attributed to other predators such as owls.

We have also noticed fewer raccoons on our security camera, which we used to see several times per week at night around our fishpond (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952437) but now only once or twice per month.

Neighbors have also reported missing outdoor cats, which I believe are probably coyote kills (we live on a small peninsula ~1 km^2 so cats are unlikely to wander far from home). About 10 years ago, a nearby relative found the carcass of a cat on his front lawn, which he believes was a coyote. All that was left was the skin/fur and the intestines.

Yes, I used to live on a peninsula in Quincy and there were coyotes that would run past us on the beach from time to time or be seen walking down the sidewalk or hanging out in the back yard.

>I love to hang out with them in the park and garden,

It's good fun to watch and listen to the coyotes until one of them steals a beloved pet away right before your eyes. My family has lost a total of three cats to these things and I know people who've lost smaller dogs. Cases of them attacking kids aren't unheard of either, and the risk isn't something to laugh at when it comes to unsupervised small kids.

As far as i'm concerned, when coyotes reach the population levels that it's easy to see in metro Vancouver, it's a good time to start a culling campaign. This is not an endangered animal.

> It's good fun to watch and listen to the coyotes until one of them steals a beloved pet away right before your eyes

Shutting cats in at night is recommended where I live, to protect vulnerable native species. Presumably that can work both ways.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-we-do...

People love to celebrate when the population of large predators near other people increases.

Coyotes do not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as a lion. And people should celebrate anytime a native predator is able to carve out a niche in an urban environment as long as it doesn’t involve murdering children. Which coyotes don’t do. They eat small mammals and also sometimes invasive feral cats.

The reason coyotes don't eat children is that they're kept separate. Same reason sharks don't eat children. Left to their own devices, coyotes obviously will eat children.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707064

> 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.

Another story that came up on HN was someone describing how he used to adventure through the wild areas near his home, and was never bothered by the lone coyotes he saw, but that on one occasion he met two coyotes together, and they began circling him. I didn't manage to find that one today.

My dad lives in Silverlake LA and there’s a coyote den up the hill a bit from his house. He’s got two huge dogs, but sometimes when you walk em they’ll get super excited to go after a coyote standing in the middle of the street. Thing is, they’re damn smart, and you can be sure that if you see one in the street, there’s another one the opposite way down the street, usually hiding under a car. They 100% know when they have numbers on a larger animal and when they don’t.

Coyotes attacked a small dog in the park near my house last fall (when the juveniles leave the den and try to stake out territory) so I understand the concern. But comparing them to lions in Zimbabwe doesn’t resonate with me and I live in Chicago (we have tons, one was under my porch last year).

Think of all the samples of the interaction function between humans and the >1mm coyotes (often unbeknownst to the humans) in American cities each day. The list of all attacks recorded in modern times has a Wikipedia page. In human-created spaces we make very little separation from the habitats coyotes live in. They choose not to predate the defenseless babies they encounter in backyards because it is not the ecological niche they have carved out.

I will let my older children play unsupervised in my backyard despite knowing there are dozens of coyotes in my city because no creature has made a niche out of killing them. The same is not true for my very young children but that’s because toddlers have made an evolutionary niche out of killing themselves :)

> samples of the interaction function between humans and the >1mm coyotes (often unbeknownst to the humans)

I'm now more worried by the possibility of ≤1 mm micro-coyotes.

> but that on one occasion he met two coyotes together, and they began circling him.

He must have done something to react fearfully. I've charged at literal packs of 10 to 15 of them, yelling and enjoying myself, only to have them scatter in complete chaos. With children and no adult present, coyotes are a real danger, but when they meet adults that show no fear, they're amazingly nervous. I know of only one North American attack on a human adult in recent history (a rather petite woman) that was fatal.

While walking my dog on leash some years back, we were surrounded and stalked by 5 very hungry coyotes (it was a drought year and they were very scrawny) for about 20 minutes.

They got increasingly more bold, eventually only just out of kicking range. As I would charge and threaten the one or two in front of me, the others would try to approach from behind. We were being hunted.

All this while carrying my dog (they definitely would have killed him if he were on the ground) and wearing flip flops.

This was in Santa Cruz, late in the summer, at dusk. Terrifying. They tracked us all the way back to the car, but once I found a good stick they became much less daring.

putting coyotes in NYC makes as much sense to me as putting a subway train network in a coyote preservation wilderness they may attack small humans, get rabbies, get hit by cars, generally be stressed and miserable from the hustle and bustle

Generation downvoting reality is at it again. Sorry, i suspect you grew up somewhere where you have to actually interact with "nature" and not its Disney-approximations on tv. I wish i could be the owl on the wall, when these things in some-freezing winter - starved out of common sense, maul some nature idealizing jogger, who "will never be attacked because they are normally scared of humans". Nature expands exponential and if you give up to it, it will demand twice the amount tomorrow.

Were they indoor cats?

one was, but liked to sit in the front patio, where the coyote literally grabbed it right in front of my mother, just a foot from the door. The other two were younger and outdoor cats. The dogs I know of having been killed were no more outdoor dogs than any dog is while being walked, sometimes briefly off-leash, in a park or wood, by its owner.

Implying blame on the owners of these pets for a plague of predators way outside the scope of any natural population they would have in an area is also just off the rocker. We live in a modified environment largely of our creation, where many wild animal populations have long since slid from whatever would have in some distant past been natural. Culling coyotes in urban areas, where they can be a real danger to both pets and kids, is not some sort of grotesque ecological sin.

There have been less than 10 (Wikipedia says 2) fatal coyote attacks in recorded history. A conservative estimate of the number of native birds and small mammals killed by feral cats since unix time began counting on 1/1/1970 is 1 trillion. Literally 20 billion a year. That’s a grotesque ecological sin against the ecosystems which keep us alive. Artificially supporting an invasive species which eats your petsmart kibble and then ravages (often as play) whatever vestige of the native wonder that existed in North America before we turned it into lawns is an ecological sin. Not caring for it and trying to leave it a better place than we found it for the next generation is an ecological sin.

>> a plague of predators way outside the scope of any natural population

You're talking about humans, right?

And are you proposing that culling coyotes is just the same as killing off humans who overpopulate?

Also, in our case, whatever our sustainable population in a place is, that's our natural population. Seeing as how we're completely a product of nature too, the numbers we can keep alive are natural.

An exaggerated coyote population in an urban landscape on the other hand, isn't natural because it depends on our presence to stay that way.

Any perceived implication is a result of your own projection. I asked a simple, neutral question. I've had an entire litter of labs get eaten by coyotes and was literally just curious about your own predicament.

And in that case, sorry for misunderstanding.

At a certain point if you keep getting outdoor cats you’re making a conscious choice to keep feeding coyotes.

I’m sorry but if you let your cat outside then don’t be surprised when it’s snatched by a predator higher up the food chain. Your cat isn’t native to the area either and it’s certainly preying on animals lower down the chain.

Sorry- but do you honestly belief that coyotes will hunt rats? In a city? They will eat fastfood leftovers from the garbage cans with the rats. Creatures hunt out of desperation- hunting is energy-expensive, dangerous and often not successful unless it targets the small, old or parasite riddled. That coyote will get diabetes before it gets to even start hunting rats.

Not sure about coyotes, but here in Norway foxes hang around near the garbage bins of restaurants because the garbage attracts rat. They will then leave happily with a huge rats in their mouths.

London, England has a large population of urban foxes.

It seems that their favourite meal is discarded fast-food fried chicken bits, their second choice is "raid the garbage bins for anything smelly and meat-based". But for sure they'd take live prey such as rats. They also eat snails and earthworms.

In other words, a successful urban animal should be nocturnal, fast and agile, clever and above all: omnivorous.

I have webcam footage from my backyard of a Coyote catching and eating a rat. The University of Washington has been doing DNA analysis of the scat of urban Coyotes and they eat a lot of rats (even more rabbits).

https://seattlecoyotestudy.wixsite.com/seattlecoyotestudy/ab...

I see coyotes hunting gophers all the time in the big city I live in. I have never seen one rooting around in a garbage can.

As a cat "owner" this seems not true. Cats hunt as a hobby.

My well fed cat used to hunt rats, and eat them.

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