Backyard Beasts of Prey
It’s unseasonably warm for a mid-October evening. The air is still, except for the occasional gust of wind. The only sound in Rio de Los Angeles State Park, aside from the faint din of nearby traffic, comes from a handful of men playing a pickup game on the basketball court. Beyond the park lies a set of abandoned railroad tracks and, beyond that, the concrete-lined Los Angeles River meanders toward a highway interchange near Dodger Stadium.
A homeless man moves in and out of the shadows as he rummages through a series of trash cans scattered along the edge of a grass lawn. A gray-haired coyote with splotches of orange-brown fur trails patiently just a few paces behind. “There’s no way he’d be following him,” says National Park Service researcher Justin Brown, watching from inside his SUV, “unless he was feeding him.”
Brown jots down a few notes, but this male coyote isn’t what he’s here for. Brown is looking for another of the coyotes that lives in this area, a female known as C-149. One of a growing number of coyotes making a home for themselves in the asphalt-coated cities and towns of North America, C-149 is a new sort of animal.
Utterly wild yet wholly comfortable in the big city, urban coyotes root around in our garbage, sniff out the fruits and vegetables growing in our yards and sometimes even take a run at our pets. Even though the mesopredators —
