Evolution in Action: The Rise of the Eastern Coyote
A coyote picks her way through the underbrush, the barely audible snap of twigs the only sound to mark her passing. She walks more like a cat than a dog, placing one paw in front of the other with slow, deliberate steps to pick her way through the nighttime woods. She stops to sniff a tree and is joined by a second coyote, a male, who does the same thing before pinning his ears back against his head and giving a soft bark. Seemingly in response, an owl hoots and they both pause.
This is a mated pair and they have just caught the scent of an unknown coyote in their territory. The male raises his leg to mark the spot before tossing his head back to howl repeatedly. His mate joins in with accompanying yips and shorter howls to fill in the gaps. Right now it’s only the two of them, but they must keep the area safe for when the pups are born.
To the human family that lives 20 yards up the hill, it sounds like a full pack. Tomorrow, they will tell their neighbors how last night they heard a dozen coyotes in the woods behind their house.
Coyotes are very recent arrivals to the eastern United States. Originally natives of the midwestern prairies, the animals first expanded west to California from the late 19th century to the early 20th. The 1940s saw coyotes come eastward and by the ’50s they had established their range from coast to coast. While on their travels, they mated with wolves in the Great Lakes region and the results of these pairings continued on to the coast. DNA analysis of coyote droppings proves that most coyotes in the East are part wolf. These expansion periods coincided with the decimation of the wolf population, which left an ecological niche for a new top predator. With little to no competition from the bigger wild canids, the eastern coyotes flourished. But something of the wolf stayed behind.
Scientists think these coyote-wolf hybrids currently live all the way from New England down along the Appalachian Mountains, and are making themselves just as much at home in towns and cities as forests and prairies.
This might sound scary for the people who live alongside them. But these hybrid coyotes might be just what we need.
For Massachusetts, more coyotes could be an answer to a deer population that’s grown too large. The number of deer is “above where we would want it to be,” says David Wattles, biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, “especially in eastern Massachusetts, inside the Interstate 495 corridor.” Too many deer mean plants are consumed more quickly than they can regrow, decreasing diversity of flora and, with it, that of the animals the forest can support. The presence of large numbers of deer creates a risk to humans as well, increasing the spread of tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme, which has reached epidemic proportions in some areas of New England. If deer were hunted by these bigger, more wolf-like coyotes, it might effectively restore balance to the ecosystem.
Jonathan Way, founder of the organization Eastern Coyote/Coywolf Research, who studies coywolves, says they are the “perfect-sized canid” for living alongside humans. They are small enough to disappear into the underbrush, do not require as much meat as wolves or as big a territory, yet hunt similar prey. Eastern coyotes “could be quite effective as deer predators,” says Way. If the animal is “only about 65 percent coyote, then a significant part, approximately one third of its genome, is not coyote,” he says, which means this is a new species altogether. Its significant levels of wolf DNA mean the animal is taking over as the apex predator in New England.
The eastern coyote or coywolf population has a reached a critical mass in New England, says Way, keeping the genome stable. That’s not to say it will stay the same. “We’re in the middle of watching evolution in action. This animal was created roughly 100 years ago and it’s still evolving.”
According to Way, there is no question that coyotes are helping to keep the deer population down on Cape Cod. In fact, coyotes prey on deer as much as wolves do, only differently since they focus their efforts on fawns and weak deer, whereas wolves target adults. Roland Kays, head of the Biodiversity Research Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, agrees this is the case, saying that a third of the eastern coyote’s diet is deer.
Wattles says that’s unlikely. “They’re not a perfect replacement for wolves,” he says. “A wolf is a much larger animal,” averaging about 100 pounds, more than twice the size of the eastern coyote. While about 33 percent bigger than their midwestern counterparts and with a more wolf-like skull, the coywolves still have predominantly coyote behavior. This means they opportunistically hunt deer but focus on small animals such as rodents and rabbits, so despite their larger size, the eastern coyotes cannot meaningfully affect the deer population. The biggest change to their diet, Wattles says, is how they have learned to incorporate food sources near human areas such as garbage, pets, pet food, and seed from bird feeders.
Even western coyotes cut down on deer and squirrel presence in wooded suburban areas, according to a study published in Current Zoology in 2016, conducted using camera traps in central Missouri. The study showed this effect to be more pronounced in areas close to human populations, as opposed to heavily forested areas where deer have more cover from predators. In New England, this could be happening in the wooded towns of eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut. The population of prey such as white tailed deer would decline in suburban forest patches either because they would flee the coyotes or be hunted by them.
For the average suburbanite, coyotes are associated with the prairie or deep woods rather than the backyard, so even one can be considered too many. Wattles calls this “the cultural carrying capacity” of an area, or how big a population of a species people will tolerate in an area. It’s a separate issue from how many animals an area can physically support in terms of food, space, and other needs.
Wattles understands that the coyote is “definitely a polarizing species” dividing “those who highly value coyotes on the landscape and those who see them as a safety threat and want to persecute them. What you’re dealing with is a lot of people in larger urban and suburban areas who are becoming increasingly separated from the natural world, even as a lot of animals are returning to the state.” As coyotes further adapt to a suburban or urban lifestyle, an increasing number of people will find they have to adapt their behavior as well, even if “they don’t have a knowledge base in dealing with wildlife.”
But Massachusetts is coyote country and the animals are here to stay, regardless of whether they’re called coywolves or eastern coyotes. Freed from their natural predators — wolves, mountain lions, and bears — eastern coyotes may be able to regulate pest species such as such deer and squirrels. They may be on their way to restoring the landscape in a suburban and urban system by their very presence, yet are small enough to be non-threatening to humans. Coyotes could still be competition for smaller carnivores such as foxes and bobcats but Wattles says both those animals seem to be doing well. As a result, he considers the coyote a native wildlife species now as opposed to an invasive species that would be “causing wide-scale havoc on the landscape.”
Way agrees that coyotes “cause very minor problems for the amount that live around here.” He says that because the animals are appropriately sized for this environment, have adapted to the fragmented yet thick woods of suburban New England, and move around so much, people think there are more of them than there really are. “People don’t realize that they live all over the place — they’re definitely adaptable animals and easy to co-exist with.”
Sharing space with wild animals, especially predators, has rarely been acceptable for humans. But coywolves could prove themselves good neighbors, making the environment more satisfactory for everyone — plants, animals, and people.
