The stealthy presence of coyotes in Harford County – a presence farmers who raise livestock have been keenly aware of for a quarter of a century – is something worth pondering as it is evidence of both the consequences of human damage inflicted on the natural world, and how little control humans ultimately have over that world.
We humans can boast some limited success in managing nature. Fisheries management efforts can be credited with helping to restore populations of rockfish, shad and yellow perch in the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay, though there's a long way to go before nature's full bounty is restored. There are those who say, however, the return of the ever ravenous rockfish put a dent in the crab population.
Similarly, white-tailed deer, once all but extirpated from these parts, have been brought back, and their return shares something with the emergence of coyotes in these parts.
State biologists tell us coyotes, native to the American southwest, began moving into states east of the Mississippi in the early 1900s when the last of the timber wolves that once roamed the forests of the east were wiped out by humans. Wolves have a special place in the human experience, rivaled only by snakes for the fear they instill and their frequent symbolic use in literature.
Destroying the wolf population was seen as a public policy goal in the late 1800s, and that goal was achieved. Though it's not the kind of wildlife management goal that would be advocated these days, neither is anyone talking about restoring wolf populations in these parts. Human dominion over the wild places may seem to have been firmly established when the wolves were gone, but getting rid of them cleared the way for their smaller canine cousins, the coyotes.
Smaller, less menacing and more likely to avoid contact with even young children visiting their grandmothers, coyotes are relatively easy for people to deal with, at least compared to wolves. Still, the goal of the wolf eradication efforts begun more than a century ago wasn't to replace one dog-like predator with another. Similarly, the goal of restoring white-tailed deer wasn't so they could roam suburban neighborhoods at night, raiding vegetable gardens and noshing on shrubbery.
Curiously, there's an argument to be made that had wolves not been wiped out, they would have been around to keep the replenished deer population in check, but that's one of those great, unanswerable "what if" questions.
The ability of nature to rebound, albeit in unanticipated ways, to both insults and assistance is evidenced in the way deer have returned with something of a vengeance and coyotes have shown up to take the place of their larger relatives. We do well to be cautious about the damage we inflict on the natural world, intentional or otherwise, as the results can be predictably large, even as their other aspects are almost always unpredictable.