By American Indian tradition, he is the Trickster, the most cunning but also the most flawed and human of animal spirits. Noble and godlike in some ways, he is also perverse, vain, deceitful, larcenous, obsessed with sex, and a lover of pranks who repeatedly blunders into trouble and gets his comeuppance, but always bounces back.
To ranchers in the West, he is nothing more than a despised varmint to be hunted down and killed.
To generations of movie and television viewers who have watched the "Roadrunner" cartoons, he is Wile E. Coyote, the sneaky but hapless hunter blown up, squashed or zapped in midair, only to show up in the next frame, whole and ready to go again.
Today, to paraphrase William Faulkner, the coyote has not just survived it has prevailed. It has defied every effort to defeat it -- hundreds of thousands of coyotes are deliberately and legally killed every year -- and has literally taken over North America.
In an unsurpassed display of adaptability in the face of human dominance of the landscape, it has spread far beyond its original range on the Western plains and northern Mexico, and now inhabits wild lands, suburbs and cities from the Panama Canal to the edge of the Canadian tundra and from New York City to Los Angeles.
No one knows how many coyotes exist; educated guesses range from a million to tens of millions. But for sure, there are "more now than there have ever been, anywhere," said Dr. Russell Mason, a federal wildlife expert in Utah whose task has been to help control coyotes. The Trickster has not made it an easy job.
Yip and howl
In the eastern United States, where coyotes did not live until the 20th century, their trademark yip and howl have become familiar. In the absence of wolves, they may have become the top predator in the region including suburbs, where they think nothing of having a cat for lunch or killing any dog they can; they probably see it as a competitor.
In short, the coyote is an ecological success story. Along with the white-tailed deer, the moose and the red fox, it has established itself as a champion adapter in an era when the ability to adjust to changes brought about by humans has created a whole new class of dominant large mammals.
So what accounts for the coyote's extraordinary success? That is one of the main questions pondered by scientists who are paying new attention to what they see as a fascinating character. "It's by far the neatest animal I've ever worked with," Mason said.
One part of the answer may lie in the coyote's evolutionary position among wild canids, or doglike predators. Roughly the size and shape of a German shepherd, the coyote (the name comes from the Aztec word "coyotl") fills an ecological niche between that of the wolf and that of the fox. In fact, its very appearance and behavior seem to combine features of both.
Though smaller, more pointed of snout and more delicate of build and features, it looks markedly like a wolf. And contrary to earlier belief, it organizes itself in family-based packs dominated by an alpha male and an alpha female, again like wolves. Field researchers now know that coyotes hunting in concert can and often do bring down animals as large as adult deer.
But coyotes also have the beautiful bushy tail of the fox, and their preferred prey and individual style of hunting are foxlike. Both species dote on small mammals like mice, and both sneak up on the prey like cats and strike with a cat's pounce.
With the wolf's ability to attack and kill big prey and the fox's feline stalk for small animals, the coyote is almost always assured of finding something to eat. Its willingness to eat almost anything gives it a further advantage. Analysis of coyote waste has identified up to 100 different kinds of food. They gobble crickets, apples, grass, even shoe leather, and they love to forage in landfills. They also love watermelon; in Texas, they have become a serious problem for watermelon growers.
Another factor in the coyote's hardiness is that it evolved originally in a harsh, arid climate where summer days are blazing and nights are freezing. This enables it to adapt to a wide variety of conditions, said Dr. Robert Crabtree, an independent Montana ecologist, who with his wife, Jennifer Sheldon, has long studied the species.
But if nature equipped the coyote to survive, people have opened the door for it to prevail. They have played to the coyote's strength, for example, by chopping the forests of the eastern United States into isolated fragments. The edges of the forest fragments provide ideal habitat for small mammals, and their populations have exploded, providing a coyote buffet.
Unlike many other types of animals, such as turtles and frogs, coyotes are mobile enough to cross forest clearings, roads and other barriers in search of food and breeding territory, and they consequently thrive in human-altered environments.
'Look like dogs'
They are highly territorial, and the drive to strike out and establish turf sends them aggressively into densely inhabited cities and towns. And "because they look so much like dogs, they are actually able to move through areas relatively unnoticed," said Dr. Michael Klemens, director of the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance, an arm of New York's Wildlife Conservation Society that deals with regional wildlife issues.
They have been spotted in New York City in recent years, most recently in late March and early April, when the police cornered and captured one in Central Park. Four years ago, a coyote lived in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, eating spaghetti with meatballs and shrimp lo mein that a neighborhood couple brought.
But feeding coyotes is not necessarily a good idea, since people have sometimes been bitten by them, and some reports say this happens when coyotes are fed. Coyotes also sometimes stalk people from a distance or chase joggers. "I think we'd be foolish" to ignore the possible danger, said Dr. Matthew Gomper, a behavioral ecologist at Columbia University. But he added, "We'd be foolish to overplay the threat."
Another way in which humans have increased the coyote's fortunes is by exterminating wolves, which kept the coyote bottled up, ecologically speaking. The demise of the wolf in most of the contiguous 48 states liberated coyotes in two ways: Deer populations exploded, providing more prey, and coyotes' most important predator disappeared.
In the canid hierarchy of primitive North America, wolves dominated coyotes wherever the species coexisted. Wolves are easily able to kill coyotes, and wolf packs do so whenever they can. This has been vividly demonstrated in Yellowstone National Park, where a reintroduced wolf population, according to Crabtree's studies, soon reduced the coyote population by more than half (though it has recovered somewhat).
In the wild, coyotes consequently exist on the fringes of wolf packs' territories; a trip to the core of wolf turf could bring instant death. The same is true of the next step down the hierarchical ladder: Foxes exist on the fringes of coyote territory. "Foxes are to coyotes as coyotes are to wolves," Gomper said.
Evading capture
Crabtree believes the coyote is resilient "because it co-evolved with a larger competitor that kills it." Having to look out for wolves made coyotes more vigilant and more adept at evading capture.
Crabtree tells the story of a male coyote he once tried to trap in Washington state. He has caught some 300 coyotes in rubber-padded leg-hold traps, put radio collars on them for scientific study, and then released them. But this particular coyote turned in a virtuoso performance in evasion.
As Crabtree tells it, he first encountered the coyote when it was trying to free its mate from the scientist's trap in Washington. For the next four years, it seemed, the coyote taunted him.
"He would do things like dig up my trap and flip it over, unsprung," Crabtree said. "One time he scraped the dirt off and defecated on it without springing it." Another time, when the scientist tried to drop a net on the coyote from a helicopter, it jumped up and tried to bite the helicopter and then hid under sagebrush. "He was one smart guy." And he was never caught. Another win for the Trickster.
"Coyotes think about things," Mason said. "A coyote only needs to be shown something once."
The coyote's evasion skills have frustrated efforts to control its livestock predations by nonlethal means, Mason said. Guard dogs, strobe-light alarm systems, aversion strategies in which lamb meat is laced with substances to make the coyote sick all have fallen short.