A coyote took up residence in Chicago’s Norwood Park neighborhood this spring. It’s hard to say how long it was there before anyone noticed it, but once someone did all hell broke loose. In mid-April Chicago television cameras and newspaper reporters descended, and the coyote graciously cooperated, posing with alert ears and bright eyes in the backyard of a white house.
It turns out that despite repeated searches and the setting of a live trap, the coyotes were never caught. Poholik’s guess is that with everybody and their brother out there looking for them, they made themselves scarce, perhaps moved out of the hood altogether.
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Just as coyotes kill the animals that are sick, weak, or dumb enough to get caught, the government’s blundering has exterminated the coyotes that are least savvy about human tricks. Biologists believe those that survive teach their pups how to stay out of harm’s way. Through experience, and perhaps natural selection, the coyotes alive today know enough to move out of “control” areas. Some go away for short periods and return when the pressure is eased, others split altogether.
A class at Oakton Community College has been studying coyote scat and tracks at Somme prairie grove in Northbrook since last February to determine what coyotes here eat and do. (Terry Trobeck intended to have the students study the coyotes themselves, but in all their visits none of them has seen a coyote in the flesh.) Perhaps the coyotes were studying the students; their tracks and scat were plainly visible in the snow. Poking around in the coyote crap back in the laboratory, the students determined that field mice and voles made up the bulk of the coyotes’ diet at Somme.
