Living with coyotes and other creatures

Like it or not, we live in the midst of wildlife, even in Huntington Beach. Or wildlife lives in our midst. It depends on how you look at it. Some of us are thrilled by the wildlife around us, and some are not. Partly that depends on how you view wildlife, and partly it depends on how the wildlife is affecting you.

For example, it’s fun to see cute baby skunks parading behind mama skunk. But it isn’t so nice to smell them. And it really isn’t nice if your pet tangles with one and then comes into the house.

Raccoons roaming in your yard can be a pleasant sight, but it’s not pleasant if they eat the koi or goldfish in your pond. It’s interesting to watch an opossum, but not as interesting if it is eating all the fruit in your fruit trees or the produce in your garden. You get the idea.

During pioneer times, people systematically killed wolves, mountain lions, bears, weasels and any other critter that might eat something that they wanted to eat. Game animals weren’t safe either. Pioneers hunted some game animals, such as bison, almost into oblivion. They hunted others, such as the passenger pigeon, to total extinction. Times have changed over the last hundred plus years. The frontier is gone. There isn’t so much wildlife left, and what little is left is mostly protected.

We think that people should enjoy seeing wildlife in their yards or neighborhoods. But no matter how you feel about the animals that visit your neighborhood, it’s against the law to harass or harm them. It’s also generally against the law to feed them.

Feeding birds in your backyard is OK, but feeding coyotes is another matter. Some misguided people do feed coyotes, but other lawbreakers are intentionally setting traps for coyotes.

Coyotes live in Huntington Beach. That is a fact of life. Coyotes have adapted readily to our urban environment and have found places to den at Shipley Nature Center, Sully Miller Lake, Bolsa Chica, the Huntington Wetlands and the Santa Ana River. Pairs of adult coyotes are raising litters of pups. The pups grow up to become adults, and in time they have pups of their own.

The world would be overrun with coyotes if there weren’t factors that keep their population in check. Coyotes get hit by cars, develop diseases, get parasites and sometimes starve due to illness or injury. Their life in the wild is short. This is part of the natural cycle of life, and we shouldn’t interfere with it by feeding them.

Coyotes are crafty hunters and highly adaptable. In the spring and summer, they eat berries and fruit if they can find them. The rest of the time, they’ll snack on mice, gophers, ground squirrels, rabbits, insects and road-kill.

Coyotes are the top predators of our local food chain, and therefore an important component of our ecosystem. Their occasional choice of household pets for prey has not endeared them to some people, but mostly they eat wild prey.

We’ve seen coyote pups at Shipley Nature Center searching for something to eat, and adults strolling neighborhood streets at night. A couple of years ago, we saw the red female coyote that dens at Shipley Nature Center engaged in “mousing.” She peered intently at the ground, ears perked, then pounced like a cat when she heard a mouse scurry by. However, such sightings are fairly rare for us.

If we spent as much time at the Bolsa Chica as Mark Bixby does, we’d probably see coyotes more often. Mark frequently walks the Bolsa Mesa and environs with his camera, recording sights and deeds (and sometimes misdeeds). We have Mark to thank for forwarding to us the picture of a middle-aged woman feeding hot dogs to a skinny coyote.

The woman probably thought she was doing the coyote a favor by feeding it, but she wasn’t. All she did was teach the coyote to not respect or fear humans. The less frightened they are of people, the harder it will be to scare them away. Feeding coyotes is not only a really bad idea, it’s against the law.

Other people have reacted to coyotes in just the opposite way. Instead of feeding them, they’ve put food into gallon containers with narrow openings and left the containers out at Bolsa Chica. The coyote sticks its narrow nose into the hole in an attempt to retrieve the food and gets stuck. If it can’t paw the bottle off its nose, it will starve to death. Maybe that’s the whole idea. Intentionally harming wildlife is also against the law.

People need to learn to leave wildlife alone. They shouldn’t feed wildlife, and they certainly shouldn’t attempt to harm wild animals. Some people are concerned that coyotes are preying on their cats. Although we can sympathize with the loss of a pet, cats should be kept indoors. Cats that run loose outdoors kill an inordinate number of birds, including migratory birds. Maybe coyotes are part of the balance of nature to keep wandering cats in check so birds have a better chance of surviving their migratory flight and reproducing next summer.

Our advice in regard to wildlife is to just let it be.20051013gzerw1ke(LA)