Feral Cities (12 page)

“What's really cool is that she was actually absorbed into another forest preserve pack, which according to Dr. Gehrt is very rare. Usually when an animal comes to a new forest preserve there's already going to be a pack there and they are not going to be too friendly, so she's a special case. She's one of my favorites.”

Shane has plenty of stories about the secret lives of Chicago coyotes, tales that have been pieced together from snatches of geo-location data, dissected scats, pathology reports, and genetic tests. “Just recently, we had the oldest coyote on the project—Coyote 125—die on us,” he says. Coyote 125 was like some grand old coyote queen. At the peak of her reign, she controlled almost half of the vast Poplar Creek forest preserve. “She ended up settling down with her mate and slowly divvied up her territory until what was once a huge home range became concentrated in these two very small blocks. All she and her mate did was travel between
those two blocks. It was almost like she was given a small piece of territory—her little senior living home—within the areas of all these other packs.

“Eventually we found her dead one day. Unfortunately it was summer and the body had already gone through an advanced stage of decomposition, so it was not obvious what did her in. We sent her to the Brookfield Zoo to do a necropsy. I'm pretty sure they didn't find anything abnormal other than old age.”

Then there's the Campton Hills Animal, who caught mange—the nasty skin disease caused by the mite responsible for scabies in humans. “He had pretty bad mange a while back,” says Shane. “He's actually gotten over it, but he was a very visual animal during the middle of the day when he had mange. He'd just be walking down the streets and in backyards.” It is thought the fur loss caused by mange can make it harder for animals to regulate their body temperature and this encourages coyotes to be active in the daytime when it's warmer.

“The residents were very concerned about it. Dr. Gehrt had a lot of conversations with residents who were asking us what were we going to do about it. But we're observers, that's all we are. We're not introducing coyotes, we are just collaring them and following them and watching what they do. Luckily, he started to become less visible as the summer progressed and the calls about him have pretty much tapered off.”

As we reach Northbrook, Shane switches on the VHF receiver. It fills the cab with a constant hiss of static, but then, as we reach the intersection between I-294 and Dundee Road, a faint but regular pulse of beeps becomes audible over the white noise.
Pip, pip, pip,
it goes.

Shane pulls onto the verge, grabs the golf ball on the handle, and starts rotating the giant aerial clockwise. The beeps get louder and then quieter. Shane stops and starts turning the aerial
counterclockwise. The beeps grow louder and louder and then quieter. He continues swinging the aerial back and forth in ever-smaller increments before settling on the point where the beeps are at their loudest.

“She's on the edge about three degrees or so,” says Shane as we look into unlit forest preserve we've parked next to.

This is just the first reading. Shane needs more to calculate exactly where Coyote 390 is. “Typically it takes four different bearings to get an accurate triangulation. You only need three, but one will usually be off at some point. But she could just cross the road right now as we're taking these bearings. It gets very frustrating if she's moving quickly.”

We return to the road to relocate the signal from different angles. We race up and down the roads, listening as we go for the telltale pips. We pull into driveways and onto the shoulder, each time scanning the area to get the loudest signal. “We do a
lot
of creeping in front of people's houses like this,” says Shane, as he takes the fourth and final reading.

And how do people react to having a dark truck with a whopping great rotating aerial pulling up outside their house? I ask. “I get a lot of people who come out and talk to us. Most are pretty friendly, but every so often you get someone who doesn't believe you and thinks you're listening in to their cell phone conversations.”

Shane inputs the four readings into a tired-looking PalmPilot PDA. It crunches the numbers and adds the approximate location of Coyote 390 to the records. “She is somewhere in the trees out there,” says Shane, pointing at the dark forest.

We may have found her but she's staying well out of sight tonight, so we move on.

The second coyote on Shane's list is another suburbanite, the Palatine Animal. “She is from an area we nicknamed Melonhead's Marsh. We've got time what with the drive, so I'll tell the story,” says Shane as we begin the drive south to Palatine.

“The first female ever caught for the project was Coyote 1 in
March 2000. She was named the Schaumburg Female because she was from the Schaumburg suburb.” One day the Schaumburg Female found a mate, another collared animal: Coyote 115. “His nickname was Melonhead, because he had a giant head. Those two had countless litters and so they had to change their home ranges. They gave it up to their kids essentially.”

Coyote 1 eventually passed away in May 2010 at the age of nine or ten. “When she died, Melonhead left the area, because they are monogamous animals and the only time in which they will split is when one passes. He left his home range to try and find another mate. But his collar was, unfortunately, dying. He settled down in an area that we nicknamed Melonhead's Marsh.”

When the batteries on Melonhead's collar finally ran out, the team tried to capture him again, laying traps around Melonhead's Marsh, but they never found him. What became of Melonhead is a mystery, and unless the team get lucky with a genetic test, they will never know if he ever found love again.

But while the traps never caught Melonhead, they did get the Palatine Animal. She was just a juvenile then. “She grew up in an urban setting, in the city parks not forest preserves, so she's much more comfortable in using the roads and using the residential areas. She's in a residential area, using small city parks and stuff.”

This isn't unusual. Coyotes can be found all over the city. They live in cemeteries and parks, hide under tool sheds, sleep in compost heaps, dig dens in the sides of gravel pits, and wander Navy Pier after dark. The project even found one, now deceased, coyote that spent her days snoozing in an elementary school. “Every time I came to look for this female during the day I would find her under a deck at this school,” recalls Shane. “So there's little kids running around there, and I know exactly where this coyote is right underneath the deck and they are none the wiser. I'm sure if the school knew they would have her removed right away, but the fact that the animal had chosen to stay in that area with all these people around her is just amazing.”

Coyotes are extremely good at concealing themselves, and cities are full of hiding places that are near-invisible to us. “There's a lot of nooks and crannies in the urban landscape that are relatively hidden from people even when people are walking by,” says Stan. “In downtown Chicago, believe it or not, there's shrubbery down along the lakeshore and crevices in the rocks that they use. There could be a trash pile somewhere and they would burrow underneath that during the day.

“That's an aspect that's still amazing to me. You put radio collars on these animals and they show us what the landscape looks like to them as opposed to humans. It was quite apparent from early on that there's a lot of features in the urban landscape that you or I don't notice or take for granted, but those little features—a little bush in a parking lot, tall grass, a corner between two buildings—can make a difference to whether a coyote can live there or not.”

These easy-to-miss hideaways, together with the railroad tracks they often use to travel around unseen, have helped coyotes go deep into the city. They are so common in downtown Chicago that Lincoln Park Zoo now brings the flamingos indoors every night so the coyotes don't get them.

Coyotes also wander amid the skyscrapers of the city's business district, the Loop. One time a young coyote even walked into a Quizno's in the Loop and decided to cool down in the sandwich shop's drinks cooler. It sat there unfazed by the commotion of the crowd that gathered, until animal control officers came and took it away. Most coyotes in the Loop keep a lower profile, and what they get up to there is unknown; the dense towers block radio collar signals, turning the area into a blind spot for the study.

Coyote 441 is one of those that roams the Loop. She often hangs around Lincoln Park and patrols Navy Pier, but she also makes regular trips into the Loop. “She has a GPS collar, and watching the movements of coyote 441 is amazing,” says Shane. “You see how far she travels, going down Michigan Avenue and then into
the dead zone in the true downtown area, where all of sudden the points stop and later pick back up on the other side of downtown.

“You've got to wonder, what is she doing? Is she just running straight down the streets? Is there an underground area that she uses? How is she moving from one side of the Loop to the other safely every single night crossing countless roads?”

Traffic may be the biggest killer of Chicago coyotes, but many of them have mastered road safety. “If they want to cross a road that's fairly busy with traffic, they will sit by the road, watch very carefully, and wait for breaks in the traffic,” says Stan. “They also understand the direction in which the cars are coming from. If it's a divided highway, the coyote will only focus on traffic oncoming to them—they don't spend time looking in the other direction.”

If the median dividing the highway is large enough, coyotes will cross to the median and then wait for gaps in the traffic on the other side too. Others have learned to wait at intersections for the stoplights to change. “They will sit at a corner, literally just like a person waiting to cross,” says Stan. “They wait until the traffic stops at the light, and once the traffic stops then that's when they go across. It looks like the coyote is actually looking at the lights and waiting for the red light, but that's probably not happening since they don't really have good color vision. But in any event they still take advantage of the light, even if they are not necessarily watching the light.”

In Chicago the animals even cross the busiest roads, including freeways that carry as many as a hundred thousand vehicles a day.

The Palatine Animal is one of these habitual road crossers. “Her range is pretty big,” says Shane as we reach Palatine. “When we started, her home range crossed Route 53 and she would go from this side to that. In the past six months, though, she has stopped going to the other side.” Today her range is on the east side of Route 53, an area of residential streets and city parks.

Shane turns the receiver on and we listen for pips, but there's nothing. We circle the area, looping round and round the suburb.
Still nothing. “This can be a frustrating time, trying to find the animal for the first round of readings, searching and searching and trying to be careful about the speed you're traveling.”

As we patrol, I ask Shane whether he ever imagined he would end up tracking coyotes in his home city when he started his career in wildlife research. “No. It sounds silly, but even throughout college I never realized the size of the coyote population here in Chicago,” he says. “When I started on this project I was shocked how many were actually out there and how deep into the city they go. It just blew my mind.”

Fifteen minutes become half an hour and there's still no sign of the Palatine Animal. The strip mall with the CVS that we've passed over and over again comes back into view. After the best part of an hour searching in vain, we admit defeat and move on to the next coyote, which lives in Schaumburg.

This time, the signal is there from the moment the receiver is switched on. Shane takes an initial reading and then heads into a residential area to get further readings. Shane sighs as we enter the twisty suburban streets. “One of the hardest things of this job is just learning the ropes, learning the cul-de-sacs,” he explains. “Suburban settings can be a nightmare because most of the new ones don't like grid systems. Everything has to be curved so you'll think you're going east and then, all of a sudden, you're turning and you're like
‘Noooo!
Now I'm going west.' It can be quite a nightmare.”

As we drive through the mazelike streets, we pass a man unloading shopping from his car. He doesn't even register the strange truck with the big aerial. The residents are probably used to it by now, says Shane. “We've been here for ten years and a lot of the residents know us, but in other areas people will sit there and point and watch you drive by.”

We eventually track the coyote to Hackberry Court, a quiet cul-de-sac that ends in a small roundabout. “There,” says Shane in triumph, “old 571.”

Between two of the houses there's movement and the
unmistakable silhouette of a coyote. Shane flicks on the truck's spotlight, illuminating the yard and revealing the yellow gray coyote. She stops moving and looks toward us.