Despite having less room to establish their home ranges in cities than in the countryside, the coyotes and red foxes in Madison seemed less antagonistic towards each other than in more spacious environments. Take tigers, for instance, whose shrinking territories can lead to adult males killing any cubs that aren’t their own.īut that’s not happening here. In many cases, animals forced to live in small urban environments come into conflict with each other, both between and within species. “We pretty quickly realized there was something different going on in these urban areas.”Īn urban red fox sniffs trash bags for food scraps at night in a London garden. If coyotes can catch the red fox the will certainly kill them to limit competition for resources in that area,” Drake says. “If you look at the literature in non-urban areas, most studies suggest coyotes would displace red fox. Their results, published recently in the journal PLOS One, came as a surprise. Over a two-year period, Drake and a group of researchers followed 11 coyotes and 12 red foxes that they’d harnessed with radio collars. In rural settings, the smaller foxes avoid coyote territory although coyotes won’t eat foxes, they do kill them to prevent them from causing resource scarcity.
Red foxes are hunters and flexible foragers, eating rodents and birds as well as fish, frogs or garbage. To understand the implication for humans, Drake also wanted to see coyotes’ behavior towards competitors, like the red fox. Several years ago, a flood of similar reports occurred in Madison, Wisconsin, prompting wildlife biologist David Drake to study the city’s urban coyote population. Once again, it seemed like an aberration to both of us: a wild carnivore in the heart of a city of 2.7 million people. Minutes later, another woman on the trail stopped to warn me of the animal’s presence and ask if I’d seen it. I jogged past a coyote nosing around the playground, seemingly oblivious to my presence. My next encounter was in Chicago, in a narrow park along the North Branch of the Chicago River that threads its way between residential areas. I suspected they’d just had a similar experience. A short while later, two young women ran shrieking from one of the garden’s forested areas. Before I could decide whether to grab a stick or start shouting to scare them off, they were gone. The pair trotted on either side of me, staying about 10 feet away for several minutes before eventually running off. They looked huge, with shaggy brownish-gray fur, and completely unafraid. But that’s exactly what I saw one evening at the edge of the New York Botanical Garden. A pair of burly coyotes is one of the last things you expect to see in the concrete jungle, especially in the largest city in America.
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