The Coyote of Poplar Drive

What to do with a visitor from the wild who seems too comfortable with humans?

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Happy New Year! Yesterday we published the last of our reader-submitted personal essays. Today, the final day of the winter holiday, we’ll publish two final essays—one by Laura and one by Ezra. We’ll be back in the news business tomorrow with an in-depth Q&A with Sebastopol’s new mayor Stephen Zollman.

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There is a coyote living on our street. That’s not so unusual. I live in Forestville, and you can hear coyotes most nights—sometimes charmingly in the distance and sometimes right up close under my window, their yipping and howling so wild and weird that it gives me goosebumps.

But that’s the thing—coyotes are mostly heard and not seen. I think of them as denizens of the night, and though they’re not strictly nocturnal, they are generally more active after sunset.

Not this guy. (For the purpose of this story I’m going to call the coyote a him, because that’s how I think of him.)

I see our neighborhood coyote almost every day, moseying down the street at noon, skulking around in our front yard, and literally sunbathing most afternoons in the middle of the road a few doors down. (Luckily we live on a small, not-very-busy street.)

The coyote has a sad backstory. My neighbors and I first saw him late in the summer as a small puppy in the company of his mother and sibling. And then, for unknown reasons, his mother disappeared, and there were just the two pups, shy and skittish and seemingly far too young to make it on their own. I called Wildlife Rescue, but they said coyotes in general, even pups, were just too fast to catch.

The next time I saw the pair, his sibling was limping badly. It looked like it had a broken back leg. As soon as they saw me, they ducked into one of the thick stands of blackberry bramble that line our road.

The next time I saw the little coyote—about a week later—he was alone.

It was one of those brutally hot September days—yellow and parched. The blackberries, which a month before had been fat, blue-black and juicy, were now dry and shriveled, and the air seemed to crackle.

And there he was again, walking gingerly in the dry grass. He looked disconsolate—though that might just be me projecting. Do coyotes feel despair?

I wondered if I should put out water for him. I know you’re not supposed to feed wild animals. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” as they say. But water?

I knocked on a neighbor’s door—the house nearest to where I usually saw the coyote— and asked what she thought. She said that her backyard wasn’t fenced and that they had several small ponds. She’d seen him in her backyard and so assumed he could get water there whenever he wanted.

Over the next few weeks, when I saw him, he seemed increasingly ill—mangy, thin and frail—and I figured it wouldn’t be long before he joined his sibling.

Then he disappeared, and I assumed with a sigh that that was that.

But it wasn’t.

After a few weeks, he reappeared in his usual haunts, looking healthier and more energetic.

And this is when I noticed the change in his behavior. One of our housemates reported that he’d seen the coyote when he was gardening in our backyard and that it had come right up to the wire fence—not ten feet from him—and watched him while he worked.

Week by week, the little coyote grew sleeker, less mangy, and less skittish.

He looks less like a puppy now and more like a teenager.

Even though it’s winter, he still loves lying in the road on sunny days, but now when a car comes by, he doesn’t dart off into the brush like he used to. Now he just steps off to the side of the road and waits there. Once he loped right up to my moving car.

When it rains, he disappears completely. I don’t know where he goes. But the moment the sun comes out, he’s back.

One day, I stopped my car, rolled down my window and took several pictures of him. He was standing about 12 feet away in a neighbor’s yard. I looked at him, and he stood his ground and looked right back—not aggressively, but speculatively.

This is not normal coyote behavior.

Talking about this over dinner with our housemates, we’ve decided that the reason for his recovery and his new ease with humans is that someone in the neighborhood is feeding him.

Our housemate, Cosette, a winemaker with a background in the hard sciences, said darkly, “Someone is going to get bit.”

A lot of people walk on our street—mothers with small children and people with dogs, some of the dogs so tiny they look—putting myself in the place of the coyote—like a nice midday snack.

Cosette suggested hazing the coyote—yelling and waving our arms and driving him away whenever we see him—so he learns to be frightened of people.

“That’s the only way it’s going to survive,” she said.

I think she’s right, and while I’m trying to get up the heart to do that, I haven’t managed it yet.

He seems so small and alone—and now he’s stuck in this liminal place between the human and the wild world.

And, of course, day by day, he’s getting bigger, which means he may soon cease being an object of pity and instead become something to fear.

Disney notwithstanding, wild animals aren’t meant to be our friends, and when we try to make them into our friends, it rarely works out. My Aunt Charlene, who owned a cattle ranch in eastern Nevada—the first place I heard coyotes singing—once took in a fawn whose mother had been hit by a car. She fed it and, when it was young, it followed her around the ranch yard as she did her chores. But as it grew and sprouted antlers, it became aggressive—chasing the ranch hands and even my aunt as she carried groceries in from the car—and eventually her husband took out his rifle and shot it.

Maybe the same thing will happen to the coyote on our street or maybe he will just disappear back into the wild, which, this being Forestville, is just a few blocks away.

Until then, we are watching him and he is watching us, and it is unclear at this point, which of us is going to blink first.

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