How Killing Wolves Put Coyotes in Every American City

🇺🇸 America spent about a hundred years trying to wipe out the coyote. Bounties, poison, aerial gunning, an actual government agency with a budget for it. In 1934 the Department of Agriculture wrote down the goal in plain language: total extermination. It didn't work. There are now coyotes in forty-nine states, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and in Central Park. What I found while researching this is that the extermination campaign isn't really the reason it failed. The reason is much stranger. America killed off the wolves, which opened up the continent. America cleared the forests, which built the habitat. America built the suburbs, which supplied the food and made it illegal to shoot anything. None of those decisions had anything to do with coyotes. All of them worked in the coyote's favour. A coyote in Chicago is roughly twice as likely to survive the year as one out in the countryside. That is the part I still find hard to get my head around. One correction I want to make up front: the map in this video shows the coyote's original range smaller than it actually was. Coyotes lived across the whole arid west, including California, for about ten thousand years — not just the Great Plains. The older narrative I used is still in a lot of sources, but the 2018 mapping study is the better one. Also, coyotes were recorded in Panama from 1981; the 2010 date in the video is when they crossed the Panama Canal specifically. 📗 Sources: Hody & Kays 2018, "Mapping the expansion of coyotes across North and Central America," ZooKeys — the range and expansion mapping Urban Coyote Research Project, Ohio State (Stan Gehrt) — Chicago population and urban vs rural survival rates USDA APHIS Wildlife Services, annual Program Data Reports — coyotes killed per year Animal Damage Control Act of 1931, US Fish & Wildlife Service — the legal basis for federal predator control Kays et al., Journal of Mammalogy — coyotes at the Darién Gap Way & Lynn 2016, and Kays' work on eastern coyote genetics — the wolf and dog admixture Gotham Coyote Project and NYC Parks — New York City sightings and history If you spot something I got wrong, tell me in the comments👇 I'd rather know.