Boston College’s environmental studies program tracks the spread of this feared species in Massachusetts suburbs.
Jennifer Weeks
If you think squirrels are the wildest creatures in your neighborhood, think again. Eastern coyotes have established themselves across Massachusetts over the past 50 years, except for the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. “They can be living literally in your backyard and you won’t see them,” says Eric Strauss, research associate professor of biology at Boston College and director of BC’s environmental studies program.
Over the past several years, coyotes have been sighted in Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, Newton, Arlington, and other areas around greater Boston. Only two attacks on humans have been documented in the past decade in Massachusetts, in 1998 and 2005 (both on Cape Cod), but coyotes’ growing presence has spurred public fear. In July the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife authorized private companies to trap or kill coyotes that were endangering humans or domestic animals or damaging property, a move that drew protests from animal rights groups.
Coyotes have been spotted in the suburbs of Boston, including this one in Belmont last year. (Credit: John P. Maguranis, Town of Belmont)
With such fear and folklore associated with coyotes, researchers are assessing how much the population in the state has grown in the past few decades, what effects the animals may be having on ecosystems, and how coyotes behave in urban areas. To answer these questions, Strauss and his colleagues have been tracking coyotes around Cape Cod since 1998 and around Boston since 2001. They also want to see how the animals’ ranges, foraging patterns, and other social behaviors vary with increasing urbanization. What they learn could help state officials come up with better strategies for controlling coyote populations.
“We can’t get rid of coyotes any more than we can get rid of deer or crows,” says Strauss. “Learning more about coyotes’ social dynamics in urban areas will help with management issues.”
New neighbors
According to recent press reports, there are anywhere between 3,000 and 8,000 coyotes in Massachusetts. Strauss and his colleagues estimate that there are a few dozen family groups (a family group usually consists of four or five animals) within Route 495. Strauss adds that this figure is a rough estimate because coyotes can travel far. “The coyotes that people see tend to be transients,” says Strauss. “One coyote that we trapped in Boston traveled all the way to Rhode Island to set up a territory.”
Hunters opened the door for coyotes by eradicating gray wolves from the Northeast a century ago. That left a vacant ecological niche for a top-of-the-food-chain predator. Coyotes, which are omnivorous and extremely adaptable, expanded eastward to fill that role. Eastern coyotes weigh 40 to 50 pounds (up to twice as much as their western counterparts), possibly due to interbreeding with domestic dogs or Canadian gray wolves.
To track coyotes’ movements, researchers place bait—including meat scraps from a Newton butcher shop—in large box-traps and monitor the boxes using cameras. Captured animals are tranquilized, fitted with radio collars, and released back into the wild. Students and volunteers go out nightly to monitor coyotes with directional receivers that can be tuned to the individual frequency of each collar transmitter. They hope to get a better sense of when the animals feed and how far they range, especially in areas dominated by humans.
So far, the group’s findings indicate that coyotes are most active at night and that they use both natural areas and developed zones such as golf courses, dumps, and railroad tracks. Coyotes feed on whatever is available, says Strauss: “We’ve found all kinds of stuff in their scat—cats, seals [on Cape Cod], fruit, food wrappers, you name it.” Strauss suggests coyotes’ most important competitors in urban areas may be feral cats and that these predators coexist by foraging at different times of day.
Coping with canines
To address public fears, the BC researchers have worked with state officials to develop guidelines for citizens on how to deal with coyotes—for example, securing garbage, keeping pets restrained and feeding them indoors, and keeping the area around bird feeders clean. Strauss says that most coyotes are not dangerous and the new regulations allowing private companies to kill coyotes will not reduce their numbers in Massachusetts. “We can ease the pressure points, mainly through public education,” says Strauss.