By Marty Schladen
The Daily News 02/10/2008

GALVESTON — When Valentine’s Day comes Thursday, it won’t just mark a high point for amorous humans. It also will mark the height of the mating season for coyotes: an increasingly visible member of the local community.

And, in the coming months, the female canines will retire to their dens to have their pups. As they do, experts predict that a disturbing trend will only get worse.

Area residents, particularly in Galveston, are reporting what seem to be increasingly frequent sightings of coyotes.

For some, it’s just a novel glimpse of a large, wild predator in an unlikely setting. For others, it’s a terrifying attack on a beloved pet that can lead to sky-high veterinary bills or even be fatal.

In the most extreme cases — which haven’t yet happened in Galveston County — coyotes can even attack humans, particularly small children.

Coyote sightings are nothing new in the rural areas around Galveston County. On Galveston Island, they were spotted near the wetlands on the island’s east and west ends and along Harborside Drive, particularly around sunup and sundown.

Those wild areas are home to rabbits, rodents, birds and other items that make up coyotes’ varied diets in the wild.

And in areas like Santa Fe and Algoa, they’re known to steal a meal from farmers.

“Every once in a while, we’ll get a complaint that they took a chicken or something,” said Kim Schoolcraft, the county’s animal services director.

Getting Closer

But coyotes seem to be making increasingly frequent appearances in Galveston’s neighborhoods. Schoolcraft said such appearances seem less frequent in mainland neighborhoods.

About 7:30 a.m. one recent morning, a pair of adult coyotes trotted down Galveston’s 17th Street near Church Street in broad daylight. They were the better part of a mile from the nearest wild area.

Miguel Aleman also had an encounter after he went out to get his newspaper about 4:30 a.m. Dec. 1 at his home in the neighborhood behind the Galveston Island Convention Center on the seawall.

He let his dog, Sandy, a 30-pound mixed breed, out as he went in. A short while later, Aleman and his wife heard a canine commotion out front. When his wife opened the door, the dog ran in and she saw two coyotes in the yard.

Sandy had bites on her back and her throat.

“The throat wound almost killed her,” Aleman said.

After $500 in vet bills, Sandy’s recovering nicely, he said.

Deeona Fuson had a similarly harrowing experience last month. She was walking her Yorkshire terrier, Dexter, about 6:15 a.m. at Stewart Beach when a coyote attacked him.

He also survived his injuries — after thousands of dollars in veterinary bills.

“We need to do something,” Fuson said.

A single animal hospital, the Galveston Veterinary Clinic on 61st Street, reports treating five dogs after recent coyote attacks, said Becky Thomas, the office manager. She said two dogs were severely injured, two moderately so and one had only superficial wounds.

In urban and suburban settings, coyotes also attack cats. But experts say the great majority of those victims never live to see a veterinarian.

Emerging Pattern

Reports of coyote citings in Galveston and in Galveston County are anecdotal, so it’s hard gauge how much more common local coyote-human encounters are becoming. But the federal government tracks complaints it gets about the wild canines from across Texas.

Reports for one type of complaint — threats to humans — appear to show a dramatic decrease in the last five years. In 2002, there were 8,582 such complaints. In 2007, there were 2,883.

But Mike Bodenchuk said the decrease might reflect a decreased fear of rabies. Bodenchuk is Texas state director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division, the federal agency that collects complaints about coyotes and other wildlife.

Starting in the late 1980s and peaking in the mid-1990s, there was a spike in the number of confirmed cases of rabies in coyotes and domestic dogs in South Texas, according to statistics from the State Department of Health Services.

While complaints in Texas of coyote threats against humans have dropped in the past five years, reports of threats against pets have skyrocketed. They’ve gone from 138 in 2002 to 766 five years later.

Some of that increase might have come as Texans refocused their coyote worries from getting rabies to protecting their pets, Bodenchuk said. But it also reflects the increasing overlap of human and coyote territory.

“Some of these coyotes are getting habituated to people,” he said.

Shared Habitat

That’s a result of at least two factors.

First, humans are moving farther and farther into areas that had previously been coyotes’ domain.

For example, Schoolcraft said, housing developments on the extreme ends of Galveston Island have pushed coyotes closer to humans. Coyotes are perhaps the most adaptable large predators there are, and they are adjusting accordingly.

They can eat almost anything. So when they live among humans, they substitute garbage and pets for the rabbits, rodents, fruits and vegetables they eat in the wild.

And, with its emphasis on trees, bushes and “green space,” the preferred human habitat these days is increasingly similar to coyote habitat, which Bodenchuk describes as “just about anything that isn’t paved.”

He said new-age subdivisions around Houston, San Antonio and Dallas are proving to be very hospitable to Texas coyotes.

And as humans move into coyote territory and build living spaces that preserve important features of that territory, the wild canines get used to having people around.

Coyotes completely unfamiliar with humans perceive adults as vertical giants to be avoided. In rural settings, farmers have tried to reinforce that natural fear with rifle blasts and leghold traps.

Also dampening coyotes’ fear of humans in some places is that they breed with their domestic cousins, which are evolved to live among people. But Bodenchuk said that’s relatively rare because of differences in the species’ reproductive cycles.

Changing Times, Emerging Threats

In a modern, suburban setting, traditional ways of deterring coyotes aren’t practical.

For starters, it’s illegal under most circumstances to fire a gun within the city limits of towns such as Galveston.

What’s more, a new appreciation for wildlife has taken hold in this postindustrial age, sometimes with unintended consequences.

The further Americans get from the farm, the less they see keeping varmints like coyotes away from their livestock as a matter of survival. And the more they watch Animal Planet and raise dogs of their own, the more queasy they get about killing their dogs’ beautiful wild cousins.

In national parks and some places in California, some people have gone so far as to feed coyotes.

But the animals don’t react with appreciation. Instead, they associate humans with dinner, becoming increasingly aggressive about snatching food and even trying to kill and carry away small children, according to a 2004 report by scientists Robert M. Timm, Rex O. Baker, Joe R. Bennett and Craig C. Coolahan.

Attacking For Different Motives

Opportunists that they are, coyotes don’t often pass up an opportunity for an easy, live meal.

They go after cats without regard to whether they’re feral or beloved pets.

“That’s why my cat doesn’t go outside very often and certainly not at night,” said Carol Bannerman, a spokeswoman for the agriculture department’s Wildlife Services headquarters in Riverdale, Md.

Coyotes also see domestic dogs of 20 pounds or less as a potential lunch. They often attack larger dogs, but for different reasons.

“They’ll kill a cat because a cat is a meal,” Bodenchuk said. “They’ll kill a dog because it’s a canine in their territory.”

Individual male and female coyotes pair up for big chunks of their lives. These pairs form the basis of social life for coyotes, which don’t form large packs the way wolves do. These pairs make dens surrounded by territories not much bigger than 3 square miles.

Bodenchuk said its natural for coyotes to try to drive out competitors. So when somebody’s dog barks in a backyard that’s part of a coyote’s territory, the wild canine might see its domestic cousin as a trespasser and attack it.

A Special Time Of Year

Which brings us back to Valentine’s Day.

Female coyotes only go into heat once a year, and that period peaks right about now. Then in a few months, they’ll have their litters, which average about six pups.

The expected and new arrivals will mean even more aggressive behavior by adult coyotes as they fight to protect and feed their young. Under those conditions, coyotes have been known to attack dogs much larger than they are.

“That territory is almost worth their life,” Bodenchuk said.

Reporter Marty Schladen can be reached at 409-683-5284 or marty.schladen@galvnews.com

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Wild facts

• Scientific name: canis latrans

• Geographic range: Natives of arctic and temperate North America and Greenland, they have spread through the Americas as far south as Panama.

• Habitat: forests, grasslands, deserts, swamps, as well as agricultural, suburban and urban settings

• Size: 29 to 39 inches in length, weighing between 29 and 39 pounds

• Breeding interval: once a year

• Breeding season: January to March

• No. offspring: one to 19, average 5.7

• Average lifespan: 14.5 years

• Food habits: 90 percent mammals, usually small ones such as rabbits, squirrels and mice; they also eat fruits and vegetables and pets and trash in suburban settings.

— Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology; “Behavior of Coyotes in Texas,” William F. Andelt, Colorado State University

For More Information Contact:
Kurt Koopmann
Public Information Officer
Galveston County Health District
409-938-2211 or 409-392-0007
kkoopman@gchd.org