You’re walking your dog early in the morning, as usual. But as you amble up the sidewalk, you spot a furry brown shape up ahead. You tighten the leash, worried about an aggressive stray dog. Then you get a closer look. It’s a coyote.
If you spend any time on social media, whether it’s your neighborhood’s Facebook page or NextDoor.com, it seems like coyote sightings have increased exponentially in the last few years. Not only that – the canids, many claim, are multiplying by the day, and some areas are being overrun, threatening public safety.
But is that really the case?
“No,” said Seth Riley, chief wildlife ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, who says he’s been hearing “that exact same thing” for the last 23 years.
Riley’s National Park Service colleague, wildlife ecologist Jeffrey Brown, said the uptick in sightings is likely related to the fact that so many people have doorbell cameras nowadays, which pick up wildlife visitors day or night.
“It just seems they’re noticing the wildlife more because they’re able to see them,” Brown said.
The California Department of Fish and Game estimates there are somewhere between 250,000 and 750,000 coyotes in the state, a wide range, to be sure, but it’s possible to get more precise in certain areas.
San Francisco’s coyote population was nearly wiped out in the last century — trapped, removed or poisoned. Some 30 years after that poison — Compound 1080 — was banned in 1972, a coyote was spotted in the Presidio. Today, the city has about 100 coyotes, which are divided into 17 to 18 family groupings, according to Janet Kessler, an amateur naturalist known as San Francisco’s “Coyote Lady,” who has studied the animals for the last two decades and posts her findings at coyoteyipps.com.
Coyotes can be spotted strolling the streets and trails in suburbia, too. They normally avoid humans, but there have been a few widely publicized exceptions to that rule in recent years. In the East Bay, an aggressive coyote attacked five people, including two children, in Lafayette and Moraga between July 2020 and February 2021, before being captured, DNA tested — to make sure it was the right animal — and euthanized. Meanwhile, in Golden Gate Park, a coyote had to be euthanized after it began lunging at small children in broad daylight in 2021.
In both cases, authorities said, the coyotes seemed to have lost their fear of humans — because people had been feeding them. In 2021, San Francisco Animal Care and Control officials even released photos of a woman feeding coyotes meat from a plate in Bernal Heights Park. That same year in the Oakland Hills, neighbors united to stop a resident from putting out dog food and water for coyotes.
Not feeding coyotes is incredibly important, Kessler, Riley and Brown agree — and it may seem an obvious thing. But you may be feeding them involuntarily by leaving your pet’s food and water bowls in the back yard or by not picking up fallen fruit or seed that falls from bird feeders. The latter attracts rodents, which are a favorite coyote snack.
We may want our back yards to be a haven for birds and other wildlife, but welcoming coyotes to your back door is never a good idea, especially if you have pets or small children — or neighbors with either. Even with these precautions, it can be hard to keep coyotes out of your yard.
Hazing coyotes — yelling at them, throwing things, chasing them off — works, at least for a while. “Coyotes are super smart,” Riley warned. You may need a longer term solution.
“A six-foot fence with rollers is supposed to keep them out,” Kessler said. “But this requires that no gaps exist at gateways and that the fence is buried at least a foot underground to keep coyotes from digging under the fence. The best practice of all is to always supervise your pet when you are out of doors.”
Which brings us back to that walk you were taking with your dog. You spot a coyote, and instead of running away, it saunters closer. What do you do?
Avoid contact of any kind. Keep your dog on a leash, so it won’t go after the coyote. If it’s a smaller dog, Kessler said, pick it up. Then, walk away, keeping an eye on the coyote and staying calm and assertive. Running away from a coyote will only make it chase you. If the coyote follows you, stay calm but keep moving. Coyotes are protective of their territories and may just be “escorting” you away.
A coyote that lunges at you or bites is still a rare occurrence, but canid aggression can vary according to season. When coyotes are breeding, they are protective of their dens. Being cautious on nature trails between March and September, Brown said, is a good idea. In fact, the Presidio of San Francisco typically closes some trails to dog walkers during pupping season to minimize the chance of conflict.
Above all, try not to let one bad interaction sour you on these animals, because we’re more alike than you think.
“Our coyotes lead much richer lives than most folks are aware of,” Kessler writes on her site. “Their lives are full of emotion — really the same emotions we experience — and full of family life — the amazingly similar family life we enjoy.”
