WildWatch

05/31/2026

05/31/2026

05/31/2026

Amazing!

The United States has killed roughly half a million coyotes per year for over a century. The coyote's range has expanded by forty percent in the same period.

That sentence contains the entire species in two lines. Every other predator in North America that faced sustained, federally funded lethal control was reduced or eliminated. The wolf was erased from the lower 48 by the 1930s. The grizzly was pushed into a handful of mountain strongholds. The mountain lion was driven out of the eastern two-thirds of the continent. The coyote absorbed the same pressure, the same traps, the same poison, the same aerial gunning, the same bounty systems, and responded by walking into every state the wolf had vacated, every city the mountain lion had abandoned, and every landscape that lethal control was supposed to clear.

Nobody planned this. The coyote was not reintroduced. It was not protected. It was not managed into recovery. It simply refused to be managed out of existence, and the biological machinery that made that possible is stranger than most people realize.
Start with the breeding. A coyote pair that mates in January or February will produce a litter of roughly six pups by April. If the local population is under heavy hunting or trapping pressure, litter sizes increase. Females in heavily persecuted populations produce more pups per litter than females in stable populations. The mechanism is not fully understood, but the effect is measurable and consistent. You kill more coyotes, and the survivors produce more coyotes. The population compensates for removal in real time.

Then there is the pair bond.

Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State University, has been running the largest urban coyote study in history out of Chicago since the year 2000. Over six years, his team genetically sampled 236 coyotes across Cook, Kane, DuPage, and McHenry counties. They tested eighteen litters totaling ninety-six offspring. They were looking for evidence of infidelity, because every other supposedly monogamous canid species that had been genetically tested, including arctic foxes and mountain bluebirds, turned out to be cheating when the DNA was checked.

The coyotes were not cheating. Zero instances of polygamy. Zero instances of extra-pair paternity. Zero instances of a mate leaving while the other was still alive. One hundred percent genetic monogamy across the entire study population.
Gehrt said he was shocked. The Chicago metro area holds an estimated one to two thousand coyotes. Territories abut each other. Males make long-distance forays through other pairs' ranges. The opportunities to stray are constant. They do not take them. Pairs have been tracked staying together for up to ten years, separating only when one of them dies.

During estrus, a mated pair spends every hour together. Running, hunting, marking territory. Cecilia Hennessy, the study's senior author, described it simply. They will always be right at each other's side. The male practices what biologists call diligent mate guarding, staying close to the female and keeping rival males away. But the genetic data suggests the guarding is not even necessary. The females are not interested in other males either.

The payoff of that fidelity is paternal investment. A male coyote that knows every pup in the den is genetically his has a direct evolutionary stake in keeping them alive. He brings food. He defends the den. He teaches the pups to hunt. He spends as much time raising the litter as the female does. In a polygamous species, the male's genetic investment is spread across multiple litters by multiple females, and his per-litter commitment drops accordingly. In a monogamous species with verified genetic fidelity, every calorie the male brings to the den is going to his own offspring. The pair bond is not sentimental. It is the most efficient allocation of parental energy the species has found.

When a mate dies, the surviving coyote grieves. Gehrt documented the behavior across multiple observed deaths in the Chicago study. The surviving animal produces persistent, long howls that researchers describe as mournful. It shows lethargy. Its appetite drops. It returns to the spot where the partner was last seen. During one capture operation, Gehrt briefly sedated a female and took her into the lab for examination. Her mate, standing outside, howled nonstop until Gehrt brought her back. There was clearly a lot of emotional stuff going on with that animal, he said.

Only three to five percent of mammal species are monogamous by any definition. Genetically verified monogamy, where DNA testing confirms that neither partner ever breeds outside the pair, is rarer still. The coyote, the animal that most of North America treats as a pest to be shot on sight, practices a form of pair fidelity that is more absolute than wolves, more consistent than foxes, and more genetically verified than almost any wild carnivore ever studied.
The animal that we have spent a century trying to exterminate mates for life, raises its young cooperatively, grieves its dead, compensates for persecution by producing larger litters, and has responded to the most sustained predator-control campaign in the history of wildlife management by quietly colonizing every state in the continental United States.

We have posted about coyotes on this page before. The Florida Keys coyote. The Chicago parking garage coyote. Carl in Golden Gate Park. Hal in Central Park. Every one of those stories is a footnote in a larger pattern. The coyote is not surviving despite what humans do to it. It is surviving because nothing humans have done to it has been sufficient to outpace an animal that breeds fast, bonds absolutely, and replaces its losses before the next trapping season starts.

Source: Hennessy, C., Gehrt, S.D., et al. (2012). Journal of Mammalogy / Ohio State University / National Geographic, January 2026 / Cook County Coyote Project.

05/30/2026

❤️👍

05/30/2026

In 2004, a National Geographic film crew working in Bakersfield, California found six dead San Joaquin kit foxes in a den near a mall parking lot. Two adults and four pups. Mall landscapers had filled the den entrances with dirt. The foxes suffocated underground.
Three years later, a new family of kit foxes moved into a den at the same site.

The San Joaquin kit fox is one of the most endangered mammals in North America. Fewer than five thousand remain. They have lost roughly ninety-two percent of their historic range across California's Central Valley to agriculture, oil extraction, and urban development. The grasslands and scrublands they evolved to hunt across have been converted into the most intensively farmed landscape in the Western Hemisphere. What remains of their natural habitat is fragmented into isolated patches separated by highways, canals, subdivisions, and industrial infrastructure.
The strange part of the story is that one of the largest and most stable kit fox populations in existence lives not in a nature reserve but inside the city of Bakersfield.

Bakersfield sits in the southern San Joaquin Valley, surrounded by oil fields, agriculture, and desert. The city itself is flat, dry, and sprawling, with large open lots, canal rights-of-way, drainage basins, golf courses, school campuses, and the kind of low-density suburban development that accidentally mimics the open terrain kit foxes need. The foxes moved in and stayed. California State University Bakersfield has a resident population on campus. Trail cameras set up by the university's biology department have captured footage of mothers and pups playing outside their dens between campus buildings at night.

A San Joaquin kit fox weighs about five pounds. It is one of the smallest canids in North America, with oversized ears that function as heat radiators in the desert and give the animal a face that looks more like a fennec fox than anything people associate with American wildlife. It hunts at night, moving fast and low across open ground, taking ground squirrels, pocket gophers, kangaroo rats, and insects. During the day it retreats underground into dens it either digs itself or takes over from ground squirrels. A single fox may use dozens of dens across its home range, rotating between them to avoid predators and parasites.

In urban Bakersfield, the dens are everywhere biologists have looked. Under parking lot landscaping islands. In the berms of drainage basins beside arterial intersections. Inside stacked pipe at construction sites. Under storage containers. In golf course fairways. Inside modular housing units. Brian Cypher of the Endangered Species Recovery Program at California State University Stanislaus has led urban kit fox research in Bakersfield for over two decades. His team has documented foxes denning in locations that no field guide would recognize as habitat. The foxes do not care what the surface looks like. They care what is underneath it. If the soil is soft enough to dig and the surface above offers enough quiet, the fox will den there.

The urban population thrived for years, in some measures outperforming wild populations in survival and reproductive rates. Then in 2013, sarcoptic mange appeared in the Bakersfield foxes and the population crashed. Sarcoptic mange is caused by burrowing skin mites and is always fatal in kit foxes. The disease spreads through direct contact and through shared dens, and Cypher's research published in 2025 showed exactly why the urban environment made it worse. Radio-collared foxes in Bakersfield used an average of nearly eight dens over a four-month period. Other foxes used the same dens within days. Some foxes were sharing dens simultaneously. In the urban landscape, where den density is high and foxes rotate through sites constantly, a single infected animal can seed mites across dozens of dens and expose nearly ten other foxes in a matter of months.

By 2022, Cypher's camera surveys detected no mange in the Bakersfield population, suggesting the epidemic had burned through and the survivors were rebuilding. But the population had been significantly reduced, and the genetic and demographic consequences of the crash are still being measured.

The kit foxes of Bakersfield represent something that conservation biology rarely produces: an endangered species that is doing better inside a city than outside it. The urban environment offers stable water from irrigation and canal systems, consistent prey populations sustained by human landscaping, reduced pressure from coyotes and bobcats that avoid developed areas, and an abundance of denning substrate in disturbed soils. The tradeoff is cars, dogs, pesticides, landscaping crews that do not check for dens before filling holes, and a disease transmission rate amplified by the same den-sharing behavior that makes the foxes successful in the first place.

A five-pound fox with satellite-dish ears hunting ground squirrels between the parking lot and the drainage ditch at a California state university campus is not the image most people carry of an endangered species. But the San Joaquin kit fox stopped matching the expected image decades ago. It adapted to the landscape humans built on top of its habitat, and it is raising pups in the infrastructure because the grasslands are gone and the infrastructure is what is left.

Source: Endangered Species Recovery Program, California State University Stanislaus / Cypher et al. (2025), Animals / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, San Joaquin Kit Fox 5-Year Review, 2025.