It’s reported that the coyote population is booming in Florida. The article that I’m reading does not tell me why but it is probably because of Covid. There have been many instances of wildlife encroaching upon human settlements because they’ve become quieter due to social distancing and lockdowns. Temporarily, the world reverted to a bygone age in respect of wildlife.
Click the infographic below to see it bigger if you are on a desktop computer.
Coyotes become habituated to people although they are inherently timid. They are very adaptable and are often seen in the urban environment and even on the beaches of Florida. In the video below you see a melanistic coyote wandering through a golf course while the members play the game oblivious to its presence.
They can eat almost anything that humans eat and are very good it eating their cats and small dogs as well. Some outside domestic cats succeed in escaping a coyote attack but often they don’t. They eat fruit, nuts, seeds, pet food, garbage, rodents and, as mentioned, pets. They will also eat feral and stray cats.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has held a coyote seminar to provide advice to Floridians on how to deal with them. They’ve been seen in all 67 counties of the state. And they arrive by crossing bridges, roads and rivers. They are good swimmers. They are a resourceful animal.
Angeline Barker, a biologist with FWC said: “I don’t want to sugarcoat it for you. Coyotes and other wildlife, other predators will absolutely predate pets if they are free-ranging”. In Florida, there is always a debate on how to protect wildlife from cat predation and cats from coyote predation! Nature’s way.
Apparently coyote sightings have been reported more often in the urban portions of Broward County. It seems that some residents believe that coyotes attack people and therefore they are fearful of them. This isn’t the case. Is the opposite in fact: coyotes are frightened of people which is why there are very few coyote bites on people and it’s why they can be hazed i.e. frightened off with the techniques referred to in the video below provided by FWC.
Note: This is a video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.
The infographic on this page is also provided by this useful organisation. My thanks.
Here are a couple of diverging comments on Facebook from Floridians:
“The population of coyotes is growing rapidly down the kissimmee park road area, I hear the pups yapping at night and see adult coyotes during the day at least 3 times a month. When I start missing cats…is when I will start popping them off!! – Carey Wright.
“They are important to the environment. It’s not their fault. Humans have put them in this position.” – Nancy Anna.
Below are some more articles on coyotes in America. On my reckoning they are probably the major reason why far more domestic cats are kept full-time inside the home in America compared to the UK for instance.
This is the second and last time I’ll comment twice on the same night and on the same subject. Just wanted to say that usually when I hear the term “hazing” it means putting young men through grueling humiliations and tortures so they can prove they’re “worthy” of being accepted as members of a college fraternity or an elite military unit. I usually only see the term in a news story when another freshman or cadet has died from these sadistic rituals. I never heard the word used to mean “to scare” before, although the video where the term was used is from Florida, so it’s not a Briticism. My evanescent reaction for a small split second was “Why would coyotes want to join a fraternity? What fraternity would accept them as members even if the came through the hazing with flying colors?” This thought amused me, in the self-deprecating sense that such a thought would even occur to me for a millisecond, though I realize I embarrass myself by confessing it, but I thought it might amuse someone else beside me, so I’m posting it.
Unlike wolves, coyotes have expanded their range and numbers for at least several decades, if not longer, as the human population of North America continues to expand. Raccoons, rats, and mice also. A pack of coyotes killed our black female cat, Ninja, in July 1986 out in the country near Poulsbo, Washington. She loved to hunt at night. She usually returned at 1:00AM, but was late that night. I heard the coyotes yapping loudly ca. 1/4 mile away on a neighbor’s land near the edge of the woods. I think they had her treed, but I couldn’t tell where. But still in my bathrobe, and with only a flashlight in pitch darkness with few trails there was not much I could do, although I tried. My human hearing isn’t even up to knowing even where the coyote yaps were coming from, even if I could’ve found a path that was close. It was too dark even to get close enough to shoot in the sky to try to frighten them had I even known the direction. I never got within a thousand feet of them, judging by how loud they were. If she could’ve stayed up that tree until late morning my neighbor starting his truck would’ve probably dispersed the coyotes, but we never saw Ninja again. We never let our remaining cat out after dark after that and she made it to age 14.
God that must have been difficult to come to terms with. A story which reinforces the danger of coyotes preying on domestic cats. Thanks for sharing.
I lost one of my cats last year to a coyote. When I found her mangled remains (she was missing three legs and the tail) in the morning, I first thought it might have been a large stray or wild dog. But I found out it was a coyote that killed her because when I started asking people around the neighborhood questions to see if anyone had seen what had happened, several of them also complained that they had lost cats and dogs to a roaming coyote. Until this happened, I was not even aware that coyotes sometimes roam this area. I had never seen them here. It took me two weeks of patiently watching and waiting for him to come back to the “scene of the crime” during the late night and early morning hours (when they are most active), loaded crossbow by my side, until I finally put an end to his terror rampage on the neighborhood’s cats & dogs.