Urban Coyotes in Art, Poetry and Music

In honor of our recent coyote visitors in New York City, here are a few images and songs inspired by urban coyotes.

By Atty Gell.

Beautiful, no? This print was made by Atty Gell, an artist who lives near Trout Lake Park in East Vancouver, Canada. Coyotes are not infrequently spotted passing through the park and the neighborhood.

When I was working on my play, NYC Coyote Existential, I asked Atty to create some coyote images for me to use for publicity purposes. She sent these lovelies.

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For poetry, listen to Tim Seibles read his poem: Midnight, the Coyote, Down at the Mouth.

For music, try this music video of Coyotes by Modest Mouse, inspired by an incident in 2002 when a coyote was spotted riding light rail in Portland, Oregon. Don’t know what well-trained coyote played the role, but here’s a photo of the actual wild coyote, looking no more harried than any other habitual commuter on a bad day.

The same Portland coyote inspired the Sleater-Kinney’s song, Light Rail Coyote:

And if you need to bang your head a bit (and as evidence that the urban coyote has been around and has legs, as it were), here is Coping with the Urban Coyote, Unida’s 1999 album. Love that cover art.

NYC: After the so-called Blizzard

 Where the blizzard at?

Snow dogs.

Anybody seen my blizzard?

Dog with unfortunate sense of style.

I know how bad the storm is for people to our east, west and north. But if there was a blizzard here in Manhattan, I missed it.

Oh, it snowed, all right. Here’s what the city looked like yesterday, back when we still believed in unicorns, elves, and being buried beneath the “storm of the century.”

Disappearing city.

By 6 PM, all city parks were officially closed. The subways started shutting down at 7 PM.  At 11 PM, all mass transit and all roads were closed.

– Wait, did you say the parks closed at six?
– Uh-huh, that’s right.
– But at six, there was, like, hardly any snow, and no wind, and great visibility, and …
– Don’t worry about it.

Because this is New York, baby, and this is what a closed park looks like.

Night sledding in Riverside Park! Woot woot!

You can’t tame the night sledders. Not in New York.

Wheeeeeee

Only the wildlife took the closing seriously. The raccoons were nestled all snug in their snow-frosted den.

Raccoons who live in the wall were wearing fur slippers, drinking cocoa and watching the weather on NY1.

All night and this morning, the city was eerily, wonderfully quiet. And the streets remarkably clear, thanks to the snowplows that had free rein of the streets all night.

Broadway this morning, light snow coming down.

The ever-present city hum was almost imperceptible, and even now, late in the afternoon, it’s unusually quiet. Although not in the parks.

The parks, with their five or six inches of fresh snow (a bit short of the predicted two feet), are bustling.

Sledding in Riverside Park – looks like a Currier & Ives.

Everywhere are walkers, sledders, little kids in snowsuits, dogs in boots, and parents hauling children in sleds.

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Last but definitely not least, here is an adorable little man in brand new boots, enjoying his first big snow.

Little man on a mission.

Coyote Caught in Manhattan’s Stuy Town

Another coyote was caught in Manhattan, this time in Stuyvesant Town, just north of the East Village.

Photo: G.N. Miller  http://nypost.com/2015/01/25/coyote-caught-in-manhattan/

After being spotted near the Con Ed station on East 14th Street, the coyote was chased by police into Stuyvesant Town and  later released in the Bronx. A young female, she is the second coyote to make it into Manhattan this month. The first January coyote, also female, was captured in Riverside Park on the Upper West Side, and released in what city officials straightfacedly refer to as “a wilderness area in the Bronx.”

Are other coyotes roaming Manhattan even as you read this? Hard to say. But if they’re not here now, they’ll be back.

With an established breeding population in the Bronx and Westchester, there will always be young dogs in search of territory to call their own. If they head south, probably late at night, they’ll find their way over a bridge into Manhattan. Others have found their way east into Queens. From Queens, where are you going to go but east, young dog, to colonize Long Island? And, in fact, the Hamptons reported their first officially confirmed coyote sighting in 2013.  Rick Wesnofske, a potato farmer in the town of Water Mill who photographed the animal in his fields, said the coyote was “… just walking around, looking at the potatoes.”

Photo: Rick Wesnofske

Long Island potato fields, Bronx wilderness areas, Staten Island garbage dumps, and the endless graveyards of Queens are one thing. Manhattan is another. I mean, let’s face it, the city’s unlikely to let a wild dog run free all over our nice street grid. I’m skeptical that coyotes will be able to establish themselves in Manhattan, unless they were to stay within the boundaries of a large park, say, Inwood Park up at the tip of the island. They’ve already tried Central Park in 1999, 2006 and 2010.

I was lucky enough to spend some time watching the 2010 coyote. She – yes, it was yet another young female – camped out in Hallett Nature Sanctuary at the base of Central Park for a month or so,. During that time, I entertained fantasies that she just might be able to make a go of it here in the city. Unfortunately, she started venturing outside the park, and was ultimately captured in a Tribeca parking garage. (She was released in an undisclosed location.)

Watching her in the night park as she stepped out onto the ice of the frozen Pond, or trotted up an empty path was a thrilling experience. It inspired me to write a play, NYC Coyote Existential.

NYC Coyote Existential, staged reading at Proteus Gowanus Gallery in Brooklyn, April, 2012..

Could be it’s time to mount a production right here in the city.

Coyote Captured on Upper West Side

Photo by Christopher Sadowski. Visit The New York Post for more of Mr. Sadowski’s photos.

Last night in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, a coyote was captured by the police. As far as I can tell, this is the first coyote sighting in Manhattan since March 2010 when a beautiful young coyote spent about a month in the city. She quickly found her way to Central Park’s Hallett Nature Sanctuary and made her base in that protected acre in the shadow of the Plaza Hotel before being captured down in Tribeca. In 2012, coyote tracks were found in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, but I can find no report of a sighting.

Coyotes have been resident in the Bronx for some time now. More recently, they seem to have taken up residence in Queens, and in 2012, a coyote was spotted in Staten Island. Manhattan’s coyotes probably come down from the Bronx over one of the bridges at the northern tip of the island or, possibly, by swimming.

Wildlife biologists at the Gotham Coyote Project are currently studying our coyote population, using camera traps to answer the question: “Where in NYC and its surrounding suburbs can you find coyotes?” The Munshi-South Lab is also involved with monitoring the establishment and dispersal of coyotes in NYC. A camera trap captured this gorgeous image.

Camera Trap image of coyote and pups from the Munshi-South Lab website.

Last night’s coyote, a female, resisted arrest, as one hopes any healthy wild animal would do, and led the police on a chase through Riverside Park before being tranquilized and captured in a basketball court. According to the Twitter account of the 24th Precinct, the police had the coyote “corralled inside fenced-in BB court, but so cold out, the tranquilizer in the darts kept freezing!” They had to wait for a second Emergency Services Truck to arrive with “warm darts” as they “wanted to stun it as humanely as possble.”

Police report the animal was unharmed and was taken to Animal Care and Control where it will be examined before being released somewhere outside the city.

Red Fox: Cape Cod in Winter

When we awoke this morning, we found we had been magically transported to an unfamiliar aerie overlooking Cape Cod Bay.

That’s what it felt like, anyway. The dog tried to figure out where he was.

Outside, strangely silent bluejays hopped about in the brush.

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Walking down Franklin Street toward the water, a flash of red streaked across the sidewalk and onto the front lawn of a house.

Our hearts beat fast.

We investigated, and found – be still, my heart –

a magnificent red fox.

Just hanging out in the driveway in the middle of Provincetown, like it owned the joint. The fox watched us, and we watched the fox for five or ten minutes.

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I’ve never seen such a tail. And such eyes. And such handsome black stockings.

After a while, the fox lost interest in us and resumed its morning business.  The dog and I, too, resumed our morning business, heading to the wharf.

But that’s a story for another post.

Happy New Year (We’re Back)

Happy New Year, dear much-missed readers!

We’re posting again for the first time since last spring when we watched a White-throated sparrow dig up the park. Eight months is a long time to go dark, but we needed to focus on other work.

A hidden nest from last spring is easily spotted through winter’s bare branches.

We missed our readers, and we want to thank all of you for supporting Out Walking the Dog. We especially want to thank those of you, friends and strangers alike, who got in touch over the past months to say, “What’s going on? Where’s Out Walking the Dog?”

Well, we’re back!

The dog looks a little rumpled after the dissipations of New Year’s Eve.

Actually, we’ve been here all along, the dog and I, smack dab in the middle of the city surrounded by the usual urban wildlife suspects. We just haven’t been able to write to you about it.

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In 2015, you can expect more tales of hawks, kestrels, raccoons, chipmunks, turtles, squirrels, coyotes, and so much more. Including rats, of course. More about those little urban devils soon, after I attend a local session of NYC’s “Rat Academy.”

On New Year’s Eve, the dog and I went looking for raccoons in Riverside Park. No creatures revealed themselves, although they were there unseen, sleeping, hunting, eating, grooming, and watching. The empty park was strangely quiet and the great stone stairs mysterious.

Out of one world and into the next.

Later we walked to Central Park to watch fireworks and cheer the runners of the annual midnight race.

Moving forward into a new year.

May the year bring peace and fulfillment, creativity and joy.