Our Proliferating Neighbors

Wile E. Coyote Lives

We lost a cat last month. Dora was one of two cats we got a few years ago from our across-the-street neighbors, Linda and Charlie Magers.

And she was my wife Terri’s favorite; Dora preferred Terri’s attention to anyone else’s. Then one night Dora didn’t come home.

It had been only a few weeks since our next-door neighbors’ cat came up missing. When Rhonda Jackson asked me if I’d seen their cat, I suggested that it was possible a coyote got her.

Coyote. That was the first thing I thought of when Dora didn’t come home.

I had been hearing distant yelping and howling of coyotes at dusk for months. They have probably been out there much longer but I just never took the time to listen.

After Dora didn’t come home, I walked a perimeter around much of our acre-and-a-half. I found sign that a dog-sized mammal had recently been around our property – and there are no outside dogs around. That pretty much settled it for me.

Then, early in the pre-dawn of a weekday late-June morning as I opened the living room shutters for the day, I caught a blur of movement out the corner of my eye. The blur, a grayish dog, I guessed, had come around the Jacksons’ fence and into my garden area.

It began running ghostlike up the hill toward the side yard and that’s when I realized it was a coyote and not a dog. The animal stopped in the side yard so I slipped out the front door and onto the porch. The coyote, much smaller than I had expected one to be, stood 30 yards from me, concentrating on the four-lane highway a couple hundred feet farther on.

I watched it for a minute or more as it nervously danced around, pacing back and forth, in obvious indecision as to its next move. Brave the increasing traffic and cross the highway or find another route?

The coyote never saw me so I slipped back into the house, trying to decide whether to get a gun or a camera. After all, this could be the varmint that gobbled up my wife’s cat and the neighbors’ cats (yes, there have been a least a half-dozen cats go missing in our rural setting).

I told Terri there was a coyote in the yard and returned to the porch. By then, the animal had made its decision and was gone. Where it went, I don’t know. But I figure it will be back, maybe trying to get Callie, our remaining cat.

Years ago in the West, I saw coyote carcasses hung on barbed wire fences; it took me a while to figure out why they were there. A friend of mine once asked me why ranchers did that.
“If you were going to cross a fence line and there were human bodies hung on it,” I asked him, “would you cross over into that property?”

But I have no barbed-wire fence and wouldn’t hang carcasses on it if I did, so I’m still left in a quandary. What do I do about the coyote problem? My friend Gary Dixon told me that his Kansas City “super-suburban” neighborhood has been having a bad problem with the canines; in just the previous few weeks, seven dogs had been killed by coyotes. One dog, he reported, was saved when its owner literally pulled her pet out of the coyote’s jaws.

“The city is trying to decide whether to hire someone to kill them or to capture and relocate them,” he wrote.

Relocating might be an exercise in futility since the space created would be quickly refilled by other coyotes, a very successful, quickly proliferating species.

And that proliferation has cost us some beloved companions; we lost another cat in identical circumstances nearly six years ago when we first moved into our house.

Another friend, wildlife biologist Ron Nassar, said I basically have three options: poisoning, shooting or doing nothing.

Preserving wildlife is a noble quest and I certainly support it. I’m just not sure how much of it I want in my yard.
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