Coyotes! with Lulu Miller

Summary

Podcast Summary: "You're Wrong About" – Episode: Coyotes! with Lulu Miller

Introduction

In this compelling episode of You're Wrong About, host Sarah Marshall delves deep into the misunderstood world of coyotes, unraveling their intricate relationship with American history, their remarkable adaptability, and the complex emotions humans project onto them. Joined by renowned naturalist and urban ecologist Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson, the episode offers a nuanced exploration of coyotes beyond the typical narratives.

Coyotes in American History and the Wild West

The conversation kicks off by tracing coyotes' historical presence in North America. Originally confined to regions west of the Mississippi River, coyotes thrived as meso predators—neither apex predators like wolves nor mere scavengers. Their vast populations, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, were integral to the American wilderness.

Dr. Wilkerson highlights the pivotal moment in 1872 when Mark Twain’s derogatory portrayal cemented the coyote's negative image:

“The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it. It is always hungry, always poor, out of luck and friendless.”—Mark Twain (1872) [19:03]

This negative depiction aligned with European settlers' efforts to eradicate coyotes, viewing them as threats to livestock and, by extension, their agricultural endeavors.

Behavioral Flexibility and Adaptability

A standout feature of coyotes is their extraordinary behavioral flexibility. Dr. Wilkerson explains that coyotes can alter their hunting strategies, dietary preferences, and social structures in response to environmental pressures:

“Scientists call this amazingly trashy generalist power, behavioral flexibility.”—Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson [12:41]

Coyotes can switch between solitary hunting and forming loose packs, adapt to nocturnal or diurnal activities, and even collaborate with other species, such as badgers and ravens, to enhance their survival. This adaptability has enabled coyotes to thrive in diverse environments, including urban settings.

Human Perception and Emotional Impact on Coyotes

The episode delves into the symbiotic relationship between human emotions and coyote behavior. Dr. Wilkerson introduces the concept of the "cycle of emotions," where human fear and vilification inadvertently bolster coyote populations:

“The more we hated them, the more we persecuted them, the more they thrived.”—Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson [26:33]

This phenomenon suggests that negative human emotions and actions, such as extermination campaigns, can lead to evolutionary adaptations in coyotes that enhance their resilience and reproductive success.

Coyotes in Urban Environments

As urbanization progressed, coyotes adapted remarkably well to city life. Sarah shares anecdotal evidence from Chicago, where coyotes have become adept at navigating urban landscapes:

“Coyotes can run up to 40 miles per hour and have learned to obey traffic lights, waiting for green signals to cross.”—Sarah Marshall [55:34]

Dr. Wilkerson recounts encounters in places like Buena Vista Park in San Francisco, where coyotes seamlessly integrate into the urban ecosystem, preying on rats, squirrels, and even scavenging from human waste. This urban adaptability underscores their resilience and the challenges humans face in coexisting with them.

Personal Stories and Reflections

The discussion takes a poignant turn as Dr. Wilkerson shares a personal story about her dog, Charlie, who was tragically killed by coyotes. This narrative illustrates the emotional complexity of human-wildlife interactions:

“Charlie went out healthy. He went out likely in 30 seconds, and he got to maybe have a moment where he was like a wild creature.”—Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson [49:23]

This experience underscores the unpredictable nature of coyotes and the deep emotional impact they can have on human lives.

Ethical Considerations and Coexistence

Addressing the ethical dilemmas surrounding coyote management, the episode critiques lethal control measures that have proven ineffective. Despite millions of coyotes being killed through bounties and poison campaigns, populations have not only persisted but also expanded.

“The more you try to kill them, the more they come back.”—Sarah Marshall [25:33]

Dr. Wilkerson advocates for coexistence strategies, such as securing trash and using humane deterrents, to mitigate conflicts. The conversation emphasizes the need to balance human safety with respect for these resilient animals.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The episode concludes with a reflection on the broader implications of coyote adaptability as a mirror to human resilience and adaptability. Sarah muses on how admiring coyotes' survival instincts can inspire humans to embrace flexibility and creativity in facing life's challenges.

“We are something better. We're street rats who just want to live.”—Sarah Marshall [49:06]

Dr. Wilkerson echoes this sentiment, highlighting the beauty of seeing coyotes thrive amidst urban chaos as a testament to nature's enduring spirit.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Mark Twain on Coyotes: “The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it.”—[19:03]
• Behavioral Flexibility: “Scientists call this amazingly trashy generalist power, behavioral flexibility.”—[12:41]
• Cycle of Emotions: “The more we hated them, the more we persecuted them, the more they thrived.”—[26:33]
• Urban Adaptability: “Coyotes can run up to 40 miles per hour and have learned to obey traffic lights, waiting for green signals to cross.”—[55:34]
• Personal Loss: “Charlie went out healthy. He went out likely in 30 seconds, and he got to maybe have a moment where he was like a wild creature.”—[49:23]
• Effectiveness of Persecution: “The more you try to kill them, the more they come back.”—[25:33]
• Human Resilience Inspiration: “We are something better. We're street rats who just want to live.”—[49:06]

Final Thoughts

You're Wrong About masterfully deconstructs the multifaceted narrative surrounding coyotes, challenging listeners to reconsider preconceived notions. Through engaging dialogue and profound insights, Sarah Marshall and Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson illuminate the resilience of coyotes and, by extension, the adaptive spirit within humans. This episode serves as a thought-provoking call to foster coexistence and respect between urban populations and the wild creatures that inhabit them.

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

You know what? Mark Twain, maybe you're an allegory of one. You ever look in the mirror and think about that?

[Lulu Miller]

Welcome to Yorongabout. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are talking about coyotes, exclamation point, with Lulu Miller. Lulu Miller is the host of Terrestrials. She's the co host of Radiolab. She's the former co host of NPR's Invisibilia, and of course, she's the author of the bestseller why Fish Don't Exist. Lulu was last on a couple years ago for our lesbian Seagulls episode. I loved making that episode and I loved making this one with her, too. This is also kind of a sassy sisterpiece to a new terrestrials episode called the Howler, the dog who joined a coyote pack. So if you like this episode, please check out that one too. And check out terrestrials. In this episode we talked about some of the history of coyotes, that history being entwined with American history as a whole, what it takes to be a survivor and how humans can identify with the animal world without just projecting ourselves onto what we see. Lulu also wants us to tell you that during her research on coyote, she learned quite a lot from the conservation scientist, carnivore, ecologist and urban ecologist, Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson. And that a lot of what we got into in this episode comes through Dr. Wilkerson's research. And as a fun bonus, at the very end of this episode, we have a clip of Lulu Miller interviewing Dr. Christine Wilkerson. If you want bonus episodes, we have plenty for you on Patreon and Apple, plus subscriptions. And our newest one is a Fun jaunt through newspapers.com that I took with Chelsea Weber Smith. We gave each other a few words, we went out on a scavenger hunt, and we brought each other back what we found. And shortly we will be coming out with a new bonus with Miranda Zickler, producer of American Hysteria and woman of many talents on Peg Bracken's I Hate to Housekeep book and what it means to hate or perhaps tolerate housekeeping. Thank you so much as always for joining us. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you for tumbling and fumbling into spring. Thank you for surviving. Here's your episode.

[Sarah Marshall]

Welcome to Yurongabout, the show where we talk about maligned women and sometimes maligned animals. And with me today is our maligned animal correspondent, Lulu Miller. That's your beat.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

That really is my beat. Last time we talked about often known as the rats of the sky, gulls.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yep, Seagulls love it.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And today we're talking about what we could call the rats of the medium sized carnivorous predators.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm so happy that we're talking about coyotes. I don't, I don't know what direction you're going to take it in. You just said the word coyotes to me and I was like, yes, perf. And I will tell you my personal fun fact about coyotes, which is that when I was growing up where there were coyotes, you know, I believe you're gonna tell me something about there being like 40 coyotes per human in this country or whatever the statistic is.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, right.

[Sarah Marshall]

But we would hear coyotes like, having a party like they do when I was a kid. And because we watched a lot of PBS nature shows for a while when I was little, I thought that they were hyenas.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Oh, I love that. The hyenas of the Pacific Northwest.

[Sarah Marshall]

The hyenas of Soviet Island. Ye.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I mean, they are. When they party. I, I've. The first time I heard them party in the wild was when I was in my early 20s and growing up in the Boston suburbs. Like, I had really never heard them. And then I did, and I truly thought it sounded like witches. Like it was such a primal, coveny, electrifying sound like that, like, and tons of that. I mean, there is something so exciting about that sound.

[Sarah Marshall]

There really is. Yeah. And it's. And I heard it the other day because I was out taking a walk and there's like, you know, coyotes still in the Portland area, of course. And you know, and there's a video, I think that went viral a couple years ago about a kid being chased by a coyote across their yard.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Oh, really? In your area?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And somewhere in Portland. But like, yeah, I heard them the other night and it was that thing where you have your headphones in and you're like, oh, what's happening? Is there a football game at the high school? And you're like, no, but like, same.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Vibe, same like blood boiling vibe. Excited, communal excitement, you know?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And I don't know what the circumstances of those party sounds are, but it just like, I don't know. And it doesn't sound menacing to me. It would sound menacing if it was closer. But like many things when you're far away, you're like, ah, nature. Nature is sexy.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, nature is sexy. So, yeah, that is, that is what we're here to say. You already brought one of our characters into this story called social media is going to have an effect on not just our perception of coyotes, but the Lives, behavior and migration of coyotes, which is pretty wild.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow. Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

To really start, I think we got to crack our knuckles. And can I hear your best coyote howl?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy. I can just do like a regular dog howl. Can we start with that? You do. Okay.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

That was so dainty, Sarah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Thank you.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Okay, I'm going to give you my coyote howl.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Because it helps me get in the zone for this story. O. All right. You ready?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

To go.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, I'm ready.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

What are your associations, Feelings? Like, you said, yes, let's do coyotes. And you said, let's call it coyotes with an exclamation mark.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Why was that your response? And what, if anything, just rough. What are your feelings about coyotes? Your associations? Your feelings.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, so I took. Yeah. To like, free associate. My associations with coyotes are like, I like a scavenger animal, which I don't even think that they are as much as just opportunistic. But, like, I've always liked rats. I had pet rats as a kid, as you mentioned before. Oh, yeah. And like, there's something about. And I respect, you know, the trauma people have with rats because, like, a rat when you're not expecting them, or like, you know, a loose basement rat in your house is not fun.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

But a pet rat that you can feed banana chips to and, like, is so nice. And so I've always been. And, you know, the rats of Nim, I think, was like a big thing for millennials. Yeah, totally. And so I think of coyotes in the same breath as like, you know, these sort of. And again, in a very non scientific capacity, I think of them as like on the foxy end of the dog spectrum, you know, of like, that maybe we feel a little bit uncomfortable with just sort of the degree of a society that they've built within hours without asking us for permission to do it, similar to rats. And then also, you know, I know that, like, they eat little dogs and it's hard to live in an area that's all mobbed up with coyotes if you're a small dog owner, especially. And is this a public safety issue? Because, like, I don't have little dogs or little kids, so I'm not personally worried about it. But I am curious about, as with most things, like the line between superstition and rational concern and where that actually falls. But I believe I'm going to, you know, be. I don't know. I was once sitting in a coffee shop in Portland and I saw a coyote just like ambling down a bike lane. And that's a Moment I treasure. I like to see a coyote. That's the kind of person I am.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And one more beat on why, Just. Why do you treasure that moment?

[Sarah Marshall]

I just. I like a trash animal, you know, And I think. And I think that's a whole vibe, right? That, like, people. There's, like, a lot of people, I'm sure, listening to this show right now, who love a raccoon, who love opossum, who love a rat, who just, like, love to see an animal who's, like, maybe not looking the most photogenic, but it's just like, surviving and carrying her babies around and just living. L I V I n. Yeah, yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And thriving, probably. Yeah, yeah. Cause they're animals. And I think that that shimmer, that, like, prismatic shimmer of admiration, fear, uncertainty, like, what are they? Ness is so. I mean, that is so. It's so key not just to our perception of them, but their animal nature. And so the story I want to tell about them, like, I was thinking about. I was kind of outlining it all last night, and I was like, this actually reminds me of. They're. It's. To me, they're not just a story of, like, behold the animal that is a mirror to our human feelings. They're not just a mirror. There's something even more strange, and this is an idea I got from many conversations with the scientist Christine Wilkinson, who I just, like, I interviewed her, I think, three times about coyotes. She go follow her. So much of this comes from her. So she is scrappynaturalist.com and she, you know, she studies scrappy. She studies just like, you know, scrappy creatures, hyenas, coyotes. And she's incredible. And she painted this idea of, like, this almost suddenly felt to me like an invisibilia story where we talk about how invisible emotions and things like that influence human behavior. But this is, like, how feelings influence animal migration, behavior, aggression. I mean, it is a w. That sense, almost ghost story. Like, you can watch these. Our feelings, our judgments having really real life, like, profound and surprising effects on populations of coyotes. And she is. Christine is someone who studies this. She's a migration ecologist. So she studies, like, how things move and in the way that she kind of was always trained to look at things like climate change or, you know, how highways affect migration, these concrete things. She's come to really see how, like, feelings, human feelings, effect. And I. I kind of think of it as, like, you know, there's a water cycle, there's a Krebs cycle. There's also, like, a Cycle of emotions, like an emo cycle. And it has impact, like, on the soil and our. Which the flavor of them affects things. So that's kind of the story I'm going to tell for you today. And coyotes are just. Man, they are really influenced by our feelings.

[Sarah Marshall]

So excited for that.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Okay, so we begin our wild tale. And like, coyotes tell us so much about the American experiment toward its slow.

[Sarah Marshall]

Decline, such as it was. Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Okay, so chapter one. We are going. We're going wild west. It's spaghetti western time. We are going to the American West. And, you know, coyotes, before European settlers showed up, were really only found west of the Mississippi. And but they were, you know, they were all over there, Likely hundreds of thousands of them roaming around. In terms of what do they eat? They can be scavengers. Like, they will totally scavenge. They're what's called a meso predator. So they're. They're not the apex. You know, those would be the gray wolves at the time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

They're in between. They're like, they're getting hunted by wolves, but then they're also hunting gophers and bunnies and birds. But they're generalists. They will also totally. They'll eat berries. They'll eat insects. They will eat human refuse. They will eat trash. Like they are trash pandas in that way.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm remembering, too. Yeah, I've got, like, a fondness for omnivores. I think there's just something very charming about an animal. Well, and, you know, it can be dangerous for them, but generally charming about an animal who's like, yeah, I'll eat that. I'll have that. Whatever.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And coyotes are truly like the omnivores of not just eating, but everything. So scientists call this amazingly, like, trashy generalist power. They just call. It has such a boring name I want to rebrand, but they call it behavioral flexibility.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, once again, we're getting into our theme of, you know, seagulls and bisexuality and just like living how you gotta.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Live in how you got it. And so they will. I mean, okay, so they do it with eating. As we kind of just ran through. They'll. They'll totally hunt. They can be great hunters, but they'll also. Are they nocturnal? Are they awake during the day? Are they crepuscular? The dusk? They're anything Sarah. They will do. They'll, like, if they need to be, become nocturnal, they'll become nocturnal. Now, do they hunt in packs or do they hunt alone? Either. They'll do either. They'll do pairs.

[Sarah Marshall]

They just like to fuck with naturalists.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

They do. And like, they just. Well, okay, very quickly. This is so dorky, but to. So wolves really like to like, they need to hunt in their packs and they, they become. They're amazing pack hunters. Coyotes can pull it off, but they, but they can also do it in pairs. Or they could go alone and just scavenge or they can hunt solo. And this is that, like, ability to either be a pack or a solo. That's called. Scientists call it fission fusion. Yeah. And it is actually in the animal world, it's pretty rare. Like, there's only a few animals that will basically swing both ways. And in terms of being lonely or kind of social and humans is one of the only other ones. And it, and it does kind of like extend our adaptability. Like, because then you could, like in a social distancing thing, you can thrive by being alone, but you can also thrive if you.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, sort of, kind of.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

You can try.

[Sarah Marshall]

We made it. We scraped through to an extent.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So coyotes are one of the very rare, like non primates who do this. Dolphins do it, elephants, bats.

[Sarah Marshall]

So interesting.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Very like limited amount of mammals will do this. So coyotes do that. They also, and I love this so much, they also will hunt with other species. And I don't know if you. Did you happen across the kind of viral badger, coyote friendship?

[Sarah Marshall]

No. How did this happen?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So there's. This was, you know, went viral. It was caught on film of this badger and a coyote just like ambling through a tunnel together. And both of them looked relaxed. They were not in a like, aggression kind of like they were buddies. And scientists have looked at it and what happens is like, the badger is really good at digging. The coyote can run up to 40 miles per hour. So they'll. The coyote can like chase, let's say a gopher. And then if it goes under the burrow, the badger can flush it out. And then they've been documented to share the spoils and their kill rate goes up, even though the coyote could probably kill the badger. It's like, so this is what we did our Terrestrials episode about is the friendships. Because there's a story of a domestic dog that joined a coyote pack for almost a year and it was documented on trail cams. And so they'll do this interspecies friendship. They also have friendships with like, ravens because the ravens will. They've learned to like, follow them toward carrion, which they will eat because they're scavengers. But then usually the raven Hangs out to get the, like, shredded up bites. They've been, like, shown to befriend with the mortal enemy of canines, which is bobcats, at least in a rescue setting. So a puppy and a kitten. So they're all. So anyway, they're just like. They are omnivores of behavior, of night and day, of food, of hunting. And they just like. They're not the best at anything, but they are okay at lots of things.

[Sarah Marshall]

They're not afraid to adapt.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. And scientists are. Now everyone's kind of freaking out about all these kind of cool interspecies friendships because things have been caught on film. But, like, indigenous traditions going back thousands, they likely think thousands of years. Paulette Steves is an indigenous scholar who, like, kind of looks at deep time and the coyote myth. But the coyote has always been seen as this kind of shapeshifter that will befriend other animals. So, like, it's there. And coyote is actually a. It is an indigenous word originally from the Nle people. So anyway, we're in the American West. The European settlers haven't come over Lewis and Clark, like, cross the Mississippi and are like, document, like, what's this strange little, like, scrappy mini wolf thing?

[Sarah Marshall]

I gotta read those Lewis and Clark journals. They've gotta be over the top.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. And. And that's. That's where they used to be, just kind of living among, hiding from the wolves, eating their birds and berries and, you know, coexisting with indigenous people. Like, they were just kind of down with all different types of habitats. And that was kind of their. Their wild life estimates of about like half a million of them maybe out there. Enter the European settlers. Okay. So they come out, you know, or mid to late 1800s. They're setting up their farms with these juicy cows and pigs and sheep.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's a buffet.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

It's a buffet. And, you know, by the 18th, you know, just wolves and coyotes are, like, preying on the livestock. And so they are very quickly reviled. And they kind of go from this more ambiguous. In some indigenous groups, like, the coyote is actually a deity. There's a creation myth. There's all kinds of different reputations. But it quickly. The sort of European settler reputation becomes very negative. And I don't know if you've ever heard of a fellow named Mark Twain.

[Sarah Marshall]

I've heard of him. Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

It is right around this time that he kind of, like, really cements the new reputation of the coyote as this villain. And so why did you do that?

[Sarah Marshall]

Mark Twain? I thought we were, you know, I thought we had an understanding here.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Oh no. So he so roughing. It comes out in 1872 and this is like so coinciding with this moment where European settlers are kind of like villainizing the coyote. They're convincing, sort of local livestock associations are putting, are convincing the local states to put bounties on coyotes and wolves. You know, make it fine to kill them. And so Mark Twain describes the coyote this way. The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry looking skeleton with a gray wolf skin stretched over it. I love that. Like it's like a sheep in wolves clothing. It's like a. I don't even know. It's just like a skeleton in wolves clothing.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's a wolf in wolf.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

A tolerably bushy tail. Okay, so that's like the tail gets a little love but. But it forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery. Its eyes are described as a furtive and evil eye. So we're just like boom. You know. This is not a majestic piece. It has a long sharp face with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general sinking expression all over. He is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. We know that is very inaccurate.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know what Mark Twain, maybe you're an allegory of one. You ever look in the mirror and think about that?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

He goes on. The meanest creatures despise him and even fleas wouldn't desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he's so homely, so scrawny and ribby and coarse haired and pitiful.

[Sarah Marshall]

I feel like this is like how we've historically written about gay people where it's like they're so scary, but they're not scary, but they kind of are.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, they're so scary, but not in a strong or admirable way.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, so like they're scary because I don't want to be like them. And it's like aren't we all opportunistic bushy tailed guys who will eat whatever we can get and be friends with a badger? I mean ideally, right?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. So anyway, that's kind of like the vibe is shifted. It's just like screw you coyote. You're not, you're, you're wild and you're eating but you're not even. Like, we're not gonna even admire you like a wolf. Like you're just saying.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Cause I feel like there's like, still so much drama around wolves. And that's a whole other conversation, but like, that sort of in the American west still there's this thing of like, hating the wolf but also respecting the wolf. And in this case, it's. There's like the fear is like grudging. It's like, I don't even want to be afraid of something this.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

You know, it's fear without respect.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

It's a totally different vibe than the wolf. Even though they are like, you know, coyote's only a little bit smaller. Look, super similar wild canines eating the same things.

[Sarah Marshall]

But it would be very hard to describe to an alien how they're so different. And yet you would never get Farley Mowat's Never Cry Coyote.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I don't think.

[Sarah Marshall]

Although I would like it.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I know, I know. What would that. That story be? You know, like, let's think about our most famous coyote. Who's our most famous pop culture coyote? Meet. Meet.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah. Oh, and you know what? There is one where he did finally catch the roadrunner, but the trick was that the roadrunner had been made giant. And so he like, holds up a sign that's like, now what?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Oh, my gosh, I didn't know that. But yeah, like, he's just. He can't catch this bird and he keeps. He wakes up every day and he fails. And like, you know, it's such a not noble creature. So, okay, so it's cement. So cementing. Cementing their place in our imagination as to be feared but not respected. And, you know, the decades go by and in. By the early 1920s, the kind of ranchers and livestock associations have actually convinced a federal bureau, the Biological Survey Bureau, to basically, like, wage a war of extermination against. Against coyotes and wolves and mountain lions.

[Sarah Marshall]

They're like, eradicating a species. Probably won't cause any issues. So.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Sounds like a good idea, right? Basically there's this, you know, federally funded extermination campaign. And the story of the gray wolves, you probably know, and you know, they're like, it's like shooting poisons, trapping all kinds of stuff. Wolves, the gray wolves, are famously wiped out, you know, within just a few decades after that. The sort of. That start.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is reminding me. I, like, went on a trip with our friend of the show Candice Opera last year, and we went through Kane, Pennsylvania. Have you encountered this town in your.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Research, I have not.

[Sarah Marshall]

I think it was like the. It might have been the gray wolf or like the timberwolf or something, but some kind of wolf that was being systematically eradicated by the US Government. I don't know how many wolf species that happened to. And there was this. This rogue doctor in, like, rural Pennsylvania and I think the 20s who was like, no, instead of killing the wolves, give some to me. And the government, I guess, was like, okay. And so, yeah, and so it's this. You, like, drive through this town and there's all. There's like a wolf statue and a little wolf museum. And you're like, all right. Something this. There's some history here. And it turns out that this doctor had this big, like, wolf sanctuary where he was taking care of these wolves, you know, whose species mates, I guess, were all being eradicated by the government at the time. And that population eventually made it, I think, to Montana or something. And so the descendants of those wolves are like, some of, if not the only wolves of that species that are still around.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Wait, that is so rad.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

This guy just kind of protected them. In a little part of Pennsylvania came pa.

[Sarah Marshall]

I need to go shout out to rural Pennsylvania. I feel like they, like. It's like the reverse version of the Children of the Corn, right? When you, like, end up in a small town with, like, a really great secret.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

That is so reverse.

[Sarah Marshall]

Children of the Corn. Children of the wolves.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

There was no one. There was not a Cain, Pennsylvania of the west, unfortunately for the gray wolves. So by about this, you know, the 1960s, like, the gray wolf population, I mean, those. Those howls, the wolves from, like, the howls in the forest are gone. It is. They are just gone. There is a tiny pocket of them up near Canada and Minnesota. Like, north. North, but, like, totally gone. Now. Coyotes, they are being attacked with the same volume of bullets, poison, money. And guess what happens?

[Sarah Marshall]

They survive, I guess.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Bet not only do they survive, they expand. The more you try to kill them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Fuck you, Mark Twain.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

The more they come back. They are like the hydra is like you chop off a head and two.

[Sarah Marshall]

More grow, like mint.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And it, like, they were described by some people as unkillable. And this is real. This wasn't a perception thing. Scientists, a bunch of scientists have studied this. And there isn't, as far as I know, like, a term for it. But there are these adaptations that basically, when they are killed and when there is sort of less population density in a certain area, these evolutionary adaptations kick in which allow them to have larger litter sizes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Isn't that awesome and wild?

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm just. Yeah. And I'm just such a, like a non thought, very visceral response of like, fuck yeah. Coyotes have as many puppies as you can.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

But that's this kind of like the first moment I'm seeing Christine Wilkinson's idea of like the, the cycle of emotions. It's like the more we hated them, right. The more we persecuted them, attacked them, called them evil, the more they thrived, throve thrived.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And our fear of them just makes them have more babies.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yes. And, and that, you know, it's. I just think that's so fascinating and like we' totally sure the mechanism, but they probably think it's because when there's one or two gone in a given area, then the ones who are around are able to have more food, which then is like more caloric content to create more babies. And for those babies to survive, it's just beautiful. Another reason they were probably able to survive. So there's kind of like three reasons they're probably unkillable. Number one is that magic. The more you kill me, the more babies I have. Number two is that thing we talked about, the generalists anthem, the behavioral flexibility. You know, wolves, if their pack is taken out, their hunting goes way down. Coyotes, if someone from their pack is taken out, they can, they'll turn to scavenging. They'll turn to, you know, they'll hunt at night. They'll. They'll learn. And so that behavioral flexibility, just like it gave them other options for how to hunt, what to eat, when to hunt, who to hunt with. Befriend a badger. As they famously say, no more livestock. Befriend a badger. And then the third thing is going back to this idea that they're meso predators. And so in a way that wolves were apex predators. They weren't used to being hunted. Coyotes were. And I guess I have this like, totally unfair. Now I'm gonna step out of the role of like dutiful animal reporter and just be projecty woman.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, put on your projecty woman hat.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

But like it's a power of being prey.

[Sarah Marshall]

Mm. Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And I think there's a way in which, you know, I remember someone once talking about horses and how like they know, they know when they're being watched. Like they, they have to be a little bit better at that than a predator because, you know, the predator needs to watch, but it doesn't have to have eyes behind its back, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Or giant eyeballs on the sides of its Face.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. On the sides. Right. And there's just something to me about, like, the wolves started getting hunted by humans, and then they were just like toads because they hadn't evolved to learn to be scared of something, you know?

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, yeah, and just the idea of, like, identity is something that holds us back. And especially, you know, in this moment of, like, American sort of like white, scary masculinity having what feels like a big charley horse ideologically, of just, like, we have to force women to have more babies, but only white babies.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I've never heard this moment described as a charlie horse, but, man, is that just like, ow. And then your leg kicks up.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. They're just like, something's wrong, but I. I'm gonna make it worse. Yeah. And just like, you know, the. The sort of, like, wild spasming in every direction except for the ones that help you and, like, trying to make every other category of person do stuff or, you know, deporting just anyone. And people know. And if it's not 2025, when you're listening to this, you remember.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Sort of white American masculinity having a crisis at this moment, it seems, because there's a lot of stressed and emotionally pliant men out there who are kind of easy pickings for ideologues who can come along and be like, do you feel like you should be making more money and having more sex than you are? Well, it's everyone else's fault. And it's also the fault of social justice warriors. And also, concentration camps will help you go on more dates. And it's like, I don't think they will, but that. This sort of, like, panic that feels to be coming from, you know, I mean, not to get too politically complicated, but like, a. Like a very reasonable panic coming from the fact that, like, industries are being destroyed and, like, you know, desiccated. And that that is. Is happening, but it's being carried out by the people in office right now for reasons of varying stupidity. But, B, this idea of, like. Like, men can't be men anymore because we can't survive under the very specific code of behavior and sort of, you know, masculinity and patriarchy that was handed to us and that we believed was the only way to be. And this idea of, like, I'm not thriving in this metric where I can't express my feelings to anybody and where I have to be a provider for a family but not be provided for in any way except by demanding that I be fed three meals a day, but nothing Emotional. No emotional nurture ever. And just this thing of, I don't know, there being, A, the appeal of, like, people who know what it's like to be prey, know how to survive and therefore will endure the situation, and B, that, like, if you're not thriving under the conditions of what you think your identity has to be, then, like, maybe that's not your identity. Maybe you can eat garbage.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, right, right. Okay. So, yeah, like, you're saying in that thing that sort of like, the white males are the wolves and it's. Is that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

They get hunted and they're like, we're not used to this. And it's like, why don't you adapt? And they're like, I simply. No, I would rather die.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

There's only one way. Like, I want to be a pack. This is how we've always done it. Totally. And I think there's something for me about, like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, nothing against wolves. I love wolves.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Nothing.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, it's like when Susan Sontag famously compared white European colonial imperialism to cancer. And then people got upset and she was like, I'm sorry. That was offensive to people who have cancer. Right, right, right, right.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, nothing gets wolves. But, yeah, I think there's something. And again, I'm still in. We're still in. Projection sidebar.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yep.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

But, yeah, there's something. Like, there's just something so beautiful to me about in this story, seeing the coyotes be unkillable. Because, like, when you're a meso predator, you know, you have to hunt. You have to be a prey. You're. You're not just, like, always hiding. You gotta. You gotta go out and risk, but you also have to kind of hide and be on alert and like, that. It is an anxious state to be meso prey. Like, you're always wondering, like, if you're under attack, but that maybe there's some benefit to all this anxiety. Like, maybe there's some benefit to the fact that my nails are chewed down and I'm always kind of modulating my TO of certain rooms and worrying about X or Y thing I don't wanna step on. But that, like, under duress, like, we have been honing and honing and like, to see them just thrive. And it's like they already know how to bob and weave. And there's a point to all that.

[Sarah Marshall]

And they're like, this is what I was made for.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. And the toll it may take and the literal energy lost on that alertness under duress may give us a leg up. And. And that I. I feel like matters to think about right now, at least for me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah. Well, and also to, like, I don't know, put a button on projection corner. I also get annoyed, as I bet you might, when a. When we use, you know, when we call, like, criminals predators. You know, even in, like, To Catch a Predator context, it's like, this guy is a Jimmy John's manager from Muncie. Like, I don't really think that we need to call him a predator. You know, it's not like he's an alligator who can wait for hours and hours until a tourist pokes him or something.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And really, like, when I think of the male Charlie Horse freakouts that are sort of dictating our policy and in this country at the moment, I'm like, you are not a predator. You are that video of a deer that crashed into the window of a Quiznos or something. Have you seen this? There's a video?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

No, but it's so funny you're bringing up Quiznos because Quiznos is coming up in our story. I'm excited, but I haven't. I have not heard about the deer in the Quiznos. I do know about the coyote.

[Sarah Marshall]

It might have been, you know, it could have been a pot belly. Who knows? But, like, some normal franchise restaurant where you're just like, it has been a long day. We are gonna have a sandwich, and we're gonna go home. And there's video of, like, a deer just, like, like, crashing through this plate glass window and just, like, skittering. Skittering straight into this family that are, like, trying to have dinner and absolutely bodying this teenage girl and then, like, just clattering off, like, on the tile, you know? And I think, like, and this is another sort of, like, specious conclusion that I have based on pop culture, but my understanding is that, like, like, you don't want to get attacked by a wolf, but also, you probably won't. And a wolf probably will look at a human and be like, I'm not dealing with that. Right. Like, things would have to be pretty weird. But if you corner a deer, they will use everything they have to survive, and they will probably, like, slice you up with their little hooves. So, like, men who are freaking out are not predators. They're just confused deer.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

There we go. Okay, Animal facts from projection corner. Okay. We are. Well, okay, one last thing before we hop out of the sidebar bar.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I just was, like, since we were bringing up Quiznos, I would like to do the. The requisite shout out to. To my brilliant Wife the other day, we were talking about sub shops and subs, and she was like, there should be a sandwich shop called Sublime. Like there should, right? Do we need to quit everything? And, like, started. I just was like, oh. Cause subs are so sublime. When they're good, they're sublime. Anyway. Yeah, okay. Whatever them being mesopredators means to us in this moment, accurately, what it meant is it they evolved alongside wolves and they learned to be scared of big predators. So when they weren't wolves and they were humans with guns, they did a bit of a better job at evading them. And they. They completely survived this eradication campaign. And as we discussed, they even thrived. Their populations expanded, their territories expanded. And so come the 1940s, we just tried to kill them harder.

[Sarah Marshall]

Aha.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So the 3031 Congress passes the Animal Damage Control Act. $10 million of 1930s money to exterminate coyotes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, Lord.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

They develop all kinds of new poisons.

[Sarah Marshall]

And spread them across the countryside. I'm sure it'll be fine.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

That one of the big ones is called Compound 1080, which wasn't developed there, but it was like, it was already developed. But they. They started figuring out to use it as kind of a coyote control thing. And. And it's a really gnarly. The way it works. It's like a slow, painful death. It's horrible. There's like, a whole side note on. I was just like, I wonder about other stories about, like, how his compound 1080. Like. Like, just like this thing that, like, because of our fear of coyotes, kind of came into human usage. And there's this whole thing in New Zealand where there was, like, a famous case. So they were using Compound 1080 all over, and this environmentalist, you know, and animals were dying, and. And. And he. He slipped the poison into baby formula and held the whole country hostage and caused this, like, food crisis. Because he was like, I'm not going to tell you where it is until you guys stop using 1080. And, like, there's a whole, like, New Zealand. Anyway, so compound 1080 appears. Blah, blah, blah.

[Sarah Marshall]

In America, we get to have crises because people can't afford a formula and no one cares. So don't know which is worse.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Okay. But so anyway, they, you know, they're just, like, stepping up the coyote can. There's bounties. There's this woman, Janet Kessler, who studies coyotes, kind of a citizen scientist in San Francisco, and she remembers people telling her about, you would get paid $4. Like, kids could be paid $4 if they showed up with two coyote ears. So they were like literal bounties on their literal heads. There were killing competitions, poison, blah, blah. It's still really not working out there, but it is finally kind of working in the cities. Like San Francisco is a very interesting one to look at because coyotes were always there and then they weren't there. So then they kind of disappeared. And then finally Reagan is actually like, you know what? 1080 doesn't sound like a good. There's all the birds are, you know, dying, so they put a ban on 1080, and that's kind of where we are. But basically from the time they started this campaign to about 1972, they guess that about 8.5 million coyotes were killed and yet didn't really put a dent in the population, which is, which is pretty incredible. So then we kind of enter this next phase where like now we're kind of getting into the 80s, I think. Sarah Marshall's born, Lulu Miller's born, We pop out into the world.

[Sarah Marshall]

Big decade. Who framed Roger Rabbit came out.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I don't know the world I came into. I didn't have any direct contact with coyotes. And so they kind of existed in my imagination a little bit more like a wolf. Like I'd see them, I'd picture that they felt like the west howling at a moon. Maybe they'd be like stitched onto like a mo.

[Sarah Marshall]

Motorcycle jacket or like in the rough of a parka.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, exactly. And to me they were like a symbol of like wildness or innocence. So when I first heard them howling in the woods of Cape Cod. What? Uh huh. I was shocked. And I was in my like late teens and I was ecstatic because I'd been going to Cape Cod my whole life. And suddenly it was around then that I started hearing them. And it turned out that, that at some point, coyotes probably crossed one of the bridges over the Cape Cod canal. And just their little silhouettes, like marching in a line and then started running wreaking havoc on the cape because they had no, no predators there. So there's just like all these things.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like coyotes on the cape, as they.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Say, like coyotes on the cape. And I remember hearing like, as. As we said earlier, like I. I would hear those howls in the woods. And as a kid growing up in like the Boston suburbs, where I felt very cut off from where wild wildness, I felt oppressed by kind of polite social norms and like, I don't know, it just was never the place for me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Where the luls talk only to Cabots and the Cabots talk only to God.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Exactly. And Lulu talks only to the squirrel outside of the window. So, anyway, then I heard coyotes, and I was like, oh, my God. And I would just listen to them at night, and if I heard them, it was like an owl. It was like an owl, a coyote. You know, it was like the treasure.

[Sarah Marshall]

Pleasure of it, because where I grew up, we. We were just, like, next to, like, just like a field, just like, empty space. Like, it was like kind of a sheep farm for a while or for a long time. But it was mostly just, like, space and would get rained on and a little bit flooded, and so swans would come and, you know, Canada geese stop there when they're migrating north and south. Or you can hear the frogs in the spring and just like.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Like, is there any better sound? No.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And just the feeling of, like, falling asleep with the window open, listening to frogs. It's like, I never want people to not have that.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, it's. It stills the blood.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. And so I. I think it was hearing it. It was just like, oh, there's still wildness out there. Even Cape Cod, you know?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. They made it, Lee. Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Like, we haven't completely paved paradise, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, there, of course, there was, like, such a big moment that we all made fun of at the very start of the pandemic of, like, we are the virus. Nature is healing. And that was, like, kind of insane, I think, given the context, because it was like, I don't know. I don't think it's gonna heal that much in four days. But, like, I was so swept up in that. In the moment. Me, too. And just the desire to be like, surely there has to be some benefit to all of this.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Ecologists called it the Anthropocene. And just this, like, pause on kind of, like, infiltrating ecosystems. There was a. I listened to this really cool podcast about, like, the acoustics of the ocean and how it. Without boats and without people, like, literally, they're. They're. Oh, this is so beautiful. This blew my mind. There is a dawn and dusk of the under. Not underworld of the underwater. And literally at dawn and dusk, like, different little shrimp and, like, things kind of wake up around the reef. And it allowed them to get these incredible acoustic recordings of what these kind of circadian rhythms actually sound like underwater without shrimp waking up, humans messing it. And it's like there was a real effect on nature. There was.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Tiny. Sidebar. Tiny, tiny, tiny.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Sidebar. Let's go.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. I was thinking. I don't know this past week about Star Trek because I remember my parents watching TNG when I was like, too little to understand what was going on. But I could, like, the visuals sort of convey some amount. So I think of it as like the show that the grown ups are watching.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because I don't know, been watching a little bit of TNG lately.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Nice.

[Sarah Marshall]

Anyone who loves Star Trek already knows this, but like so much kind of current sci fi and like fantasy dystopian stuff is just like, what if we took everything that's happening now and reskinned it for a slightly new world? And I feel like that's what a lot of the new Star wars media has been like. And it's like, yeah, you know, I mean, that's. Look, there's certainly like a lot of value to dystopian storytelling. It like, serves to show us sort of like Children of Men is one of my favorite movies and that certainly is in that vein. The world of Star Trek is like, you know, what if the future is about? You know, we work in these really diverse workplaces and it's about like, communication and teamwork and there's like misunderstandings between people because we're different from each other and we're trying to, to achieve a common goal. And it's like, there's like, I don't know, so much metaphorical autism in Star Trek and like. But it's really, I don't know, like, thinking about it. Lately I've been like, you know, I don't fucking want to go to Mars. I do not give a shit about Mars. I might have liked it more in the past when it was a less politicized idea, but like, there's nothing for us on Mars. You know, there's just like. And it's easy to take a dim view of humanity because we certainly do get up to a lot of awful stuff. But when you think about, even if we're not alone in the universe, we're like very far away from anyone else that we could talk to or from any other kind of a planet that can support this amount of life, you know, and like the sort of incredible rareness and incredible specialness of the Earth, the fact that it's not disposable and also that people are really precious and that we, we don't have. I don't. In my opinion, we don't have a universe, certainly not a galaxy that's like jam packed with other sentient creatures that we can like, have diplomacy with. You know, I think like, the Secret of Star Trek is that it's like, it's just about Earth.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Make it work with the people you're cooped up with.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, right. And like, it's like, is space the final frontier? Is the final frontier just like learning how to get. Get along with people with different communication styles, you know?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. Oh, I love that. And that the final frontier you're not going to go find elsewhere where there's. Where there's nothing around.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, it's just like Data and Worf learning about human weddings.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I love that. And how did you get there? From hearing coyotes in the wolves. How did that. Or in the woods?

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I guess this thing of. Yeah, the early pandemic days of like, oh, nation is healing. Humans are staying home and we can hear the shrimp again. And it's like, yeah, I want to hear the shrimp waking up. And I want, like, we understand that things are out of balance, you know, and that this amount of human intervention is bad and not just for, you know, for, like, the part of nature that is us. Because we've created an environment that is really hard to thrive in, you know, especially, you know, just looking at the United States like it is a utopian dream for most people approximately our age to be able to have. Have grocery shopping, schools, playgrounds, and a nice bar within walking distance. Most people don't have that. And that's really all a lot of people are asking for. So I guess this thing of it's easy to look at humans and be like, I don't like any of this right now. But also, I don't know, I want to be able to find moments to treasure the fact that we behave against nature in a lot of ways. But I think at the end of the day, we are nature and we are part of this precious world that we're trying to protect, and that is the only one that we get to have. So we have to protect humanity and foster the best in it as much as we take care of anything else.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, of course that line, that divide that we keep searching for is not there. There was this beautiful book maybe 10, 115 years ago called the Gap. Not about the gap, not about the close of the gap, but about all the ways scientists over the years have tried to define the gap between humans and animals. And it's like, tool use. Nope. Language? Nope.

[Lulu Miller]

Clothes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nope. Orcas put. What if, like, orcas are putting, like, fish on their head or something?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And like, the ways that humans behave, I mean, I. And I think One of the cool things coyotes show us is, like, coyotes, like, use a lot of our similar tricks. Like, like, the things we do. Coyotes do a lot of that stuff. And so, yes, it's a beautiful reminder also for. For someone like me who, like, tends to romanticize nature and only view humans as parasites. And I need to, like, get over that just to be like, no, we are. We. We maybe even belong, too.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And also that it's. I don't know, that we hold ourselves to unreasonable standards and then get disappointed. And it's like. Like, no, we don't have to be noble. We don't have to behave in these certain ways that we invented or someone else invented and imposed on us, you know, but just like, I think part of the human hatred of rats comes from the similarly, like, they're unkillable and they're opportunistic, and they can survive anywhere, and they will survive anywhere, and they will have lots of babies and eat whatever and figure it out. And I think that, like, we want to think that we're these, you know, we. We are the masters of our domain because we are the best, and we are the apex predators. And it's like, no, we're not. We're something better. We're street rats who just want to live.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And that's pretty great behavioral flexibility, man. So, okay, so we're in this romantic period of the now. We're into the late 90s, early 2000s. I'm, you know, in the keep cod.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hearing howls and low rise jeans are in, et cetera.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So in. Now, I have to tell you a very sad part of the story, which is that my dog Charlie, my family dog, a West Highland terrier, a little westie. Yeah. He was eaten by coyotes in front of all of us.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, man.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

We did not see it, but I say in front because we heard it, and it was like, right at dusk. It was like we had never. We hadn't known to keep him inside because for his whole life, he'd sat outside on the deck and it was fine, but coyotes had, like, suddenly filled up the woods and had made it further and further out of the cape, and they got him. And then it was. It was horrible. He was 13, so he'd, like, had a good life. That's the one consolation that he didn't, like, go out in a vet. But, you know, and people told us it was probably, like, very quick, but the next morning, we were all very sad and just, like, rearranging the chair is like, where is he? Where's his spot on the floor, like, it just was this. We were all, like, looking at our feet and noticing the emptiness of the floor, the quietness of the floor. It was very sad. And then my mom, as a joke, was like, well, maybe he didn't get eaten by the pack. Maybe he went and joined the pack. And that was, like, our family joke. And, like, my sister painted this little painting of, like, a Westie leading these coyotes. And. But then I learned about the interspecies friendship, and I was like, it is very unlikely, but it is not zero percent. Right? Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, that's how I feel about, you know, the escape at Alcatraz. It's like, did they drown? Probably, but we don't know. We never found bodies. They could have made it.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. And there was a case just a few years ago in upstate New York, or maybe it was Connecticut, where there was a. There was a dog who. Who was with the coyotes. And there was a case in Nevada, even more recently, of a dog who, like, ran with coyotes for almost a year. So it has happened. Those were bigger dogs, but still. Still.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, and I feel like that is, like, part of the human story with nature, right? Where it's like. I feel like a lot of stories are about people who have certain ideas and then are personally victimized by nature and are like, never mind. I'm against that now. So, I mean, what. I'm curious about how you metabolize that. Unless, you know, he's out there still riding the rails until he's, like, 40. You never know, you know, but like, that the feeling of connecting, sort of the thing that thrills you when you hear it in the distance with the thing that can come up on your porch.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

If his end. He was getting to be old, and if he had to be in a vet on an IV or some, like, sad, like, two months where we couldn't accept. And he was hurting. Like, he went out healthy. He went out likely in 30 seconds, and he got to maybe have a moment where he was, like, thought he was a wild dog. Like, he went out like a wild creature. And so I. I think probably that's my own projection as a kid who felt confined by the suburbs. But, like, there. There was something about, like, he got to go out like a wild dog. He got to commune with that former self. He got to, like, for a moment, leap toward a pack that maybe he thought was beckoning him, and maybe they were tricking him and eating him. But, like, he got this moment. And. And so I actually think that's kind Of. Of, like, badass for little Charlie that he got to go out that way.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So, okay, we've got, like, our third act to hit.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

It's right around this time, and I'm a little blurry on exact. I think everyone's a little blurry on exactly when this happens because coyotes are truly so wily and sneaky and hard to pin down. But they start early 2000s. Like. Like, they start showing up in American cities, and again, maybe they. In certain cities, they already were, but they. They. They start getting cited more and more. And to just focus on San Francisco for a second again, because, like, that holds that whole. Like the bounties, and they were there originally, but then the bounties, and then the. Around 2002 was, like, one was cited in the Presidio. And so they, like, reenter these American cities. The population is continuing to explode. Now, people don't know exactly, but before the extermination campaigns, they guess there was about half a million coyotes in the wild. Now they think there's, like, somewhere between 1 and 10 million. So there's just, like, so many more. The campaign did not work. It had the opposite effect. They are so good at thriving in cities as this kind of. You know, they are, like, really an apex predator of the city now. You know, all kinds of things. That flexibility. They. They can. They can go out at night and roam solo through the alleyways and eat trash and open trash cans, but they could also, like, hunt in a pack in a cemetery, say, and, you know, get a rabbit or whatever. They can eat berries, and they can eat, you know, candy bars, and they can eat, like, there's tons of food. There's tons of different ways to get it. And that meso predator that, like, be wary, they're also really, mostly really good at hiding from us. Like, these days, the estimates are that in Chicago, where I am, there's like, two to 4,000 coyotes just like, that kind of emerge at night after, like, downtown has kind of cleared out.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, man, that makes me happy. I'm just. I feel so much better knowing that there are that many coyotes probably in.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Chicago, and they think they're in Manhattan. They think they're. They're in Philly. They're definitely in San Francisco. There's. There's. They're definitely where, you know, where you are there in Portland.

[Sarah Marshall]

I think in Philly, they're, like, running student housing for Penn.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, they're. They're in la. They're in San Francisco. They're in a lot of of American cities. And in some of them, there's, like, a lot of them.

[Sarah Marshall]

There was a photo that went around, like, 10 years ago of a coyote that very confidently got on the max train at the Portland airport and took.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

A. Oh, I have not heard about that. Yeah. And they've learned the one thing that can be really dangerous to coyotes in the city, obviously, is humans and cars. You know, cars going fast that can get a coyote. They have been observed to obey traffic lights, so they wait for a green light or, you know, a walk sign, basically, to cross.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, and then I've heard of, like, feral dogs in, like, Russia doing that and are, like, taking the bus or the subway and, like. Like people theorizing that it's like, even if they can't tell the light is changing, they, like, can follow people or, like, I don't know, figure out the pattern, which humans do, too. Right. I do so many things that I don't know why I'm doing, But I know that it works, and I know someone told me to.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. So they just, like. They're all these, you know, the train, the traffic lights, the sub shop, the grocery store, the skylight. Like, they're just all these stories of coyotes thriving in the city. You know, in Chicago, they'll also hunt. Like, they'll hunt in the Chicago river. And so I had heard that Graceland cemetery, which is a big cemetery right near Wrigley field in Chicago, had a bunch. Like, it was a really good place to see coyotes. And so I went right after dawn one morning with this guy, Robert Lorzel, who. Who just has an incredible account where he takes pictures. He snaps pictures of wildlife in the city, and he gets, like, hawks, foxes, coyotes. And I went to see them with him, and we walked around, and he took me up to this statue, which is called, like, eternal silence. And it's this very scary grave that is for some of the first, like, European settlers in Chicago. It's, like, nine feet tall. It looks like a grim reaper. And the urban legend is that if you look into its eyes, you'll see how you're gonna die.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, man.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And so he was doing that one. He had heard that. He went over to do it, and he didn't see that, but he saw it was his first coyote in the city. And a coyote, like, popped out, and he snapped this awesome photo of it. It's so metal. And then, anyway, so we walked around, and we weren't seeing it, and he. He was tell. He was showing me all the spots where we see them. And then we started to. We sat down and started to talk. And then suddenly a literal gravedigger comes up to us and is like, you guys were looking for coyotes, right? Look behind you. And we were being watched. We were being watched by three coyotes. Isn't that wild? And they're like, we were looking for them for two hours. We couldn't see them, but they were totally watching us. And they have learned, like, they have mostly learned to stay out of our way because, like, if they bother us, we get scared. And then we often kill them. I don't know. So I feel like they're in this moment now where they're coming back to our spaces more and more because of their ability, they can thrive there. And, like, cities are actually, like, great environments for them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Don't peregrine falcons also like cities?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Do they? I don't know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I think there's, like, a lot of peregrine falcons in, like, Minneapolis, and they've adapted well or it suits their needs because it's like, they really like skyscrapers, I think, because they can.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Interesting. Because it's like a perch.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So. Right. And the few species that can, you know, like, survive in an urban graveyard, like some geese, some ducks, maybe some rabbits, some rats. All delicious prey for coyotes. Plus whatever pig nick you left behind in the trash.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, I guess that, like, if humans are leaving food all over the place, which we do everywhere we go, then, like, we also. That attracts animals that are, like, if you don't want the trash that's on offer, you can eat the animals eating the trash. I love it. It's a circle of life, and it moves us all.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And so now that, like, we're kind of coming into contact them with them again, but not as ranchers as much. Obviously, there are ranchers who have their feelings about them, but, you know, yes, some of us are small pet owners. But, like, it's this. I feel like it's this. It's another sort of prismatic moment where. And this is another thing. Christine Wilkinson, studies in. In the Bay Area, was kind of like, complaints over the last 20 years since coyotes reappeared in San Francisco. And she says there's this whole range where you get some people being like, oh, they're back. It's beautiful. And then they'll say things like, I don't want to be a snitch, but I am seeing this one near the park, and I'm a little worried about toddlers and pets or you'll see in other ones being, like, really angry that Are like, you know, I pay taxes. Coyotes don't get them out of here. And there's like, even a politician who's a city councilman in Torrance, California, where coyotes were kind of becoming a problem. And he ran a campaign. He, like, started this grassroots organization called Evict Coyotes, which was suddenly this, like, counterpoint to the Humane Society and Greenpeace and that, where it was all about, like. Like, let's, you know, he. He campaigned on basically, coyotes being a nuisance, and he won. And they started this, like, they started back up a kind of lethal injection program where they kill a coyote a week, which, again, as we know, probably isn't going to help the problem.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. It almost feels like a kind, like actually similar to what executing human beings offers you as a politician, which is to perform a kind of passion play and prove that you're doing something that feels effective, even though, you know, logically and also from a statistics perspective, it probably doesn't matter.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

So this idea of, like, our emotions, you know, like, that our, like, vilification of them could, like, help this guy, what was his name? Aurelio Matucci, win city council in Torrens. But also that hatred of them, like, we slather that vilification all over them. And our fear of them, our want to hunt them, just makes them come back more. But then also in another way, like, our. This part, like, absolutely destroys me. This kind of last thought. So our yearning, our love of them. Like, I kind of feel still in the camp of even though they ate my dog, I still, like, admire and like them for all the, you know, like this, that they're still wild. And they.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, if you love a wild animal and understand that it'll be wild, then, like, that's true love.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And that they can survive us like that. There is still wildness in these places. We have contaminated like that. That the wildness finds a way. And that. That's beautiful. That's exciting to me. Mostly coyotes in cities, you know, we do need to worry about small pets. That's a real thing. And, like, if we want to coexist with them, we just probably shouldn't leave our pets outside. That's like a great fix. Or just make sure you walk with them on a leash. You know, that's a way to coexist. But another thing is that, like, they will learn that we are dangerous to them. They will mostly avoid us. They will, in the graveyard, be watching us.

[Sarah Marshall]

Us.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And even when we're trying to find them, hide. Unless we start feeding them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. There are signs around Portland and maybe around Chicago too that are like, a fed coyote is a dead coyote. Don't feed the coyotes.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, and I, and, and there's this story that Christine told me about in San Francisco where there was this one coyote got aggressive. And you talked before about a coyote that was. Was like following a toddler right across a.

[Sarah Marshall]

Or like a. Actually just like just chased a kid across a yard briefly and then gave up very fast, I believe when an adult came out.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, and these are the ones that go viral. Robert, who I walked around with in Chicago, like feels really tortured about like he, he posted this video of a coyote that was kind of walking back and forth across a little footbridge in the cemetery toward a woman reading, who must have been reading a really good book cause she didn't own it. And then Christine similarly, also there video that went viral of like this coyote kind of like really basically stalking a toddler in the Bay Area. And there have been attacks, like very scary attacks, but yeah, really of these thousands of coyotes living among us, these are the outliers. But then they become the celebrity, they become the fear. And right in the Bay Area there was this. It was truly one coyote who they named Carl, who is. His kind of territory was Buena Vista Park. And there was this one, one unhoused woman who was hand feeding him. And he got used to the idea that like there would be food and, and. And it was basically when she passed away that he start, he moved to another park and he started attacking and.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, I have a biopic of Carl.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, I know, but it's heartbreaking because you think about that woman and like she has been. Been so screwed over by humanity. You know, she has like fallen through the cracks and not been cared for and humanity has failed her. Of course she's gonna want connection, a literal hand feeding.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, let's be honest. Like what human being. Maybe there are people who, who don't and God bless them. But like, what human being doesn't secretly want a special connection with a wild animal? You know, like, even if you know all about how dangerous that is and how it, you know, it's gonna be harmful to them in the end? Like I say, I think that it's because there's something in us that, or at least a lot of us that just wants that totally.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And like, and then it's this painful thing where I kind of talked about the cycle of emotions or how this is an invisibilia where like the emotion, like her yearning for some kind of connection Then it's like the opposite of trying to kill, just makes them come back. Trying to connect in the end, made this creature more aggressive, start to attack, and then made us attack and then have to kill Carl and then Carl got killed. Coyotes are both caught in the crosshairs of like our perception of them changes their reality so much.

[Sarah Marshall]

We invent these stories that we want animals to be inside of and then they suffer because of it. And I think one of the things that bothers me most and like keeps me up at night is like when people create little like photo shoots and maybe AI will actually reduce the need for this. But like, you know, videos of an animal that's allegedly doing something cute but is if you know the behavior of that animal like clearly distressed and it's being read as cuteness or like they've got props or something. Or like the. Remember the slow loris video?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

No.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh my God. There was like this whole thing where like there's this, I don't know, it's not a marsupial, but it's, I don't know, it's like it's like a bush baby or it's bush baby adjacent.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

But this like cute little guy with big eyes called the slow loris. And there was like this super viral video like 15 years ago that I think has actually pretty much been wiped from the Internet because of how much exotic animal trafficking and encouraged. Yeah. And it's like this animal that, that shouldn't be a pet, like has needs that like a human being can't meet. And certainly not just like a regular old human with an apartment and a cage. And it was like this moment that went viral that caused them to, you know, that caused a lot of animals to suffer simply for being too cute for us to be able to resist projecting our ideas onto. And the idea on the video is that like this, it's so cute because it keeps raising its arms when this woman is like scratching him. And then he'll like lower his arms and then raise them again because he wants more scratches, but he doesn't because that animal has like glands underneath their arms that they use to like create a self defensive spray.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Oh, that's heartbreaking. It's like just our misinterpretation, like our projection just slathers it so fully. You don't see that it's in distress.

[Sarah Marshall]

And like something that really bothers me just generally is like animal behavior being read as something other than it is so that humans can complete an agenda that involves like sentimentalizing the animal but really just treating it as an object in our own fantasy and in a way that makes it disposable.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah, and you're right. It's like the sentimentalization is as dangerous as the vilification, I think.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ooh, that's really good. Yeah, I think so.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And I think we really see that on the coyote. And, and I think also because it is so as like indigenous people have said for thousands of years, it is so shape shifty.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

And it is this interesting refraction of us because like they were here. They coexisted with indigenous people and nice populations. We settled, we brought our livestock, we tried to kill them. There were more and more of them. We tried even harder to kill them. We developed poisons that rock havoc on the whole world, you know, the whole ecology. We finally dialed back that poisons. They stayed. They eventually learned how to thrive in our cities, which is not actually the Aldi thing. And then those of us who loved them, like, there's problems with people who feed them, who leave, you know, meat out for them, or like who hand feed them. And then that makes them aggressive, makes us attack them, attack and makes us kill them. And we're they're just like, they're both locked in a tango with us, but they're also not. They're thriving. They're in the shadows. And I think they're this, this, you know, good sized predator that has figured out how to thrive in the kind of rough and tumble extreme environment that very few animals can, which is our cities and our worlds and. Yeah, and that excites me. That excites me about them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, that sort of survival part of them that we admire, I think. I don't know, I find it heartening to think that we, we, when we admire it, we are admiring something in ourselves that we deserve to embrace, which is just our ability to adapt and to figure it out and to go on living and to love life. Not because we get to fit into a certain identity or because we get to be pack hunters or we get to do whatever, but just because, like, it's really nice to live. It's nice to like wake up another day and figure out what you're gonna do this time to make it through. It would be nice to not, you know, be, be poisoned. But yeah, most of the time, you know, ideally, most of the time that won't be happening. And it's just like the daily figuring out how to pee a coyote, having it all in Chicago.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Yeah. And I think that, okay, I mean, again, don't project See the animal. But if we want to project, I do think, like, in a moment of duress, like, follow the coyote. Be flexible. Lean into your meso predator. Like, let your anxiety serve you and, you know, bob and weave and slither around the threats and get creative. Eat an avocado shadow.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Pair up with an unexpected friend. Make friends with a badger. Get on the max, whatever. Yeah. And there's, like a joy in figuring out what actually works for you and also through survival, maybe finding conditions that you thrive more under than you did with whatever you were doing last. I think there's, like a big human attachment to the idea of having a plan. And it's like, you don't have to have a plan. To quote Phoebe Buffay, I don't even have a pla.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I don't even have a pla. But thank you. I. I just. I love listening to you and it's such a treat to come and get to gab with you.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love listening to you too, and. Well, tell us where else we can find you and what are you doing lately? Have you written any fun children's book or anything?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I have written a children's book called Truckee Rhodes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Best title.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Come try out Radiolab. If you used to listen but left, come back back.

[Sarah Marshall]

We are.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I'm so proud of the stuff we're doing there. And some of it is very. You're wrong about adjacent. We have.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

We actually just did a rethink of Stockholm, which I know you've covered, but we did a different take where Sarkari, our reporter, interviewed a bunch of people involved and actually just won a award for it. And I'm forgetting which award, but an award just won a big award for it. And. And then also I would love to love if you. If you come listen to terrestrials. It is a show about nature. It is family friendly, but it. And it's on the Radiolab for Kids feed, which might sound like a deterrent, but we don't talk down. It's really for all ages. The dream is that we kind of engineered it to try to feel like a Pixar film in that it's fun for all ages, there's little winks to adults. And really, it's just like if you're interested in nature, every episode is about something that is true, that really happen and kind of like this, but with less swear words and, you know, shows you that this planet is still wilder than you think. There are more possibilities than you think. And it's. It's really my creative baby at the moment. So come, come along and listen. I would love it if people checked it out.

[Sarah Marshall]

And Lilly, just thank you for everything. And I know that when we talk next, you will have done more, just, I don't know, more questioning and exploring. And I can't wait to talk with you about whatever we talk about next.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

I'll see you soon. Bye.

[Miranda Zickler]

The deeper thing was about how our relationships with these animals and how we interact with them can. Can trickle down into things that eventually get those animals killed. Looking at where the attractants are on the city feeds into the one health thing because there are so many neighborhoods that have been systemically disadvantaged through things like redlining, that have fewer municipal services, more pollutants, and, you know, quote, unquote, pest species, and might be attracting coyotes because of these attractants, but then those coyotes also might be more exposed to things like pollutants and like, kind of getting into the nitty gritty of the spatial ecology of an urban coyote and where it thrives versus where it doesn't, and where it gets bolder versus where it doesn't, et cetera is sort of the. The next component, as well as with hyenas and the other species that I study.

[Unknown]

And then I guess, like, last question for now. I mean, when you've. When that cycle of kind of chain reactions, these linkages, when and when you eventually learned about the woman who was hand feeding the coyote, was there a.

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Like.

[Unknown]

A sense of, like, even if you didn't know her story, like an imagined sense of why someone unhoused and screwed over by human. The human world, like, why she would want to connect with a coyote in that way? Like, was there a sense of recognition?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Miranda Zickler]

I mean, we all want to connect, right? And so that need for connection is going to be even more when you are someone who doesn't have other connections and. Or who has been systemically disadvantaged by society. You know, San Francisco has a huge inequality problem because of all the gentrification and the tech boom and all of that. And there are a lot of people suffering from homelessness that are constantly both villainized and also, you know, ticketed and all these things, and dealing with a lot of issues that are very much based in, like, societal ills and societal systemic problems that go back many, many, many years. So in my mind, Carl, to some degree, is not just a product of the need for human connection in nature. It's also a product of all of these systemic issues that you see in places. You see more starkly in places like cities.

[Unknown]

I don't know, I just think about the kid, the 11 year old you, who's still so shy, who's trying to catch us, who's trying to catch a squirrel, who's trying to touch a squirrel and not quite succeeding, but man, if she did, would probably be feeding them from her hand. Like, who maybe wasn't being failed in the same way, who wasn't unhoused but like, wasn't loving the human world and was finding something in these cicadas or these squirrels. Like, like, do you see yourself in, in that gesture? And is it so easy to just say, like, hurting humans? Don't, don't take comfort in that?

[Christine E. Wilkerson]

Like, I don't know.

[Miranda Zickler]

I do see myself in it. And honestly, like any wildlife biologist will tell you that there is still, even though they're doing science and they're permitted and they're doing it ethically when they handle animals, there is still something that is achieved in connecting with that animal to do the science, like with your hands.

[Lulu Miller]

And that's our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Lulu Miller. And once again, the clip that you just heard is Lulu Miller interviewing Dr. Christine E. Wilkerson. And thank you, Dr. Wilkerson, so much for your work too. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing. And thank you to the four or five coyotes who were probably looking at me right now.