Coyotes

[00:00:00] Alex Re: Hello. Welcome to On Wildlife. I'm your host, Alex Re. On this podcast, we bring the wild to you. We take you on a journey into the life of a different animal every week. And I guarantee you, you're going to come out of here knowing more about your favorite animal than you did before. Today, we're going to be talking about an extremely misunderstood animal, which unfortunately, a lot of people have a negative opinion of.

[00:00:26] What's surprising is that this animal is actually is closely related to dogs, one of the most beloved animals by humans. And joining me today to talk about these amazing canines is Dr. Susan Ehrich, a biologist and psychologist who is the founder and executive director of the Earth Fire Institute, a wildlife sanctuary and retreat center.

[00:00:50] So let's get ready to talk about coyotes.

[00:01:09] The scientific name for coyotes is Canis latrans. Canis is referring to the canine genus that also has dogs and wolves in it, and latrans means barking. The howl and bark of a coyote is really unique and can almost be a little haunting when you hear it.

[00:01:32] This vocalization can be heard from a thousand yards away, which is ten football fields in the distance. They communicate with each other using these sounds and can identify other individuals in their pack. They'll also communicate using scent and body language. Something really interesting about their howls is that it's hard to figure out how many coyotes there are when just listening to them.

[00:01:58] It usually sounds like there are a lot more individuals howling than there actually are. And this could be a great way to warn predators to steer clear, making them think that they're outnumbered. If you saw a coyote in the wild, you might think it was a wolf. But if you know their key differences, it's easy to spot which one is which.

[00:02:19] Wolves are much larger than coyotes are. Coyotes are on average about two feet tall at shoulder length, and weigh about 30 pounds, which is one third the size of a wolf. Coyotes also have longer, more pointed ears, while wolves have rounder ears. Some say that you can even identify them by looking at their tails when they run.

[00:02:42] It's said that usually coyotes run with their tail pointed at the ground, and wolves run with their tails straight out. Also, dogs run with their tails pointed upwards. Coyotes can be found all throughout North America, from Canada to Mexico and all of the U. S. states in between. This means that they're well adapted to live in all sorts of climates, and they oftentimes use the abandoned dens of other animals as a place to call home.

[00:03:11] Coyotes are mainly carnivorous, meaning that they eat other animals, but they've also been known to eat berries and grass. Their main diet consists of rabbits, mice, snakes, birds, and so on. Remember that they're not nearly as big as wolves, so they're eating much smaller prey. Coyotes also eat carrion occasionally, which is the carcass of another animal.

[00:03:34] And if you listened to our episode on vultures, you'll know how important it is for animals to do this, as it helps to control the spread of diseases in the environment. Okay, we just got through a lot of information about coyotes, but there's a lot more to learn too. So let's hear from our special guest, Dr.

[00:03:52] Susan Ehrich, who has had some amazing opportunities to work with these animals up close. Hi, Susan. How are you doing?

[00:04:01] Susan Eirich: I'm doing fine. Thank you. It's gorgeous out here in the Tetons.

[00:04:04] Alex Re: That's great. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. So let's just get started. And can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you decided to get involved in wildlife conservation?

[00:04:16] Susan Eirich: Well, I love nature always, and I loved animals as long as I could remember, but I can't say I decided. To get involved in wildlife, what happened? I was actually operating as a psychologist, but quite happily in some maximum security prisons, even though I always loved nature, and for a while I had run a nature center.

[00:04:32] But what happened was somebody invited me to help raise wolf puppies. And I don't know about you, but I wasn't going to say no. So I dropped everything and helped him, helped this person raise seven wolf puppies. He's currently my partner, Jean. So I took a year off in order to do this. And I fell completely, totally, hopelessly in love with him.

[00:04:54] It's like I could feel the hormones flowing through me. And I said, I have to share who these animals are. Not just everything that people ordinarily know about wolves, but the passion and the spirit and the intelligence and the personality and all of it. I said, I have to share this. So the orientation that I have to wildlife conservation is adding the element of who they are as individuals.

[00:05:16] They're incredible, remarkable individuals. They are the bears. And I work with wildlife that's native to the Yellowstone, Yukon Wildlife Corridor. And so I got to know these animals on an individual basis. I live, I've lived with them, and I've lived with them for many years now. And because of who they were, I said, I have to add this element to wildlife conservation.

[00:05:38] I have a degree in biology as well, but there's lots of fabulous biologists out there. There are not that many people who can share the essence of the animals that turn us on emotionally to want to share our land with them, our earth with them. So that's the essence of how I got involved with it.

[00:05:55] Alex Re: Wow, that's really amazing.

[00:05:57] And sometimes you can just, like, feel a connection with you and an animal that you don't really know how to explain, and I think that is what causes a lot of people to get involved in wildlife conservation.

[00:06:12] Susan Eirich: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:06:15] Alex Re: And you're also the executive director of the Earth Fire Institute. Can you talk about the mission of this organization and what you do there?

[00:06:23] Susan Eirich: Yeah, I'm the founder and executive director. So Earthfire is the name of one of the seven wolf puppies that I helped raise because she has this passion to protect anything vulnerable. It didn't matter if the wolf puppy was hers or not. So I decided to found the Institute in order to do, as I said earlier, to share with the world who these animals are.

[00:06:44] So the fundamental mission is to help us understand that we're all part of one community, a truly open community. truly part of one community, and to expand our sense of community to all living beings, and then operate and live from that position. Because if we see a tree or a coyote or a wolf or anything else as a part of our community, as well as whatever else they are, we treat them differently than if it's us versus them versus us being a whole unit together, all living beings So the mission is to do anything I can to help foster that sense and awareness in, in us humans.

[00:07:22] So we have animals that are, are never able to be free. So we have wolves and bears and coyotes and, and other native animals to this, to the wildlife corridor who can never be free. And for them, I, since I live with them, I live the right here. If I started a howl right now and the mic didn't take it out, you could hear the wolves howl.

[00:07:43] So I live with these animals over their lifetimes and get to see even more incredible things, incredible stories. I was raised as a scientist and a biologist, and the things I see and have experienced are beyond our current understanding of science, in terms of how they heal, in terms of how they connect with us, in terms of who they are.

[00:08:04] Alex Re: Wow.

[00:08:05] Susan Eirich: And so the whole focus of Earthfire is to help share this. So I have a video on YouTube that anyone can see. It's called Energy Healing Wolf, and it's about a wolf we had who got distemper to her brain, which is supposed to be 100 percent fatal, but wild animals. have a huge capacity to heal, but she was all distorted, like, like epileptic.

[00:08:25] I couldn't stand it. Regular medicine couldn't help her. And so I called someone who did craniosacral work, working with humans with paralyzed nervous systems. This is all on video. So I took this wolf into our yurt with my partner, Jean, and this woman, Jill, who did craniosacral, laid her down, which she did pretty willingly, considering she'd never been in the yurt before, laid her down.

[00:08:47] Jill put her hands on her and you see that wolf start to settle in almost immediately and you see her going into a healing trance like for 45 minutes. I have the video right on her eyes and after several sessions she was completely healed. So, um, for the rest of her life. So that got me excited about sharing the capacity of the animals and using alternative healing with wild animals rather than the far shore Western medicine.

[00:09:13] And all these elements that happen as you start to live with the animals, you see their capacity to connect. And, since we're talking about coyotes, we had a coyote called Fairy Tail. She must have had some kind of PTSD, but she was just traumatized and a delicate little thing. And someone asked me if she could bring her football friend, who's called Mad Dog.

[00:09:35] He was so aggressive, this huge football player. And he came, I thought he'd like our bears, no wolves, no. He loved Fairy Tale the Coyote. And I have some of this on video also, his meeting her. And he stood there absolutely mesmerized by this delicate little female coyote. And she stood there. Delicately, tearfully came out from behind her box and started to crawl towards him, and they both were like fascinated and mesmerized by each other.

[00:10:03] And he couldn't, the friend who brought him said he couldn't stop talking about it.

[00:10:08] Alex Re: Wow, it seems like coyotes are extremely intelligent animals. Let's take a quick break, and when we get back, we'll talk about how this intelligence has helped them adapt to humans encroaching on their habitat.

[00:10:32] Today, I want to give a shout out to Ella from Massachusetts. Her favorite animal is an orangutan. Did you know that orangutans have a wingspan of over seven feet long and that their arms are one and a half times longer than their legs? Pretty cool stuff.

[00:10:58] Now back to the episode. And can you describe some of the adaptations that coyotes have that allow them to survive in the wild?

[00:11:07] Susan Eirich: They're the one animal we've constantly tried to eradicate, and cannot. Not only can't we eradicate them, they do better. Okay. We've done horrible things to them, which I don't really want to repeat, because I don't want to traumatize people, but they've tried every possible way of eradicating coyotes, everything that you can imagine, and when they try to eradicate them, the population increases.

[00:11:30] Instead of giving birth at two years, Like up, like 15 or 20 percent of babies might give birth in one year, at the first year. Like 80 percent are now giving birth within the first year, when ordinarily there's two years. They've learned to hide their dens. Um, they've learned so much, so much so that sometimes they'll put it in places where it's impossible to find the tracks because it's, it's hardpan or rocks.

[00:11:56] So they understand that they can be tracked and they hide their dens. They can eat anything. They've adapted, so they can eat grass, grasshoppers, berries. eggs, meat, carrion, because they have a wide range of things they can eat, they can adapt to almost anything. They're so alert to the slightest changes, way beyond what we are, to slightest changes in our environment, and they remember, and they adapt to all of these incredible changes.

[00:12:25] I think those are, those are probably a couple of ideas about the intelligence and the tuning to things. It's quite amazing, and they used to apparently hunt in packs more, historically, but as we started to try to kill them, they understood on some level, somehow, that the packs were more vulnerable, so they ended up becoming solitary hunters mostly, though they do pair for mating and for raising their young.

[00:12:52] But they've adapted over 100 years to the pressure that we put on them, and they learned very quickly to be afraid. And so they've adapted their hunting, whether they hunt day or night. Their intelligence is amazing. It might have increased because we killed all the ones that weren't, but they're astounding.

[00:13:13] Alex Re: That is really interesting. And you talked about how they were at least pack animals, and what kind of relationships exist between each other?

[00:13:23] Susan Eirich: So because they so are adaptable, the relationships have changed, as I mentioned, over history. They would, used to hunt in packs. Interestingly, in national parks, where they're protected, they will still work in families.

[00:13:38] Outside, they're more solitary.

[00:13:40] Alex Re: Wow.

[00:13:41] Susan Eirich: They have a dominant hierarchy, similar to wolves, if they are in a pack. But they will mate. They're a little, it's interesting, they won't always mate for life. Some seem, it's almost like a personality thing. Some will mate for life, some will not. But they will stay as a family, with the father looking after the mother.

[00:14:02] And the pups going out to hunt and bring her food while she's nursing. There are stories of, uh, food being left by coyotes trapped in a trap, understanding if they couldn't feed themselves. So their relationships to some degree depend on the circumstances, again, being so incredibly adaptable.

[00:14:21] Alex Re: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:23] And why are coyotes important to the ecosystems that they live in?

[00:14:27] Susan Eirich: They're actually, if left alone and in a reasonable habitat, they eat They do a lot of pest control. Their primary diet is rabbits and rats and mice and prairie dogs, so they do a very good service in doing pest control, what we call pest control.

[00:14:45] They also eat carrion, so they clean up dead animals from around. They belong with all the other predators in a beautiful balance of what works in nature. And the other thing is most people who hear them at least fall in love with their song. The howl is just Absolutely, it's not a howl. It's a combination of yips and barks and tremulos, etc.

[00:15:12] And it just, it's enchanting. And it's joyous and wild and exuberant and just the essence of, of wildness and joy and just sheer joy being alive. So other than the practical issue of rodents, it's having something that vibrant. And alive on the earth. People who hear them camping out, never forget it.

[00:15:31] Alex Re: Oh, absolutely.

[00:15:32] I've, I've heard them in far in the distance. Yeah. In the woods before. And it's, it's just something, it's like something you've never heard before. Yeah. It really is.

[00:15:41] Susan Eirich: Yeah.

[00:15:42] Alex Re: What were some of the largest issues that coyotes are facing right now? Well,

[00:15:46] Susan Eirich: in fact, they're basically thriving. Everything has been tried over a hundred years to eradicate them, so.

[00:15:54] They're not endangered. I would say the largest thing they face is the cruelty with which we continue to try to kill them. Coyotes individually undergo a lot of suffering because of what we do. And again, which I will not discuss, but it's, it's awful. So really that's the, the major thing for them. They're doing fine in their own way.

[00:16:17] And what we, what we need to do is to learn how to adapt to living with them. They will take pets in an urban environment. So you keep your pets in at night, you keep your food tight, and you don't have food attractions out at night. They'd moved across the entire continent. They used to be in the West, but they're so successful they're now found in cities all over, and there was a farmer on Prince Edward Island in Canada.

[00:16:42] They'd moved all the way across to the east to there, and he had a farm, and he said he, he really liked the coyotes, as long as they didn't eat his livestock, which is very rare, given the numbers of coyotes. It seems to be only a certain percentage of coyotes. few number of coyotes who actually eat livestock, most of them don't, so you have to try and get the troublemakers.

[00:17:02] But he said he would put, he set up a camera, a webcam, and put out food for them, not a whole lot, but food for them, and he would see them coming, and he, they never got any of his livestock. He said it was a lot cheaper than replacing a calf. So, and generally they won't attack or eat a calf or a lamb or whatever, unless they're really hungry, or unless somehow they're They've learned to, and, but most of them haven't.

[00:17:29] But they want to kill all the coyotes rather than just what we consider troublemakers. But they're doing okay, other than what any individual has to suffer.

[00:17:39] Alex Re: Well, I'm glad that their populations are doing well, but there's still a ton that we could be doing to help. coyotes and to also kind of change how we view them as a society.

[00:17:51] Susan Eirich: Yeah, that's basically my work, Earthfire's work, trying to change our perspective.

[00:17:58] Alex Re: That's great, and where can we support the Earthfire Institute?

[00:18:03] Susan Eirich: You can look up our website at www. earthfireinstitute. org You can contact me directly. I also just finished a book called whispers from the wild stories from the rescued animals of earth fire.

[00:18:17] And several of the coyote stories I talked about can be found in there. And that book can be bought on Amazon whispers from the wild stories from the rescued animals of earth fire.

[00:18:28] Alex Re: That's great. And everybody go check out that book. Go check out the earth fire Institute's website. And Susan, thank you so much again for coming on.

[00:18:36] I really appreciate hearing your stories and hearing more about what you do and how you're helping rehabilitate coyotes and all other animals.

[00:18:47] Susan Eirich: Thank you for the opportunity to share this. I really appreciate it.

[00:18:51] Alex Re: I'm so glad I was able to have Susan on the show to tell us about her experiences with coyotes.

[00:18:57] She's doing amazing work by taking care of them and working to change how people view them. Coyotes really have gotten a bad reputation just based on the things that they eat, but they can't help it. They're just doing their best to survive. If you want to help coyotes, You should definitely go check out the Earthfire Institute.

[00:19:17] You can also support Project Coyote and Predator Defense. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with me as we explored the world of coyotes. You can find the sources that we use for this podcast and links to organizations that we reference at onwildlife. org. You can also email us with any questions at onwildlife. podcast at gmail. com. And you could follow us on Instagram at on underscore wildlife or on TikTok at on wildlife. And don't forget to tune in next month for another awesome episode and that's On Wildlife.

[00:19:59] Jess Avellino: You've been listening to On Wildlife with Alex Re. On Wildlife provides general educational information on various topics as a public service, which should not be construed as a professional financial real estate. tax or legal advice. These are our personal opinions only. Please refer to our full disclaimer policy on our website for full details.