Marin County
neighborhood
co-exists with coyotes
December 4, 2016
The three coyotes sleeping in the sun on a
hillside behind a canopy of trees in Larkspur
didn’t even flinch when Monte Deignan
stepped forward with his binoculars this past
week to monitor the neighborhood pack.
A family of eight coyotes has taken up residence
in the hills, where homeowners and their pets are
now on alert, but the 62-year-old Larkspur
planning commissioner is thrilled to see wildlife
so close to home.
“This is the perfect urban wildlife habitat,” Deignan
said, scanning the virtually inaccessible brush-
covered landscape hidden from the road by a line of
houses. “You realize they are very benign and, hey,
they are taking care of the rodent problem.”
Yipping coyotes are a bedtime routine in virtually
every city in Marin County, a veritable test case
for a predator coexistence movement that is
gaining popularity throughout the Bay Area and
much of Northern California.
Once rarely seen, coyotes are now prowling
the foothills, trotting through people’s
backyards, boldly stalking prey and raising
puppies outside living room windows. It
is a situation that Bay Area communities,
including San Francisco, are confronting
as they receive reports of sightings from
excited, and in some cases fearful, residents.
Larkspur and adjacent Corte Madera, in
the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, are the
latest to go gaga over the yowling fur-
covered throngs.
“They hear the (emergency) sirens in
the city and they say, ‘Oh, we can out-do
that,’” Deignan said. “It just triggers them.”
The cacophony is little comfort to the
owners of cats and small dogs that have
been known to find themselves on coyote
dinner menus. Many parents are also
uneasy having the wild predators near
their children.
In an attempt to ease tensions, Project
Coyote, the Marin Humane Society and
Marin County Parks are holding a
community forum on the highly adaptive
animals this month. The discussion will
include tips on how to coexist with coyotes
in general and the Larkspur family of
eight in particular.
“They are seen a lot, giving people the
impression the place is being overrun
by coyotes when it is really just one family
group,” said Camilla Fox, the executive
director of Project Coyote, a national
nonprofit group with headquarters in
Larkspur. “Coyotes do not exceed the
biological carrying capacity of an area,
which is based on food and habitat
availability.”
Public meetings have been held
recently in Berkeley, San Francisco,
Walnut Creek and other communities
in the Bay Area where coyote sightings
and confrontations have increased
dramatically over the past few years.
The numbers are growing, Fox said,
because the animals are moving back
into places where they were killed off
decades ago.
There are as many as 700,000 coyotes
in the state, according to the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife, but
nobody knows exactly how many are
in the Bay Area. The crafty creatures
crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in the
early 2000s and have since been
reported in neighborhoods and parks
Ingleside Terrace, Bernal Heights,
Golden Gate Park, Stern Grove,
Lake Merced, Mount Davidson
and the Presidio.
Experts believe that the drought so
reduced the populations of the
primary prey of coyotes — mice, voles
and rats — that they began looking for
food in neighborhoods.
But the center of the song-dog
expansion is Marin County. The
carnivorous canines were ravaging
sheep on west Marin ranches as far
back as 1998. The practice back
then was to kill them, but in 2000
the county formed the Marin
Program, which essentially used
the money once paid to federal
trappers to help ranchers build
fences, corrals and lambing
sheds, and purchase guard dogs.
The guard dogs in Marin have
reduced predation and, according
to the sheep ranchers, saved an
industry that was struggling
mightily in the 1990s just to
remain viable.
The program has since morphed
into a push for coexistence in
urban areas like Mill Valley,
Larkspur, Tiburon, San Rafael
and Novato. Signs telling residents
to “Be Coyote Aware” are popping
up, and wildlife advocates like Fox
are pushing hazing techniques
and the necessity of keeping food
and garbage away from the animals.
“Coexistence takes some education,
which is what Project Coyote is trying
o provide,” said Fox, who co-wrote the
book “Coyotes in Our Midst.”
“Unfortunately, the knee-jerk response
in a lot of urban areas to the presence
of coyotes is lethal removal, often because
homeowners associations have hired
pest management services that are
required by state law to either release
them on site or euthanize them.”
Fox said that killing coyotes can actually cause
their populations to increase by disturbing the
pack hierarchy and, in turn, allowing more
coyotes to reproduce. In a pack, only the
alpha coyotes mate. When the alpha is
killed, all the animals disperse and breed.
Federal trappers nevertheless kill close
to 5,000 coyotes in California a year,
according to Wildlife Services charts.
The animals are opportunistic and, given a
chance, will sometimes kill and eat small
dogs and cats, but Fox said they generally
want nothing to do with humans. In
virtually every instance of aggressive
behavior, she said, the coyotes had
either been fed by humans or were
defending their dens during spring
pup-rearing season.
On average, 20 people a year are
killed by family dogs, but there has
only been one documented case of a
coyote killing a human in the
United States — the 1981 death of a
3-year-old who was dragged away
from her house in Los Angeles County.
It turned out the family had been feeding
coyotes.
The hillside neighborhood in Larkspur
is getting along just fine with the
four-legged family, which shares the
hillside with a large group of
uncommonly bold deer.
“This is the urban wildland interface,
and they are a part of it,” Deignan said.
“I think it’s great we can live in an area
and all get along.
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