Long Island, New York----The final frontier in the continental USA for Coyotes to colonize is increasingly within reach of becoming a reality................."A pair of coyotes was photographed in Middle Village in Queens, NY in December 2016 Nagy et al. (Long Island coyote breeding 905near 40.8801° N, 072.9741° W WGS84)"............. "This sighting is the first report of a pair of coyotes in eastern Long Island" .........Prior to this in 2016, a Coyote pair had pups adjacent to Laguardia Airport in Queens, NY, a "hop, skip and a jump" down the road from Nassau County, Long Island, NY.............."Long Island resembles the eastern forest 'mosaic landscape' with early-successional and mature forests, meadows, and suburban areas that coyotes have success-fully exploited throughout the eastern USA"........... "In particular, the north shore of both Nassau and Suffolk counties have large tracts of protected open space"......... "Farther east, the land use of Suffolk County generally spans a spectrum from suburban to rural, perfect habitat for Eastern Coyotes"..........As for how Coyotes have (and will continue) to enter Long Island, via crossing the heavily traccked bridges(from Queens) or swimming across the Long Island Sound"............."While all of these routes appear challenging to individual coyotes and has likely limited the rate of dispersal to and colonization of Long Island (see Nagy et al. 2016), Americas most opportunistic and highly adaptable canid most likely will in fact make Long Island a breeding home over the next several years"

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Initial colonization of Long Island, New York by the eastern coyote,

Canis latrans (Carnivora, Canidae), including first record of breeding

Received 3 July 2017

Christopher Nagy,1 Mark Weckel,2 Javier Monzón,3 Neil Duncan,2 Michael R. Rosenthal4

1 Mianus River Gorge, 167 Mianus River Road, Bedford, NY, USA 10506. 2 American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th

Street New York, NY, USA 10024. 3 Pepperdine University, Natural Science Division, 24255 Pacic Coast Highway, Malibu, CA, USA 90263.

4 State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Department of Environmental and Forest Biology, 1 Forestry Drive,

Syracuse, NY, USA 13210.

Corresponding author: Christopher Nagy, chris@mianus.org

Abstract

Coyotes (Canis latrans Say, 1823) have increased their range dramatically over the past century. Formerly restrictedto western North America, they now roam across the continent, in many habitats including large cities. One of the lastareas in North America without coyotes has been Long Island, NY, a 3629 km2 island in the New York metropolitan area.

Middle Village, Queens, NY Coyotes(January 2017)

 Here we summarize all verified accounts of coyotes on Long Island, including the first record of breeding. There are few coyotes on Long Island currently; however, given the history of coyote success, we expect coyotes to establisha growing population there in the near future.

New York City (NYC), one of the largest and mostdensely populated urban centers in the world, has beencolonized only recently by coyotes (Toomey et al. 2012).

South Fork, Long Island Coyote-2011

The geography of NYC inuences how coyotes areexpanding their distribution throughout this metropolis.The southernmost region of New York State consists ofthe 5 boroughs of NYC—the Bronx, Manhattan, StatenIsland, Queens, and Brooklyn (Fig. 1) as well as LongIsland, the largest island in the contiguous US (3269km2). The Bronx is the only mainland borough of NYCwhile Manhattan and Staten Island are 2 islands in NewYork Harbor, and Queens and Brooklyn lie on the west-ern end of Long Island. East of Queens are Nassau andSuolk counties which make up the central and eastern portions of Long Island. Nassau and Suolk are notthought to presently support breeding coyotes, thoughrecent sightings described below indicate that coloniza-

tion is underway.

 The South Fork(Hamptons)-2011 site
of most recent Coyote sighting on Long Island

As the historic range of the coyote did not includeNew York State nor the northeastern US (Parker 1995,Fener et al. 2005, Kays et al. 2009, Wheeldon et al. 2010),the presence of coyotes in the region represents a large-scale range extension. Within New York State, coyotes gradually expanded southward from northern New Eng-land and/or New York’s northern border with Canada,starting approximately in the 1940s until they were estab-lished in Westchester County, the county directly northof NYC, in the 1970s (Fener et al. 2005). This left NYCand Long Island the only regions of the Northeast withoutbreeding populations of coyotes by the end of the 20th century.

Rare sightings in the Bronx began in the late1990s, and territory-holding, permanent residents havebeen documented only recently within NYC or LongIsland (Toomey et al. 2012). By 2012 or possibly sooner,coyotes were breeding in 3 parks in the Bronx, withstable occupancy and breeding activity each year, andthis number of breeding sites increased to 5 sites in 2014.

 Queens, New York Coyote on building rooftop(took the stairs
of this abandoned building several Summers ago)

However, only 1 individual was known to reside perma-nently on all of Long Island in a small park in Queens,rst photographed in 2009 by local residents and moni-tored from 2011 to the present by researchers (Nagy etal. 2016). More recent sightings and photographs placed another lone coyote in eastern Suolk County (near40.9607° N, 072.3423° W WGS84) from 2013 to early2014 (R. Wesnofske, resident, and J. Stiller, New YorkState Department of Environmental Conservation, StonyBrook, NY, USA, 2014 pers. comm.). These 2 were therst conrmed records of coyotes on Long Island ever,but they were lone individuals and there has not yet been

any evidence of successful breeding of the mainland.

Infrequent and unveried sightings of coyotes have beenreported across Long Island for several years, but werenever conrmed by researchers and may represent casesof mistaken identity, as the red fox, Vulpes vulpes, andgray fox, Urocyon cinereoargenteus, both live on Long

Island, and domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, are common.

We have monitored the range expansion and siteoccupancy dynamics of the coyote in this area via cam-era traps, genetic sampling, and other methods. Here,we present a brief but timely report on the rst record ofa successful coyote den on Long Island, found in May2016, along with other recent observations of coyotes in NYC, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties.

In May 2016, adult coyotes caring for several smallpups were photographed by camera trap (Fig. 3)  a nar-row wooded strip bordering a baseball eld and parking lot in northern Queens (40.7765° N, 073.8901° W WGS84).These camera trap photographs of pups represent the rst conrmed observations of successful breeding on LongIsland.

 Additional unconrmed sightings suggest that this breeding pair had likely been established for sev-

eral years before researchers detected them (G. Dugan, Queens resident, pers. comm.), likely living in a nearby 7.64 ha woodlot (40.7755° N, 073.8934° W WGS84) that was developed into a parking lot from 2014 – 2016. The parking lot was opened in the spring of 2016, which apparently ousted the coyote family from its selected den- ning area and, as the pups were still very young, forced

them to move to the closest available habitat patch