http://www.gothamcoyote.com/news/archives/10-2016
VIEW THE NATURE VIDEO OF COYOTES IN NYC
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=gPyA2PPYMTU&u=/watch%3Fv%3DnNWCDpW6T4c%26feature%3Dem-share_video_user
VIEW NYC COYOTE FAMILY VIDEO
https://youtu.be/IE4qWYeIDBA
VIEW THE NATURE VIDEO OF COYOTES IN NYC
https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=gPyA2PPYMTU&u=/watch%3Fv%3DnNWCDpW6T4c%26feature%3Dem-share_video_user
VIEW NYC COYOTE FAMILY VIDEO
https://youtu.be/IE4qWYeIDBA
DIETARY HABITS
I’m an intern at the Gotham Coyote Project
and I spend most of
my time picking through
coyote scat. If you
don’t know that technical
term, scat is another word for
excrement.
What I’m looking for in the scat is
undigested
prey items like hair, feathers, bone
fragments, and plant material. I examine the prey items under a microscope and compare them to hair and bone from
out exactly what animals New York
City coyotes are eating. For example, if I find a hair in
a scat sample I look for a mammal
with similar hair in the reference collection and then
compare the two hairs to see if they
match up. Every time I figure out what a coyote ate -
was it a squirrel, or a deer, or a
muskrat? - I feel like a master detective. So far the team
and I have found that NYC
coyotes are mainly eating small mammals, birds, deer, and fruit. Coyotes living in New York City are a hot topic right now which makes researching
them all the more exciting. When I see news stories like
today's article in Village Voice
those coyotes! I examine their scat!”
I first got my hands on coyote scat about a year ago as an intern from the
Science Research Mentoring Program (SRMP), a
program at the American Museum
of Natural History which pairs high school students
with scientists on novel research
projects. During the SRMP I worked with a team of
three other high school students.
Now, I have graduated high school and I continue
to work at the museum with the
Gotham Coyote Project as a volunteer. Making
contributions to research is thrilling Check out the poster my team and I made on the preliminary results on the diet of
New York City coyotes! And to learn more about
students studying coyotes in New York
City, watch the videos linked here:
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Mark Weckel is a Brooklyn born, Bronx
and Manhattan educated, Queens resident,
conservation scientist and co-founder of
Gotham Coyote . He did his graduate work at
Fordham University and the City University
of New York where he worked on jaguar
conservation and white-tailed deer
management, respectively. Mark is currently Manager of the Science Research Mentoring Program at the American Museum of Natural History where NYC high school students have the opportunity to join ongoing research projects lead by AMNH
scientists.
Chris Nagy is the co-founder of Gotham
Coyote and has worked in NYC as a wildlife
biologist since 2001. His graduate work at
Fordham University and CUNY focused on the
population biology of eastern screech owls
in NYC, and he has always been interested in
learning how wildlife can make a living in an
urban environment. He is currently Director
in population and occupancy modeling as
well as a thorough knowledge of NYC parks.
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Coyote sighting in Bridgehampton
Long Island It's a technical detail, but the eastern
coyote has been documented on Long
Brooklyn are both geographically part
of LI, even though city residents,
including myself, are surprised by that
fact). But back to coyotes. The Bridgehampton
coyote is a big deal. It is the first
time that a coyote has been seen on
Suffolk County. This intrepid traveler
made it all the way out to the southern fork of LI.
Probably the same way most
commuters do. . . .by train, following the tracks from We hope that the arrival of this first eastern
coyote is met with curiosity and excitement and not fear.
There are plenty of statistics
that illustrate that coyotes pose no real risk to human
health and safety in most
belabor this point. I think we should all be a little
enamored by the coyote simply
by it being here, in NYC and its burbs, at all.
The coyote is a symbol of the American west,
representing wilderness and the wide open plains.
And yet, in the Northeast, where we
have done a good job at wiping out wolves and
cougars, and paved over forests and
filled wetlands, coyotes are deciding to move in
despite what we've done with the
place. So, for a conservation biologist looking
for a success story, I look no farther than
the coyote.
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