Toronto doesn’t have a coyote problem, it has a people problem. How human behaviour is shaping our urban wildlife population

Thestar.com
Jan. 4, 2021
Johanna Chisholm

When the pandemic sent most of us indoors this past spring, news reports quickly began documenting how some of Toronto’s wildlife and most cautious inhabitants were beginning to brave what the urban jungle had on offer during the hours traditionally dominated by crowds of commuters.

“That’s when the coyotes really began to take over the neighbourhood,” said Ursula Rattey, a resident of the Upper Beaches since 1973. Rattey explained how she only began seeing -- and hearing -- the wild canid at the end of her cul-de-sac in the past five years; the pandemic, however, made those sightings more frequent.

“A mom and a dad and a pup, and they would just walk up and down the street here,” she said, describing the family’s more adventurous COVID lifestyle.

Her home is bordered by Small Creek’s Ravine on one side, and railroad tracks on the other, “so it’s not too surprising” that their “eerie” late night howls could be heard from her bedroom.

This didn’t unsettle Rattey too much; having taken in two feral cats, Misty and PeeWee, just last year, the self-proclaimed animal lover acknowledges that city dwellers should balance their claims to a land that also plays host to dozens of wildlife species and whose arrivals date back much earlier than hers.

In the last few years, however, coyote sightings have shot up. In 2017, the City of Toronto reported 798 cases, and by 2019, it had nearly doubled to 1,257. And there’s a growing concern about the proximity of this urban canid to match these figures -- one felt by Rattey and her neighbours, and only intensified through the home-confining effects of the pandemic.

“We have 20 small kids in the neighbourhood,” she said. “I respect their life and right to be here, but not in front of my house and not in my backyard.”

A coyote scavenges for food along the waterfront in Bronte Outer Harbour Park in Oakville in February.

But biologists and conservationists warn that the only thing that’s really changed are humans and if there’s a finger to be pointed about the idea that “urban coyotes are getting out of control,” the hand’s only going to be turned back on ourselves.

 “[They’re] a part of our urban landscape now,” said Lesley Sampson, founding executive director of Coyote Watch Canada, who explained that the science behind an urban coyote problem “just isn’t there.”

Sightings, she said, can seem to go up in the winter months, but that’s only because there’s less shelter from the summer foliage, making them easier to spot. Their breeding season is also in February, and this can lead to more movement.

Moreover, if there aren’t enough resources, shelter or food for coyotes, they’re not going to settle there, she said. “They’ll disperse.”

“Food drives behaviour,” she said. “We have to be really cognizant that if a coyote is continuously coming down in a neighbourhood at a certain time, that’s indication that food is being provided.”

Rattey is all too familiar with this problem. Her routine of accompanying her feral cats for their nightly walks went uninterrupted until one day when she noticed the family of coyotes that roamed the nearby ravines were becoming a bit too comfortable with her neighbours.

It didn’t take much sleuthing on her part to figure out exactly what was enticing these naturally fearful creatures into her residential abode.

“There was one lady putting food out beside the river and the coyote stands across the road from our house, looking at her front door. Waiting for the food.”

A coyote passes a cyclist on Lake Shore Boulevard West near Leslie Street in early December.

This, amongst other factors, explained Sampson, is the main vehicle driving the myth of Toronto’s emboldened urban coyote.

But it’s not just feeding that’s changing the coyote’s behaviour; in fact, people have had a hand in almost every stage of the canid’s evolution across North America, dating back to when it first began settling in southern Ontario at the turn of the 20th century.

Beginning with the intense hunting of wolves, a competing species for prey, in the early 1900s, to relying on social media as a virtual town square for coyote sightings, our fingerprints are all over the urban coyote’s story. Tools, like Facebook and Twitter, have only intensified the problem, creating an echo chamber that propagates the narrative of Toronto’s urban coyote problem, allowing it to grow in viral proportions.

“Social media has really impacted how communities receive information about coyote sightings ... and it can be very damaging and misleading,” Sampson said.

So how did coyotes -- a canid once only found in the Canadian Prairies and south of the border -- not only get to be here, but eventually come to be seen by conservationists as an essential bellwether for a harmonious ecosystem in Ontario?

Eastern coyotes, the variety you’ll find scouting the green spaces in cities like Toronto and rural parts of southern Ontario, can now be found as far east as Cape Breton and down into the United States as far south as Florida. Though widely dispersed, they’re actually the result of a fairly recent hybridization event, explained Dennis Murray, a biology professor at Trent University and a Canada Research Chair in Integrative Wildlife Conservation

“About a 150 to 200 years ago, western coyotes were restricted to the prairies of the U.S. and Canada,” said Murray. But human activity -- namely, pioneers moving west and carving up forests into farmland -- changed the habitat, driving coyotes to migrate east.

Simultaneously, Murray added, the eastern wolf (also known as the Algonquin wolf) was being hunted off in droves in Ontario to prevent the region’s alpha dog from picking off settlers’ recently cultivated agricultural land.

“Coyotes moved in as wolves were dying off,” he said, leaving a vacant spot for a new top predator to slide in. “With few viable partners left, the wolves began mating with the area’s new top dog for survival.”

A coyote roams around on Lake Shore Boulevard East near Leslie Street on Dec. 2, passing cyclists and seemingly unbothered by traffic.

Coy-wolves, as they’ve now known, are larger than their western ancestors, but would still only outweigh the smaller dogs you’d find in a city park (on average, they range from 35-50 lbs. while the endangered eastern wolves can top out at close to 70 lbs.)

Hybridization in mammals makes a species uniquely capable of adapting to a variety of environments; and coyotes are no different, Murray explained.

“They’re not able to kill a moose like a wolf,” Murray said. But, he added, packs can take down a white-tailed deer, an abundance of which can be found in Ontario.

As opportunistic feeders, a coyote’s diet can be quite varied. In rural Ontario, they’re supported by the available small prey and fruits, while in Toronto, they help control the population of rodents, raccoons and rabbits.

There’s no hard data on just how many packs live in Toronto, but researchers have estimated that in a similar sized city like Chicago, for example, there are about 2,000 coyotes living in its metropolitan area.

Mississauga began a crowdsourced initiative in 2020 where residents can report coyote sightings online through an interactive map to help animal services track populations.

Despite the work of institutions and researchers that have dedicated resources for tracing these wildlife populations, such as Toronto Wildlife Centre and Coyote Watch Canada, there still seems to be a narrative that persists that local coyote populations are out of control.

What is needed, Sampson said, is a better understanding of coyotes’ behaviour.

An urban coyote, Sampson said, will have a different hunting schedule than a rural one. A consequence, she added, of their food resources being dictated by the city’s, which in turn shapes the patterns of the entire food chain and their prey.

“If you have a family living in the green space by your home, you’re likely going to see them once a day, if not more ... [they’re] continuously defending and foraging in their territory,” she said.

A sign posted near a trail in Newmarket warns of coyotes in the area, in this photograph taken in April.

But in the age of sharing everything you see on your phone, the scale of this presence can quickly shift from being just a local misunderstanding to a problem for entire swaths of the city.

“If one person posts a picture of a coyote at, say, 5 a.m., and then that same coyote is spotted later in the day and another person posts about it,” Sampson said, it could be “misleading.”

“Where there was one coyote, there’s now an impression that it’s double.”

And it’s not just social media that’s perpetuated the myth of the urban coyote taking over the neighbourhood, explained Nathalie Karvonen, a wildlife biologist and founder of Toronto Wildlife Centre.

“[Coyotes] have been villainized in the media and in the public eye, and those kind of negative perceptions really seem to be reinforced,” she said, hinting at the news stories where a small pet is taken from their backyard or a wandering pup finds itself in a schoolyard full of children.

“Unfortunately, once in a blue moon things do happen with coyotes,” she said. But, she cautioned, part of her work with Toronto Wildlife Centre is to educate the community about what steps they can take to mitigate those kinds of risks.

“Keeping your dog leashed, not leaving your small pets alone in the yard, and ensuring there’s not food attractants in your yard go a long way,” Karvonen said.

Bad information, Karvonen noted, is initially the source for sowing misunderstanding in coyote-human interactions.

At community meetings, for instance, Toronto Wildlife Centre will often partner with local animal rescue groups to discuss issues they’re having with wildlife. The topic of coyotes and the danger they pose to humans is “almost guaranteed” to come up.

“It’s remotely, remotely possible that a coyote could injure someone seriously,” Karvonen said. “But the thing is that even if that is a remote, remote possibility, we always try to remind people in community meetings: look up the statistics for dogs.”

A coyote is spotted roaming around Nelson Street and Lakeshore Road West in Oakville in February.

The Canadian Safety Council found from a 2009 estimate that over 460,000 people each year are bitten by dogs. While a study from the University of Calgary that examined 453 articles published between 1995 and 2010 mentioning coyote events in North America (e.g. sightings, attacks on people and/or pets) found that on average, fewer than three people a year were bitten by coyotes. Of this, one in three were toddlers and children.

There is one known report of a fatal coyote attack in Canada on a human: it occurred in 2009 when a 19-year-old folk singer from Toronto was visiting Cape Breton and was mauled to death while walking the Highland Trail.

An investigation into the incident was inconclusive, but in the same study, researchers found in all but one of the attacks on humans in cities that food being left out was either directly or indirectly involved.

That paper was published nearly 10 years ago, but its recommendation to discourage feeding and removing food attractants as “the most viable management option” for reducing the risk of negative coyote-human interactions is one that continues to be echoed by experts today.

Linda Rutledge, an assistant professor in the biology department at Trent University who specializes in canid genetics, explained how this feeding feedback loop can be seen when you look at the urban-rural divide in coyotes.

Coyotes in rural environments tend to have fewer confrontations with humans, Rutledge explained. It could be a density issue, she said, but also, “in part because they aren’t getting as much of a food benefit from humans.”

Rutledge went on to discuss how our interactions with wildlife may seem well-intentioned at first, but can easily fall into a category with more insidious repercussions. For instance, the seemingly harmless act of leaving food out for feral cats or even bird feed can create an artificially inflated food chain that both attracts urban coyotes to an area and creates a reward system that encourages more exploratory behaviour.

“[Human behaviours] are then actually shaping the evolutionary trajectory in urban environments because there will be either people intentionally leaving food out -- or leaving their garbage accessible,” she said.

She points out that we don’t need to look too far back to understand how large a role humans can play in shaping the traits of wildlife: “If we look at the domestication of dogs, in just over 10,000 years, we’ve turned a wild wolf into this dog of various shapes, sizes and behaviours.”

When an urban coyote does become more curious and comfortable around human sources of food, the first response of some communities is either relocation or, in some cases, lethal intervention.

“Solving wildlife conflict through culling, it’s not only ethically bankrupt but scientifically it’s just corrupt,” Sampson said.

Coyote Watch Canada instead recommends “hazing,” a non-lethal intervention to change a coyote that has perhaps become too at ease. The simple act of making loud noises and waving your arms in big gestures can discourage most coyotes. But if you need to escalate, Coyote Watch Canada says opening and closing an umbrella near the prowling canid, or even walking towards them with an unfurled garbage bag that you rapidly snap, can create an irritating noise that should curb their curiosity.

Rutledge and Sampson agree that some cities, like Toronto, have begun to embrace these more progressive policies.

In 2001, the city passed a bylaw that made feeding wildlife in parks illegal, and the Ministry of Natural Resources has a stipulation that all coyotes caught for rehabilitation must be released within a kilometre of where they were caught.

“If we can get everybody on board and take actions that are going to minimize these negative coyote interactions ... there can be this peaceful coexistence,” Rutledge said. But all experts that spoke to the Star agree that any step forward is predicated on one thing: everyone needs to be on the same team.

“We need to see ourselves as a part of nature,” Rutledge said. “And not apart from nature.”