Coyote Tracker: San Francisco’s Uneasy Embrace of a Predator’s Return

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A young coyote living at Telegraph Hill completes her morning patrol of the neighborhood. She has become adept at avoiding cars in the high traffic area. Photo by Jaymi Heimbuch, Urban Coyote Initiative

By Kim Todd, Bay Nature

One night a little more than a year ago coyote 02M took off into the dark.

He had been born in the Presidio, San Francisco, likely a year and a half before, in an earth den dug under a log and hidden by English ivy or in the pit left by a windfall cypress. For months he wriggled in a mass of brothers and sisters, playing and fighting, waiting for his parents to show up with a nice dead rat. Then, a bit older, he scampered through the landscape of palm trees and cream-colored buildings with red-tile roofs, the smells of ocean and hot pavement, learning to listen for the scratchings of gophers underground and to catch his own. But for the past while, he’d been restless. Pale, with stilt legs, enormous ears and an anxious expression — the picture of a gangly adolescent — he was old enough to want his own territory and a mate. The unease pushed him down to Lands End and back, long-distance pacing.

And now it was time to go.

Read the complete story at Bay Nature. 

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