- You know honestly, I got an idea.
You can see the sun is on the grass
behind the cypress trees.
- Yeah.
- Likely, very likely she's just setting her sights,
usually what they do in this time of day.
- And we're already thinking like a coyote here.
- That's how you find them, just think like them.
- Somewhere in this park
is a coyote known as 15F.
She's wearing a collar that broadcasts GPS and radio pings
and we're here to check up on her.
If we can find her.
- Keep your eyes peeled,
cause she could just be out and about.
- 15F is a pretty big deal around here.
She and her mate recently fought off,
the alpha pair of this park.
She claimed this scrap of San Francisco for herself.
And she's not alone,
15F is one of thousands of coyotes securing territories
in cities across North America.
They've mastered the art of urban living,
but they've also made news for attacking pets
and sometimes even people.
- Coyote that attacked a 6 year old.
- Which puts urban dwellers in a funny position.
The coyotes have adapted, now it's the humans turn.
- So you notice the signal's strong from that direction.
- We're on the trail of coyote 15F
with Jonathan Young.
He's the Presidio's wildlife ecologist.
The outing is basically a tour,
of what makes coyotes great at city living.
First, their basic needs are highly flexible.
Shelter for a coyote could mean a fallen tree
or the crawlspace under a house.
Food might mean wild fruits, rats, and gophers, garbage
or the occasional cat.
- Keep your eyes peeled as we're driving by,
sun, water, gophers.
- That's all they ever need.
- Yeah, they don't need much, they're simple.
- Second, coyotes can make do
with territories big or small.
In rural areas, 15F and her mate
could occupy 15 square miles or more.
Here in the city,
coyotes have been spotted in green spaces much smaller.
- You go to some place like Coit Tower on the eastern,
northeastern corner of San Francisco,
it's just a tiny little patch
and they've managed to really carve out
their residency there,
and seemingly are thriving in that area.
- And finally, they're really fucking hard to find.
There are likely dozens of coyotes,
trotting around the city day and night,
but most of the time, you'd never know it.
After an hour of searching for 15F,
even with a tracking device, we've got nothing.
That's it, that collar is off
until 9 a.m. tomorrow morning?
- Yes.
- The coyotes living in San Francisco
are here because of a truce.
They're common in this part of the country
but they disappeared from the city around the 1920's.
Here and elsewhere, they were seen as pests
and threats to livestock.
Trapping, poisoning, and bounties were commonplace.
But across North America, coyotes have been on a tear,
their range has grown dramatically since 1900,
this is one study's estimate.
Ironically, it's human expansion that's helped,
people wiping out apex predators like wolves
and clearing land, which coyotes prefer to forests.
So more and more coyotes found
themselves mingling with people, and people came around.
Attitudes shifted in the 1970's toward animal rights
and conservation.
Many cities, San Francisco included,
began focusing on coexistence.
And slowly, they came back to San Francisco.
First, to the Presidio in 2003,
then to parks across town.
It's a truce and it's held,
but that doesn't mean everything goes smoothly.
Here in the Presidio, Jonathan is a peace keeper,
he tracks the animals,
to make sure they stay out of human business,
then vice versa.
It's not easy.
- Our management goal is to reduce
human-coyote conflict to the extent possible.
And we do, and we can't, manage coyote behavior,
but a lot of that is out of our hands.
- So there's friction, coyotes get in people's garbage.
Off-leash dogs scuffle with them,
mostly in the spring when coyotes are guarding their pups.
And again, they are not picky about their food.
- It has happened where small pets,
dogs and cats have been taken.
It is a reality that urban managers have to deal with,
and pet owners need to be aware of.
- Jonathan doesn't want to oversell the danger
of coyotes, but they are wild predators.
Search local news archives over the past few years
and you get some scary stories.
- A New Jersey woman survives a vicious coyote attack.
- [Reporter] Attacked a 6-year-old boy on Wednesday.
- [Reporter] A 13-pound dog picked up
and carried away by a coyote.
- In 2016, the city of San Francisco
held a hearing to hash out the coyote situation.
Jonathan gave a presentation.
- Human-coyote conflict.
- And concerned citizens spoke out.
- Because they're killing our family members.
- Coexistence is really a farce.
- We pay high taxes, the coyotes aren't paying taxes,
they aren't voting, they're killing our pets.
- What we need is less coyotes
or no coyotes in an urban city.
- Thank you very much, next speaker.
- We have got to get rid of these coyotes.
- Other residents feel differently.
Janet Kessler photographs urban coyotes
and advocates for coexistence.
She says anti-coyote residents are actually rare.
These days, the problem is the opposite,
everyone's too cozy.
- How it began is people were afraid of coyotes
and rightfully so, some cats were disappearing,
some small dogs had been taken.
There were fears and then what happened,
is this fear kind of the pendulum swung
and people started loving the coyotes, but too much.
They started feeding them, befriending them,
getting close to them.
Basically, people were turning them into stray dogs
and that's not what we want.
I tell people love them at a distance,
and just out of the corner of your eye.
- Back in the office Jonathan showed us
how 15F conquered the Presidio.
Because it explains a lot about our coyote truce.
According to the GPS, she spent months without a territory,
she wandered the city, bouncing from park to park until.
- The trail blends in and then,
that's when she started taking over the Presidio.
- So you can tell something changed.
- Very clear.
- You don't have to be any kind of expert to know.
- Very clear pattern.
- At some point, she picked up a mate
and the two of them went after the sitting alphas.
This is likely one of many fights
that established the new power couple.
This caught on tape by a restaurant security camera.
It's like a cartoon, just tails and a cloud of smoke.
The battle reveals two crucial truths
about coyotes.
One is that they can cover a ton of ground,
just look at how far 15F wandered.
Here is another transient,
who basically crossed the bay area in about a month.
- That's San Jose right there, 70 plus miles.
- The other truth is that,
coyotes will only tolerate close family in their territory.
Their own pups usually leave their land within a year or so.
Combine those two truths and you start to see
why a coyote free San Francisco never was in the cards.
- There is an endless supply of coyotes
in the greater bay area,
that are constantly getting pushed out by their parents,
looking for their own territory.
And when you kill coyotes in a territory,
you create a vacuum,
and those coyotes are constantly looking
to fill that vacuum.
So if there was an eradication policy,
you would have to continuously do that indefinitely forever.
- This also means coyotes
never will over-run the city.
The suitable parks all seem to be occupied,
so new coyotes are forced elsewhere.
And most pups born here either disperse
or get killed by cars.
They rarely make it a full year.
So, all in all, the population seems more or less flat,
but they'll never disappear entirely.
Given that, Jonathan's big priority is community education,
teaching people about territories, breading seasons,
leashing their dogs.
Hopefully, residents accept the coyotes as neighbors.
- The better thing is to have these long term resident,
coyotes, to monitor them, to allow them
to keep out other transients
and keep their population levels naturally in check.
And you have these coyote residents
that could live up to 10 plus years
and they could be the most ideal urban
coyote could ask for.
- Community education
is not what Jonathan signed up for,
but with a little work, humans can be managed, too.
- And I got into this field because I like animals,
I like nature.
And I talked to a lot of other wildlife biologists
across the country and I think the general consensus
these days is, in this field, it's more about people,
than it is about animals.
(coyote howling)
- What the purpose of this exercise is,
(birds chirping)
Wow.
- A Red-shouldered Hawk. (laughs)