As our landscapes have changed over the years, coyotes have adapted to thrive in urban environments, creating unique challenges and opportunities for coexistence. In this episode, Dr. Colleen Cassady St. Clair unpacks why coyotes are so prevalent in our cities, discusses the challenges of living alongside them, and shares strategies for avoiding conflicts and interactions with these adaptable creatures.

Key Topics:

• The evolution of Alberta’s landscapes and its impact on wildlife
• The adaptability of coyotes in urban settings
• Common challenges arising from human-coyote interactions
• Effective strategies and management techniques for reducing conflicts with coyotes
• The role of public education in promoting coexistence

Guest:

Dr. Colleen Cassady St. Clair, Biological Sciences Professor at the University of Alberta

Resources Mentioned:

• 87.7% of Albertans reside in ‘Urban Municipalities’, including cities, towns, villages, summer villages, and specialized municipalities
• Calgary and Edmonton’s changing landscapes
• The negative effects of land use changes on wildlife
• Edmonton Urban Coyote Project website
• The Urban Wildlife Information Network
• How to avoid and prevent conflict with coyotes

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[00:00:05] Today, we're chatting about the impact of urbanization on wildlife, particularly coyotes and how we can promote coexistence in our rapidly changing landscapes.

[00:00:21] The 2021 Canadian census found that 87.7% of Albertans reside in urban [00:00:30] municipalities, including cities, towns, villages, summer villages, and specialized municipalities. Looking back as early as 1910, the landscapes of cities like Calgary and Edmonton were mainly filled with grasslands and forests. Today, in their place, we find agricultural and urbanized development.

[00:01:29] [00:01:30] Coexistence is Dr. Colleen Cassidy St. Clair biological sciences professor at the university of Alberta's faculty of science.

[00:01:42] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: Oh, thank you, Sabrina. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:05] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: Yeah, that's such a broad question. I'll tackle it by referring to my own heritage here in Alberta. Grandparents on both sides of my family arrived as homesteaders from other parts of Canada or Europe. And, you know, they saw this great frontier at that time, a hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago.

[00:02:50] They were very actively encouraged to To break the land, meaning remove the natural habitat. And they were super effective at doing that. So [00:03:00] Canada's grasslands, as you probably know, became very rare in that era already a hundred years ago. And there was lots of agricultural development into, uh, the more northern parts of the province too.

[00:03:35] And we can see that heritage to this day in the endangered and threatened species in our province. They're really disproportionately concentrated in the grasslands in the southern part of the province. And that's for a couple of reasons, because of that agricultural conversion that I mentioned, but also because they were already on the northern edge of their distribution.

[00:04:23] For the pioneers, those were really rare species. They were hunted almost out of existence. [00:04:30] Uh, they've come back fabulously with the arrival of hunting regulations and limits to the removal of those species. So now we have this kind of, um, mix of species that you might think of as being, Species that don't like urban areas, ecologists call those urban avoiders, species that can kind of cope with urban areas, , we call those adapters, and species that actually do better in urban areas, and we call those urban exploiters.

[00:05:05] Bri H.: That's so interesting to talk about the avoiders, the adapters, and exploiters, because I had just thought of, you know, adapters as maybe the, the ones that would be mainly within the urbanized areas, but to have exploiters, that's, That's very interesting.

[00:05:45] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'll do that. I'll give you some examples Sabrina of all three. So, uh, what I'll tell you next comes from data that I collected in collaboration with Catherine Shire at the City of Edmonton and my former master's [00:06:00] student, Cassie Stevenson. We joined a North American, actually now it's global, uh, collaboration called the Urban Wildlife Information Network, where we use, uh, with, uh, A few dozen other cities, the same methods, , of setting and retrieving images from remote cameras to monitor, uh, the species mammals mostly that live in cities.

[00:06:55] So those were species like badgers, cougars, [00:07:00] fishers. Fishers are a fairly large member of the weasel family that probably most people have never seen because they're, they're quite forest dependent and you wouldn't expect. To see a forest dependent species like a fisher in the city, but we did detect some on on the outskirts of Edmonton.

[00:07:21] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: Yeah, so those are examples of the avoiders. Um, Among the adapters, I would say coyotes are probably the most famous [00:07:30] example. They can live, of course, in rural areas. They can live in wilderness areas. They can live in urban areas, but they do tend to be associated with people. They adapt very well to living with people and they have done for a long time.

[00:08:11] That's another species. It's a grassland specialist. It lives in Edmonton, kind of on the northern limit of its range. But in Edmonton, a colleague at King's University, Darcy Bisher, has shown that Whitetail jackrabbits are actually much more abundant, you know, maybe hundreds of times more [00:08:30] abundant in Edmonton than they are in the surrounding area.

[00:08:57] They're fairly nocturnal, but very good at [00:09:00] exploiting urban areas.

[00:09:10] And when we speak about the coyote, uh, particularly, um, as an adapter, potentially, uh, with re, research showing it's moving into the exploiter area, potentially, um, what, what makes coyotes thrive in these urban settings? What makes them so adaptable?

[00:09:37] They're generalists as a species, meaning that they can live in a wide variety of habitats, um, they can eat almost anything. In fact, in, um, In a study where we looked at the contents of, uh, the stomachs of coyotes that had been killed for other purposes, we couldn't believe the diversity of things we found in those stomachs.

[00:10:29] So the same [00:10:30] relative meal era of this coyote had, had involved all of those things. And this is the reason that coyotes have expanded their range throughout North America. They're so good at coping with environmental change, a lot by humans. And also they've taken advantage of the relative disappearance of wolves through much of North America.

[00:11:16] Now, coyotes, uh, live throughout, uh, Most of North America, except for the very far north, they occupy cities throughout North America, ranging from Panama City, to [00:11:30] Yellowknife, from Vancouver, to Halifax, virtually everywhere in between. And recently they've crossed the Panama Canal and they are, they are expanding into South America.

[00:12:06] They have larger litters, they breed at earlier ages in the smaller territories, basically making more coyotes. So it's a little bit like whack a mole with many, many, many, many thousands of whack a mole holes, you know, that are popping up. And for me, I find that just kind of fascinating and something I kind of admire because, you know, change is [00:12:30] hard for most of us.

[00:12:38] Bri H.: That is so incredible to learn about these often, I would say, misunderstood, uh, creatures and we, we kind of placed them in a box and, and that leads me into my, my next question on, you know, the challenges of human coyote interaction, because we're talking about these, these, the species making its way into urbanized areas and having.

[00:13:17] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: Yeah, great questions again.

[00:13:43] They are still extremely rare, but they're more common than they used to be. And they're very well publicized. So quite reasonably, people are afraid of the vulnerability that, that might exist, especially for small children from coyote attacks. And [00:14:00] some of those have been pretty severe. Um, resulting in, in really significant injuries.

[00:14:35] But it's a new strain of it that has arrived from Europe in the last probably 15 or so years. And then once here in North America, it mutated. So now we have our very own extra virulent, meaning able to, in fact, um, strain of this European type of this old tapeworm. It's a tiny tapeworm. It doesn't cause [00:15:00] coyotes much harm.

[00:15:26] So in humans it can cause cysts in their liver. Um, [00:15:30] that tends to be asymptomatic for a long time. Uh, you know, 10 to 15 years. Um, but then when it becomes symptomatic, it's severe. It causes severe abdominal pain and, uh, it is fatal. Um, almost always if it isn't treated. And so thousands of people die from this parasite where it's prevalent in parts of Asia.

[00:16:16] Whether we do that intentionally or unintentionally, if we aggregate coyotes at sources of food, which tends to aggregate rodents too, we are increasing the opportunity to feed coyotes. For the, uh, [00:16:30] the increase in prevalence and then spread of this parasite. And that could be really quite a bit more serious than these quite rare attacks on people and, and more frequently pets.

[00:16:49] Wow.

[00:17:05] So, increasingly, when I talk about human coyote conflict, I talk about this parasite because I think it's actually, uh, potentially going to grow to be a bigger problem than these fairly rare attacks. And, uh, happily, there are There are solutions, there's changes in behavior by people and coyotes that can reduce the risk of both these types of conflict.

[00:17:48] How, how do you acquire that bacteria as a human?

[00:18:12] So how we would acquire it would be the Uh, what are known as proglottids are, are shed in the, in the feces of coyotes with these, these tiny eggs that are super, uh, well protected with a hard case. So they can last in the environment for [00:18:30] In European studies for over a year, they can blow around in the wind, they can travel in water, and we know that coyote scat is often eaten by magpies, and we speculate that that is another way that it could be spread.

[00:19:11] So, our community gardens, for example, that we know are frequented by coyotes, uh, that would be a place where this kind of contamination could occur. So, the solution, wear gloves when you're gardening, wash your vegetables. Uh, wash things like strawberries that, uh, you know, have all these little [00:19:30] porous surfaces that could, could hang on to, uh, microscopic eggs, wash those especially well.

[00:19:59] First, [00:20:00] dogs can act as the same kind of, uh, definitive host, top of the food chain host that coyotes do if they eat infected rodents. And then the dog poop that is maybe in your backyard and cleaned up, but with eggs that still remain. That would be one potential route of transmission. The more likely one though, I suspect, is dogs that roll in coyote poop, as dogs like to do.

[00:20:42] etc.

[00:20:47] But happily, uh, Emily Jenkins, a veterinary medical researcher at the University of Saskatchewan says you wouldn't likely get infected as a human by eating one or [00:21:00] two or a few of these eggs. You'd have to have long term exposure. So again, um, just an easy precaution.

[00:21:07] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: hands after you pet the dog

[00:21:29] [00:21:30] And, and, you know, now that we have that in our, in our minds and we kind of know how to avoid that piece of it. Uh, like what are some strategies and programs that have been developed in Alberta to manage interactions between humans and coyotes and how effective are the efforts in reducing conflict?

[00:22:12] As I've mentioned, culling, you know, might have this backfire effect anyway. But what is, uh, what is clear, just anecdotally from cases in Edmonton and elsewhere, is that removing highly aggressive animals is a good way to reduce [00:22:30] conflict in the short term. So when animals become food conditioned, that means they've started to associate people with food, they lose their fear of people, they approach them very aggressively.

[00:23:04] So that, that's something that is still being. You know, handled with a combination of education and enforcement. It has become illegal by bylaw to feed wildlife, um, in Edmonton, fairly recently, that's, was passed as a bylaw. Um, but the bigger sources of food are probably incidental or accidental ones. So coyotes eat a tremendous diversity of things, as I said before, but that includes compost.

[00:23:52] . But along with that, it's important to keep coyotes from denning in residential areas, under porches, under sheds, under [00:24:00] three season rooms that lack a foundation. That situation often is unknown to the, to the homeowner until there's pups running around, and it causes severe conflict. Um, not necessarily with the homeowner, because that's typically a place without a lot of activity in the backyard, but big conflict for the surrounding, uh, neighbors.

[00:24:58] It doesn't have any real [00:25:00] consequences for them. So even though it seems cruel, the more intense That's that aversive conditioning is, especially early in a coyotes. exposure to people when it's still learning about people. The more intensive and negative that conditioning is, the more likely it is to create sensitization rather than habituation to people, keeping coyotes wary around humans and reducing subsequent opportunities.

[00:25:48] Uh, and I actually had my son shoot me with a rubber ball from a paintball gun so that I knew how much it hurts. It hurts, but it doesn't cause injuries, it doesn't break bones, and it [00:26:00] doesn't cause lasting damage to an animal. So it's probably the sweet spot of truly aversive, but not injurious and, of course, it's limited where and how often rangers and wildlife professionals can be with this technique.

[00:26:46] So then their instructions were to run at the coyote while shouting at it or shaking a can of coins and throwing in the direction of the coyote, uh, these tennis balls that we made up in [00:27:00] advance that were weighted to be the weight of a baseball so you could throw them more accurately and then fitted with this, these pieces of flagging tape.

[00:27:28] to use this technique. [00:27:30] So in, in thousands of hours of patrolling, coyotes were seen 175 times by our volunteers, and they only let them get close enough to use the technique 23 times. And, uh, they always left immediately when they were treated that way.

[00:27:46] Dr. Cassidy St. Clair: all this by way of saying it's actually pretty easy to intimidate urban coyotes, and we do them and us a great favor by treating them in this unfriendly way.

[00:28:18] Bri H.: It's such a great overview of all of the different techniques and tools you can use to, to lessen, or when you have an interaction, to lessen the probability that, you know, people You will interact with them again, or if you do, [00:28:30] it's at a lesser distance, and, and you spoke about a group that you were working with, um, to, to teach them some of these tools, and I wanted to maybe have a little bit of a conversation around the role of public education, because, um, as, as, as an Edmontonian, as an Albertan, I didn't know any of these tools and techniques that we could use, uh, for these, interactions with coyotes, how can we ensure that Edmontonians, Calgarians, Albertans know these tools to help [00:29:00] reduce these interactions and conflicts?

[00:29:25] And we have about 13, 000 reports on that website since it launched in [00:29:30] 2010. I've learned so much from those reports. Um, and we've written them up in a paper led by Jonathan Farr, that was able to use those data to show that the, the frequency of bold behavior by coyotes is increasing. In Edmonton, which everyone knew anecdotally, but now we know it with quite a bit of quantitative evidence and with those increases in bold behavior are increases in [00:30:00] perceptions of, um, concern by residents.

[00:30:41] Bri H.: I love that you mentioned the Edmonton Urban Coyote Project and the work with the city. And to that point, You know, we've learned so much today about, you know, how this became a challenge with an urban, urbanized areas, uh, with coyote interactions and wildlife interactions and conflicts and the [00:31:00] solutions to that.

[00:31:26] How can they be a part of, um, the solution to this challenge? [00:31:30]

[00:31:38] We invite this kind of participation from the public. I'm really dedicated to it. I, I think it is such a great opportunity not only to share the purpose of a university with the public that supports the existence of a university like mine, the University of Alberta, but also for the very real contributions the public [00:32:00] makes, um, to new knowledge.

[00:32:18] Bri H.: I will make sure to include a link to the Edmonton urban coyote page in the show notes. So if people are listening right now and they want to go to that page to learn more, submit their sightings or read some of [00:32:30] that research. It'll be available for them. And I hope it leads them to finding new ways to promote coexistence.

[00:32:51] Bri H.: Oh, thank you, Colleen. That means a lot. These, uh, these podcast episodes are so fun to record and, uh, I hope they're even more fun for the listeners, [00:33:00] uh, and just help to educate them and bring awareness to these really important topics.

[00:33:04] Bri H.: Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and having this incredible conversation.

[00:33:12] Bri H.: Thanks for listening to this week's episode. If you'd like to learn more, check out the resources in the show notes.