Denver has seen its share of urban coyote news lately, with a few related stories in the Denver Post, and even one on Monday in the New York Times. Denver-area residents seem to be dealing with coyotes on a large scale, with Greenwood Village, a 14,000-person suburb, having reported 110 sightings in the first two months of 2009.
After several attacks on both animals and humans, Greenwood Village has gone as far as to hire an animal management firm to shoot coyotes deemed "a threat to humans or animals," according to the New York Times.
Not surprisingly, the Times article paints a complicated picture of reactions to the coyotes, which have been "spotted hanging out in local parks, trotting down city streets and lounging in backyards, content and seemingly unafraid of humans." While the prevailing opinion expressed in the article is to want the animals gone, some in the town support eradication, while others have adopted non-violent methods.
Mentioned in the Times article, and at the center of the Denver Post article, is the practice of yelling and gesturing at the coyotes, hopefully to drive them away by instilling a fear of humans -- a method the Denver Post termed "hazing."
A coyote expert quoted in the Times article points out that the coyotes' comfort around humans may largely be our own doing. The Ohio-based expert, Dr. Stanley Gehrt, stated the following: “We do know that when coyotes start to flip over to the dark side, it is almost always because of human feeding... [the coyotes] become more comfortable, and then they become aggressive.”
The coyotes in Denver are not the eastern variety like ours here in JP, but they're still coyotes living in urban and suburban areas among humans. The articles (links above) are worth reading.
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3 comments:
Saw a coyote in JP today.
And I report this to you how?te
Thanks for your sighting report. Leaving a comment, as you did, is the only way I have for people to report sightings.
If you tell me the details of the sighting -- date, time, location, even any description -- then I can update the map on jamaicaplaincoyotes.com with your sighting.
Since asking how to report my sighting, I have talked with several of my neighbors and now have three sightings on this block within a week, plus two in the Morton St./Shattuck area.
The latest three were on Williams St. within a block of Franklin Park.
5:30 am, too dark to see color
11:00 am, mottled beige
?, "really big and fierce looking"
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As a suggestion, you might add a line in your Blog that says "Report here" so people can sighting/comment in one place.
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