Threshold Conversations: Coyotes in the City with Christopher Schell

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AMY: Every so often, wild animals show up on our news feeds doing surprising things. A coyote riding the subway, a leopard casually strolling past an apartment building. These moments seem so unlikely — a crazy juxtaposition of human society and wild animal life. But actually, scenes like this are happening in big cities around the world all the time. For many animals, places like Mumbai or New York City aren't enemy territory. They're home. 

Doctor Christopher Schell is fascinated by city-dwelling carnivores. He’s an urban ecologist based at UC Berkeley, and he and the researchers in his lab have found that these animals are not just impacted by physical infrastructure like roads and parks, but also by the social dynamics that shape human communities too. Factors like wealth inequality, race, housing policy and history all influence where these animals are, what they do, and who they interact with. I wanted to talk with Chris about the ecology of our shared urban spaces, and what big city coyotes might be able to teach us about ourselves.

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AMY: Chris, welcome to Threshold Conversations.

CHRIS: Thank you for having me, Amy.

AMY: So I have to start by asking you to tell me the story of the Quiznos coyote.

CHRIS: That story lives in infamy, doesn't it? So in April of 2007, in downtown Chicago, there's this Quiznos on East Adams Street in the Loop, which is, for any of you Chicagoans out there, downtown Chicago. And this coyote, in the middle of the day, walks into the Quiznos and jumps into the drink cooler. So there are folks eating sandwiches. Folks making sandwiches. They all stop what they're doing. They slowly back out of the establishment, and the coyote that's in the drink cooler looks around, then falls asleep for almost an hour before animal care and control relocates the animal to a nearby nature preserve. When I tell folks this story and they see the images, they think, wow, there's no way that these are real. They look photoshopped, but in fact, they are as real as they could be.

AMY: So, the Quiznos coyote is just sort of like one of the most famous examples, right? I think there's a picture of a coyote on a train in Portland, and I was watching one of your talks, and you played this amazing video of a coyote walking through, I think it was the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, and people were just, like, reading their book and didn't even notice that a coyote walked like three feet away from them. So are they in like, all cities, and why are they so ubiquitous and so unafraid of human contact?

CHRIS: So coyotes are almost in every city across the United States. But I want to expand and say, really, they're in all types of human dominated environments, from cities to towns to places like farms, in agriculture. They're ubiquitous, not just in the U.S., but also in Canada, in Mexico. And likely before the end of this century, they will have then colonized parts of South America.

So these animals are extremely adaptable. How did they get there? Well, there are a couple of historical precedents. The first being that many of the larger apex predators that would have kept the coyotes at bay, they were extirpated from most of the US. So think the wolves, the mountain lions, the bears, all of the other apex predators that would kill coyotes on sight.

Those animals were removed for all sorts of reasons. So then that paired with massive landscape changes, a lot of the wilderness was then developed, and more and more development happened in the early 1900s. It then changed the physical landscape and led to a lot of smaller prey items. Everything from the rats and the mice to the rabbits starting to proliferate in these human dominated environments.

Coyotes, because they are opportunistic, the breadth of their diet is incredible, which means that they could eat anything. And now all of a sudden, they didn't have any apex pressure from any of those other carnivores. So they can get into these uninhabited ecological niches. And they were able to take over the space because of their flexibility, because of how they were able to figure out solutions to stay alive.

And they could exist in spaces where people were, because there were plenty of other dietary resources that they could capitalize on. And that's why we have coyotes in cities the way we do now.

AMY: Yeah, it's so interesting. And they're such survivors.

CHRIS: Yes.

AMY: Well, these moments when we see them, you know, on a train or in the drink cooler, you know, they are for a lot of people, amusing for a minute or fascinating, give it a thumbs up on your Instagram feed or whatever. But why are they important? What do those kinds of moments have to tell you as an ecologist?

CHRIS: It's all about interactions, relationships, and connections. So when we see coyotes in a Quiznos, on a train in Portland, getting pizza from somebody in Huntington Beach in California, evading NYPD for three days straight — when these animals are doing things that are surprising, it's a good reminder to folks that we're all in this together and we're all connected. We very rarely in the past have thought about all of the other more-than-human organisms that also exist in this space. And these coyotes, when they get into spaces that we don't think are made for them, they upend our notions of ourselves as separate from nature.

AMY: That boundary crossing is like a signal, like, instead of it being like, oh wow, how weird. It should be. More like, yeah, I'm here to like, take it in. We're sharing the space.

CHRIS: Exactly.

AMY: Well, we've been talking about urban ecology, but I haven't actually just asked you to define it. What is urban ecology?

CHRIS: So ecology, right, if we start there, traditional ecology is thinking about how organisms, broadly defined, are interacting with each other, interacting with other species, interacting with the environment. And urban ecology then says, well, what if we were to think about those relationships in spaces that, at least in terms of evolutionary history, are relatively young? Modern cities have only existed for 150 to 200 years, which in ecological and evolutionary time is a snapshot.

AMY: Yeah. It's nothing.

CHRIS: So we do a lot of that work in thinking about the ecology of these organisms in cities. But more expansively, what we're doing is saying that human beings are a part of that interaction network, and in trying to understand how these animals exist and survive in urban environments, we necessarily need to start unpacking how we intersect with and interact with these animals, plants in other organisms.

AMY: And just smashing those two words side by side, just in itself is sort of one of those, those boundary blenders, and challenges to be like, what part of nature am I playing? Whether my urban environment may be even just like a small town in Iowa, it can have an ecology too, it doesn't have to be some pristine, imaginary place where humans don't ever go.

CHRIS: It feels like a paradox. You put urban and ecology together. Most folks, when they hear the term ecology, they think of a natural system that's untouched by people. Urban ecology is a pretty young field. It is probably somewhere around 30 ish years old. And that's because ecologists back in the day also did not see urban ecology as a legitimate field of inquiry.

And that is largely because they thought that there was no way you could understand ecological theory and principles in a space that is so distorted as an urban environment. And yet climate change and landscape development and alteration is all human mediated. So there's nowhere on the planet that isn't touched by people now. So now we sit at the front lines trying to understand, how do we better coexist with a world that we are a part of, but we've treated ourselves and separate for so, so long?

AMY: It's fascinating that it's that young a field of study. I mean, that's our lifetimes.

CHRIS: That's our lifetimes.

AMY: I'm guessing you're older than 30.

CHRIS: I am. Do the grey hairs give it away?

AMY: No, the PhD. So how does that work kind of intersect, or in what ways does it intersect with your work on the carnivores?

CHRIS: So we ask basic questions like where the wild things are. We think about, well, what natural features of the environment are present for those animals to exist there? Why do we see animals have differences in their behavioral traits in one neighborhood versus another neighborhood? 

So green and gray infrastructure is oftentimes a really good predictor of where animals are going to be. Then you can start to ask the question, well, where are these spaces located across the landscape? Why do these neighborhoods tend to have larger, more connected green spaces?

AMY: To that point, you've done some really interesting work on how our human social dynamics end up kind of permeating out of our societies and into the ecosystem as a whole and affecting wild animals. And one of the terms I learned when I was reading some of your research is the luxury effect. Can you explain what that is?

CHRIS: So oftentimes when I'm in a talk for the public or my students, I have them look at two photos within the same city of two different neighborhoods in that city. One tends to have a lot of green space. The lots are pretty big. They're big parks with remnant forests, and then the other has a lot of impervious surface cover. Think concrete, asphalt roads, parking lots, vacant lots.

Normally, those neighborhoods are only like a half mile away from each other or a mile away from each other, so you could easily drive to one or the other. And then I ask a follow up question: Well, which of these two neighborhoods would you expect to have a higher median household income?

And of course, almost always people point to the neighborhood that has more green. So the green begetting more green if you get the vernacular, right. That really underscores the luxury effect. This idea that more socioeconomic wealth oftentimes is positively correlated with greater biodiversity or species richness in a given area. And that could be plants or animals, but it tends to be very consistent across a lot of cities, not just in the US but globally.

And that has a long history. So it didn't just originate out of nowhere. Trees, for instance, which are many of the homes for many of the organisms we want to see in cities, they can grow for, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of years. So that means that somebody at some point planted them or removed those trees, right?

Maybe there used to be trees here and they aren't anymore. Who made that decision? And as you start to dig deeper into the past, you start realizing that the legacies that other generations left for us then created the ecological reality that we're living in today.

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AMY: We’ll have more of my conversation with Chris Schell right after this

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AMY: One of those legacies from the past that you have researched is redlining. For people who aren’t familiar with it, that’s the policy of the Federal Government from the 1930s through the 1960s that labeled some neighborhoods in cities as too ‘risky’ for mortgage investments. And that prevented many Black people from buying homes. So what does redlining in the first half of the 20th century have to do with where coyotes live in cities now?

CHRIS: So they created these color-coded maps that had the scale of green to blue to yellow to red, and those red colors designated areas in cities that were predominantly people of color or low income communities, which is where we get the term redlining. 

So it didn't only segregate people as a function of their race or ethnicity in where they could live. What it also did was it limited the municipal resources that were devoted to those redlined neighborhoods as well. So that then directly links us back to carnivore ecology in the city, because those policies that were in effect between 1933 to 1968 had a profound impact on where the green infrastructure was. And many of the carnivores that we study follow that green infrastructure.

Those previously redlined neighborhoods, they don't have the resources necessary to sustain carnivore populations long term. And that becomes a big issue because it's not just that part of the city that's impacted is the entirety of the city, meaning that all populations of all wildlife are affected, even if you live in a greenlined area.

AMY: It's so bananas to think of, like decisions that people were making about people in the 1930s are affecting where coyotes live today. It's like we redlined coyotes as well.

CHRIS: Exactly.

AMY: And just in human terms, what are some of the other impacts of all this, do you think, on us?

CHRIS: So the impacts are legion. So let's just start talking about public health. Not having access to nature is a public health threat. Having access to nature helps improve both your mental and your physical health for all sorts of reasons. So it can, for instance, decrease your cortisol. Multiple studies have demonstrated that if you take 20 minutes to walk through a park, and that park not only has green space, but has birdsong and sounds of other wildlife in the space, you reap a lot of those psychological benefits. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin all increase when you're in nature. So imagine taking that away from a group of people and saying for generations they don't get access to that.

AMY: Yeah.

CHRIS: Folks that live in previously redlined neighborhoods are experiencing a lot of the chronic illnesses that then come with chronic stress. Everything from higher rates of cancer to higher rates of preterm birth to higher chronic respiratory illness. Many of the folks that lived in previously redlined neighborhoods are losing their connection and their belonging in nature, what we call the extinction of experience, which in and of itself is an environmental justice issue because the folks that have the least amount of experience of what it means to be in these green spaces are the folks that are low income people of color, folks that are from marginalized communities. So this nature-connectedness crisis is paired with the crisis of biodiversity loss, is paired with the crisis of economic inequality, is paired with the crisis of racial segregation. They're all connected.

AMY: I know you grew up in Los Angeles. What was your own experience of nature as a kid? Do you have early memories of seeing wild animals in the city?

CHRIS: Yeah, all of the time. So my grandparents lived in the Altadena Pasadena area, which is in the northeast foothills of LA County. So coyotes, they were a mainstay. We would see them sort of walk through the streets constantly, because we're right up against this larger expanse of green space. And the howl was so iconic that it would be unmistakable if you heard it. So it was just this common place of like, this is part of the soundscape that we exist in.

AMY: And were you scared of them as a little kid? Were you just like, ‘Oh yeah, cool coyote, no big deal,’ or—what was your kind of emotional reaction to them?

CHRIS: Yeah, the feeling was exhilarating. I mean, I remember this embodied experience of wanting them to make eye contact with me and wanting to sort of be a part of the pack. That was something I remember from really early on, which is why I wanted to watch all the Nat Geo specials on Wolves and other kinds, like African wild dogs and foxes and coyotes, because I was so enamored with them.

AMY: Oh, I love that. There is this kind of identification as a human with this animal. I mean, they're dogs, they're cute, they're fuzzy. They have, you know, warm brown eyes, all that. But it's not just that. I think there's something about their incredible opportunism and ability to kind of make their way, no matter what that—it feels like as a person, it doesn't take that much analysis to be like, we're kind of alike, me and you.

CHRIS: Yeah. Coyotes and people have a lot in common. Oftentimes I have reflected sort of as a black ecologist working in the field of urban ecology, in many ways, many black Americans, especially during the Great Migration, as they were moving more into cities to the north, into the west, they were trying to devise strategies that would allow them to survive, even in an oppressive society.

So the analogy is like taking pig intestines and making chitlins, right, making the best out of what you have. And coyotes do that all of the time. They constantly are moving into environments where they may not necessarily be welcomed, or people may be surprised by them, or they may be accosted by the folks that are in certain neighborhoods, and they're smart enough to figure out when to cross the road, what road to cross, what neighborhood to be, and how to behave in that neighborhood.

All of that is very akin to what it's like to be a person that's marginalized, that exists in a space that they may not necessarily be welcome. So coyotes ecologically, culturally, socioeconomically are extremely relevant to the American story. They are teaching us a lot about how we are resilient, how we are adaptable, how we are connected to each other. Even in all of this mess that we've created, animals have still found a way.

CREDITS

To learn more about Chris’s research and the Schell Lab at U.C. Berkeley, check his website. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Chris is also a National Geographic Explorer, and you might be able to catch him speaking on tour—he’ll be in Seattle at the end of April.

Threshold Conversations is produced by Sam Moore. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Thank you for listening, and for considering making a donation to support this show at threshold podcast dot org.