Central Park Coyote Faces Death Despite Offer of Reprieve

The coyote that's been living discreetly in Central Park for the last month is now on wildlife officials' hitlist. Fearing rabies, the Department of Environmental Conservation is trying to trap the coyote and euthanize it, wildlife rehabilitators familiar with the case say. That's too bad because local rehabbers have offered an alternative: They're willing to put the coyote in the standard 10-day quarantine, then find a suitable release site outside the city.

In the past, the DEC has trapped coyotes and at least made an effort to release them. (Hal, the 2006 coyote, died from stress, rat poison and heartworm, according to the necropsy.) What's different this time is there is widespread rabies in the raccoon population in upper Manhattan, especially the north woods of Central Park, where the coyote trots after spending the day sleeping in the isolated Hallett Nature Preserve near 57th Street and 6th Avenue.

These animals aren't exactly making a reappearance in Manhattan after being vanquished for centuries. They are a slightly different species than ever lived here before; they aren't really coyotes, which live out west, but coywolves--a hybrid of versatile, small western coyotes and the gray wolves that were hunted out of the east. Jon Way, a biologist at Eastern Coyote Research, is pushing for them to be classified as a native species since they weren't introduced by humans and are the natural product of canines evolving to survive in the habitat altered by humans.

Coywolves are now established across the eastern U.S., where they are enjoyed by some and hunted as invasive pests without limit by others. Way believes they could be the answer to the deer overpopulation problem in a way larger, warier wolves could never be. But even though coyotes have been showing up in New York City since at least 2004, there's no plan to manage them. Packs live freely in Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay Park. The DEC is trying to catch one that shows up regularly in a Jamaica, Queens, housing project. (Long Island, of which Queens is a part, is so far the only place in the eastern U.S. not colonized by coywolves.)

This coywolf is in a complicated situation even if he's captured, safely handled, and cleared of rabies. He can't be released in the city. The DEC doesn't want him released into a park or a distant one of their districts (because he could spread disease). If he's released upstate, someone will likely just shoot him. One coyote was successfully released onto private land upstate and this is the coyote's best shot. DEC is not dead set--yet--on euthanizing the coyote. They're only working to catch him weekdays. If he gets put in an appropriate rehabber's care, he may be let be. Meanwhile, public support for the coyote may grow now that New York magazine has covered him. New Yorkers may not want a coyote hanging around Sheep Meadow, but they don't want him shot for nothing, either.

Where to See Wild Animals Around New York City

Where to See Wolves and Coywolves

Read more about coywolves

Read about the coywolf from its original tracker, Urban Hawks

Check out the Eastern Coyote Research center

A Scourge of Bunny Rabbits?

Stadspark (City Park) in Antwerp, Belgium, has bunnies like Central Park has squirrels. At first I didn't believe a local who told me of the roaming rabbits, but they aren't hard to find. In fact, they were hard to miss. Black, white, multi-color rabbits that had clearly been released from careless pet owners, nonchalantly gathered in clusters and hopped across paths.

Antwerp is not alone. It's just one of many places around the world facing a surging rabbit population. Stockholm parks managers kill thousands of rabbits a year, so many that this year they decided to start burning them as fuel. England is worried of a rabbit surge. Even Mike Ballast, the composer who wrote theme song for the embattled rabbits of Watership Down, has been wiping out rabbits on his estate. In British Columbia, the town of Kelowna has been hunting bunnies with air rifles, but will now catch them and try to give them to rabbit rescue groups or neuter them like feral cats.

What's going on here? There are two kinds of rabbits: wild and dumped pets.Both groups are benefiting from some changes: in Europe 95% of rabbits were wiped out by the myxomatosis virus in the 1950s. But resistant rabbits thrived and over the decades the population came back to levels not seen in many people's lifetimes. Some also think global warming lets them overwinter in places that were once inhospitable. And there's the lack of natural predators. Or even unnatural predators, like unleashed dogs, which have vanished since the 1950s.

The dumped pets generally can't survive in a real forest; they starve to death or are eaten by predators, according to the House Rabbit Society. A predator-free city park with human feeders can be another story. Some of the rabbits I saw in Antwerp were babies--too cute to have been dumped. So I think they're successful enough to breed. People who dump pets are hard to catch--unless the cities start requiring microchips in rabbits, which could quickly put an end to the problem.

What's odd is that there's been little effort to introduce natural predators. That's admittedly difficult in a city park. But fox and rabbits are the classic population cycle relationship biologists have been using for decades. English pest control agents are using ferrets to chase them out of holes. If there are any natural predators out there, they're likely to start surging on their own with this healthy diet.

Will Beijing Slaughter Dogs Over Plague?

The Chinese government now blames outbreak of pneumonic plague that killed 3 people in central Qinghai province on a dog. If I were a Chinese dog, I'd be going into hiding about now.

Beijing has a habit of mass dog culls to fix (or at least assuage anger over) health problems. In 2006, government workers beat 50,000 dogs to death in the streets after they were blamed for causing three deaths from rabies. Despite world outrage and nausea, the practice continues. In May another 20,000 dogs were brutally dispatched, some on film.

Professor Wang Hu director of the Qinghai disease control bureau told Xinhua that the first to die, a 32-year-old herdsman, had just buried his dog, who might have gotten plague from a marmot he ate.

That may all be true, but I'd bet that Beijing's desire to cast blame and their hostility to dogs may play a role. There are a couple problems with the theory. Dogs can get plague, but they usually don't get that sick from it. Pneumonic plague doesn't need to be spread by fleas and blood like bubonic plague; pneumonic plague is airborne.

Unless there are already undercover cameras in that isolated town like there were at the May dog slaughter, we probably won't find out how many dogs they kill over this.

Australians Save 3,001 Kangaroos

An Australian court decided to end the military's plan to shoot 7,000 kangaroos on a base near Canberra. But the decision comes half-way through the program, so they've already killed 4,000 gray kangaroos. The military says the 9,000 kangaroos living in Austtralian Capitol Territory were over-grazing and destroying native grasslands.
Animal Liberation, the group that sued to stop the cull, says the science behind saving the kangaroos is flawed and that kangaroo culls are pushed by the "kangaroo industry" as a way to produce a kind of cheap, free-range 'roo meat. The meat is often contaminated and the clubbing of joeys and clumsy shooting of adults makes the Canadian baby seal-clubbing look quaint, the group says.
The local government is going to try to write some new laws and a way around the judgment so it can carry on slaughtering the kangaroos.
The case highlights the vastly different ways of viewing animals: either as populations to be managed to human desires or as individuals. I know it's supposed to be soft-minded to anthropomorphize and describe animals as unique characters. But you can't be around them without starting to think of them that way.
Think about another Australian making a decision about kangaroos at the same time. Surfer Neil McCallum saw a joey go out for an ocean swim and get caught in a riptide. He grabbed his surfboard and pushed the little kangaroo back to shore. The story made headlines around the world--not, I think, because everyone thought he was crazy to have bothered. But that's the story we'd rather hear about and rather believe about ourselves, the one where we go out and save even just one animal, no matter how pointless the gesture.