A pack of coyotes howling in the night is eerily reminiscent of the ghoulish chortling of spotted hyenas savaging a kill in the Serengeti. The primordial refrain rings of death and foreboding and never fails to raise the hair on the back of my neck, no matter how many times I hear it.
Their baleful cries remind us that we may bury the wilderness beneath concrete and condos but we cannot escape the tenacity of its original inhabitants — and coyotes are nothing if not tenacious. Scientists tell us that when man finally destroys himself and his planet, coyotes, carp and cockroaches will likely remain to scavenge our post-holocaust debris.

And, as if to prove it, they continue to live among us despite all our efforts to discourage them. Coyotes — along with foxes, raccoons, prairie dogs and a host of other wild critters — have discovered that life can be good in Colorado’s cities and towns: They’re protected from hunters and trappers; they can dine at their leisure on pet food, the scraps of Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s leftovers that litter our back alleys and mall dumpsters; or they can filch an easy duck dinner from city park ponds. Mice, voles, muskrats and shorebirds abound along the edges of our creeks and lakes and vacant city lots. Urban coyotes are especially fond of free-roaming “puddy tats” and poodles, too. After all, predators like a fresh hot meal as much as the next guy, and to a hungry coyote, a puppy dog is as tasty as a prairie dog. Or as someone once said, “Parts is parts.”

Of course, this sort of thing doesn’t set too well with folks who keep pets and live in areas frequented by urban coyotes.

Small children are also at risk, as has been documented more than once. There have been at least 53 verified coyote attacks on people in California alone over the last 10 years. Add the recorded attacks in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wyoming and New Mexico in recent years and an ominous picture begins to form. With increasing frequency, these attacks are taking place not in the wilderness where you’d expect, but in suburbia: on city streets and in school yards, town parks and people’s backyards.

In the last few months, coyote attacks on humans and pets near Broomfield and on the jogging trails bordering Cherry Creek in Denver’s suburbs made local news. In October 2009, coyotes killed 19-year-old Taylor Mitchell in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia. One of the more dramatic stories involved a 3-year-old girl in Fullerton, California, who was dragged kicking and screaming by a coyote from a neighbor’s sandbox where she was playing with several other children. She was horribly bitten on her neck, chest and legs, her femoral artery nearly severed before her mother could beat the coyote off with her fists.

When coyotes become acclimated to residential neighborhoods, they lose their inherent fear of people, and confrontations become inevitable. We can take the country away from the coyotes, but we can’t keep them from coming in to the cities — especially if there’s free food to be had and no guns or traps to worry about. It is no laughing matter.