The coyote tilts his head back, bellowing out a series of high-pitched
yips while standing alone in the patch of marsh he calls home. Soon a
dog nearby barks in response. The coyote answers. Before long other
dogs in the area add to the canine symphony, their woofs and yips
resounding as the sun hangs low over shingled roofs just before dusk
on Saturday.
Every time a coyote makes a cameo, Donna Alexander’s phone rings.
Alexander, the administrator of Cook County Animal and Rabies Control, which is sponsoring Gehrt’s study, says calls to her agency spike soon whenever a
coyote sighting makes the papers. “We calm people down and tell them a
coyote is your best friend, especially if you have rats,” she says. In
the past decade, she says, they’ve only had to remove one animal — a
coyote they trapped after it had been fed repeatedly by
people and lost its fear of them.
But overall, daily life for coyotes isn’t that much different from
that of other Chicagoans: most have a place in the ‘burbs and young
mouths to feed. Take the guy who started yipping at sunset, a 40-lb.
alpha male named Big Melon for his oversized, reddish-furred head,
whom Gehrt and his crew have been tracking since 2004. Big Melon and Big Mama — an alpha female and the first coyote Gehrt put a radio collar on, back in 2000 — had a monogamous relationship for years; they raised pups each spring and together roamed a stretch of traffic-clogged
terrain near O’Hare International Airport.
Then one day in April 2010, Big Mama’s radio signal indicated she
wasn’t moving. A researcher found her dead in a forest preserve, a
13-year-old great-grandmother taken not by traffic on Interstate 90,
which she crossed regularly, but by natural causes. Big Melon finished
raising their spring pups and then last fall went missing for months.
But by October, Big Melon was back, resettling just a few
miles away in the patch of marsh tucked between a subdivision and a
Sam’s Club, in the shadow of the Streamwood water tower.
Researchers think he has a new mate and is ready for another spring of
raising pups. He’s not shy with his new canine neighbors; although he
keeps his distance he still makes music with them. And he appears to
have found another new neighbor to his liking as well: on the gravel path beside
Big Melon’s marsh, where suburbanites walk their dogs daily, lie the bones and feathers of what used to be a Canada goose, with coyote scat not far away.
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