Wildlife, sport and activities, sometimes all at once

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

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Once, not that long ago, the coyote was king in Mammoth.

Anyone could make a case that the roving packs of Canis latrans just about owned this town, living it up by chowing down on the town's hundreds of feral cats, raiding the town's open trash containers and scrounging for free handouts under Mammoth Mountain's chairlifts and at Mid-Chalet.

They were big coyotes, too -- fat, indolent and living way beyond their means.

"Oh yeah, we had a huge number of coyotes," said Steve Searles, the former Mammoth Lakes Police Department wildlife officer who is mostly known for his work with bears.

Searles is long and lanky and has a long beard. He speaks quickly, with his words tumbling out in torrents. He sat for an interview to discuss the old days, back when you could hear coyotes all night long -- back before Searles himself brought them down.

"There were packs of them working the streets," he said. "People can still see them now, but we'll see just one or two working together. We don't see packs of them anymore. But we had dozens and dozens of them.

"I have pictures of a pack of nine coyotes on Berner Street at one time; seven at Chair 2; five at Chair 3, all of them living at eight thousand feet or above."

Searles shook his head from side to side, as if it were still hard to believe.

"You can go to any mountain anywhere you want, and you won't find a coyote over eight thousand feet," he said.

Nobody in Mammoth seems to miss those roving packs, though. It's as if the coyotes have become third-class citizens in their own town -- as if they were just so much riffraff.

"I think the coyotes couldn't sell themselves," said Searles, who came to town thirty years ago and worked with coyotes before he started working with bears.

"I know just as much about coyotes as I do bears," he said. "They're not sellable; they're not marketable other than as a fringe product on a coat. People don't care about them. They assume they have a bad attitude. They don't respect the coyote the way they respect the bear.

"People around here like raccoons more than coyotes, and there is a way bigger problem in Mammoth with raccoons than there ever will be with coyotes. For cleanliness, bites, scratches, that kind of thing? Raccoons are way worse.

"Nobody likes coyotes."

An average coyote stands less than two feet tall and varies in color from gray to tan, with sometimes a reddish tint to its coat. A coyote's ears and nose appear long and pointed, especially in relation to the size of its head. It weighs between 20 and 50 pounds and has a thick bushy tail, which it often holds low to the ground.

Coyotes live in lots of different environments and they are highly adaptable. Their behavior can vary widely depending on where they live, but, in general, they live and hunt singly or in monogamous pairs in search of rabbits, mice, shrews, voles and foxes. They are omnivores and adapt their diet to the available food sources, including fruits, grasses and vegetables, in addition to small mammals.

Coyotes mate for life. They breed in early spring and four to six pups are born in late April or early May. Both parents help feed the pups. At three weeks old the pups leave the den under close watch of their parents.

Once the pups are eight to twelve weeks old, they are taught to hunt. Families stay together through the summer but the young break off to find their own territories by fall. They usually relocate within ten miles. The young are sexually mature at one year of age.

Hearing a coyote is much more common than seeing one. The calls a coyote makes are high-pitched and variously described as howls, yips, yelps and barks. These calls may be a long rising and falling note (a howl) or a series of short notes (yips). These calls are most often heard at dusk or night, particularly during the spring mating season and in the fall, when the pups leave their families to establish new territories. The coyote's howl can be very deceiving: due to the way the sound carries, it can seem as though it is in one place, when the coyote is really elsewhere.

In rural areas, coyotes will respond to human calls. This is most often after the coyotes have started a howling session. They will also respond to recorded howls.

In areas where the coyotes have grown accustomed to humans calling back to them, they tend to continue with simpler calls back to the humans and return to more complex calls when the humans get tired of calling to them.

In environments where there are wolves -- Mammoth has none -- playing a recorded wolf howl will make them stop for up to an hour before they start in again, probably because wolves prey upon coyotes.

Many myths from Native American peoples include a character named "Mika" or just "Coyote." He can play the role of trickster or culture hero (or both), and also often appears in creation myths.

In Mammoth, coyotes have forged a special kind of relationship with the population of black bears, making for remarkable sightings of bears and coyotes walking together.

"Some of the coyotes are actually denning with the bears, side by side," Searles said. "When a bear goes out, the coyote goes right with him. The coyote doesn't waste energy that way. When a bear trashes a dumpster, there's a little food that the bear's not interested in, and the coyote gets a little bit off that.

"You've seen the picture of the rhinoceros with the bird on its back, and the bird is picking out the parasites, and they live together?

"It's the same thing with the coyotes and the bears here in Mammoth. Any good den with a big male bear in it, you'll see coyote tracks in close proximity.

"Personally, I think the world of them, and they're in a really good, healthy balance right now in Mammoth."

The problem, back in the bad old days, was that Mammoth's coyotes basically just forgot who they were, Searles said, and by the mid- to late '80s, something had to be done.

They were, he said, a little bit like gangsters.

"Gang members can be really nice people, and then you get them together and then that machismo stuff starts. And it's the same with a coyote. Get them together in a pack and some dangerous things can happen.

"These coyotes, in a pack, would take a bitch coyote and put her out in a middle of a field all by herself, and the rest of the pack would lie close to the ground. We have film of this. She'd sit out there and yelp and cry and she'd draw a dog away from its owner. And then the dog gets up there and ‘Wham!' They've got it.

"It was extremely interesting, but you can imagine the homeowners. They love their dogs like members of their family."

These kinds of events forced Mammoth into an eradication program, the effects of which are visible today.

Searles and police went after "offending" male coyotes and shotthem systematically, with strict rules attached.

"We never shot females," he said. "We never shot skittish coyotes. We only shot offenders. Something had to be done, and I felt I could do it better than anyone.

"I'd see a coyote and hold out a gloved hand, and then I'd whistle or bang a couple of objects together, and if it was skittish or acting afraid, if it ran the other way, I made sure nobody shot it."

Coupled with Mammoth Mountain Ski Area's halt of the feeding practices at Mid-Chalet, now McCoy Station and better trashcan security in town, coyote numbers dropped over the years, and their behavior changed, too, he said.

"They're smaller, they're skinnier, and they're more skittish," Searles said. "These are things that weren't forced upon them. That's naturally the way they are.

"We just helped them remember that that's the way they should be -- nervous, scared, fast, slight and not overfed. Those are things they just forgot, so we had to artificially get that right."