Information and stories about San Francisco coyotes: behavior & personality, coexistence & outreach, by Janet Kessler: Unveiling first-hand just how savvy, social, sentient and singular coyotes really are!
These two coyotes, a father and a year-old daughter, were out walking together at dusk, in a thick fog, when a large English Setter up the path went after them. This caused the coyotes to split up, with the female running off and out of sight. The dog owners grabbed their dog and walked on. I watched the remaining coyote, the male, walk on and then head over to some grasses to wait for his walking companion. He waited and waited. Finally he stood up and walked to the crest of a hill where he strained his neck and lifted his head high looking in all directions for her. The crest of a hill is a good vantage point if you’re looking for someone. No luck. He then went down the hill a little ways, walking slowly, and did the same thing. He then turned and looked at me, and I understood.
That he wanted to be with the other coyote, that they were companions who were fond of each other, was obvious. It was joyful to know and understand this, but sad to see the little fellow distressed by her absence and searching for her, but not finding her. In the past I’ve watched coyotes spend half an hour searching for each other after an unexpected encounter on a trail caused them to split up. Coyote family members are good “friends” — not too different from the way we humans are with our family members. They, like us, like being together and doing things together, and they’ll search for one another when they unexpectedly become separated.
Coyotes spend a great deal of time playing, which includes horsing around, teasing and bantering. These are extremely social and family minded animals: they are constantly interacting with each other. These two are wild urban coyotes in one of the public parks right in San Francisco, one of the 10 densest urban centers in the country. They are behaving like any of the rest of us might towards a much loved parent!
Here, in the top photo, an adult yearling daughter has just “hopped on Pop”, actually draping her entire body over his like a wet rag! While on top of him, she gave little playful nibbles to his elbows and knees and then she slid off!
She ran off to wrestle energetically with her brother, but within a few minutes she returned to Dad and placed, this time, just a paw on his back, bottom photo, and again, playfully and affectionately nibbled at his elbows, teasing him a little! She’s the only one in this family of three that puts her paws — or even more of herself — on top of anyone else. She is the only female in this family pack. Hmmm. I’m wondering if she has special status due to this, or if she just happens to be the most demonstrative of the group?
There was almost no light, and there were tall grasses between the camera and the coyotes, so these photos are totally washed out and blurry. However, the behavior depicted in them is absolutely fabulous: I decided it was worth it to post them, so I enhanced them as best I could.
A little female yearling coyote “teases” her dad and then her brother by affectionately stretching herself on top of them, and either nuzzling their legs as in the case of her father, or nuzzling their ears, as in the case of her brother! Her behavior was good-willed fun. It was not meant to provoke any kind of reaction — it was simply a display of her affectionate teasing. It looks like this little gal has two BFFs!!
She had been out alone, whiling away the time until the daily family get-together/rendezvous time.
Then her brother appeared and he was absolutely ecstatic to see her. He seemed to “jump for joy” as she and their dad approached him: first he performed one bounce, then one squiggle sitting down, and finally a jump, squiggle and bounce all at the same time!
Then they all piled up together where there were the usual kisses/nose-touches and wiggly-squiggly movements which are a dead giveaway for the excitement and joy they were feeling.
After the general excitement of the initial encounter and greeting died down, the female youngster “hopped on Pop”. It was affectionate contact that they both soaked up. She then twisted her head down and around him and gave him little love nuzzles and bites on his legs. Wow!
The three then broke out into an intense play session: they chased each other wildly, they wrestled, they groomed each other — no photos because the movement in tall grasses with no light just shows blurs. These are all activities which regularly follow the initial rendezvous greetings after spending the day apart sleeping.
During the intensive play period, the female youngster jumped on her brother, as she had done to her dad earlier. Only this time she tugged at one of his ears and then the other, teasing him affectionately.
They played intensively some more and then ran off and out of sight. They would spend the night trekking!
My eyes almost popped out as I watched this. Two coyotes were having a fabulous time playing in a yard — I had not seen coyotes play in a long time, so this was a real treat for me: there was joyous wrestling and chasing. Then one of the two happened upon a possible toy — a bright green garden hose — a novel find. One coyote went over and lifted it up in its mouth and began tugging on it — trying to move it. “Toys” are most often played with alone unless there is going to be a tug of war or a chase about it. But the hose was rather cumbersome and not very maneuverable so the coyote couldn’t run off with it or play tug-of-war with it. I thought it would soon be dropped. Instead, the coyote stopped tugging, and within 30 seconds the hose had been sliced in two. Well, there was one thing you could do with an unyielding hose! Afterwards the coyote looked around — it was almost as if the coyote was trying to see if anyone was watching — but the coast was clear (except for me, and I didn’t count).
The coyote proceeded to another section of the hose and tugged on it for a moment before chewing through that! “Done, again, in 30 seconds”. Maybe that was what hoses were for? After this second cut, the coyote walked on a short distance and urinated: “take that”. Hmmm. Coyotes are very intelligent and can be very purposeful in their activities. They are known for creating diversions for themselves, but in this case, the thought occurred to me that maybe there was more going on than that — could it be that the coyote didn’t like the hose? Could it be that the coyote had been sprayed by a hose? It was just a speculative thought. Photos of the first “slice” are in the gallery above; and those from the second “slice” are in the gallery below.
A COYOTE WHISPERER FOR URBAN COYOTES: For seven years, 64-year-old Janet Kessler has been voluntarily observing and photographing urban coyote behavior throughout San Francisco’s parks. She regularly logs six hours a day, taking up to 600 pictures. “People think coyotes are vermin, dangerous or the big bad wolf,” Kessler said. “But they’re wonderful animals we can live with if we treat them with respect and take the right precautions.”
The coyote behaviors that I’ve watched and been writing about revolve around single coyote families — almost exclusively. The one exception has been when an intruder was driven out of a territory. We may have found another exception! Last night we heard the first concrete evidence that interactions outside the nuclear family actually do take place!
Background: I’ve been recording the howls of all the coyotes I know. Those I hear regularly I have pretty much learned to distinguish from the other members of their families. Human voices are different and we can distinguish them — each person has a signature voice which is uniquely his own. Coyotes, too, have individual voices which can be distinguished once you get to know them.
One of my coyote families regularly treks the mile from their “home base” to another open space. I’ve followed them and observed them in the distant open space, particularly during the darkest hours of the night. Fellow coyote enthusiast, Jo, lives on the edge of this distant open space.
Not only that, Jo has the extraordinary luck of having a back yard which appears to be a cross-roads for coyotes. She has been seeing coyotes which, although she cannot distinguish between, she’s been sending me recordings of their howls regularly and can distinguish some of the howls. The howls seem to confirm what I have been seeing: that it’s the same coyote family members from another open space who frequent that area.
Jo has just sent two new midnight yipping and howling recordings, taken only six minutes apart. The first sounded with the voices I am familiar with. However, the second one has a voice I don’t recognize — it’s a totally new voice to me.
“It’s funny that you mentioned hearing a coyote that you didn’t recognize. Here’s why: in recording 1, the coyotes were very clearly in one spot toward the upper left of the yard; but in recording 2 from 12:58am, it sounded like the group was joined by an additional group in the neighbors yard to the lower right beneath my window. There were some voices I hadn’t heard before. The two groups continued communicating from opposite corners until the light went on. It was AMAZING!”
Jo adds, “Lots of laughs, but I think our yard might be the coyote version of a nightclub where they all just let loose!”
#1
#2
I’ve often been told that one is more likely to “hear” a coyote than “see” one, and that happened to be the case here. So, although I myself have not seen a new face in the area as of yet, I have heard its howl. We don’t know if the communication with the newcomer was antagonistic or friendly. More than likely it was not friendly since newcomers are never welcome and may, in fact, be vying for that piece of territory. I have been seeing some fight wounds and limping in the resident coyotes which might indicate a territorial dispute.
However, I’ve been speculating for some time that coyote social interactions might extend beyond the nuclear family, based on my observation that the female alpha from one of my groups is absent from her home base on a regular basis for a few days at a time, as are the other family members from that family, but less frequently. My thought is that the alpha female regularly visits her dispersed grown pups from previous litters, and then returns to her own territorial home base. AND that the alpha female may even remain the “matriarch” over these particular dispersed individuals. This is pure speculation, but I wanted to toss it out there as food for thought.
Jo comments about one of the female voices: “Her voice has a beautiful silvery timbre on the high notes that I don’t recognize as any of the other coyotes in this area. I love her song!”
As in our human families, coyotes each have unique individual personalities and they form unique relationships among themselves which are often very affectionate and caring.
Here, two yearling siblings are out exploring and hunting before meeting up with the adults of the family. I was able to watch the two for a couple of hours.
During this time, each kept visually aware of where the other was and what the other was doing. They would separate for only short periods of time and short distances as they explored and hunted, and then they would look up and run towards each other. Besides simply liking each other, they seemed oddly dependent on each other for safety and security on this particular evening.
In these grainy photos taken at twilight, the little female coyote, to the right, after yet again running towards her sibling, rubbed her head against him and then actually raised the front part of her body over his back and partially lay on him! Togetherness and physical contact are characteristic of coyote family members. As she lay there draped over his body, she engaged in some tender grooming — looks like she was removing bugs from the back of his head — extending her contact with him and staying there for over a minute, and occasionally looking around before both slipped apart and again wandered a little ways apart from each other.
About My Site and Me: This website reflects my 17 years of intense, careful, and dedicated field-work — empirical observations — all photo-documented without interfering or changing coyotes’ behaviors. Be welcome here, enjoy, and learn!
Coyotes reappeared in San Francisco in 2002 after many years of absence, and people are still in the dark about them. This site is to help bring light to their behavior and offer simple guidelines for easy coexistence.
My information comes from my own first-hand observations of our very own coyotes here in San Francisco. They have not been studied or observed so thoroughly by anyone else. Mine is not generic information, nor second-hand.
Note that none of the coyotes I document and photograph is “anonymous” to me: I know (or knew) each one of them, and can tell you about their personalities, histories, and their family situations. There have been over 100 of them, distributed among over twenty families, all in San Francisco. Images and true stories have the power to raise awareness and change perspective.
Coyote Yipps 