SF Families to 7/22

I’m finally posting the family groupings I know here in San Francisco! I don’t think anyone else has identified and assemble these, or counted the coyotes in the city. These photos visually summarize the current 17-18 coyote family units here in the city, at least eleven of which had pups in 2022 that I’ve seen. Of the more than 100 individual coyotes I’ve documented and come to know and recognize over the last 15 years, 50 territoried coyotes currently remain, not counting the pups born this year, and there are several yearlings running around who I haven’t caught up with yet and I probably won’t. Litter sizes run from one to five that I have seen so far.

Below I’ve extracted the individual family groupings from the image above. For this posting, all images are purposely pixelated just enough to clearly show the families but not necessarily the individual coyotes. The important point is what each of the families consists of; individual identity is not the point of this posting. Again, these family groupings include coyotes who no longer are around, such as previous generations and genealogical ancestors, and coyotes that have dispersed from these particular families: the current coyotes living there are enclosed in a bold red box. Click on any of the images to expand and see the whole image. There are three rows and 7 columns for a total of 21 families, several of which petered out and no longer exist, or bifurcated into two family groups.

Update 8/6: Already things are changing in these families. The older Rookie is no longer appearing in the SL family — though it could be that I’m just not seeing him. And Cape’s family has acquired a lone female who hangs out on the fringes, but is not allowed into the den area and food is not shared with her. I’m seeing several of these “peripheral” individuals. I’ll eventually update the charts to keep them current — until then, I’ll just add updates here.

[Legend: Large filled bold-red boxes indicate the family members living together on a territory now. Empty small bold-green boxes indicate I haven’t added those images yet. When there is no bold-red box in a family grouping, this means that the family is no longer around or they have divided into two families which are represented in other family groupings].

© All information and photos in my postings come from my own original and first-hand documentation work which I am happy to share, with permission and with properly displayed credit: ©janetkessler/coyoteyipps.com.