Canis latransPhoto: Illustration by Sarah Esteje
With coyote populations upstate ballooning and competition for food growing more fierce, every winter, coyote pups are leaving the den hungry in search of new territories to scavenge. Increasingly, the city has become that new territory. Here, a few sightings.
February 7, 2010
A pack of three enters Columbia’s campus and tries lounging in front of Lewisohn Hall. An alarmed onlooker dials 911. The trio flee.
March 3, 2010
Another, caught loitering at Chelsea Piers, evades tranquilizer-gun-wielding police, who corner her near a dog-free-lawn sign.
2010
Coyotes menace golfers on the Van Cortlandt Golf Course, chewing golf balls and mauling raccoons on the holes, but one (perhaps friendlier) coyote shadows a party on the tenth hole. “I stop the cart, he stops,” said a player. “I jump out, he jumps back.”
December 2011
Freaked out by a sighting spree near their LIRR station, residents near Locust Manor, Queens, put up signs warning neighbors that coyotes are everywhere and they are hungry.
April 5, 2012
Likely crossing one of Staten Island’s four bridges, a coyote becomes the borough’s first on record when a worker spies it running around the former Fresh Kills landfill.
December 12, 2013
During winter’s first snowstorm, a coyote goes on the loose in Crotona Park in the Bronx. It takes the NYPD from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. to find the animal, which, once tranquilized, is surrounded by reporters and onlookers. “Wildlife is coming to New York,” said a parkgoer. “It’s about to be the country again.”