Frank Carini: Facing the population explosion of coyotes in New England

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

MIDDLETOWN, R.I.

During her decade of tracking coyotes on Aquidneck and Conanicut islands, in Narragansett Bay, Numi Mitchell has discovered humans have a lot to learn. The pervasiveness of Canis latrans — Latin for “barking dog” — in Portsmouth, Middletown, Newport and Jamestown, R.I., can largely be attributed to people’s carelessness with food and their compulsion to feed wild animals.

Since 2004, when Mitchell began studying local coyote behavior, she has found an Aquidneck Island Council member who was feeding coyotes, believing that would keep them from eating neighborhood cats; a gentleman who fed coyotes submarine sandwiches; an elderly woman who was feeding some 100 feral cats, not knowing much of the “kibble” she was leaving out was actually being devoured by coyotes — most of the cats were then eaten by the coyotes when the woman moved on; and Newport residents who left chicken carcasses out, across the street from a playground, to attract coyotes.

Coyotes eat whatever is easy, Mitchell told an audience of 20 or so people during an Aug. 20 presentation at Newport Vineyards. Without the direct or indirect help of humans, the wildlife biologist said coyotes dine on woodchucks and field mice. She noted that 20 percent of the coyote diet, especially for pups, is fruit such as blueberries.

But once coyotes get a taste of human food, that’s when the problems start. “Coyotes eat deer, but they’ll also whack neighborhood pets,” Mitchell said. That happens when they begin to associate the presence of humans with food. “They won’t eat pets if there’s no subsidized food from people,” Mitchell said, “because they wouldn't be that bold.”

The Narragansett Bay Coyote Study was born out of one pet’s mauling by a coyote. After Aquidneck Island resident Diana Prince’s dog was killed, she contacted Mitchell about how to exterminate the island’s population of coyotes. However, once Prince's anger subsided and Mitchell had explained coyote behavior, the Prince Charitable Trusts decided to fund a one-year study. Mitchell’s study is now entering its 11th year.

Coyote smart

Coyotes were first documented in Rhode Island, in Warren in the 1960s, and are now found in all parts of the state except Block Island. They first reached Aquidneck and Conanicut islands in the mid-1990s, according to Mitchell.

The Narragansett Bay Coyote Study tracks, with expensive collars and equipment, the local coyote population to develop science-based co-existence and management strategies. Mitchell noted that the study — and her work — aren’t pro or anti-coyote. She said the program is “straight science.”

CoyoteSmarts, in partnership with the study, is a public-information initiative of the Potter League for Animals, The Conservation Agency, Rhode Island Natural History Survey, Aquidneck Land Trust and the Norman Bird Sanctuary to address the growing presence of coyotes in Jamestown and on Aquidneck Island and to educate humans to coexist with these wild animals.

The mission of the group is to work with municipalities, local police and school departments, and state agencies to raise public awareness about coyotes, encourage best management practices and promote effective strategies for keeping pets, families and communities safe.

Coyotes are a native species, according to Mitchell. She said they are hard to catch, and clever, creative and opportunistic. Their numbers and range across North America are growing, she said, because the wolf population has been “blasted away.”

Their numbers also grow when large amounts of food are provided to coyotes intentionally or unintentionally by people. These “easy pickin’s” create coyote problems — and problem coyotes.

Mitchell said the most effective way to reduce human-coyote conflict is to reduce the animal’s food supply. The more food available, she said, the more pups they have and the smaller the territory they have to defend, which results in more coyotes per square mile and more risk of contact with humans.

Coyotes live in a family group, usually in packs of seven to 10 members, and typically take ownership of 7 or so square miles, according to Mitchell. She has counted an Aquidneck Island pack with 21 members.

Seven to eight packs roam Aquidneck Island and there are another three to four in Jamestown, according to Mitchell. As for the total number of coyotes on the two islands, she said she doesn't really know.

“We don’t call them wily for nothing,” Mitchell said.

However, unlike deer, which will keep breeding until they starve, coyotes manage their population. Female coyotes will have fewer pups if the pack is stressed by a lack of food.

On Aquidneck and Conanicut islands, improperly discarded livestock carcasses and roadkill, especially deer, dragged into the woods are easy pickin’s for coyotes. Their numbers grow.

Mitchell said she found a dumping ground of dead animals, including sheep and deer, on Peckham Brothers Quarry property in Middletown. It was feeding a large coyote pack that lived in a small territory.

She showed a nighttime video of a coyote pack feeding on cow carcasses not properly buried on a Jamestown farm. She said that a coyote pack can feed on a deer carcass for three to five days.

“An area that would be able to handle one pack can now hold three,” she said. “With easy food resources, coyotes don’t increase their territory.”

Feeding pets outside, unsecured trash cans, poorly managed compost bins/piles, fish guts left on piers, docks and rocks, and restaurant food scrap left out in the open, as a Middletown pig farmer has done, help create “super small coyote territory,” Mitchell said. She said these practices, which can include doughnuts left behind at a construction site, also make coyotes see people as food providers.

“As soon as coyotes get a taste for these subsidized food sources, they go for it,” Mitchell said. “The pack could have gone ten years without coming in contact with people, but now they are no longer afraid of people.”

Coyotes are always on high alert when it comes to sniffing out subsidized food sources, like unsecured trash cans and poorly secured livestock feed.

No lethal solution

Removal of coyotes by lethal means — though it may be necessary for some problem animals — doesn't control their population, according to Mitchell.

“Shooting them isn’t effective, because they are impossible to get rid of,” she said. “You can’t get rid of them with lethal control. Passive management is the most effective method.”

Lethal methods such as hunting, trapping or poisoning, especially in neighborhoods, are generally more dangerous to pets and the community than to the coyotes, Mitchell said.

She also noted that eliminating an entire group of coyotes, rather than solving the problem, simply creates a vacuum that other coyotes will quickly fill. Also, if a resident pack is removed, she said, it will likely be replaced by transient coyotes, which are often even less desirable.

In Rhode Island, you can hunt coyotes year-round, but relocating them is illegal.

Mitchell said recreational hunting of coyotes is fine and keeps them fearful of humans. However, a kill campaign, she said, accomplishes nothing. She said eliminating subsidized food sources can drop pack numbers by two-thirds.

Ecosystem and community impact

Coyotes play an important ecosystem role. As the top predator in Jamestown and on Aquidneck Island, the presence or absence of coyotes has a major impact on the surrounding biological community, according to Mitchell.

They help control pests such deer, rodents and geese, and with some 40 feral-cat colonies in the four island municipalities, coyotes help keep those numbers under control.

And while coyotes can benefit bird populations by preying on many of the small mammals that eat birds, their young and/or their eggs, it's possiblethat coyotes also kill piping plovers, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Mitchell is studying coyote impact on the islands’ natural environments.

Coyote attacks on humans are rare and seldom result in serious injuries, according to Mitchell. Only two deaths have ever been documented — a toddler in California, in 1981, and a 19-year-old woman hiking alone in Nova Scotia, in 2009. Children are more at risk than adults, and attacks are more common in urban areas where coyotes have lost their fear of humans thanks to intentional or unintentional feeding.

Coyotes are sometimes mistaken for dogs and may at times act like dogs. They’ve even been known to beg for food. Despite this disarming behavior, however, they are a wild and dangerous animal, especially when they’ve lost their fear of humans, according to Mitchell.

Coyotes run with their tails down and dogs run with their tails up. Coyotes are more adaptable than wolves and have learned to thrive near humans, especially the ones who feed them.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.

Frank Carini: Zoologist sees human overpopulation as world's central problem

James 'Skip'' Lazell in nature.

Via ecoRI news (ecori.org)

JAMESTOWN, R.I.

Even as a kid in the 1950s, James “Skip” Lazell knew that there were too many people living on the third rock from the sun. He got a vasectomy in 1960, when he was 21.

“Population has been a hot topic of mine for some time, but there’s very little we can do about it,” he said. “The economic system is a Ponzi scheme that requires growth, growth, growth to sell more and more products. More consumers are needed year after year. Overpopulation is the root cause of all of our problems, from excess carbon dioxide to global warming.”

His evolving concerns about human population and its impact have been formulated by his life’s work, plenty of discussion and much reading, such as the controversial bookThe Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich. The 1968 book sold millions. While Ehrlich’s doomsday scenario — the Stanford University biologist predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s — didn’t materialize, hunger is a major problem on a planet now inhabited by some 7.4 billion people. Our population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Our numbers are driving the planet’s sixth mass extinction.

While global population growth must be part of the conversation about sustaining the planet, it’s seldom discussed. Lazell has seen the issue sidelined for most of his 78 years.

“Sea-level rise, desertification and ocean acidification are linked to overpopulation,” he said. “Human-induced climate change is going to wipe out entire species and ecosystems. It’s likely going to end with catastrophic population decline."

Lazell, however, isn’t alone when it comes to talking about an issue that most of the world largely ignores. Geologist Walter Youngquist has called for a “greatly reduced” population as a critical element to the solution of natural-resource shortages.

In his 2016 paper, "Framework of the Future,'' Youngquist draws on his professional experience as a petroleum geologist and earth scientist to predict a grim future for the world’s people and its energy resources.

“It is doubtful the 7.4 billion people here now, and the billions more expected, can be sustainably supported in any decent standard of living beyond the time of the widespread use of fossil fuels,” he wrote. “This is the human dilemma. We have built a world based on fossil fuels ... and moving on to much less energy-dense and much less versatile alternative sources in the face of an ever-growing population is a challenge before us. ... If there is a solution to this problem it is a greatly reduced and much less affluent population.”

Youngquist and the Virginia-based organization Negative Population Growth both have noted the conspicuous absence of any official U.S. population policy. Author Alan Weisman’s 2013 book, Countdown, looked at how many peoplethat the planet can sustain. Lazell believes thatit’s a billion. The longtime/part-time Rhode Islander is concerned that the crush of humanity will wipe out many of the creatures he has spent his life finding, studying and conserving.

“We’re pretty smart, but we need leadership to get interested in overpopulation,” Lazell said. “The United States devours the most, and much of the rest of the world wants to live like Americans. Our consumption level is unsustainable.”

ecoRI News visited with Lazell last month at his modest home on Swinburne Street, Jamestown, a house he bought in the late 1960s. We sat in his living room for more than an hour talking about the natural world and the many pressures squeezing it. While he has long been concerned with human population, his life’s real passion, animals, most notably reptiles and amphibians, also began when Lazell was a child.

As a youngster, Lazell spent hours reading and studying his world atlas. His interest in geography often focused on islands. His scientific niche naturally grew into “island biogeography.” In its Dec. 8, 1957 edition, the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine featured an article about the 18-year-old naturalist and how he had, among other things, recently captured crocodiles in Jamaica.

Lazell was born in New York City and grew up in suburban Philadelphia. His accent, however, has been softened by boyhood summers spent with family in Jackson, Miss. But Rhode Island, specifically Conanicut Island (Jamestown), has served as his summer and fall base for decades.

Lazell earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island — he also has graduate degrees in biology and zoology from Harvard University and the University of Illinois. In 1988, in Jamestown, a friend’s mother introduced Lazell to a Chinese-born woman, Wenhua Lu, who would become his wife. Wenhua, who also earned a Ph.D. from URI, married Lazell in 1992. They don’t have any children, for obvious reasons.

While zoologist Lazell focused on amphibians and reptiles — his thesis was on lizards of the West Indies — his 62-year-old wife is an entomologist with a keen interest in beetles.

When he was 17, the Philadelphia Zoo paid for Lazell to go to the West Indies to collect specimens. It’s where his doctoral work on Anolis, a genus of iguanian lizards, first came into focus. He returned a year later on another zoo-funded trip.

In fact, Lazell visited the West Indies every year from 1957 to 2014, making his last visit when he was 75. His favorite island there is Dominica.

For this work researching clouded Anole on the uninhabited West Indies island of Redonda, Lazell rented a boat, was given a compass and was wished good luck. He loved the experience, a wide grin formed on his face when he recalled the tale. His 30 years of work on Guana Island reportedly produced the most comprehensive, long-term record of the natural history of a Caribbean island.

Iguanas, salamanders and crocodiles, however, haven’t consumed all of Lazell’s professional time. He first recognized the potential for successful reintroduction of flamingos to the salt ponds of Anegada in the early 1980s.

He has been published in scientific journals more than 200 times; he’s discovered some 30 new species and rediscovered some of the planet’s rarest ones. In 1985, Lazell made Rhode Island’s first official recording of spring salamanders, commonly called gyros, in Foster.

His 1976 book, This Broken Archipelago: Cape Cod and the Islands, Amphibians, and Reptiles, has detailed chapters on 38 species of frogs, salamanders, toads, turtles and snakes, their natural history, and how they got there. His 2005 book,  Island: Fact and Theory in Nature, describes Guana’s flora and fauna against the backdrop of islands worldwide and their ecology, evolution and conservation.

The longtime naturalist worked with the late Roger Conant, a herpetologist, author and educator who wrote one of the first comprehensive field guides for North American reptiles, in 1958. He also was director emeritus of the Philadelphia Zoo.

Lazell studied with the late Ernest Edward Williams, a noted Harvard University herpetologist. Before founding a Jamestown-based nonprofit in 1980, Lazell had stints with The Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society. He taught biology at the Palfrey Street School in Watertown, Mass.

He founded the The Conservation Agency to work globally to provide and publish scientific data “contributing to the protection of biodiversity and promoting sustainable relationships with valued wildlife.” Lazell was the organization’s president until a few years ago, when his former Palfrey Street School student Numi Mitchell took the reins. He said the founding of The Conservation Agency was the “biggest thrill” of his career.

Now 78, Lazell, who is recovering from open-heart surgery, still speaks enthusiastically and passionately about his life’s work and the wondrous natural world in which we live. He and his wife will return to Jackson, Miss., to his late parents' home, in early November as usual, after they enjoy New England’s fall foliage and crisp air.

His proudest accomplishment, though, may be this:

“I was the only person to be a full-time employee at both Yale and Harvard with a full beard, earring and tattoo,” he said with a smile.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News