City dwellers: the Urban Coyote Research Project with Chris Anchor

Abigail: 00:06

Welcome to another episode of the Everyday Environment podcast where we explore the environment we see every day. I'm your host, Abigail Garofalo.

Amy: 00:14

And I'm your cohost, Amy Lefringhouse.

Abigail: 00:17

And today, we are joined by Chris Anchor, the wildlife biologist for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, and he is here to chat with us about the urban coyote research project. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: 00:30

Hello.

Abigail: 00:31

We are excited to have you. I've had a relationship with the Forest Preserves of Cook County for quite a few years now, but I've never gotten the chance and the pleasure to chat with you, but I've heard your name around. So you are famous in the forest preserves. You're the wildlife guy that gets mentioned, and so, you know, why don't we just start with getting to know a little bit about you and your work with the forest preserves of Cook County?

Chris: 00:56

Okay. So I've been around for over four decades now. I'm the first wildlife biologist the district has had in over forty years. So the last biologist they had left in 1940, and they never hired another one. Oh, They found me.

Chris: 01:16

Funny note about that is they offered it to four people, and nobody wanted it. I was jumping up and down in the back of the room, and they said, okay. Give it to him. So initially, I didn't even have a job description for eight years, and when I did, I wrote it.

Amy: 01:34

Yeah.

Chris: 01:34

So those days are long gone. That'll never happen again. Initially, the job was created as an agreement with the state of Illinois. If the state would put on an urban deer biologist, the county of Cook would put on a wildlife biologist. And initially, my only tasks were to run the urban deer program, as well as address any wildlife concerns as they came up, and they just said go.

Chris: 02:06

And I have an interest in zoonotic disease, and everything that I do in the district has a foundation that looks at zoonotic disease and surveillance and control thereof. So World Health Organization says eighty percent of emerging infectious diseases in humans starts in animals and ends up in us. So things like West Nile virus, rabies, Ehrlichia, SARS COVID, anaplasma, and on and on and on. So I always tell people that although I get to work with animals, and I think that's great because I love animals. A lot of people do.

Chris: 02:51

The real benefit to the citizens of Cook County is the fact that I'm out there surveilling for diseases. Typically, show up in the wildlife three to five years before they show up in us. So by working with public health and various disease research organizations, we're able to be proactive as opposed to reactive. So we also run baselines on all of the wildlife so that when some disease pops up, we know what the problems are that are already on the landscape. So as a researcher, you don't have to parse through and figure out what's real and what's not, or what's a problem, or what is just background noise.

Chris: 03:39

So I get to handle everything out there, and I get to play around with a lot of wildlife, and I know how fortunate I am.

Amy: 03:46

Gosh. That's interesting take on wildlife biology, and I think I guess since you work in Cook County and you're working up there where there's a lot of folks, I come from downstate, so I'm more rural and we're more spread out, but I guess, you know, public health and wildlife, I just didn't, you know, I kind of think about that every now and again, but I just didn't think of the field of wildlife biology really being that kind of on the ground first oh, what's the word? Like, first detector, early detector of of some of that kind of stuff. So that's an interesting approach. You're are you talking too about, like, tick borne illness and things like that? Is that in your ?

Chris: 04:26

Absolutely. So many of the diseases that humans can contract require a vector of one sort or another, either a tick or a louse or a mosquito. And for thirty years, I worked in a very, very basic pole barn without running water and heat, and now they've put up this absolutely fabulous, wonderful, modern building that has a beautiful laboratory and necropsy room in it, and I'm able to properly handle samples and study them. So I have all of the same blood chemistry machines that Brookfield Zoo, Lincoln Park Zoo, Shedd Aquarium have. I'm able to talk apples to apples with other professionals in the disease field.

Chris: 05:16

And, also, more importantly, we have a a large bank of ultracold freezers. This is these are freezers that are minus 80 degrees centigrade, and what I've been able to do over the decades is store back tens of thousands of blood and tissue samples from all of the indigenous fauna such that I can work with research agencies, and as the decades have gone by, the technology has increased dramatically. As an example, when I started in the eighties, it took a milliliter and a half of blood to run one heavy metal sample. Now I can put a drop of blood on a piece of paper, I can send it out to a lab, they shoot a laser at it, and they'll tell me 20 different metals and 20 different pesticides and herbicides from one drop, and they give it back to me. Yeah.

Chris: 06:12

So the technology is just fabulous, and by having these samples that go back decades in these freezers, we act as a library. And so we've cultivated relationships with, you know, Illinois Department of Public Health, CDC, NIH, various disease monitoring agencies, and they know they can come to me to get samples for whatever it is that they're that they're looking for. We use animals not only for disease, but as environmental sentinels as well. Mhmm. So we're able to go, like, into our our fishing lakes and remove a very small piece of the of the gill from a fish, and by looking at that under a microscope, you can see hyperplasia, and that's just a proliferation of cells.

Chris: 07:01

And what it tells you is that there's some sort of insult going on in the water. It doesn't tell you what the insult is, but it tells you that there's something going on or something cooking. And by using animals as biomonitors, environmental monitors, it suggests things that are happening in our environment that we all have to share with the animals, and we're able to keep tabs on what's actually happening. The Chicagoland region is the third largest metropolitan area in North America, and about 11% of Cook County, the county that has Chicago in it, is forest reserve district. So it's a fabulous place to study the interface between wildlife and humans.

Amy: 07:44

Yeah. Well, that's fascinating. Today, we wanted to dive into this urban coyote research project that you've been involved with, and tell us about that. Like, what is that what is that project, and how did that how did that come to be?

Chris: 08:01

So the project officially started in the year 2000, and it's a collaboration between Cook County Animal and Rabies Control and Max McGraw Wildlife, which is in Dundee, Illinois, which is just to the west on the Fox River, and I teamed up with doctor Stan Gehrt, who's a full professor at Ohio State University and the head of research Max McGraw. So prior to the official start of the study, I had received about 40 coyotes from the city of Chicago and the city of Aurora that we thought at the time were lost, that they just showed up in the sit in those two cities, and they didn't know where they were. So I would receive them, and I would put radio collars on them, and I would release them into the agricultural areas of Cook County such that they had every opportunity to stay away from people. And what happened was in every single case, they went right back to where they were caught or they died trying to get there. They died trying to cross the road.

Amy: 09:06

Mhmm.

Chris: 09:07

So in talking with doctor Gehrt, he was interested in it, and I I, you know, I have a a relationship with animal control for funding. And we decided to start a study which started in the year February. And at this point, we've handled over 1,600 coyotes over twenty five years. And the importance of this study is that several fold, when you handle that many animals, you are able to ask all kinds of questions that you wouldn't be able to ask with a typical study. The typical study lasts one year or three years.

Chris: 09:45

That's how long you have a grad student. A master's student lasts one year. A PhD student lasts three years. This study has produced many PhD students and a multitude of master's students. And as an example, we have a DNA profile on over 1,600 animals now, so you can start asking all kinds of questions that you never even conceived of when the study first started.

Chris: 10:10

Things like, is aggression heritable? Mhmm. You know? Who is related to whom? Are are animals monogamous?

Chris: 10:19

Are animals you know, are there super stud coyotes out there that are actually doing all the breeding, and all these animals are are related. You know? How big is a home range? How many animals are actually getting in trouble with people and their dogs? These are all questions that have been able to be addressed because two reasons.

Chris: 10:43

The study has lasted so long, twenty five years, so you've been able to weather all of these various biotic and abiotic inputs that you would not have even conceived of initially, and you've been able to look at it long term and not just stochastically, not just a snapshot of what's happening on the landscape during that one season that you're actually studying the animal. So it gives you a much more comprehensive understanding of the animal, and then more importantly, how the animal interacts with us in our environment.

Amy: 11:19

Mhmm. Mhmm. What I'm thinking about too, so it sounds like you're gathering a lot of different kinds of data. Right? So you put on the radio collars on them. What other kind of data are you gathering? Like, are you getting samples? Are you getting like, what what kinds of information are you getting from these coyotes?

Chris: 11:37

Yeah. So there there's there's only two ways to catch a coyote. You either have to use a snare, which is kinda like a choke collar on a dog. The harder the coyote pulls, the tighter it gets, but when the coyote relaxes, the snare relaxes. Or you have to use a foothold trap.

Chris: 11:53

And both methods, if done properly, result in absolutely no damage to the animal at all. It doesn't make sense for us to damage the very thing we're trying to study. The foothold traps get a real bad view in the press, but many people are unaware of the fact that the otter reintroduction program that has taken place across the Midwest, over 5,000 otters were caught, transported from Louisiana, released in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, they were all caught with foothold traps. And here again, they didn't they did not cause damage. So when used properly, that that's how we capture them.

Chris: 12:32

So then we we take basic metrics. So we take, you know, weight, sex, age, blood, tissue. We identify if they have any ectoparasites. We take a fecal if it's available, and then so we get a basic health assessment of the animal, and then you put the radio collar on it. There's two different radio collars.

Chris: 12:52

There's a radio collar that is VHS that's reacts just like the radio in your car, and it's line of sight. So it's it's good for a mile and a half to three, four miles. And then there's a GPS collar or a cell phone collar, which bounces either with a cell phone tower or to a satellite. And, obviously, you can glean a lot more information from that. Otherwise, you have to have someone physically out checking where that animal is, tracking that animal.

Amy: 13:21

Mhmm.

Chris: 13:22

And I've spent thousands and thousands of hours out tracking coyotes and skunks and everything else. I'm a huge believer in radio telemetry. We put radio transmitters on coyotes, deer, fish, turtles, salamanders, snakes, birds. The transmitters are so small now, we even put transmitters on bumblebees, which is just fascinating to me that you could do that.

Amy: 13:49

The movies whenever I think of transmitters on bumblebees, like, of of whatever. Is it bee bee movie? What's the anyway. Yeah. But in my head, I think of those little, and they're like

Chris: 14:01

Yeah. You you end up with a ton of information that you would not know unless you had these radiotelemetry devices on them, and that's how we figure out what's going on.

Amy: 14:12

Well, I will say that I don't know if you're if you work with the folks at the DNR on their Coyote Track website that they have, but I teach wildlife management at the community college that I teach at, and we use that coyotetrack.org that has coyotes out there that have radio collars on. And we've done lots of work with that data, and we can see the visualization tool on that website. And we we've asked questions and looked at different things, and you can see all kinds of seasonal stuff and just, you know, where there might be human, you know, interaction or whatnot. So yeah. I mean, even from an educational standpoint, I mean, you guys are, you know, like public health and research and but even just, like, education and just training some of, you know, the up and coming wildlife students, it's helpful. Stan McTagger and I, collaborate a lot.

Amy: 15:09

Okay. Perfect. So we're Well

Chris: 15:11

We have a very good relationship. Yep. Yep. And we work with the local some of the local folks that help get I guess, put the collars on. We were able to to be there when they were doing that last season, so that was pretty cool for us.

Chris: 15:25

That's Rob Erickson and and his crew. Yep.

Amy: 15:28

Yep. Yep. It was fun. You kinda talked about how you track and monitor coyotes, what data you're and information you're collecting from those coyotes. But what do you find, like, going gleaning through all the information that you get?

Amy: 15:44

What are some of the most surprising behaviors that you see when it comes to to these guys?

Chris: 15:51

I think the thing that surprised me the most when we got into this after a couple years, it was obvious that wherever you live in the Chicagoland region, whether you live in the Loop, down by Navy Pier, or in the most remote areas of the Chicagoland region, you live within the territory of a family group of coyotes, and we didn't know that when the study started. It doesn't matter where you live. You could live in a high rise right right on the lake. You live in a territory of a family group of coyotes. And every year, there's a group that lives on the museum campus, and they they have a den over by the Soldier Field right in the parking lot.

Chris: 16:39

To me, that was absolutely fascinating. So here's an animal that was extirpated from the region. The coyote, the white tailed deer, the beaver, and the giant Canada goose were all gone in 1970. When I first started in this job, there were no coyotes in Cook County, just gray and red fox. And shortly after I began, the coyotes appeared, and they drove out and or killed all of the red fox.

Chris: 17:05

They were pushed into the cities, into the towns, and the gray fox suffered mightily as well from the coyotes. Just the fact that they are so plastic in their ability to exploit the habitats that we have allowed in our society, in our day to day runnings. The vast majority of people have no idea that they have coyotes that run up and down their streets or run up and down their sidewalks every single night. They they the vast majority of coyotes never cause a problem. They are not something to be feared.

Chris: 17:41

They're not something to worry about. It's just another example of the incredible biodiversity of the region that most people are not aware of.

Abigail: 17:52

That list of species that you just named of, like, didn't exist so many like, were extirpated from this area is, with the exception of the beaver, like, the major hit list of urban ecosystems, which is wild. I'm just saying and like, I remember looking into like the history of the introduction of the gray squirrel, and squirrels in cities and stuff like that too, and I remember thinking like, woah, like, that's wild that they like we brought them in because we wanted them, and now they're like nuisance friends. Like, staying with the goose and the and the coyote and and deer. Right? Like, deer management is huge.

Abigail: 18:27

It's I mean, it's why you were brought on. So well, that's it's just really crazy to think about that. And these the story of urban wildlife is really interesting, like, because it's it's a similar story across the you know, we've created these ecosystems for them, but, just like they're they have these interesting ties that showcase, like you said, their plasticity of, like, survival. When it comes to coyotes in rural or wild settings versus, like, in these urban environments, are there different adaptations that you see occur, or are they just different presentations, or does it matter?

Chris: 19:07

It's almost like they're totally different animals. Their strategy for survival is 180 degrees. The coyotes in the urban areas, along with most other wildlife, this is kind of an oxymoron. It's counterintuitive. They have much smaller home ranges, and they have much higher densities in the city than they do in the rural areas.

Amy: 19:33

Say that again one more time. Say it again for me.

Chris: 19:36

So they have much higher densities. And they have much smaller home ranges.

Amy: 19:44

Okay. Okay.

Abigail: 19:46

So they're city dwellers.

Chris: 19:48

Exactly. So the area that it takes to support a family group of coyotes out in DeKalb County Mhmm. Is 10 times bigger than the area it takes to support a family group of coyotes in the city of Chicago.

Amy: 20:03

Woah. 10 times? That's crazy.

Abigail: 20:06

Well, that makes sense why the population's bigger then. Right? Is that, like, one of Well, that's why

Chris: 20:11

the density that's why the density is bigger.

Amy: 20:13

Sure.

Abigail: 20:13

Density is bigger. Yeah. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Chris: 20:16

And it's it's also true of many other animals. Raccoons, squirrels, possums, skunks are much, much more common, dense, smaller home ranges in the urban areas than in the rural areas, and their behaviors are much different as well. So in the rural areas, they're hunted and trapped. And if you notice a coyote out in, say, DeKalb County or Winnebago County or Macoupin County or Brown County or wherever you're at, chances are the moment that coyote notices that you're there, it's gonna be gone in a flash. Whereas in many areas in the Chicago region, if you notice a coyote, they may look back at you and then completely ignore you.

Chris: 21:02

We have we have observed and documented coyotes walking past people on sidewalks. The people don't skip a beat, and the coyote doesn't skip a beat, and they go right past them. And I've been on telemetry shifts where the same couple walks every night. It was a very interesting story. It was at a hospital, and both the husband and wife were residents at the hospital.

Chris: 21:28

And every morning, about 03:00 in the morning, they would take a walk around the hospital, and every morning, a coyote would walk past them. And one day, I finally had to stop them and ask. I introduced myself. I said, hey. Do you ever notice that animal that oh, yeah.

Chris: 21:42

That dog is always here. We we don't we don't bother it. It doesn't bother us.

Abigail: 21:46

That's just Steve.

Chris: 21:48

I explained. I said, you know, that's actually a coyote. And they go, no. It can't be a coyote. Like, yeah. That's a coyote.

Chris: 21:56

So it's amazing how their behavior changes. That would never happen in DeKalb County or Cass County or Alexander County or wherever else you're at.

Amy: 22:06

Just thinking, like, of the why on that, Chris, and you probably already know the answers, but is this just like is it because there's like a routine and a flow in an urban area where they're, like, they know where they're they have these, like, routes that they run, that they're hunting or running all the time?

Chris: 22:27

It's because the it's because the coyotes are not hunted or trapped.

Amy: 22:30

Oh. But, like

Chris: 22:32

Everywhere else in the range. Is it Everywhere else in the in the in the state, they're hunted or trapped. They're persecuted, and they they learn that very quickly.

Amy: 22:42

I got it.

Chris: 22:42

But as far as the smaller home range, it's because everything else, the food resources are much higher than they are out in the rural areas.

Amy: 22:52

Interesting. Very interesting. Coyote or coyote, for the listeners.

Chris: 22:57

Both are acceptable.

Amy: 23:01

Cleared up.

Abigail: 23:03

Yeah. I wanna hear anybody sending me emails that I say coyote. It's like that idea of, like, ecology of fear too. Right? Like, it's like they're more they're they're like, oh, I know that humans are something to be feared.

Abigail: 23:16

Right? Like, versus, like, in these urban environments, they're not like, that pressure from humans is different.

Chris: 23:23

Absolutely, The coyotes are very, very intelligent animals, and they're very difficult to capture. You would think that it would be like trying to capture some the neighbor's dog. You just put dog food in a cage trap, and the the coyote would run right in there. And in tens of thousands of trap nights, I've caught exactly two coyotes in a cage trap over over four decades, and they were both yearling coyotes, and they were both starving. Mhmm.

Chris: 23:51

Otherwise, a coyote absolutely, positively will not go into a trap. They're just too smart. Mhmm. They're very, very intelligent animals.

Amy: 23:58

Well, from what we understand from, like, the research that we've read is it shows that coyote attacks on humans are rare.

Chris: 24:08

So Incredibly rare. Incredibly rare.

Amy: 24:11

So what are those misconceptions that you Yeah. Out there that that, you know, people have about coyotes?

Chris: 24:18

So, generally, there's one to two legitimate coyote attacks in North America a year. To put that in perspective, generally, there's four to 5,000,000 dog attacks. Mhmm. And the chances are you're going to be maimed or killed by your own or your neighbor's dog as opposed to a coyote.

Chris: 24:46

So in the forty plus years that I've been doing this, we've been able to document one legitimate coyote attack. And there's a with with one exception in North America, all attacks have occurred on children six and under, and they've all occurred in areas where people were actively feeding them. So if folks take away one message from this podcast, please don't feed coyotes. It's imperative that you do not feed coyotes. What happens is that their normal social behavior breaks down, and they start looking at humans as food, not just attacking them, but attacking them, dragging them off, and consuming them.

Chris: 25:30

So it's very, very important not to feed coyotes.

Abigail: 25:34

Don't feed coyote. That's I was like, woah. Like, that's not just like, oh, you're gonna ruin that animal's life. It has abnormal like, you will also perish in this scenario.

Chris: 25:45

That's what what what we tell people is a fed coyote is a dead coyote. Mhmm. Yeah. Inevitably, they're so smart. They start to realize that humans equal food.

Chris: 25:56

They start approaching people. They start getting bolder and bolder. It's not really aggression. It's just getting bolder and bolder. They know where the food resource is, and then people get upset, and then the animal has to be lethally removed.

Chris: 26:10

There's no place that you can take, you can translocate a coyote to that doesn't already have the maximum population of coyotes that the area can support. The entire state of Illinois is completely saturated with coyotes. There's no place to take them.

Amy: 26:28

Yeah. That's interesting.

Chris: 26:29

Yeah. And even if you did take them somewhere else let's say we took a nuisance coyote from Cook County and took it to Clay County. Okay? We leak we released it in Clay County. It would end up in someone else's territory.

Chris: 26:45

It would be an interloper, and it would get attacked every single place it went because it wouldn't be accepted into that family group.

Amy: 26:52

It would always be moving about trying to find that place

Chris: 26:56

That's right. Was the the only thing you can do is euthanize that animal. It's sad, but it's the reality of the situation. Sure. And we've documented that many times because of the radiotelemetry work.

Chris: 27:08

It's not it's not our opinion. It's the fact. It is exactly what happens to these animals.

Abigail: 27:14

Yeah. Well, I'm thinking about too, like, other things that people think about coyotes, so we see these on, like, the social media pages all the time. Right? There's a coyote watch out. You know, I don't want it attacking my kid or eating my dog or anything like that.

Abigail: 27:30

Like, negative these negative feelings about coyotes. Is there anything that, like, the study have kinda learned about those kinds of things, about, like, whether they eat your pets kinda thing?

Chris: 27:41

Well, absolutely. So they can eat your pet. I mean, that does happen from time to time. That's why we recommend that you do not run your dog off leash. We recommend that you don't encourage your dog to interact with coyotes.

Chris: 27:58

We get reports, and we've seen video clips of people who encourage their dogs to go and play with the coyotes.

Abigail: 28:08

Amy and I's face for this audio medium are like, absolutely wild. Wow.

Chris: 28:16

You know, people have a Walt Disney World view of wildlife, and that is not healthy. Wildlife should be appreciated and enjoyed from afar, but you should not have physical contact with wildlife. Otherwise, it's not gonna remain wild very long.

Amy: 28:32

Mhmm. Mhmm. We see that a lot with the public campaigns about, you know, the bison out West and, you know, don't feed the don't approach, you know, the bison and, you know,

Chris: 28:44

the with the bison, it tends to be a self limiting problem problem.

Amy: 28:49

True. True. True. Abigail, you were talking about, you know, social media, and we see some of these videos. Have you seen kind of like a like, in your years that you've been there, Chris, have you seen a change in public perception?

Amy: 29:02

You know, you're talking more. I know you've been on some other podcasts, you're talking to people, you're educating people. Have you seen a change in perception by the public about coyote behavior?

Chris: 29:13

Yeah. So I've I've depending on how you wanna look at it, I have the perspective of having started in this job before there were coyotes in the area, in the region. So I've seen I've been able to note the change in people's understanding of coyotes from the very beginning. So when coyotes first showed up, many people thought they were wolves. They didn't understand the difference between a coyote and a wolf.

Chris: 29:42

The first naturalist to the area, Robert Kennicott, described a timber wolf, a gray wolf, and a brush wolf. The brush wolf was the coyote. I mean, what he didn't understand was that the gray wolf and the timber wolf were just color morphs of, you know, of of the wolf. Right? But, typically, coyotes and wolves, much like coyotes and fox, don't live in the same area.

Chris: 30:09

If you're in Northern Wisconsin and you hear wolves howl, you know the coyotes aren't around. If you hear the coyotes howl, you know the wolves aren't around because they don't tolerate each other. Coyotes and the fox do the same thing. Mhmm. To directly address your your question there, initially, were rather frightened by them.

Chris: 30:27

They it was a very unique thing. It was a very unique encounter. Now I think people are much more accepting of the fact that they're here. I wish people would do a better job of not feeding them either overtly or covertly. You know, you get situations where people put out pork chops and and Chinese food for the coyotes, and they attract all kinds of wildlife.

Amy: 30:53

On purpose?

Chris: 30:54

On purpose. They're trying to feed them. Yes. And it causes all kinds of issues for, if not them, then their neighbors.

Chris: 31:02

Their neighbors get very upset with that. I think the biggest concern I have is is the one that, you know, I mentioned before, that people get too habituated to them because that coyotes the people become habituated, and the coyotes become habituated, and then trouble starts happening. So here again, we have to keep wildlife wild.

Amy: 31:24

Mhmm. Yeah.

Abigail: 31:26

Yeah. I feel like those interactions again, like, this is one of our most densely populated coyote areas, as well as, like, densely populated area of Illinois. What are some practical steps that people can take to reduce those kind of conflicts that they might have with coyotes?

Chris: 31:45

It's all about food. 90% of the issues with coyotes have to do with food. During the breeding season, coyotes become they'll change their behaviors somewhat in that they're not as nocturnal, they'll become more diurnal, or because they're actively patrolling their family territories, and they may become very bold around dogs because they view the dog as a interloping canine, and they wanna keep the canine out. So it's very important that you keep your dog on a leash. There have been very, very few times that I can document that a coyote has actually made contact with a dog that was leashed.

Chris: 32:26

It almost never happens. They may stand off. They may growl. They may bark, but they don't make contact. It's a very rare occurrence.

Chris: 32:36

Whereas if you're running your dog, that can happen. That absolutely can happen. So

Abigail: 32:41

That's a I've seen I've I've heard some from people being like, the coyote followed me, and I feel like that's more of like the coyote kinda making sure it's like keeping its like, you're keeping its space. Right? Like, that the dog is kinda keeping away.

Chris: 32:54

That's exactly what that is. Yep. Yep. It's just keeping track of this interloper that's in my territory.

Abigail: 33:00

Yeah. So definitely, like, keeping and then you were saying, when is the breeding season for coyotes in Illinois?

Chris: 33:05

Believe it or not, in the Chicagoland area region, it's Valentine's Day. February 14.

Abigail: 33:12

Easy to remember. Very cool. I love that.

Chris: 33:16

And we didn't make that up. That's statistically accurate for the Chicagoland region. Valentine's Day.

Abigail: 33:23

There you go. Keep it in mind. I So always say and then you were saying keeping that food away is like another really important piece. Right?

Chris: 33:31

The so the food is not so much that the coyotes eat eat the human food. They can and they will if they have to. I mean, they're completely opportunistic. I mean, if the apples are falling from the trees, they're eating apples. If the mice are coming to your to feed on the bird's food that you put on the ground, they're eating the mice.

Chris: 33:50

If the if the squirrels are coming to eat the bird food, they're eating the squirrels. So it's it's very much food food motivated. It's very much when we get complaints of deer and or coyotes, nine times out of 10, someone in the neighborhood is feeding. And if you can stop that feeding, the problem goes away because it concentrates all the animals in one spot.

Abigail: 34:17

This is why we don't recommend bird feeders anymore. Like, when people call us, we're like, well, like, I actually really recommend you plant things that birds might like to eat if you wanna support and help the birds and the animals because then that's habitat and, like, natural habitat encouragement as opposed to, like, a nice plate of food for them, which creates a nice plate of food for the next level of consumer. Right?

Chris: 34:42

Yeah. Absolutely.

Amy: 34:44

We started talking about, like, zoonotic disease in coyote zoonotic diseases in wildlife, I guess. And, you know, you said the research project started. I think it was like a something to do with rabies and and public health. Have you I guess, this research, has there been anything that has come out from a public health standpoint from this project?

Chris: 35:09

So what we have found is that everything that a coyote any kind of disease that the coyote can have, your dog can have.

Amy: 35:17

Okay.

Chris: 35:17

So it's imperative that you maintain a relationship with your veterinarian and that you maintain your vaccination status with your dog. Because between the external and the internal parasites and then all the various diseases that the coyote can carry, whether that be parvovirus or canine distemper or leptospirosis or anaplasma or bordetella, the coyotes have it. The coyotes are, in many cases, a reservoir or an amplifier. So they are assaulted with these diseases from birth, and they die off very quickly if if they're if the disease is too aggressive on their systems, and if they're not, they end up carrying it. And if your dog has contact with these coyotes, they could very easily be exposed to these diseases, and you don't wanna go through that.

Chris: 36:21

It's but it's far easier just to vaccinate and use flea protection and heartworm protection prophylactically and not have to deal with active disease.

Amy: 36:33

Sure. Because that could be, like you know, you talk about contact or not really contact or whatever with coyote coyotes, but it could be, like, you know, their feces or their you know, like, could be if they're

Amy: 36:46

in the same areas, it doesn't it's not like the dog and the coyote or they're kissing in the backyard or anything like that. It can't No.

Chris: 36:52

They don't. They absolutely do not have to do that. Right.

Amy: 36:56

Yeah. Chris, just kind of wrapping things up, how do you approach educating the public about coexisting with, you know, coyotes or even just urban wildlife in general? How do you how do you approach that?

Chris: 37:12

So there's there's several different modalities to that. I am one of many people that actually go out and give presentations to various groups and organizations. We also have the Forest Preserve District of Cook County website that has a whole section devoted to research, where you can see peer reviewed publications that have been generated from this work, and you get an idea of the type of work that we're doing. The Urban Coyote Study itself has its own website that is just loaded with tons of information. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources has a Living With Wildlife website that also has a ton of information that folks can access if they have if they have questions.

Chris: 38:02

We also have six nature centers in the Forest Preserve District Of Cook County that are staffed with professional naturalists that I interact with on a regular basis. I give them the information about urban wildlife, what's actually happening in their own backyards, and then they package it to deliver to a growing urban population so that they can understand the environment that we all share.

Abigail: 38:31

Yeah, that's awesome. And they give really great presentations out there and programming, and there's some ambassador animals as well that they kind of utilize in some of

Amy: 38:39

their programming to talk about those, so really cool opportunities.

Abigail: 38:44

Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge about just your work with wildlife and the Urban Coyote Research Project. It's been really illuminating and just really, really cool to hear all the work that you've been doing.

Chris: 38:57

I appreciate the offer.

Abigail: 38:58

Yeah. Anytime. Come anytime. Just chat with us. We could chat longer.

Chris: 39:03

Yeah. All you all you have to do is call me up, and I'm more than happy to help you folks out.

Amy: 39:08

Yeah.

Abigail: 39:09

Now we are going to finish today's episode with everyday observation where we highlight the mundane and normal of our environment that is actually really interesting. So Amy, what is your everyday observation this week?

Amy: 39:22

Well, mine is not related to wildlife, it's more related to trees, but I was out in woods doing some scouting for some educational programs that I have coming up and I was along a trail, I was along a lake and and just kind of in a really, I guess, would say 100% canopy covered forest. Right? So it was very, very shady understory. Burr oak tree, I don't can't even remember what size, probably like 10 inches or something like that. And some of those shade leaves at the base of that know, at the the lower branches of that tree were ginormous.

Amy: 40:01

I mean, giant. Some of the biggest shade leaves that I'd ever seen is if you know, you know, those shade leaves that underneath a, you know, closed canopy can get very, very large because they're, you know, trying to find light or they have the the biggest surface area to try to find light and I measured it up against my foot and I think I brought I even brought it home because I wanted to show my kids because it was so amazing, but it was like 13 and a quarter inches long. I mean, it was it was like one of the biggest leaves I've ever seen, so that was kind of fun to see. And again, just kind of the normal everyday stuff, but pretty cool still in the same in the same sense.

Abigail: 40:40

Yeah. Cool observation too to like and like, yeah, you look at these kind of the different sizes, you're like, why is this leaf so big? Why is this leaf, you know, smaller? Is this a normal presentation? And you start to see that observation of like these lower, more shaded leaves are bigger because they need to absorb that light.

Abigail: 40:58

So, yeah, just like really really neat. Also like, I thought you were gonna say when you measured it with your face, which I was like

Amy: 41:03

Oh, no. But I took a picture of it next to my foot because I, of course, posted it because I was like, look at this thing. It's amazing. So I needed some kind of, like, scale because, you know, when you take pictures of leaves and things out there in nature, you're like to you know that it's, you know, you know, a different size, but you need, like, some kind of, like, pencil or penny or, you know, something next to it.

Abigail: 41:24

Banana for scale.

Amy: 41:25

Exactly. I was like, I don't have anything. I didn't I didn't have anything. I didn't even have a pencil. I just had my phone and my foot, and that's that's that worked.

Abigail: 41:35

That's all you needed. Alright, Chris. What is your everyday observation?

Chris: 41:40

So we're getting ready to ban the baby herons at some of our heron rookeries. Yeah. That'll be happening in the next couple of weeks. And on one of our heron rookery lakes, we have a group of about 40 nonbreeding white pelicans, and they've been there now since March. So it looks like they may be sticking around all summer, which would be really, really exciting.

Chris: 42:09

We haven't had a nesting pelican in the Chicagoland region in over a hundred years. And a pelican colony started about four years ago, about 50 miles north in the Wisconsin Kettle Moraine region, and they're actually breeding up there again for the first time in over a hundred years. Oh, wow. So we're hoping that this group of non breeders is gonna turn into a group of breeders, and once again, we'll have breeding pelicans in the Chicagoland E area, which would be really, really cool.

Amy: 42:46

God. That's pretty cool. 100 is your wow.

Abigail: 42:50

See, that's so special. I also feel, like, very encouraging to hear. I feel like all you hear is that, like, things are declining and leaving, and so to hear that, like, we're getting back a species that we haven't seen.

Amy: 43:00

Really awesome. What about you, Abigail?

Abigail: 43:03

So about a month ago, I was on a tour at the forest preserves at Trailside, and we were in the bottomlands of that site, and they were and all across was like this yellow flower, and they were talking about that it's butterweed, and they were like, this is actually like an indicator. It's a natural migrator of climate change. It's like native to Illinois, but not this far north. Mhmm. So they were surprised to see it, but like and and they're like, we don't we don't know what to do, like, if we need to manage it and because it's like it was like it's like a sea of yellow, right, when you see.

Abigail: 43:38

And now it's like one of those things where you hear it once and now you see it everywhere. Right? And so when we were at in Champaign for our team get together, we I saw butterweed there and I got to talk to Chris Evans about that species and like how it is kind of like a an indicator of climate change in our milder winters, and how it's able to survive a little bit better. But is it an issue? Right?

Abigail: 44:03

And so I just thought of it again today because I was on a field trip and I got the chance to just like drive by and watch on a school bus, all these areas of Cook County. And it was really cool too because I also got to observe it's not in the dry areas. It likes these wetter near creeks, rivers, streams, things like that, lowland forested spaces, but in in these like upland dry areas, you don't see it at all. And so I'm like curious, what Chris told me is that it's it's not it's blooming so much earlier than a lot of other things, so it's not as much he's not super concerned about it right now, but it's definitely like on our kind of like keep an eye on it list because it's different and new and it's abundant. And even like native species in abundance, like, we kinda wanna watch out for because maybe they're more like pioneer species and not super great indicators of high quality ecosystems.

Abigail: 44:57

And so so, yeah, I just thought it was really interesting to see like another instance of like this natural migration of species due to climate change and also to, like, where you can physically observe it and not because it's so yellow. It's like and it's everywhere. So you, like, you're like, oh, like, that's not there. So Mhmm. It was really cool.

Amy: 45:17

Yeah. We get questions about that at the office when it's in Bloom. Yeah. People are like, what is that? What is this?

Abigail: 45:24

because it's everywhere. Right? And it's like Yeah. Like, it well, Chris, thank you again. I'm so excited that you brought up the zoonotic disease aspect because our guest next week is a zoonotic disease expert from SIU.

Abigail: 45:35

So we are it was really great to chat with you and to hear about, like, this, like, on the ground experience that you have and all the different ways that you're looking into wildlife in the urban area. Was just, I don't know, just very illuminating. So thank you so much.

Chris: 45:49

Thank you for the opportunity. And if you ever wanna look at another subject, explore another subject, I'm more than happy to help out any way I can.

Abigail: 45:58

This has been another episode of the Everyday Environment podcast. Check us out next week where we get to talk with Augustine Jimenez about the armadillo migration and zoonotic diseases. This podcast is a University of Illinois Extension production, hosted and edited by Abigail Garfalo, Erin Garrett, Amy Lefringhouse, Karla Griesbaum, and Darci Webber. Marketing and communications are by Emily Steele.