A coyote was recently caught on camera playing a dare-devil game of weaving in between lanes in downtown San Francisco.
San Francisco is at a perpetual impasse with its coyote population. Around 100 of these medium-sized canines crisscross the seven-by-seven, keeping certain vermin populations in and denning their cubs. (It’s estimated a single coyote can eat upwards of 1,800 rodents per year; some simple math means SF’s urban coyote population helps lower the city’s rodent population — a four-legged cohort that’s already growing, every year — by some 180,000 animals.)
That’s not to say San Francisco and these descendants of wolves exist in absolute mutuality. The replenishment is anything but smooth. An increasing number of dogs and cats have been attacked — in some instances, hunted, taken, and later consumed — by coyotes; human encounters, though rare, have also seen upticks, some of which have resulted in injuries to the bipeds and death to the quadrupeds.
The sentiment, nonetheless, stands: Coyotes are more afraid of you than you are of them, and if you do stumble across one, respect its space and don’t approach it. This is easy advice, impart because coyotes prefer wooded, secluded, more natural landscapes, even when living inside large metros.
Coyote sightings in, say, downtown San Francisco aren’t unheard of; they’re incredibly rare, however, and often involve animals that simply got lost en route to find new hunting grounds or establish new territory boundaries. But a recent sighting of adults crossing lanes on 7th Street shows how deep these intelligent creatures will go in built-up metros.
The large coyote was filmed shortly after midnight on November 3rd by a reader, who shared the video with Underscore in an email; thankfully, there was no traffic at that hour, and the coyotes were not in any immediate danger of getting hit; the reader, who was on a Lyft bike share, cycled in parlay with the coyote as they each went up 7th Street; the coyote traveled three city blocks — at one point, the reader was concerned the coyote would travel up the highway ram off I-80 — before traveling onto Bryant Street and out of sight.
It’s unclear where that hopscotching fur-stranger is now, but rest assured that San Francisco remains a wild, wondrous place. And, like the coyotes themselves, should be respected as such.
