The Coyote Conquest

As a former New Mexican, I’m a great fan of coyotes. Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to get close to them. Bit too many teeth and claws for that. But I admire their intelligence and strength.

But the problem is that over the last few decades, they’ve moved in all directions. Right now, you can find them as easily in New York as New Mexico. I, personally, remember the very first time I saw them running wild in a park in Winchester, Massachusetts. They regarded me with absolute indifference, and hurried on their way.

Now, it seems they are poised to move into South America as well. In a piece in the Washington Post, Coyotes are poised to invade South America. Humans are to blame, Robert Gebelhoff notes that in the 1950s, the beasts moved into Mexico. In 2014, they crossed the Panama Canal.

The problem with this? Coyotes are out-competing a great many things along the way. It is entirely possible that biodiversity will drop dramatically as the result of the coyote conquest. That would decidedly not be good for life in the Western Hemisphere.

So, Gebelhoff says that if we wish to keep that diversity, we had better take a stand. He writes, “Hold the line against invading coyotes. Fortify the region’s rainforest defenses. Do everything possible to keep these animals from arriving in a new continent. If we can stave off this offense, perhaps we can win the bigger war to save biodiversity.”

Let’s hope we manage that. Let’s hope we hang together to stop the coyotes. I am hopeful that we can.

Or, at least, that we will do better than some on the left did at standing together to stop Trump from entering the White House in 2016.

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



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