Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History
An excellent choice for those interested in America’s natural history. However, and I write this as a fellow hunter, this might be an especially thought provoking book for those who participate in hunting or ranching, as author Dan Flores makes some very fair and insightful observations regarding American ideology’s impact on North American Wildlife.
Suggested Readers: Naturalists, Historians, Anyone That Encounters Coyotes
Author of the acclaimed books, “American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains” and “Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America,” Dan Flores is an expert in the cultural and environmental history of North America. In particular, he has a talent for depicting the impact of how the continent’s biodiversity has been influenced by its first encounters with early humans, like the Clovis people, to its current relationship with modern-day Americans.
In “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History,” Flores takes a magnifying glass to one of the country’s most iconic and persecuted species, the coyote. The United States’ westward expansion put the nation’s predators in the crosshairs of ranchers and bureaucratic interests. Over the course of a few decades, government sanctioned bounties and a shockingly liberal use of poisons, decimated predator populations across the American west and prairies. While extremely effective against its canine cousin, the gray wolf, the defiant coyote managed to evade eradication and boost its own infamy among public opinion. In fact, Flores writes that one 1980s Yale study revealed that coyotes remained the most despised animal in America, “behind rattlesnakes, skunks, vultures, rats, and cockroaches.”
And yet, Flores cannot help but recognize the coyote as the perfect animal avatar for humans in North America. Already depicted in native folklore as “Old Man Coyote,” these resourceful canines made their own eastern manifest destiny following the highly successful “species cleansing” of wolves. This massive killing campaign used propaganda to manipulate public opinion (despite the growing concerns of scientists and naturalists) and readily condoned biochemical poisons like 1080 and strychnine. Ironically, (and sadly) this agenda occurred simultaneously to the horrors and ethnic cleansing witnessed in Europe during the early and mid 20th century.
But like the American people after two world wars, these little “prairie wolves" endured and thrived. A true cosmopolitan species, coyotes can now be found in every state and have made a successful living in the country’s most populous urban centers. This increased exposure, along with a greater public understanding and appreciation of predators and their crucial role in the environment, has given the species a new identity and subsequent generations of Americans the opportunity to decide for themselves how they view this charismatic animal.
So read this book and ask yourself: where do you stand on a Coyote America?
Excerpt:
“Standing on my patio on the ancient coyote range outside Santa fe, with coyote howls enlivening almost every night in the High Desert of New Mexico, I wonder now at the mind-set of it all, the mode of thinking that makes us such stoic killers, able to extinguish with such ease the very qualities that lend the world beauty, grace, romance. And, to my personal regret, I wonder not just how it played out a century ago or in other minds. I wonder about it in all of us, certainly in myself, who as a teenager, when coyotes were colonizing Louisiana, tried so hard to possess wild nature and bring it to hand.
This is an uncomfortable memory for me, but here it is. It is an early daybreak, with the sun a flattened red ball through the mists of the Red River Valley. I am seventeen years old. A coyote pauses in yellow prairie grass, her muzzle wondrously sharp and refined, her ears working. Dew droplets cascade into silvery pearls in the air above her as her tail switches the grass. Her intense eyes bore straight into mine: she is posing an ancient question, one I will not be capable of answering correctly until another decade of living has passed. So a rifle blast shatters the humid morning air, and she yelps, spins, disappears.
The next moment is one of the most vivid mind’s-eye pictures of my life, as perfect in my memory as a circle. The sun suddenly breaks through the mist, and all that only an instant before had seemed wild, romantic, beautiful, dissolves in stop-frame motion as I look on. The “prairie” becomes a scraggly pasture littered with cow dung and discarded plastic soft drink bottles and broken farm machinery. The “wilderness” is now encircled with a half-collapsed barbed wire fence decorated with rusted, bullet-riddled no-trespassing signs. And somewhere beyond the cottonwoods along the river, the gears of a propane delivery truck are grinding like chalk on slate.
In an instant I had personally recapitulated the last two hundred years of coyote history. I had destroyed what I love, drained beauty and perfection from the world with a syringe as I looked on. Detached, stoic. A killer.”
PUBLISHER: Basic Books, 2017.