Feral Cities by Tristan Donovan Page B

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    â€œThey don’t worry at all. I think they know the truck, for when we pull up they start watching us, whereas the ones in the forest preserves will run away right away. They never stick around.”
    First on the list is Coyote 390. She was collared as a pup back in 2009 and the team have nicknamed her the Northbrook Animal. “She began her life in the Highland Woods area, which is about eight to ten miles away from where she now is,” says Shane.
    Coyote 390’s early life was uneventful. She stuck to the golf course she was born on, found a mate, and had a litter of pups. But then, around the age of three, she was struck with wanderlust and took off to find a new place to roam.
    Her decision to pull up stakes was a tense moment for the team. The radio signals sent out by the collars can only be picked up within a mile radius and so tracking down a wandering coyote can be a challenge. “Usually it will take months before we’ll end up finding these animals again, but we got really lucky with her—we found her within a week. Her home range now, half of it is forest preserve—the Des Plaines River forms the boundary line for her—the other half is a residential area she uses.
    â€œWhat’s really cool is that she was actually absorbed into another forest preserve pack, which according to Dr. Gehrt is very rare. Usually when an animal comes to a new forest preserve there’s already going to be a pack there and they are not going to be too friendly, so she’s a special case. She’s one of my favorites.”
    Shane has plenty of stories about the secret lives of Chicago coyotes, tales that have been pieced together from snatches of geo-location data, dissected scats, pathology reports, and genetic tests. “Just recently, we had the oldest coyote on the project—Coyote 125—die on us,” he says. Coyote 125 was like some grand old coyote queen. At the peak of her reign, she controlled almost half of the vast Poplar Creek forest preserve. “She ended up settling down with her mate and slowly divvied up her territory until what was once a huge home range became concentrated in these two very small blocks. All she and her mate did was travel betweenthose two blocks. It was almost like she was given a small piece of territory—her little senior living home—within the areas of all these other packs.
    â€œEventually we found her dead one day. Unfortunately it was summer and the body had already gone through an advanced stage of decomposition, so it was not obvious what did her in. We sent her to the Brookfield Zoo to do a necropsy. I’m pretty sure they didn’t find anything abnormal other than old age.”
    Then there’s the Campton Hills Animal, who caught mange—the nasty skin disease caused by the mite responsible for scabies in humans. “He had pretty bad mange a while back,” says Shane. “He’s actually gotten over it, but he was a very visual animal during the middle of the day when he had mange. He’d just be walking down the streets and in backyards.” It is thought the fur loss caused by mange can make it harder for animals to regulate their body temperature and this encourages coyotes to be active in the daytime when it’s warmer.
    â€œThe residents were very concerned about it. Dr. Gehrt had a lot of conversations with residents who were asking us what were we going to do about it. But we’re observers, that’s all we are. We’re not introducing coyotes, we are just collaring them and following them and watching what they do. Luckily, he started to become less visible as the summer progressed and the calls about him have pretty much tapered off.”

    As we reach Northbrook, Shane switches on the VHF receiver. It fills the cab with a constant hiss of static, but then, as we reach the intersection between I-294 and Dundee Road, a faint but regular pulse of beeps becomes