The coyotes are back.
When we moved to our current neighborhood last year, I decided to be more mindful of the tiny changes happening around me in nature. Despite the fact that I now live in what is considered “midtown” Wilmington, I have observed more varied wildlife than I ever did growing up on the fringes of farmland that once made up the northwestern sector of New Hanover County. The retention pond behind our building was home to a small alligator when we moved in last year. She (I say “she,” though I don’t know what sex the little thing was, actually) was somewhere between three and four feet long. We named her “Nessie.” Then one day she was gone, either scared off by increasing traffic in the area or removed by Animal Control to a safer home.
There have been big bullfrogs the size of salad plates, water snakes, and yellow-bellied sliders. A fat raccoon ran down the sidewalk one morning in broad daylight as I walked the dog. I’ve seen and heard ospreys, corvids, egrets, and the little blue heron who overwintered at the pond last year. But the autumn is coyote season.
Watching the skies as a late summer thunderstorm rolls in across the Barnards Creek watershed
Color me in awe the first time I saw a full-grown and well-fed coyote slinking from the treeline between our neighborhood and the next, across the road to the undeveloped acreage beside us. A few years ago I had been driving down the road only a mile from here and saw a scrawny coyote dart out into traffic before bee-lining it directly back into the pines. It seemed like an anomaly.
I heard the coyotes first before I saw one. It was late one night and I was home alone when a siren sounded in the distance. The shrill noise conjured up the sound of shrieking that could only be compared to the biting screams of a pack of young women. These screams were more canine than I had first believed. For the next two months their howls and shrieks haunted the evenings when a siren or some other sound interrupted the suburban soundscape, but I never saw another one. I held the dog’s leash tighter on evening walks and stayed further away from the tree line than I usually would.
It makes sense that coyotes would migrate through this part of the county. The Barnard’s Creek watershed empties from this area of midtown, or Pine Valley, into the Cape Fear River not far away, creating a sheltered corridor for wildlife.
Coincidentally, last autumn our county government also started advertising public safety meetings on living side by side with these wild neighbors. Rising incidents of coyote-human conflict have been reported for some time, but the NC Wildlife Resources Commission has reminded residents that these incidents are rare. A friend relayed his own experience a few years ago with this particular pack. He was living in the neighborhood next door at the time when a particularly brash coyote chased him up and onto the hood of his car in the parking lot as he tried to check the mail. It seems comic, but is a stark reminder of the space we as humans share in nature with these animals. Our encroachment on their world with our blacktop roads and office buildings with skeletons of steel has caused some of them to push back.
How do we find a way to live alongside them? To ask their permission, in a way, to find our own place back in the natural world.
A few nights ago I took my dog out for his quick evening walk. The light was beginning to fade as we shuffled over to the edge of the pond for him to relieve himself. A siren called out in the distance before the sharp howls descended across the woods. I turned to Teddy and whispered, “Well, the coyotes are back.”
-K
